Make items be picked based on their difficulty, resulting in all cards having a similar difficulty

[NeunEinser]

Currently a meta in the speedrunning community is developing, were people will skip cards until they get one which has easy items only.

While this is certainly an interesting way to play, it also removes part of the challenge and part of the charm old school speedrunning had. Having a concept of a "playable card" and an "unplayable card" is kind of bad. It also means that tools for skipping cards are required so you don't lose your mind clicking a sign for 10 minutes.

A possible idea to fix this is to assign each item a difficulty score and define a target score a Bingo card should have.

During card generation, first a random difficulty is picked, weighted dynamically depending on the distance from the target score the difficulty level has.

If implemented well, this would mean that every card should have a similar difficulty, in total allowing for more cards to be used in a speedrunning context, reducing the amount of "unplayable" cards.

For this to work, the algorithm needs to avoid outliers. If there still is a way to generate a card with nothing difficult on it, even if extremely unlikely, nothing would change except the wait time between runs, which would be objectively bad. This means the weight of difficulties should accurately represent the expected target difficulty of the entire card, meaning the more items have already been generated, the greater the impact of the next pick will be.

For difficulty values, I think it'd make sense to use numbers of the Fibonacci sequence, as is commonly done when estimating tasks in projects:

• 1 (Trivial)
• 2 (Very Easy)
• 3 (Easy)
• 5 (Medium)
• 8 (Hard)
• 13 (Very Hard)
• 21 (Extremely Hard, consider removing)
• 34 (Don't even think about including this in the item pool)

The summed target difficulty should then likely be something between 125 and 200, resulting in overall medium - hard cards.

This would also give an opportunity for having players select a difficulty in the lobby for card generation, though I don't know how I feel about this yet, and to be honest, it's a feature I don't really want, I'd much rather have a single but well balanced difficulty.

Since such a system would be a major balancing change which I would want to be tested thoroughly, this will sadly not make the cut for 5.0.

Discussion down below about how people would feel about such a change is very much appreciated.