What about a random seed category (most for the escape categories) ? Such as Escape Any% merciless Random seed

It would add another difficulty and strategies. Could be interesting and challenging

There is only a limited pool of seed words. One can keep rerolling the seed for several minutes until they find the particular seed they want (or one of their particular favorites). For example, the French localization has only 3858 words in the Strings/Words lists, of which 3046 are unique (assuming different capitalizations are distinct). Assuming the runner has ten favorite seeds and they keep rerolling twice a second, by average they will find a seed they like in a little over a minute.

If we disallowed rerolls, still nothing would prevent a runner from restarting the recording, dozens of times, until they find the particular seed they are looking for. For judging, how random is random? How would we know how long the player has been trying? They could attempt one run each day and submit a year later. How would we know whether this is their first attempt or their 365th attempt, on which they happened to find their favorite seed? It would be impossible. Even with an uncut video from livestreaming it would still show just that one run.

In short, this sort of limitation would only make sense in a race setting; not in something where people submit their best runs made in the passage of months or years, to the leaderboard.

In general, we have tried to make the categories as fair as possible so that every runner has equal chances. A random category like this would be the opposite of that. (The only reason we don’t allow Prepare Carefully is because it would open a can of worms concerning the use of mods.)

I understand and I was thinking about the limited number of seed. I had in mind the minecraft category, but you're right it doesn't work here. It would have been nice.

Thank you Bisqwit

@Bisqwit this is a very well explained reason for not allowing said category, thanks a lot. 😎