I think there is a strict difference between the solo campain and a tournament context. The competitive environment makes people trying to be better than an opponent, not only better than a simple AI (however hard the AI is). Trying to be creative is fun and fun is a good learning environment. However, the variety of skill range in programing is so wide on the internet, the first ranks in online tournaments will always be taken by fullly skilled programers, and could discourage the ones who are still learning.
I’m 30 and I need not to learn anything from code-combat, but I love the way this CodeCombat tournaments fulfill my childhood dreams of RobotFighting. So I take this seriously (even though my new born child doesn’t let me code for fun a lot !), and many skilled people do too apparently. But if I were 20 years younger, I couldn’t compete with those guys, and wouldn’t like to see myself so low in the ranking, even though I’m trying really hard with my middleschool knowledge/skills.
I don’t think a tournament is newbie friendly (newbie = learning student), and that’s why we see these complex concepts brought in. Keeping a low hard limit doesn’t make the tournament more fair toward them. It just make good programers scratch a little bit more their head. Which is good, but this is not what CodeCombat was meant to be. (a place for kids to learn their first coding language in a friendly and fun environment).
PS : I would love to know if there were a hard limitation on the @nick success on defeating Sarven Treasure.