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Couldn't they just make malmutate add random mutations and shuffle existing ones so you're less likely to get the deadly ones and they're less permanent? Mutations would be more of an unstable element that you have to play around until you can clean yourself or bathe in more radiation.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 01:58 |
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# ? May 14, 2024 02:13 |
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LogicNinja posted:I don't think it's really that hard to understand why players for whom this game is Hard Enough Already might object to removing the three best wands, or why not being able to heal in lichform (or as a mummy), teleport out of Silence, etc might not go over well. So why get so lovely with people who are posting about it?
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 02:04 |
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The actual commit message about taking out the best wands was really unconvincing because the last line was like "to make them scale with evocations like other wands we would have to redesign their effects so that they weren't identical to potion effects" and it's like what's wrong with that?
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 02:08 |
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euphronius posted:I think in a 3 rune its ok and thematic. Its the price you pay and all that. You come out of the dungeon as a winner but changed. But maybe I role play too much. That doesn't really happen when you just chug cure mut to get rid of that stuff ASAP. Does anyone actually try to play under the effects of teleportitis or berserkitis? I sure don't. When I get those early from my purple munching habits I'll scarf down every bit of mutagen I can find until they go away. dpeg posted:Too hard to understand for me! But seriously, I didn't think that trolling only goes one way. You ask me a question, I answer. You troll me, I troll you. What's really hard to understand for me is why people get so worked up about a game. I guess I should be glad about the emotional attachment? People generally get annoyed when changes are made to something they enjoy outside of their control. Especially when it feels like the people who make those changes don't actually play the game to see the impact they have. Unless the devs behind the mutation reform actually looked at red glow in Hell and thought "yes this is fair and fun".
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 02:12 |
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Putting aside the real concern of undead races and silent specters, which I don't have anything worth saying, I have a different perspective on those three wands. Heal wounds wands has definitely saved a good portion of my games where the potions have run out and the RNG hasn't been all that generous. I don't feel a 10% increase in weighting honestly makes all that big a difference - I'll be feeling the shortage although ambrosia sometimes helps close the gap, especially since I haven't had anything near a shortage of !curing. A 10% increase in the weighting for potions of heal wounds isn't really going to make the difference, although I have had some games where they've been common enough I've considered using them to open up a trove (only with a wand of heal wounds to hand of course). I feel wands of hasting are pretty trash. Putting aside my idiotic splats, I've had enough potions for 3-6 rune games and more ran out of the patience for hell before I ran out of consumable potions. Wands of Teleportation? I put some value on that, but I'd rather see some kind of teleportation gadget that charges with experience introduced, if someone could come up with an interesting design. Not an old ring of teleportation or controlled teleport, but something less spammable and less reliable. It'd be somewhere on the power level of passage of golubria, though with a different balance and function. As a counterpoint to 'the game is hard enough' argument I'd state that many roguelikes all have 'limited resources' as a core concept, and these three wands can all change me from feeling miserly to spendthrift. I'm fine with the 'feeling overpowered or awesome argument', but I'd rather waste time arguing about the balance and difficulty of other parts of the game than relying on these three wands remaining in the game to get over the hump. Give me some more awesome gadgets and a replacement for that piece of poo poo wand of lightning even if some other people like it. Edit: Keeping those three wands in the game feels to me (even though it is not what you're saying) like you're arguing that it's better that the game has balance issues if they're randomly solved in every other game based on a rare loot. I'd rather have success be less arbitrary, even if the game was made easier in other aspects. LordSloth fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Dec 22, 2016 |
# ? Dec 22, 2016 02:14 |
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Hell effect contam is an inexcusable crime.Ferrinus posted:The actual commit message about taking out the best wands was really unconvincing because the last line was like "to make them scale with evocations like other wands we would have to redesign their effects so that they weren't identical to potion effects" and it's like what's wrong with that?
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 02:17 |
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What is the winrate of 0.19 anyway?
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 02:22 |
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Darox posted:I've realised that my favourite gods are acquirement gods. Acquirement gods in this case being any god that gifts you permanent benefits that are not intrinsically linked to their worship. Vehumet, Kiku, Gozag & Trog are usually my first choices for worship. Even the bad gimmick acquirement gods like Jivya feel more attractive than those without. I completely agree, sandblast is useful throughout most of Lair even in my experience. I meant that after about L6/D3 you can ration your stones more easily by having access to other spells, you can survive running out of stones because you have other options (wands, weapons, etc), and most importantly you probably won't run out of stones because by D3 you usually have tons of them.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 02:22 |
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LordSloth posted:Edit: Keeping those three wands in the game feels to me (even though it is not what you're saying) like you're arguing that it's better that the game has balance issues if they're randomly solved in every other game based on a rare loot. I'd rather have success be less arbitrary, even if the game was made easier in other aspects. I don't think those wands were necessary to beat the game. Certainly not a 3 rune game at least. I'm just concerned about the removal of them because, despite what the commit says, they weren't exact clones of their potion/scroll counterparts. Okay haste was, but haste I don't care about at all. Wands of teleportation could be used while silenced. Silence is a rare threat but it can be very, very deadly for certain characters to get caught in it. Now there's no escape method other than manually running away. Probably not gonna be relevant most of the time but I pity the poor undead that runs into Mennas early on now. Wands of heal wounds were the only way for mummies to heal so now they suck even more. It also means a lichform character can't heal without canceling it, so now there's even less of a reason to met the absurd requirements for casting lich form. Mummies DEFINITELY did not need the nerf but they are a "challenge" species so I guess devs are okay with them being lovely. Deep dwarves also suffer from having less healing sources overall, so they are just gonna cling to their OP combos even more now. I don't think those wands really made the game much easier for me in the long run. They had the most impact when I found one early and could abuse them to get over that early-mid game difficulty hump. Later on they just let me be more liberal with consumable use, such as burning a dozen tps just to skip Tomb:2. But I do think they make some specific combos harder and I really dislike changes that do that. Gives me less of a reason to want to do anything other than my standard statue form stomp through extended.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 02:33 |
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tote up a bags posted:What is the winrate of 0.19 anyway? * (0.19) has won 1853 times in 159641 games (1.16%) * (0.18) has won 2555 times in 298557 games (0.86%) * (0.17) has won 2785 times in 317496 games (0.88%) * (0.16) has won 3121 times in 284655 games (1.10%): * (0.15) has won 1895 times in 223933 games (0.85%): This is kind of misleading, though, since tournament skews the winrates up. If you exclude tourneys... * (0.19 !t) has won 447 times in 74409 games (0.60%) * (0.18 !t0.18) has won 1194 times in 222793 games (0.54%): * (0.17 !t0.17) has won 1443 times in 234115 games (0.62%): * (0.16 !t0.16) has won 1373 times in 188020 games (0.73%): * (0.15 !t0.15) has won 903 times in 159893 games (0.56%): There are some good graphs around somewhere probably, or someone could make one. IIRC, winrates tend to bounce up and down over time, but generally trend upward as the playerbase becomes better. (Not just individual players, but the quality of advice given from communities...)
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 02:35 |
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Internet Kraken posted:Wands of teleportation could be used while silenced. Silence is a rare threat but it can be very, very deadly for certain characters to get caught in it. However, silence is a monster effect intended to disable spells and scrolls. Why should there exist some tool that allows you to reproduce scroll effects under this special, dedicated threat? (Historically, the wands are much older than silence.) If we think that Silence is crippling now [1], then we should address that directly, not hand out tools that make everyone who has it stronger, regardless of Silence. Your argument about specific combos basically shuts out any nerf. If you're interested in edgy species-background combinations, say, then any random player nerf or monster buff can hit hard. Should this be the yardstick for balance? To the contrary, if statue form dominates the game, then *that* should be nerfed, to open up variety for other builds. Or, the other way around, some cool but underpowered spell/weapon/whatever buffed. [1] And *if* Silence is that crippling, what about those poor characters who got silenced in 0.19 without access to a wand? I am absolutely confident that the wand change will have no visible effect on winrates: it does not affect the early game at all, and the midgame too seldom to matter. For the endgame, we had similarly or more drastic changes, and it does not affect rates. (Think of -cTele, orbrun, monsters change all the time.) Someone mentioned (Brannock?) the theory that the change might actually *improve* winrates, because the +10% !HW,!speed,?teleportation matter much more early than the absence of the wands later on. Who knows?!
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 02:59 |
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dpeg posted:Your argument about specific combos basically shuts out any nerf. If you're interested in edgy species-background combinations, say, then any random player nerf or monster buff can hit hard. Should this be the yardstick for balance? You just took away healing for an entire species outside of god abilities. If you don't consider a whole species when you balance stuff because they are "edgy" (what?) then why is that species even in the game? I know mummies are supposed to be a challenge but they already had so much working against them. Not being able to heal makes me never want to touch them again. As for silence, its such a rare threat that by the time you ran into it you pretty much always had a teleport wand. However teleportation only lets you escape death from silence; it does not help you actually deal with the silencer itself. So I don't think its fair to say the existence of teleport wands made silence irrelevant. Will it need to be rebalanced? Again not sure about that since it was already super rare. I'm gonna be real annoyed though if Hell decides to spawn multiple hellions and a fiend near me while some rear end in a top hat silent spectre is hiding behind a wall. Also I don't really think wands of teleportation made your character stronger outside of finding one in the early game. By the time you reach mid game and beyond you don't want to be using teleports as much since there is a much higher chance of you landing in an even worse situation. I can't remember the last time I had a shortage of teleportation scrolls by late game. So I don't think wands of teleport made every character stronger outside of having a way to escape from silence, which might otherwise kill them. EDIT: I don't think these changes are gonna have a noticeable impact on winrate either, but that's because I believe that more players have a problem with actually using consumables versus running out of them. Its very typical for people to get themselves killed in these kind of games because they were too concerned about saving supplies. Or simply forget that they even have them.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 03:18 |
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This discussion might have run its course... just two little bits:Internet Kraken posted:I'm gonna be real annoyed though if Hell decides to spawn multiple hellions and a fiend near me while some rear end in a top hat silent spectre is hiding behind a wall. Like I said, some poor chap will die to this, and faultlessly so. Most characters will find a way however, and it'll be cooler than "hey, I've got a source of teleport you cannot silence".
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 03:22 |
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I am sure that for the majority of people who win but are not ever going to get long streaks going, the games in which they do win are the ones where the floorgod is especially kind. Removing items from the high end would impact winrates because games that get those high end items are the ones that win. If you removed rings of evasion and ac from the game I'm sure my death rate for early game would take a tiny but noticeable hike because any game where I find a ring with 4-6 bonus ev or ac is a game where I will reach lair pretty easily.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 03:24 |
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dpeg posted:Too hard to understand for me! But seriously, I didn't think that trolling only goes one way. You ask me a question, I answer. You troll me, I troll you. What's really hard to understand for me is why people get so worked up about a game. I guess I should be glad about the emotional attachment? Do you somehow not realize that you're not particularly good at trolling? Or that trolling and effective communication don't mix? I'll skip the wall of text and go straight to the tldr: maybe you should consider learning a social skill or just let someone else do the talking. Specifically regarding player reactions,
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 03:25 |
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silentsnack posted:Do you somehow not realize that you're not particularly good at trolling? Or that trolling and effective communication don't mix? quote:I'll skip the wall of text and go straight to the tldr: maybe you should consider learning a social skill or just let someone else do the talking. quote:Specifically regarding player reactions,
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 03:37 |
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I would still like to know if this is an intentional downgrade to mummies (and I guess lichform). No trolling! I legitimately want to know if it was intended that they can't heal (or haste?) outside of god abilities now; wands of haste/heal wounds are so old that I have to assume that mummies' and Necromutation's design took them into account.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 04:02 |
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silentsnack posted:Specifically regarding player reactions, quote:I'll skip the wall of text and go straight to the tldr: maybe you should consider learning a social skill or just let someone else do the talking. Clearly, Something Awful is most the amiable of places, well known for hospitality. I don't expect SA to start coddling developers, or we wouldn't have memorable threads game threads like "The Demon Rush" and Cherry Venus, but I'm not under any delusion that we're the easiest group to get along with. quote:In a lot of cases the message is: the current state of discourse between crawl's community (such that it is) and the developers is... not exactly ideal. True enough, but I can think of a shitload of games with worse community relations, and this doesn't have a singular person at the helm projecting their sole vision. Nethack.org posted:As a rule, the DevTeam does not volunteer information or comment on our plans or schedules. However, at this time we'd like to make an exception to that rule and provide a brief update on what's been happening: Honestly, I feel there are too many communication channels on the game development, but previous attempts to streamline communication like the devwiki didn't really turn out to be everything hoped for. Could we please get back to bitching about Ogres and wands, please?
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 04:06 |
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dpeg posted:Apart from that: what *is* discourse between community and developers? No such thing! Mr. Prokosch posted:Couldn't they just make malmutate add random mutations Also something something encouraging degenerate play by incentivising standing in front of neqs something. quote:and shuffle existing ones so you're less likely to get the deadly ones and they're less permanent? Mutations would be more of an unstable element that you have to play around until you can clean yourself or bathe in more radiation. LordSloth posted:Could we please get back to bitching about Ogres and wands, please?
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 04:08 |
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FR: Feature Mimics, which resemble beloved cut features from the game and disappear when you attempt to use them
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 04:10 |
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Prism posted:I would still like to know if this is an intentional downgrade to mummies (and I guess lichform). No trolling! I legitimately want to know if it was intended that they can't heal (or haste?) outside of god abilities now; wands of haste/heal wounds are so old that I have to assume that mummies' and Necromutation's design took them into account. Well apparnetly mummies are an "edgy" species and thus need not be considered when balancing anything. I don't really know what that is supposed to mean but the effect is no, dpeg did not think about mummies at all when making this change.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 04:11 |
Dpeg, if you're looking for another piece of tedium to take out of 0.20 you can always start with yourself
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 04:29 |
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dpeg posted:I'm working on my trolling skills, there's a handbook right on my table. DO you have a fat belly? A+ on the verbal fencing; amazing repartee, even tempo, literalistic pedantic deflection, and a fairly convincing job of pretending to get defensive over offhanded personal insults. But really... a lot of the things you've written seem to indicate that you don't always recognize when humor is appropriate and when it is better to be as clear and straightforward as possible, or that dismissing people's opinions as irrelevant (even when they are) does nothing to invite constructive input to the project. LordSloth posted:Honestly, I feel there are too many communication channels on the game development, but previous attempts to streamline communication like the devwiki didn't really turn out to be everything hoped for. Too many channels is one problem, yeah. There is also a lack of uniformity/clarity/consistency in basically everything, which makes it difficult to tell whether everyone is even speaking the same language sometimes. edit because I failed to copypaste before: LordSloth posted:Wow! It's like people don't have differing opinions on these issues! "What Person A says and what Person B hears are almost always two different things," is the point I was getting at. silentsnack fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Dec 22, 2016 |
# ? Dec 22, 2016 04:34 |
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There's a reason why commercial games keep the details of most changes a secret until release, and we're seeing it here. Keep in mind that we are the vocal minority, most players will never post about Crawl on an Internet forum, and despite the criticism we all appreciate the effort the devs go through to create and maintain this game without any compensation or even a request for donations.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 05:12 |
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There's not so many people I take seriously on the internet, but, lo and behold, The Sloth is one of them. "When in doubt, do it like sloths do" is one of the more proverbial proverbs. The order was to bitch about overnerfing the ogre: I actually cannot comment too much on that, because I learned about it from the commit messages. I assume that my fellow developers discussed this at length, and if poked or pressed, I could dig up the ##crawl-dev logs to show it. I fully trust the commit message: this change was made to *increase* choices, by making the dominating Ogre weapon choice less attractive and thus opening other builds. Whether the change achieves that, or even overdid it, remains to be seen. In any case, it was my idea (of several years ago, when Og and OM were folded into single Og) to have good Spellcasting and bad other magical skills. This got lost with the recent change, and while I'm partial to my own ideas like everyone else, this change came out well-motivated enough. (Unlike, to give a random example, arbitrarily removing amnesia by ripping pages from books! [1]) It turned out that Marvin actually liked that aptitude niche, and this seems to have led to the corresponding Mummy change. I cannot say whether this was intended as a compensation for the wand removals -- I wouldn't think so. From my personal point of view: I had nothing to do with Mu/Og changes, and I'll be happy to see how they play out. They're fine by me either way. I encouraged and rooted for the wand removals (there's a c-r-d mail about it, and also further stuff about moving rods to non-rods), and I am very happy these are in. It was about time. What now? I am absolutely sure that the yellow wands will not come back. I can imagine that there'll be discussion about generation rates for the consumables. All the hullabaloo about gimped endgame and whatnot will be entirely ignored. Ogre aptitudes will be revisited if and when feedback rolls in. The aptitude changes have been significant, and it's completely counterproductive to revert for nothing. The changes arrived in very early 0.20 trunk -- the best moment to test stuff like this, and see what happens. Exactly the same goes for Dwarves and their new innate healing, as well as for Mummies. Regarding future development, much more interesting (as in: open, large, discussion-worthy and reliant on feedback) changes hopefully materialise later: the Hell-Pan stuff, and if we get lucky, whatever Lasty can pull off (this includes the ranged reform). These are on the 0.20 planning page. I hope the royal sloth is happy! [1] This is a joke. I have nothing to argue for book amnesia apart from flavour. And the desire to make book duplicates good for *something*. The interface for book amnesia was admittedly lousy, and there have been conflicting trends about goldifying strategical items -- book amnesia probably just got the short straw there.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 05:24 |
Expressing contempt for the devs (from the players) or for the players (from the devs) is pretty sad. We all love Crawl though it seems like it's hard to agree what parts we love about it.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 05:26 |
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FR: Scroll of whining - summons a dev to your webtiles game, duration scales with evocations
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 05:36 |
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Wait, DID they remove book-destruction amnesia? Or was that a proposed and rejected change? I keep seeing this mentioned and can't remember any commit to that effect.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 05:39 |
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Ferrinus posted:Wait, DID they remove book-destruction amnesia? Or was that a proposed and rejected change? I keep seeing this mentioned and can't remember any commit to that effect. It's been gone since August. The tournament did not have book amnesia.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 05:40 |
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What the gently caress.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 05:41 |
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What exactly is the ranged reform? There's no explanation for it on the 0.20 page, just a mention of something.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 05:42 |
Can you Wizmode on CAO or do I have to download a standalone?
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 05:52 |
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Goodpancakes posted:Can you Wizmode on CAO or do I have to download a standalone? You can if you're a dev (or server admin, presumably)! Before I had my first win I used wizmode to look at some areas of the game and try out Tornado and such, it was nice to have the option. These days I occasionally use it to check weird interactions, if the first people I ask don't know the answer. Is explore mode available online? (And how do you use it offline?)
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 05:58 |
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rchandra posted:Is explore mode available online? (And how do you use it offline?)
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 07:01 |
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Dpeg if you're going to act like this I think the thread would actively be better off with one less dev posting in it
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 07:03 |
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In what way would it be better?, at worst just ignore him. I rather like having his perspective here even if it's sometimes presented in an annoying manner. At least I know more about what the devs are thinking and how they think.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 07:12 |
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Internet Kraken posted:I don't really know what that is supposed to mean but the effect is no, dpeg did not think about mummies at all when making this change.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 07:19 |
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Yeah. Getting your panties in a twist because the dev posting here is as mature as we are about changes to Crawl isn't really an interesting discussion point. No matter the delivery, I still know more about where things are going and why, even if I might disagree with both the where and the why.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 07:21 |
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Yeah, spellcasting apt going from -1 to +2 is a pretty big swing; even if spellcasting is not something you'd always keep on that's still going to mean focusing on other skills a lot more quickly once you get enough spell levels. e: unless you do a scummy mummy MuFi and just thwack everything instead
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 07:52 |
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# ? May 14, 2024 02:13 |
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a day ago or so someone on tavern was talking about how losing these makes mummies awful, and said "Now mummies have only two gods viable on 15 rune games; Gozag and Nemelex." so I said you don't need HW to win as mummy, my mummy win was without HW wand(or god that gives healing) and got a hell rune as 3rd(and that mummies biggest concern is not endgame/postgame, it's early game where they are actually crap, and they wouldn't have heal wounds then anyways) so then they said that win was two years ago and I used haste spell in it, so it doesn't mean anything. I said I'll get another mummy win, they say quote:OK, you said you can do, just try. Of course with 15 runes, without Gozag/Makhleb/Nemelex, no abyss grinding. Don't forget Haste spell (Which you casted 276 times in the run you showed me), wand are all gone. quote:Ok, I did it(MuFi^Oka). The whole thing was fairly academic because I knew from the start that, like I said, early game which is most dangerous for any character is where you need to worry as mummy because you don't have XP yet and rF-/no potions is the biggest deal there. Lategame you have enough XP(+gear) to make things more even compared to other species, extended you have more XP than you'd ever need even with -2 apts. the whole thing makes me feel that most people complaining about how it's a big nerf to mummy don't really understand where the challenge of playing mummy actually comes from. the idea that this is a large nerf feels so divorced from the actual experience of playing and winning as Mu.
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# ? Dec 22, 2016 08:08 |