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Yeah, a lot of the recent changes have been making the original game harder and harder, and I say that as someone who has won a bunch of times through persistence but also has a lot (a LOT) of experience dying in this game. Things keep being removed because everyone uses them which just means they're good, and new, tougher monsters get added. Nobody has ever explained to me where exactly this "crawl is too easy" mentality comes from because only the handful of very best players have 50% winrates. (IMHO it's been downhill since rMut got removed--the latest version is the very first time since I started with 0.12 or whatever that I've felt a new version is worse than the previous one. The QoL improvements continue to be amazing, but Goddamn.
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Feb 7, 2017 11:43
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IronicDongz posted:I don't really mean it like that. I just don't think it's fair to say "The game is going the way of ROMhacks"(especially since I used to be way into that scene and it is totally different in almost every way), and I don't think rmsl is a fun spell, or one that player's chances of winning revolve around. I don't think the game is in romhack territory either, but I think on every change that has removed stuff (rmsl, tele and HW wands, rods bieng cut) your response is essentially to say that those aren't really impactful changes and we don't need those anyway. You're right that most of the changes don't individually lessen the chance of people to win, but taken together it has to be clear there's been a removal of "slack" in the game and fewer and fewer ways to make up for mistakes or bad luck. You probably don't need them, but bad (most) players stuck in a corner with a hill giant a couple steps away will really miss that HW wand and I know for a fact there was no way I would be able to do extended without one. Rmsl isn't absolutely necessary but it gives you room to make a mistake in shoals that would kill you dead without time to learn what you were doing wrong E.G: A pack of merfolk javelineers caught me in the open and nearly killed me in a single turn even with rmsl! I should be really careful! VS A pack of merfolk javelineers caught me in the open and killed me in a single turn! gently caress shoals! The beserkers and really dumb melee guys you mention don't need rmsl, they can power through yaktaur and merfolk packs anyway, its casters and hybrid characters that needed it and now they've got to sacrifice a equipment slot to get it.
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Feb 7, 2017 14:07
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LogicNinja posted:(IMHO it's been downhill since rMut got removed--the latest version is the very first time since I started with 0.12 or whatever that I've felt a new version is worse than the previous one. The QoL improvements continue to be amazing, but Goddamn. I remember when rMut removal was partly justified because it would put malmutate's issues to the forefront Well, they're still in the forefront..
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Feb 7, 2017 15:14
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Teriyaki Koinku posted:
Holy poo poo, nice items and its been so long since offline tiles for me I totally forgot about the visual inventory! For someone in the know is there a reason for the discrepancy between offline and online tiles UI? Is it mostly a matter of concessions for online tiles that never got ported back?
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Feb 7, 2017 15:15
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Internet Kraken posted:I agree that Crawl has shifted away from arbitrary difficulty in the form of "gotcha!" traps that require prior knowledge to reasonably avoid. A lot of roguelikes have a bad habit of flooding the game with those. They can be funny but most of the time they just gently caress over new players that want to get into the game. Really like these! Keep it up! Also, want to echo the QoL improvements but I feel for a newbie getting into this game now because as a veteran the game keeps getting more difficult, I can't imagine how someone just starting out (or getting back into it) must feel. Also still waiting on the malmutate changes as someone that went down into slime and ended up getting looked at wrong by two shining eyes in the same turn trying to get away from them 
FulsomFrank fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 15:42
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As someone returning to the game after a year or so, I'm pretty disheartened that there seems to be a fascination with removing even more options and tools from non-casters. e: If you want to remove bloated evocables, cut back on decks imo. fool of sound fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 16:18
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Removing rMut without fixing malmutations breaks several Dev platform promises by repealing the Affordable Malmutations Care Act without replacing those provisions that allowed those of us whose employers do not donate regularly to United Zin to keep our families mutation free. Malmutations are not a big deal for score players - for the rest of us they are total boner killers. Berserkitis, Teleportitis, wand MP, placid Magic, these are all just fun-wrecking. Another example, book amnesia. Used to be you found a spellbook you could mem a spell from it free of charge without worrying about finding one later. If you were a vehumet caster you could actually use your spell levels without having to have a plan. It let casual and new players try spells out without a huge penalty or risk. If you are a speed runner you know what spells you want, if you're a veteran player you know which ones are good for your build. It should have been made more obvious rather than removed. My issue with charms reform and many other changes/removals is the game has such a hard on for pure melee in heavy armor. RMSL was yet another way light armor users or dodgers closed the gap. Now it's become easier again to simply put on a big rear end suit of armor and turn off your brain. Yet another change that makes it harder for casual players and different playstyles while barely affecting veterans who as noted don't need RMSL. The problem is no dev wants to tackle the real balance issues (light armor vs heavy, 1h/shield vs 2h, magic vs melee, combat in general being obfuscated as gently caress) or no one can get a consensus when they do. So you get removals like these that exacerbate them. They would be good changes if the game were balanced. Instead they remove the little shims that are keeping the pool table playable. Ideally what you'd do is FIX THE loving POOL TABLE instead. If light armor / dodge worked worth a poo poo you wouldn't need RMSL. To me this is the end result of having a lot of devs with ideas without having at least one with a grand design or quite frankly a holistic view of their game.
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Feb 7, 2017 16:24
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What do you find to be obfuscated about combat?
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Feb 7, 2017 16:26
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SKULL.GIF posted:What do you find to be obfuscated about combat? To start with: damage dealt, enemy health (and randomized on top of that). Aside from following Conventional Wisdom passed down by veterans it's still not clear at all how to decide on weapons even if your only criteria is DPS (DPAut?). Looking at the base damage + enchantment + accuracy values is really confusing for a new player, and it shows when often times advice for melee characters is some form of "use this harder hitting weapon you silly goose". I understand it's going to be very difficult to devise a damage system that isn't swingy as hell without breaking combat, but I think there's already a fork (hellcrawl IIRC?) showing damage numbers for just about everything and it's been pretty well received. That would be a good starting point IMO. apple fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 16:34
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fool_of_sound posted:As someone returning to the game after a year or so, I'm pretty disheartened that there seems to be a fascination with removing even more options and tools from non-casters.
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Feb 7, 2017 16:45
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SKULL.GIF posted:What do you find to be obfuscated about combat?
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Feb 7, 2017 16:44
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Can Of Worms posted:...decks were removed. For non-Nemelexites, at least. Yeah I'm aware, but they're still a big weird unique mechanic for just one god.
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Feb 7, 2017 16:46
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i feel like Gods are the perfect place to have big weird unique mechanics; otoh, decks are boring and kludgy
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Feb 7, 2017 16:56
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fool_of_sound posted:As someone returning to the game after a year or so, I'm pretty disheartened that there seems to be a fascination with removing even more options and tools from non-casters. Decks have been cut back on, though, and repeatedly. They're finally back to being workable for Nemelecites at least.
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Feb 7, 2017 17:00
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Araganzar posted:Removing rMut without fixing malmutations breaks several Dev platform promises by repealing the Affordable Malmutations Care Act without replacing those provisions that allowed those of us whose employers do not donate regularly to United Zin to keep our families mutation free. Malmutations are not a big deal for score players - for the rest of us they are total boner killers. Berserkitis, Teleportitis, wand MP, placid Magic, these are all just fun-wrecking. I agree with all of this.
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Feb 7, 2017 17:06
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Auto explore dumped me in this really lovely situation: I sat here going over all my consumable options...maybe a corpse drop to distract him...maybe I could berserk and kill him before his rapidly splitting heads can kill me... Oh, there's a door, OK.
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Feb 7, 2017 17:08
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I love that you can just close the door on a monstrous rampaging six headed hydra and he can't do sh*t about it
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Feb 7, 2017 17:13
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why/how can giant orange brains (or whatever they got called in the de-giantization) open doors?
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Feb 7, 2017 17:20
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Darth Windu posted:I love that you can just close the door on a monstrous rampaging six headed hydra and he can't do sh*t about it You can close the door on a orb of fire and it can't do anything about it!
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Feb 7, 2017 17:25
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SKULL.GIF posted:What do you find to be obfuscated about combat? Recent changes have come a long way in showing a monter's capabilities, particularly their likely hit points and damage. However, I still see the following: ACCURACY No details on your accuracy is with any weapon or any attack other than a contextless +/- to hit on the weapon No details what your various bonus to hit from spells, slaying, skill, fighting are No real details on your odds to hit or be hit, or on how bad misses were or how solid hits were DAMAGE No damage numbers on attacks delivered or received, no details on how strong or weak a hit was for the weapon No indication of damage reduction by armor or other means on attack or defense, no details on chance to block or dodge, no details on damage saved by resists Damage taken can be derived but no indication of how much damage from each source in a turn HIT POINTS No indication of HP contribution from Fighting, Race Apt, buffs, gear No idea if a 50-200 hp monster is swole or non-swole "Almost dead" is a lie and there's no way to tell how big a lie it is (probability of killing this thing in the next 1-2 hits) SPELLS Spell to-hit might as well be coded on an Enigma Machine Spell damage is hidden and even if it weren't it's like they had a contest to build the weirdest and most variant die combinations Spell power is on a # to ########## scale that is too full of nerd math to be useful to anyone for anything Now, I LIKE THIS to some extent. If I wanted to see numbers flying up over monsters heads I would play WoW or Diablo or The Witcher. I recognize there will always be a balancing act here. I also know there is no dev right now who is TRYING to be the one with a Grand Design, and there has been a lot of great work lately to de-obfuscate combat and spells. But it does grind my gears a bit when people say the combat is not obfuscated when it's almost completely mysterious compared to almost any other game I play. As one brief for example, it's impossible to swap between say an executioner's axe and a hand axe and see any qualitative or quantitative indication of your character's effectiveness with that weapon in terms of accuracy and damage other than the absolute broadest strokes other than the aut delay. When you miss or do no damage it's hard to tell why. When you wreck something, you have no idea if it was big weapon damage, a crap AC roll, your freezing brand, or what. So you have little feedback on the effectiveness of your skills, brands, weapon choices, etc.
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Feb 7, 2017 17:31
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someone awful. posted:why/how can giant orange brains (or whatever they got called in the de-giantization) open doors? Telekinesis? Or maybe they have blobby arms like Krang.
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Feb 7, 2017 17:33
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Mr. Lobe posted:Telekinesis? Or maybe they have blobby arms like Krang. How about a green slime monster fusion wherein a Giant Orange Brain meets a Giant and melds with it to form an even greater threat to this dimension
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Feb 7, 2017 17:37
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To answer your question about mummies SKULL.GIF they're miserable to play and are always worse than other races for anything you want to do. I like the idea of a race that's about slow and calculated play, but with almost zero escape options it's tedious. Mummy anything is worse than most other races for that class, so you only pick them when you don't want to deal with torment or food but their abysmal midgame means you're stuck fighting ettins with ice beasts. The tedium of spending 200+ manual turns on killing a couple of ugly things correctly so you don't need to use one of your three tele scrolls is common. I guess I just don't see a reason for mummies to exist as-is because their apts are atrocious and they're often behind everyone else on the power curve in a game that's getting increasingly tight with XP. Phoneposting, but there are some cool things you can do with mummies to make them interesting (which they are not) or decent (which they are not) or fun (most subjective, but they're only really fun in late game).
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Feb 7, 2017 17:42
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Fitzy Fitz posted:Auto explore dumped me in this really lovely situation: I fixed this image so it shows what it would look like in one of my games. 
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Feb 7, 2017 17:42
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A couple thoughts after reading the last few pages: I want to caution against getting too worked up about Crawl becoming too hard. I've noticed that SA discussion, in the years I've been reading it, has a habit of reinforcing everyone else's negative opinions about a game (or another piece of media) and everyone gets worked up and starts thinking that the game really going completely loving awful to poo poo. This isn't something I see in other spaces that discuss Crawl. A lot of these removals that people are bemoaning mattered a lot less, in the long term of Crawl, than the posts discussing them made it seem. Over the last several versions, the general winrate has either held steady or increased. This has happened alongside a growth in the player base. Now, this could be for any number of reasons (I personally subscribe to it being a combination of the game becoming clearer and clearer, and the advice-giving community becoming collectively better) but Crawl isn't becoming any more unwelcoming to new players, I think. I personally think the current version is the most welcoming it's ever been, but I have clear bias. Feedback is heavily limited by the message log: Crawl combat is already message-spammy, and better feedback means longer messages. On top of that, Crawl is limited by having to support the console/ASCII version which has much less visual bandwidth to convey feedback. Many things you mentioned about obfuscation are maybe probably not going to be cleared up, because when presented with clear numbers many people have a tendency to just try to math things out instead of play the game. That said the past version, version and a half, has made huge strides towards opening up the numbers side of the game. We now show monster relative AC, EV, MR, HP averages, damage averages... Some of these points about how severe the misses/how accurate the hits were are difficult to convey without confusing players and leading them into drawing false conclusions. What if they rolled really badly on a given attack and "overwhelmingly missed by a mile", when their average swing would have connected? Maybe we'd just show chance-to-hit instead, but that's kind of an abstract number itself, and players already get frustrated with the chance-to-succeed that we display for hexes.
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Feb 7, 2017 18:04
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fool_of_sound posted:e: If you want to remove bloated evocables, cut back on decks imo. Unless they already did, ain't really played it serous in a long time. SKULL.GIF posted:Maybe we'd just show chance-to-hit instead, but that's kind of an abstract number itself, and players already get frustrated with the chance-to-succeed that we display for hexes. World Famous W fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 18:04
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Araganzar posted:I fixed this image so it shows what it would look like in one of my games. It's impossible to close 
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Feb 7, 2017 18:05
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Nah, least with an arrow you can pick it up (if you aren't under fire from centaurs!). A corpse, now that will clog up a door until it decays and barring some form of Necromancy there is nothing you can do about it!
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Feb 7, 2017 18:15
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There's a creature in the doorway! The six-headed hydra hits the butterfly!! The butterfly dies! There's a creature in the doorway!
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Feb 7, 2017 18:23
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SKULL.GIF posted:What do you find to be obfuscated about combat? I think the biggest issue is figuring out what's the right armor to wear at your strength and skill level. Shields and spells just tell you what level you should be at, and weapons show mindelay which is good enough as a goal, though I'd like to see a "this weapon has higher/lower dpr with your skill than your current weapon" thing when equipping. GDR is very hidden nonsense too. My issue with removing rmsl as a spell goes along with haste. It's not increasing player choice, it's removing builds. You either go all-in with spellcasting or you're a heavy armor melee dude because there isn't anything worth dipping. Trog's big drawback for a dumb melee guy is you sacrifice those low level utility spells that are otherwise "free." They don't just cost the spell levels, they limit equipment and god choices. I'd actually be excited to see a complete charm overhaul instead of these weird cuts, they strike me as devs who have a problem with something but lack the drive, creativity, and vision for a genuine reform. I disagree with necromutation being garbage though. Malmutate is horrific bullshit and torment is also terrible, necromutation grants immunity to both and makes extended much nicer. I'd say it's why for the moment casters are the only reasonable way to clear 15.
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Feb 7, 2017 18:31
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Stop making the game harder.quote:Trog's big drawback for a dumb melee guy is you sacrifice those low level utility spells that are otherwise "free." They don't just cost the spell levels, they limit equipment and god choices. Stop making the game harder. Speleothing fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 18:35
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Mr. Prokosch posted:I think the biggest issue is figuring out what's the right armor to wear at your strength and skill level. Shields and spells just tell you what level you should be at, and weapons show mindelay which is good enough as a goal, though I'd like to see a "this weapon has higher/lower dpr with your skill than your current weapon" thing when equipping. GDR is very hidden nonsense too.
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Feb 7, 2017 18:41
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Speleothing posted:Stop making the game harder. I'm actually not sure if the game is harder, though a lot of builds have become non-viable to the point where the game should just make you choose Wizard + Subclass or Fighter + Subclass. I will say an even winrate over years is likely evidence that the game has gotten harder. As games age the playerbase is increasingly dominated by veterans who have a lot of system mastery and you should expect a large rise in winrate. Instead it stays even over time which tells me the game is actually slowly getting harder to maintain challenge for players who are experts in the game.
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Feb 7, 2017 18:42
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I've really enjoyed playing crawl on a Vive via Bigscreen lately. Idiotic as it sounds, the isolation and theatre-sized screen make the game a lot more fun. Easier to focus too. It does seem a lot harder to play some hybrid and light armor classes in the more recent versions. I don't know if I'd say the overall game is getting less fun, but there is definitely a shift in what playstyles are viable/effective. Even if the race hadn't been eliminated quite a while back, I don't think my favorite gimmick HE/AM of cheibriados would have any hope at this point.
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Feb 7, 2017 18:43
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Skull.gif do you have stats for how many people have been downloading the various offline versions of crawl? I suspect that most new people try that before they "graduate" to online (Though a lot of people probably stick with offline for variosu reasons, such as I do.)
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Feb 7, 2017 18:43
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Araganzar posted:HIT POINTS ? The game tells you monsters' AC, EV, and average HP. I get what you're saying about damage, but I don't see how monster HP is 'obfuscated' at all.
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Feb 7, 2017 18:50
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Mr. Prokosch posted:I'm actually not sure if the game is harder, though a lot of builds have become non-viable to the point where the game should just make you choose Wizard + Subclass or Fighter + Subclass. I will say an even winrate over years is likely evidence that the game has gotten harder. As games age the playerbase is increasingly dominated by veterans who have a lot of system mastery and you should expect a large rise in winrate. Instead it stays even over time which tells me the game is actually slowly getting harder to maintain challenge for players who are experts in the game. I'd be cautious about assigning too much interpretation to this. The best players have absurd streaks of 20+ wins. Back in the old days streaks of 4-5 wins were considered legendary. Overall winrate is also dampened by new players coming in with every version. I don't understand what you're seeing when you say that a lot of builds have become nonviable. Carcer posted:Skull.gif do you have stats for how many people have been downloading the various offline versions of crawl? I suspect that most new people try that before they "graduate" to online (Though a lot of people probably stick with offline for variosu reasons, such as I do.) I don't have the download stats offhand but the majority of people who play Crawl play offline.
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Feb 7, 2017 18:51
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Well then that's were you should be looking. I know its impossible to see winrates, or anything, for offline players, but if you've been seeing a drop in people downloading recent offline versions that would perhaps point to people giving up on the game. As for builds becoming non-viable a lot of what made hybrids viable, mostly charms, have been removed. This kills the hybrid.
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Feb 7, 2017 18:59
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I know for a fact that everyone I've ever introduced Crawl to has chosen the offline tiles version and plays almost exclusively on it. Someone else I know would play online at her work, but aside from her no one else.
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Feb 7, 2017 19:02
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Crawl has really weird underlying combat formulas, but EVEN SO there are a lot of things whose absense is indefensible: * Your "accuracy" expressed as an EV-esque integer * A monster's actual AC, EV, and HP * A monster's % chance to hit you * Your % chance to hit a monster with your current weapon * Singularity * Yor maximum damage with your current weapon * Your maximum damage with all your damaging spells * The amount of damage dealt or received in any specific already-resolved action
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Feb 7, 2017 19:24
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