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Internet Kraken
Apr 24, 2010

slightly amused

World Famous W posted:

Also, as a side note, I would love for my avatar to be canon again.

I'd say your avatar could pass as a dream sheep.

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apple
May 18, 2003

Jose in the club wearing orange suspenders

Heithinn Grasida posted:

I remember pleasingfungus' last post in this thread was something like: "you all are complaining about changes that haven't even happened yet, I'm going to take a break, maybe I'll come back later". He explicitly said he was leaving because the environment in the thread was getting really bad. Maybe he can come and correct me if I'm wrong.

FTR this was pertaining to the reaction to WJC's changes and while I agree some people jumped they gun by saying the god is eventually getting removed, it is indeed getting removed/merged. Is it cynical of said posters to make that prediction? Yeah definitely, but WJC was a breath of fresh air for a lot of people so they felt a little betrayed when nerfs/removals started to hit WJC. I don't blame PF for not wanting to be involved (specially when this is a volunteer thing), but I also think that was just another normal episode of disgruntled crawl goons, maybe with a side of feeling blueballed because everyone thought SteelNeuron's god design was basically a lock for 0.20

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

To be fair, I was the one who started that conversation by predicting Wujian would remain in trunk for a few versions before being removed. If I recall, PF specifically was responding to a few posts in which people were blaming the devs as if it had already been removed. Of course, it turns out that it likely will be removed after all. But the people jumping right away to slamming their "The devs! :argh:" button were shitposting, and I think it's reasonable to want a break from that, especially since it seems reasonable to assert that the number of those kinds of posts has gradually grown in proportion to good faith discussion in this thread.

Fitzy Fitz
May 14, 2005




I've been playing this game for 10+ years and posting in good faith all along. It's only been in the last few versions that development has started to suck poo poo. Not sure why.

Archenteron
Nov 3, 2006

:marc:
I still miss original wutiang council with turbo weapon crosstraining. More choices with less decision making.

Maybe that's why I like current gnolls so much

Fayrn
Apr 5, 2009
still playing Crawl v0.Singularity crew checking in

Zaodai
May 23, 2009

Death before dishonor?
Your terms are accepted.


Heithinn Grasida posted:

To be fair, I was the one who started that conversation by predicting Wujian would remain in trunk for a few versions before being removed. If I recall, PF specifically was responding to a few posts in which people were blaming the devs as if it had already been removed. Of course, it turns out that it likely will be removed after all. But the people jumping right away to slamming their "The devs! :argh:" button were shitposting, and I think it's reasonable to want a break from that, especially since it seems reasonable to assert that the number of those kinds of posts has gradually grown in proportion to good faith discussion in this thread.

People with a good sense of pattern recognition (and pessimists) are always seen as poo poo posting right up until it turns out they're right again, then the cycle repeats for the next thing they see the writing on the wall for.

Maybe the devs do have a plan for WJC that isn't just gutting it and dumping it in a ditch. Maybe they've got a plan for Ghost reform that isn't just cutting ghosts. But probably not. Maybe they'll be able to resist the urge to make sure a new race gets kneecapped before release. But again, not many of us are going to take that wager based on their recent track record.

The dev team operate like that back alley organ doctor in Futurama. "I take lungs now, gills come in next week". They're quick with the axe part of any given reform and then NO TIME TO FIX IT, WE'VE GOT BIG PLANS! *swings axe wildly about the room*

mdct
Sep 2, 2011

Tingle tingle kooloo limpah.
These are my magic words.

Don't steal them.
Still waiting on that malmutate rework that is definitely happening

redneck nazgul
Apr 25, 2013

I can't remember if Hellcrawl has WJC in it or not. If he'd implement that, I'd probably never go back to DCSS.

Prism
Dec 22, 2007

yospos

Mighty Dicktron posted:

Still waiting on that malmutate rework that is definitely happening

Half of Dracula
Oct 24, 2008

Perhaps the same could be
It's not shitposting if you're right

Indecisive
May 6, 2007


where did this thread go wrong.................

Pacra
Aug 5, 2004

Eela6 posted:

My favorite race was Sludge Elf, my favorite spell was Evaporate, my favorite class was Reaver, and my favorite god was Pakellas.

Sludge Elf was an uninteresting race, Evaporate was a tedious and terrible spell, Reaver was redundant, and Pakellas was a trainwreck :colbert:

my hot take: Crawl is Still Fun and the only things I kind of miss is the old summon dragon and oldTomb

Pacra
Aug 5, 2004

Also here is my favorite crawl fanart of Cerebov

apple
May 18, 2003

Jose in the club wearing orange suspenders

redneck nazgul posted:

I can't remember if Hellcrawl has WJC in it or not. If he'd implement that, I'd probably never go back to DCSS.

Pretty sure the nerfed version is there, the god might still be a good fit for Hellcrawl though (thanks to no upstairs/backtracking levels).

edit: nvm, I'll ask about it though

apple fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Nov 7, 2017

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

Pacra posted:

Sludge Elf was an uninteresting race, Evaporate was a tedious and terrible spell, Reaver was redundant, and Pakellas was a trainwreck :colbert:

my hot take: Crawl is Still Fun and the only things I kind of miss is the old summon dragon and oldTomb

Pakellas was fine if you just accepted him as trog for evocations that needed another drawback (reduced xp to non-evocations? I dunno). :colbert:

Internet Kraken
Apr 24, 2010

slightly amused
The flaws with Pakellas seemed to me seemed less to stem from his design and more from inherent issues with evocables. He was a god that encouraged having a large stockpile of evocables to use, but that meant carrying around tons of rods and items that didn't stack. He was powerful but optimal play with him was a cluttered a mess. Also from a balance standpoint he allowed near infinite uses of wands of heal wounds and teleportation, which was pretty bonkers.

I can understand the thought process behind removing him, but its yet another case where I wish more effort was put into finding an alternative solution than just cutting the feature. This case in particular is notable because this problem with Pakellas extends to evocations in general; optimal play has you carry a bunch of wands that don't stack and clutter your inventory. So they removed Pakellas but now they have to go back and rework evocables anyways. Removing a feature does not actually improve the game unless you address the core issues that caused it to be problematic.

apple
May 18, 2003

Jose in the club wearing orange suspenders
Turns out I'm a dummy and was thinking of sprint maps, WJC hasn't been merged into hellcrawl (yet):

Hellmonk posted:

WJC never got merged. I don't have any immediate plans to do so but I'm willing to reconsider if there's a good idea for what WJC "should" look like in a hellcrawl context. The current trunk version felt underwhelming outside of heavenly storm (which is an extremely powerful and pretty cool ability), and I was not personally a big fan of the old trunk version either. If there's a lot of interest I'd suggest digging up the old WJC threads and/or asking SteelNeuron if he's still around. Chances are there's *some* variant of WJC that I'd be willing to code or pr in.

Definitely sounds like this is in SteelNeuron's ballpark, but I don't know if he likes hellcrawl or if he even wants to touch DCSS anymore.

SteelNeuron
Feb 23, 2017

apple posted:

Definitely sounds like this is in SteelNeuron's ballpark, but I don't know if he likes hellcrawl or if he even wants to touch DCSS anymore.

Yeah that sounds good, I'd be happy to work with Hellmonk. Is he around here at all?

I don't play DCSS anymore but I see no problem with Hellcrawl. About helping move WJC there, I'd be happy to if we can agree on a plan of what to implement beforehand, because I can't justify spending more time tweaking and ajusting the god. By my last count I spent around 400 hours on it, including coding, playing and spectating time.

SteelNeuron fucked around with this message at 11:07 on Nov 7, 2017

Samog
Dec 13, 2006
At least I'm not an 07.

Heithinn Grasida posted:

I'm too lazy to go point for point with you because time off is rare now, and I'd rather spend it playing video games than arguing on the internet about something nobody else cares about. And I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth. I remember pleasingfungus' last post in this thread was something like: "you all are complaining about changes that haven't even happened yet, I'm going to take a break, maybe I'll come back later".

that's not the first time a crawl dev has posted something like that in this thread, but the change-that-hasn't-even-happened yet always makes its way into the next release somehow

SteelNeuron
Feb 23, 2017
Call me crazy for trying again, but Amethyst has shown interest in keeping the dream alive so at least I'll try to propose ideas.

SteelNeuron fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Nov 8, 2017

apple
May 18, 2003

Jose in the club wearing orange suspenders

SteelNeuron posted:

Yeah that sounds good, I'd be happy to work with Hellmonk. Is he around here at all?

I don't play DCSS anymore but I see no problem with Hellcrawl. About helping move WJC there, I'd be happy to if we can agree on a plan of what to implement beforehand, because I can't justify spending more time tweaking and ajusting the god. By my last count I spent around 400 hours on it, including coding, playing and spectating time.

I've only seen him on tavern, maybe you could PM him? Cool to hear about WJC potentially living on!

Yngwie Mangosteen
Aug 23, 2007

Internet Kraken posted:

What the hell are you talking about? Skull.gif and Pleasing Fungus posted in this thread for tons of versions and never had a problem with the atmosphere here. Dpeg is the one who sauntered in, acted like an rear end in a top hat, and then somehow it was all our fault when people responded in kind. Any discussion he created was pointless because he never listened to anything said here. I can't think of a single change that seems like it was influenced by feedback here in recent versions.

You point out that there is barely any recent discussion, but that's because there's barely anything going on. The most substantial change to the game is the possible addition of Gnolls, which plenty of people have talked about. What else was there to talk about? Development has slowed down to a glacial pace and most of the upcoming changes are the removal of content or reworks of existing stuff, and there's only so much you can say about that. Especially when its almost entirely theoretical at the moment, like the supposed swamp rework.

The general plan for Crawl has shifted away from adding new content to reworking or removing the existing features. This can be for the better, but a lot of the time its for worse. Don't act like this thread is negative just for the sake of it when the atmosphere was mostly positive and enthusiastic up until the recent versions.

This is a good and accurate post. Dpeg got butthurt people didn't suck his dick and goons, being goons, decided to make fun of him for it relentlessly.

Then crawl p. much died. So the thread has just been the same rounds of 'lol guess what they're removing now' for a while.

Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Dec 22, 2005

GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS
Hellcrawl is really good and pretty much what I always wanted crawl to be so uhh, if you wanna target that I'm all for it!!!

pathetic little tramp
Dec 12, 2005

by Hillary Clinton's assassins
Fallen Rib
Where do I get HellCrawl?

Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Dec 22, 2005

GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS
You can play it online at CBRO or download here:
https://github.com/Hellmonk/hellcrawl/releases

apple
May 18, 2003

Jose in the club wearing orange suspenders
BTW, while hellcrawl has a fair amount of cool features that help offset the lack of upstairs, on normal difficulty it's still harder to play than standard DCSS IMO. It's also a lot harder to snowball and become super overpowered because the overall game is shorter, XP is more limited and new dangerous monsters are added later on. It think it's pretty fun though, combat is still very much DCSS at its core; it just gets rid of the stairdancing without it feeling unfair/unfun.

e: Also it goes without saying if you like upstairs hellcrawl probably won't be a good fit

Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Dec 22, 2005

GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

apple posted:

BTW, while hellcrawl has a fair amount of cool features that help offset the lack of upstairs, on normal difficulty it's still harder to play than standard DCSS IMO. It's also a lot harder to snowball and become super overpowered because the overall game is shorter, XP is more limited and new dangerous monsters are added later on. It think it's pretty fun though, combat is still very much DCSS at its core; it just gets rid of the stairdancing without it feeling unfair/unfun.

e: Also it goes without saying if you like upstairs hellcrawl probably won't be a good fit
Yep - these are all quite welcome to me. Shorter crawl where a higher percentage of fights are life-or-death, I never quite feel safe, and never see any messages about food are all I really wanted. No upstairs is a boon beyond that and I think it works pretty well.

I also haven't won yet so I guess I can't review any changes to zot. :)

Internet Kraken
Apr 24, 2010

slightly amused
How does Hellcrawl handle branches contained within other ones like the lair runes?

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

SteelNeuron posted:

Call me crazy for trying again, but Amethyst has shown interest in keeping the dream alive so at least I'll try to propose ideas.

I would need to play it to get a feel for how the changes work, but my instinct is to say that these changes are going to land the god in a weird compromise position: whirlwind, wall jump and lunge are all usable at will, but specifically designed to be situational and often not necessary. Since those abilities are the core of what makes the god interesting and the core of its power, I feel watering them down so significantly waters the god itself down too much. I can't imagine this iteration of the maneuvers will encourage you to stay out of corridors at all. They're just too weak. Of course, I might be grossly underestimating the proposed pin on whirlwind. But if I am, it will run into the same type of opposition as WJC faced before.

I am very much a proponent of the idea that people who don't want to play with the changes WJC makes to melee combat can simply not play WJC: there is nothing wrong with directional keys being better than tab if that's attached to a god choice.

But since the god that's designed to change your approach to melee combat is apparently not actually allowed to do that, I would propose that weakening the maneuvers to roughly the level you suggested is reasonable, perhaps without the pin on whirlwind as well. But then strongly increase the degree that these abilities, particularly whirlwind, are boosted by serpent's lash. I don't recall serpent's lash's piety cost, but if it's not already too low, it might make sense to reduce it so that players are expected to use it several times in every significant fight. Or just remove the piety cost and give it a short cooldown. Then the god is about increased tactical options in open spaces until it's time to suddenly break some faces with flashy kung fu.

apple
May 18, 2003

Jose in the club wearing orange suspenders

Internet Kraken posted:

How does Hellcrawl handle branches contained within other ones like the lair runes?

You get a random lair rune branch after Orc, and you get an entrance to Vaults after that (entrance is always at the rune)

SteelNeuron
Feb 23, 2017

Heithinn Grasida posted:

I would need to play it to get a feel for how the changes work, but my instinct is to say that these changes are going to land the god in a weird compromise position: whirlwind, wall jump and lunge are all usable at will, but specifically designed to be situational and often not necessary. Since those abilities are the core of what makes the god interesting and the core of its power, I feel watering them down so significantly waters the god itself down too much. I can't imagine this iteration of the maneuvers will encourage you to stay out of corridors at all. They're just too weak. Of course, I might be grossly underestimating the proposed pin on whirlwind. But if I am, it will run into the same type of opposition as WJC faced before.

I am very much a proponent of the idea that people who don't want to play with the changes WJC makes to melee combat can simply not play WJC: there is nothing wrong with directional keys being better than tab if that's attached to a god choice.

But since the god that's designed to change your approach to melee combat is apparently not actually allowed to do that, I would propose that weakening the maneuvers to roughly the level you suggested is reasonable, perhaps without the pin on whirlwind as well. But then strongly increase the degree that these abilities, particularly whirlwind, are boosted by serpent's lash. I don't recall serpent's lash's piety cost, but if it's not already too low, it might make sense to reduce it so that players are expected to use it several times in every significant fight. Or just remove the piety cost and give it a short cooldown. Then the god is about increased tactical options in open spaces until it's time to suddenly break some faces with flashy kung fu.

I would need to play with these changes myself, but I think they're better than they look. I hope I can find a compromise with the devs on these changes, because I would be pretty happy with them. I used to share the viewpoint that WJC should be first and foremost anti-tab and that plenty of other god choices exist if you want normal melee combat, but I've come around by the sheer amount of dev and experienced player feedback against that. The balance I'm trying to strike here is that you're not completely screwed if you choose to play like old WJC (the damage economics of jumping around a monster are identical to tabbing, modulo the extra risk form the timing) so die hard WJC fans can forgo tab completely, but make it so tabbing is equally viable and the somewhat default combat approach, with the movement abilities shining at key moments that you need to learn to identify.

A somewhat subtle part of this version of Wall Jump is that it can still reward you for tactical jumping if you understand how monster energy works. If you judge your position well, you can use it to end fights safely. Think of this situation (P for player and E for enemy):
code:
XXXXXXXX
X......X
X.E....X
XP.....X
XEE....X
X......X
XXXXXXXX
If you whirlwind right, you would be trading 10 auts worth of your damage x3 enemies for 10 auts of incoming damage x3 enemies, and that gets reduced by the whirlwind malus. However by wall jumping to the top right you would be instead frontloading 20 auts against the top monster against its 20 auts of incoming damage, while the bottom monsters spend all that time catching up. If you think you can alpha strike the top monster, you made a perfect play, killing it before being hit by anything, which would be impossible otherwise. These situations will arise regardless of your EV boost, and the key thing here is that a player that really enjoys using WJC movement abilities can be constantly on the look for these and does not have to think of interface restrictions, while a player that doesn't like them that much can safely ignore them as they are not overcentralizing.

For fun, think of what would happen if you did Right-Left-Up-Lash-Up-Up on that picture (assuming the enemies are just melee and have your same move speed)

Whirlwind would not be ideal for sustained damage, that's right, but again there are plays where it's a good choice, and how frequent these are will depend on your play style. As you mentioned, Serpent's Lash also immediately gives it a strong role as AoE damage and disengage, and mixing/matching with Wall Jump to get max AoE damage vs risk is going to be interesting.

Lastly, having a deterministic pin as part of whirlwind is cool because it allows you to set up plays like the one I painted above. Determinism is important for the chess feeling of planning ahead.

Agreed on potentially reducing the cost of Serpent's Lash. Will probably mention that in the proposal.

SteelNeuron fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Nov 8, 2017

Darox
Nov 10, 2012


I really like this version of wall jumping. The slow movement is a great solution and synergizes well with how movement attacks work. Not having the random chance effects is also great, the daze was impossible to plan around.

Drunk Theory
Aug 20, 2016


Oven Wrangler
So I haven't touched this game since like early 2016. Catching up with the thread I see a lot of unhappy players. I'd like to pop into the game for a week or two until I get bored then shelve it for another year or so. Which version # would the thread recommend? (I'd prefer a tiles non-online version, but I'm open for other suggestions)

Ugly John
Jul 18, 2009
[img]https://forums.somethingawful.com/attachment.php?postid=514899866[/img]

Drunk Theory posted:

So I haven't touched this game since like early 2016. Catching up with the thread I see a lot of unhappy players. I'd like to pop into the game for a week or two until I get bored then shelve it for another year or so. Which version # would the thread recommend? (I'd prefer a tiles non-online version, but I'm open for other suggestions)

Try the new Gnolls in the current trunk before they get beaten down. They're the thing keeping the game interesting for me at the moment, even if I still suck with them.

Eela6
May 25, 2007
Shredded Hen

Drunk Theory posted:

So I haven't touched this game since like early 2016. Catching up with the thread I see a lot of unhappy players. I'd like to pop into the game for a week or two until I get bored then shelve it for another year or so. Which version # would the thread recommend? (I'd prefer a tiles non-online version, but I'm open for other suggestions)

0.18, probably?

Canine Blues Arooo
Jan 7, 2008

when you think about it...i'm the first girl you ever spent the night with

Grimey Drawer

Speleothing posted:

And yet the devs think the game is too easy

I seem to only post in this thread with effort posts, so lets do that again! Lets talk about Difficulty In Games!

Very strong players can produce win rates that are well above 50%. Inexperienced players often time have trouble getting a win in 100 games. The big questions to answer are:

- Why is this the case?
- Is this a problem?
- If it is a problem, how do you fix it?

To answer this, it's important to understand game difficulty. Difficulty is generally derived from a combination of three categories. Those categories are Execution, Decision-Making, and System Knowledge.

Execution is performing an intended action. The classic example is shooting a guy in an FPS. You see him, you know you want him to not be there and your gun can remove him. Can you actually point and click on the man before he clicks on you?

Decision-Making is pretty self-explanitory. Using the FPS example again, if you see a man you want dead, but you are also overextended on the map, do you think he's alone and engage him? Do you suspect immediate backup and retreat? Do you try to get a safer pick and take cover before shooting? Do you have a planned retreat vector? Do you charge him and worry about preserving your life later? These are the decisions you have to make as a player in such a scenario and great players tend to make a better decision than new players.

System Knowledge is simply knowing the rules of the game on a detailed level. Lets say the FPS you are playing happens to be Overwatch and you are playing D.Va and the guy you want to kill is across the map. Someone with strong System Knowledge would know that firing at him is a worthless endevour because it's going to do virtually no damage. But queue into bronze league and you'll see inexperienced D.Va players try to pick fights from a range of 30 yards against 76s and Pharahs - an ill-advised tactic. Knowing all the rules of the games and how individual systems interact with each other can lead to better Decision-Making - Great players tend to have great System Knowledge.

What kind of difficulty your game exhibits depends on it's genre and how it uses these three difficulty categories to create an experience. Turn-based games will never have an Execution requirement, so they must derive their difficulty from Decision-Making and System Knowledge. You don't need to embrace all three to have a great game that is difficult either. Go is a turn-based game with an extremely simple ruleset that has the depth of the Mariana Trench.

There is a debate about whether or not System Knowledge constitutes 'Real Difficulty'. If you aren't expected to execute on your ideas, and if you don't have to make hard decisions -- If the only thing stopping you from defeating a boss is simply knowing it's move list, does that constitute difficulty? It's a hard question to answer, but context matters a lot, so lets put it in some context:

Dark Souls is a very popular game that a lot of people have completed, but still gets the label of a 'difficult' game. Why is that? The reason is because Dark Souls is a game about trial and error - It's a game that wants to surprise the player in fantastic ways with big bosses and literal giant enemy crabs. It kind of feels like you have to make decisions, but it's not terribly difficult to arrive at a plan to not get hit and hit the dragon when you can. Your moveset isn't particularily deep and it wisely gives you a roll with IFrames to really smooth out the experience. The truth of the matter is that Dark Souls isn't actually a hard game at all. The game derives almost all of it's difficulty in forcing the player to learn it's rules, which in this case manifest as enemy attacks. It's a game that's designed to be beat by even the most average of gamer and feel like an achievement and it executes on this idea almost perfectly.

This is all actually OK in the context of Dark Souls because Souls games are supposed to be an Adventure. Adventures should be about exploring the unknown, and learning about your world organically through exploration and getting better as a player by understanding the environment and your opposition. You can clearly see this is the intent of the design and the wish of the community by how people discourage players from looking up spoilers to bosses and areas. Baking a lot of the difficulty into System Knowledge is not only OK in this situation, it's arguably ideal. It means you can deliver this real feeling of an adventure and you don't need LEET GAMER SKILL to actually complete it - You just need patience and willingness to learn. But it doesn't make the game difficult more than once. Once you know about the stuff, the stuff is no longer hard - the purest would argue that Dark Souls is not actually a difficult game at all and just provides the illusion of difficulty, and does so more successfully than almost any other game in the market.

It's also a reason why Souls games don't have an 'easy' mode. Such a mode compromises the experience the game wants to deliver on a fundamental level and the people clamoring for such an option or argue that it doesn't do any harm to include it have a total misunderstanding of the underlying elements that make Souls games appealing.

So how does this relate to Dungeon Crawl. Dungeon Crawl has elements of Decision-Making, but a great deal of it's difficulty is baked into System Knowledge. If you know all the rules of the game, all the quirks of all the items and spells and abilities and gods and races, then you will find that your decision-making tree is actually very narrow because arriving at the Best™ decision in any given scenario becomes easier and easier to do as your System Knowledge becomes more compelte. This has been true about Roguelikes in general for a very long time, but few have garnered the attention and the longevity of Dungeon Crawl, which puts the game in a very awkward spot. Traditionally, Roguelikes have channeled the same kind of spirit in gameplay as a Souls game, but on a grander scale with larger consequences for failure, making the time investment to complete it very high. The result is mastery feels even more rewarding and is even more impressive, but mastery of a Roguelike is pretty hollow since it's not the result of understanding complicated decision-making, but is instead the result of acquiring increasingly complete knowledge of the game systems.

The truth is that Dungeon Crawl is not a hard game if you know the rules.

The reason why less experienced players have sub 1% winrates is because they don't know the rules. The reason why theglow can streak 18 games in a tournament without dropping a single game is because he knows all the rules in detail.

The unfortunate end game of a game like Crawl that persists for years and years with players that have played for the better part of a decade is that the knowledge gap between the most experienced players and new players becomes increasingly large. The veterans of the game still want to cling to the memories of when they felt the game was more of an adventure and the newer players just want a game that they feel they can approach at all. The truth of the matter is that veteran players will never be able to go back to that feeling - It's like playing Dark Souls the 30th time and expecting it to feel like your first playthrough. It just can't happen.

So now dpeg and fungas and friends are in this spot where they are trying to make the game less esoteric and easier to learn for newer players with fewer 'gotchas', but are also trying to cater to the jeans and elliptics of the community without trying to make either group too upset. This is actually a needle that is possible to thread, but it is extremely difficult and requires substantial effort and intuition. More importantly, it probably requires a fundamental shift in design ideals. Specifically, it will mean that the game cannot rely on baking the majority of the difficulty into System Knowledge. It probably means that they will have to start looking for ways to embrace what I lovingly call 'Character' into the game in ways that might seem unintuitive but serve the goal of offloading more difficulty to the Decision-Making side of the game. Maybe I'll make an effort post on character later.

Anyway, what I want to express out of this book of a post is a couple things:

1. The community as a whole, especially the SA side of things needs to chill out. Crawl is a very unique beast and appeasing everyone is a nearly impossible task.
2. The folks doing System Design for Crawl need to be willing to embrace their harshest critics, not because they should listen to their ideas, but because they need to understand what their pain points are.
3. Those same folks need to probably ignore the veteran players more often than not in the short term, but start getting their qualitative, actionable feedback if they start redesigning major systems.
4. The long term goal should be to pivot the systems to allow players who have incomplete knowledge of the game to intuit more adequate solutions to the problems they have to solve. Good example of this in action is Hell as a whole and out of depth monsters (sometimes). A bad example of this is Rupurt, Orbs of Fire, and Tomb.

Crawl is not 'dying'. I think my core philosophies and those of dpeg might clash at times, but most of the decisions the team makes are pretty smart. I think the major divergence we would have at a high level is the role of 'Character' in the genre and specifically in Crawl.

Anyway, SA needs to relax a bit and I hope dpeg and team shows up here again because I would like to chat with him about Crawl's direction, but on the whole, I think they are doing a pretty good job even though I still think casting as a whole needs to probably see fundamental changes.

Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Nov 10, 2017

Zaodai
May 23, 2009

Death before dishonor?
Your terms are accepted.


They could ease some of the system knowledge bar by leaving in options that let you survive more poor decision making. Ultimately, it is a single player game. They cater a lot to the hypothetical autistic man, who can only play 100% optimally, and thus any individual thing being strong to other things is seen as some kind of detriment, because "why would the HAM ever play anything else?!". I think that's most of where the "the devs think this game is too easy!" comes from, because they seem to prefer to nerf strong things down for some hypothetical balance level rather than simply accepting that strong things can be useful in your single player game.

Sojenus
Dec 28, 2008

i will never chill out until boulder beetles are a playable race

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Canine Blues Arooo
Jan 7, 2008

when you think about it...i'm the first girl you ever spent the night with

Grimey Drawer

Zaodai posted:

I think that's most of where the "the devs think this game is too easy!" comes from, because they seem to prefer to nerf strong things down for some hypothetical balance level rather than simply accepting that strong things can be useful in your single player game.

These are two different things.

Things that are too strong a game where a lot of the difficulty is baked into System Knowledge manifest in the same way that an easy mode in Dark Souls would - It compromises the intended experience. Also, this relates very, very heavily to 'Character In Games' which I guess I might effort post this weekend or something.

The other thing being, 'The devs think the game is too easy', is likely a result of them thinking the decision tree is too narrow in most circumstances that are actually supposed to be difficult and complicated.

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