Comp 202

[Pete Mack]

Maybe 10 lost? I was down to dl 12 or so, and moving pretty slowly.

[debo]

OK, I quit. Finally had a promising character, found ?recall in the dungeon. Seg fault on entering a store. Everything since cl 4 is lost. That does it. I will consider this variant dead.

I don't like O either. Having said that, spamming ^s is pretty much required practice for older variants.

[Pete Mack]

Yeah, but I am so accustomed to auto-save on every level. And this one time I forgot to set autosave when I started. (Why it's even an option I don't know. Just do it no matter what, on a reasonable schedule.) There were just too many annoying things. Really massive crowds of kobolds. Weird stacking, even with items with THROWING flag; quiver items not returning to quiver; horrible pickup options; etc.

[debo]

I just get bored of never finding anything worth keeping.

[Pete Mack]

Well, that too. I'd been cheating a little by running of a carefully chosen savefile from the initial town visit, mostly because I was sick of going through the opening motions, but partly because of a good Fern drop of a pile of four daggers. Since there was no sling for sale, this seemed like a reasonable workaround. But yes. Terrible drops, and little gold gets boring fast. Grinding takes over when you can't even kill groups of kobolds.

[wobbly]

I had a reasonable time with marksman & a shooter till I rang out of ammo. Maybe you have to stash 1 of each shooter type in the home to guarantee ammo. Don't know, play was still a bit slow.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Man, when was the last time Oangband was updated??

[Pete Mack]

Looks like nobody wants to play Oangband. Elliptic will win (surprise!) at dl 62.

[MITZE]

Not that I'm disparaging O . . .

. . . but is there any reason to play it over FA? I was kind of under the impression that the latter was pretty much an improvement in every way.

[Nick]

O has a nicely shaped difficulty curve, IMHO - there are no big patches where the levels all feel the same, unlike current V. But it's so punishing it just gets demoralising.

As for FA being better, I always thought it had different aims and so couldn't really be compared; it's nice to hear, though

[the Invisible Stalker]

I like O. I played a couple of comp characters, none of whom got below about dlev 25, but didn't really have time to have a proper go at the comp, which is a pity because I like the race/class combo. If it had happened outside term time I would definitely have spent (wasted?) a lot more time on it.

In answer to MITZE's question, I'd say FA is an improvement in most ways, but I still like to play O from time to time. FA is great, but its maintainer just isn't evil enough for my taste.

[debo]

Looks like nobody wants to play Oangband. Elliptic will win (surprise!) at dl 62.

This prediction ended up being exactly right, but probably not in the way that you expected.

[Qyx]

I had a lot of fun with this competition, played 27 Ibuns, the last was the best, dying on level 29 to a Nruling.

[debo]

Congrats to elliptic for winning without really trying, and to clouded and Gwarl for their 2nd and 3rd place finishes. And kudos to everyone who gave this a shot, O is not a forgiving variant.