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I may have come across as a bit salty, but that's how much I hate Time Attacks, Hounds, and Vortices. They were added in way before you became administrator of this fine program---I get that. But, you're also the person who now carries the burden of Vanilla. I also, if you have noticed, have come with a series of suggestions on how to improve the game going forward (not that I have any significant gripes about how the game is structured). I think the End Game is rather fine for what it is now; as I mentioned in another post, I liken it to the end game in chess. End Games in chess are also about managing the win (or eeking out a draw if one is on the losing side of material). You shouldn't be penalizing players or presuming the game is finished if a certain situation arises. Just because you have an extra Queen on the chess board doesn't mean you are guaranteed a win in chess. You still have to win the game to get the full credit.
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BTW, vortices, hounds, time attacks are as nothing compared to old style Nexus. Without resistance, even the weakest breath could destroy your game. Temporary stat loss is nothing compared with getting CON swapped with CHR.Comment
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TBH, personally, I don't get the hate against v's and Z's... Z's were bad in the days of yore, now they are just another type of obstacle to overcome, neither trivial nor too harsh. v's are just a "doh" to be honest, if they happen to destroy a particularly costly piece of gear, otherwise they just are ...
Anyways, just looking at mages does nothing for the end-game. Examining the end-game from the perspective of the different classes gives us clues on what could be the issue with the end-game though (risk vs reward is the distilled form of the question).Comment
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The problem is tri-fold.
a.) The v's and Z's are far, far too common.
b.) There are too many variety of them. Every color of the rainbow---why? Not even orcs have this many colors in the game. Too un-imaginative, like "Time" attacks.
c.) The game designers (yes, I realize this means Nick at the moment) depend too heavily on them to slow player progress down. And, that's all they do: eat clock. They offer little real strategy or tactic to the game otherwise.
The hounds and vortices are only antagonists to players trying to work through a level. Sure, you get the occassional 'f' prancing at you, but they are far less common and annoying as Hounds and Vortices. Z's and v's in 3.x are even more annoying.
The packs of bats are sensible in the latest versions than the hounds and vortices have ever been.Comment
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No, but I don't like it when your mistake is distant and non-obvious (i.e. spread your skillpoints too broadly, don't spread your skill points broadly enough, pick the wrong spell etc and so forth). Open ended character builds lead to distant, non-obvious mistakes. To say nothing of the balance problems I pointed out earlier. When the vast majority of possible builds are garbage, your players don't actually have that many more choices. It's just harder to find the right one than it is with a more static leveling scheme.Comment
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Time attacks aren't that bad. Mostly they just turn a bunch of your stats yellow temporarily. If you"re the kind of player that gets annoyed by yellow coloured stats its infuriating. Personally I'm not that bothered by the colour of my stats. It's temporary. You kill some stuff, it goes awayComment
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With all due respect for the -unpaid- work you do here, i would advise you the same way i have done in other games: the players who you get on the dev forums are not the same as your base population.
The responsibility of a game designer is to magically divine what your average player needs from the game, *not* what your "i kill morgoth with a shovel" player wants.
Players who are jaded with years of experience will not help you build a better game - that's what variants are for.
Angband is very much a game where most of the fun is figuring out, learning things the game can do. Once you got it all down, the game's difficulty goes steeply down.
One of the most common ways i would die in my sophomore years was when inside a vault, i would TO most bad things out, and then get teleported by a Q. And BAM, im in a room with every baddie i teleported out.
.. i don't make that mistake anymore. Now i Detect everything before i go anywhere, check for Qs, and fireball them from around a corner.
Number of deaths from being teleported dropped to near zero.
But hey, it took me years to learn what was happening.
Does this mean that we should allow Qs to teleport you away through walls?
See what i mean?
It's fine for a player to reach a point where they dominate the game. Nobody gets to play a game for eternity and never get to that point, unless you want to make the game chance-based exclusively."i can take this dracolich"Comment
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a) IMHO the amount of vs and Zs is fine, heck I just played for hours and barely remember having to kill em more than couple times, and I play fast (real time)
b) dragons of every color exist as well, as in, I don't get this issue
c) you know they have the animal pack instinct, go in a corridor, tunnel behind you an open space, and voila, you get to fight them 1v1, it is the tactic to farming them ... as in having them in makes you do more tactical stuff
As for 'slowing' stuff down, dozens of things 'do' that. Don't have SI/FA? Oh well you are slowed in diving. Don't have base covered? Damn slowed. No rPoison? Better play super carefully and slows you down. Et cetera. vs and Zs for me at least are just a bump or free xp (those yummy high end hounds).
Nowhere NEAR the annoyance level of Qs to me ... or even the lowly magic mushroom.
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No offense, but the way you framed that hardly came off as respectful, just a FYI if it was just a written format problem.
As for *bands, my assumption would be that a lot of actual players do lurk the boards. These are old as heck games, I mean I started (in the *band style) back in 80s with Moria, so my assumption is a lot of players are also a fair bit older. Newcomers are more likely just people branching out from *hacks or ToME etc. I know I have played a large portion of available roguelikes over the decades.
Yeah, the word is "goal" not responsibility, and since this is the end-game thread, umm yeah making the end-game more fun for the shovelkillers of Morgoth is also a valuable goal.The responsibility of a game designer is to magically divine what your average player needs from the game, *not* what your "i kill morgoth with a shovel" player wants.
I wholeheartedly disagree. They have a perspective of years of experience. They actually remember and played the other versions for years, so there are aspects that were changed because of some reason and why going back to those kind of aspects is not keenly looked at.Players who are jaded with years of experience will not help you build a better game - that's what variants are for.
As with anything. However goal would be to still have the end-game be fun, instead of a clerk/janitor like hassle.Angband is very much a game where most of the fun is figuring out, learning things the game can do. Once you got it all down, the game's difficulty goes steeply down.
For example my current ranger, I straight up dove from 40 to 90, x amount of ?Deeps in a row. The first runs in the 90s were fraught with crazy danger. Now I am just having my usual problem with checking uniques killed and being OCD about going full Pokemon on them. I actually didn't clear any major vaults in the 90s, none of my major items is a floor pickup, but from actual kills in the 90s.
It is obviously doable without vault floor janitorial duties. My goal would definitely be to fine-tune the current meta of being a janitor. And that'll be by doing my own branch of Vanilla. Then others can see what they think of it.
So if you guys who seem to be focusing on playing mages want to change mage spells, that's the way to do it. Make your own variant, put it up for people to try, and hey, maybe it will be put into the game. Or maybe it will just stay a variant. Best part, you get to play it.
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Look, what @Sky wrote is just fine and correct.
If Nick is too thin-skinned to take a subtle jab, then so be it. No one has forced him to take the throne of Vanilla Supreme. Okay, maybe I shouldn't write this while I'm starving, the food quips may get extreme. Invariably, these boards are chalk-full of Yes Men. Yes, Nick, whatever you want, it's a great idea.
But, those who push back can be and often are labeled as radicals who must 'go write their own Variants'. This has been the mantra of debate for a good number of years on these boards---part of the reason I'm here so infrequently.
Nick began (and I just happened to softly pop in to the boards concurrently) to suggest that Mages might be OP, as he noted someone else had written something to that extent. I think we had a fine discussion on the matter with Nick ultimately opting not to alter much. My point, though, as with others who also joined in, is that there are other ways to essentially modify the game to improve enjoyment. And it requires looking into HOW and WHAT specifically one is trying to achieve those goals.
This thread began with the notion that the Late Game needs amending... somehow. I coupled it with the Mage OP thread because I sensed these two threads were about the same agenda: looking to improve the game.
The Mages OP thread sought to achieve this by paring down Mage power. Which, I countered, does nothing for the rest of the classes playing the game. As this is a 1-vs-CPU game, scaling back Mage power does nothing to that end.
The current End Game thread really hasn't ventured forth any ideas other than, "it needs to be changed". I have rebutted saying this is akin to a Chess Game whence the game has reached a conclusion phase, it is merely a point of management to reach the end goal of a Win-Loss-Draw result. That is just the nature of the beast.
We can, however, continue to pursue the goal of Game Improvement through a number of means and measures. We don't necessarily need a new Variant to test these. Indeed, Vanilla already has the means to test many of these ideas and such has been the case in the past. Birth Options has often been the playground for new ideas in Angband... and that tends to reach the widest audience for feedback. It should also be noted that Vanilla itself is its own variant: who approved the reduction of 9 Mage Books to 5 in going from 3.x to 4.x? Was that sent to a Committee for final vote and approval? Or did the Supreme Leader of Vanilla decide and code that on his own? (If that is taken as bashing, so be it. It was not intended as such, just a point of clarity.)
If the Game Designer is open to suggestions, well, we've already had a plethora of ideas come forth in just this past week. Good, sensible ideas to allow players MORE options, MORE choices---not more CHANCE as @Sky accurately pointed out of letting the RNG figure out who wins or loses. Letting mobs suddenly have superior, undefendable attacks, like TIME, or being able to cast from within a WALL where the player cannot attack the mob in return, that just leads to silly, "It breathes. You die." nonsense.
Players of all abilities want to know -- oh, I could have avoided that death by doing wxyz. Not -- sucks, my RNG hates me. If Morgoth or some other Upper Unique destroyed my character later on, past 2500' because I was deficient in some gear prep, so be it. But, as a Veteran player of the game, I detest those attempts to make the game better by weakening player abilities or giving mobs un-defendable attacks (I don't care how temporary the effects may be). That's NOT how to improve the game; I cannot think of a worse way to take Vanilla.Comment
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I find the tone of this discussion weird
I feel the tone of this discussion is extremely weird and unpolite. I get the impression NCountr is just an alias of some other user that has beef with Nick.
Having played Angband for a long time and having followed the discussion leading to evolution of latest versions of Angband, I hardly think criticising the maintainer (that is, currently Nick) or taking "jabs" in any way contributes to the betternment of the game.
One good way of getting things done is provide the code to try for example the "select x spells from x+30 different spells).
Sadly, usually the people yelling here suddenly drop out when it comes to actually contributing something else than namecalling.Comment
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Why would I change / use alternative aliases? I have no idea how that alters any notion of what I'm conveying about improving the game.
By all means, feel free to contribute or discuss the suggestions that have been made thus far. All I'm reading, however, is how my 'tones' are awkward and perverse for some. Whenever you're ready to discuss Improvements, please contribute.Having played Angband for a long time and having followed the discussion leading to evolution of latest versions of Angband, I hardly think criticising the maintainer (that is, currently Nick) or taking "jabs" in any way contributes to the betternment of the game.
Yes. I believe we covered that .. and how to go about it.One good way of getting things done is provide the code to try for example the "select x spells from x+30 different spells).
No need to contradict yourself, but okay. If you don't mind scrolling back, you'll see I've enumerated a number of ideas to improve the game (without handicapping one class over others).Sadly, usually the people yelling here suddenly drop out when it comes to actually contributing something else than namecalling.Comment
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Throwing ideas is not The Way. Think it up, code it, show it, test it, let others test it.
Back a long while ago, I thought some things were off. I rebalanced the whole item rarity file. Tested. Had others test it. Found a major bug in it in the process. In the end it was pulled into the main vanilla game.
The beauty of open source games such as Angband is, that YOU can do it.Comment
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It is, however, a fundamental truth. If you want a change made, you have only so many options:
- Lobby the maintainer to make it
- Write it yourself and submit it as a patch
- Put it into a variant for people to test out, then lobby for inclusion once the bugs are worked out.
- Lobby for somebody else to put it into a variant.
- Fork Angband and state that yours is the new baseline. (This is really just “make a variant”, but with extra politics and ill-feeling.)
Yes, most of these require you to be able to program. There’s not much to be done about that, barring some kind of community vote-based model, which would work quite poorly.
Vanilla maintainer is generally a conservative position, and so it should be. It’s usually a process of refinement, rather than radical change.
First of all, birth options is a terrible way to do significant changes to the game mechanics. It creates multiple different versions of code that does the same thing to maintain. If the change requires alterations to the data files, it doesn’t even work without ugly hackery.We can, however, continue to pursue the goal of Game Improvement through a number of means and measures. We don't necessarily need a new Variant to test these. Indeed, Vanilla already has the means to test many of these ideas and such has been the case in the past. Birth Options has often been the playground for new ideas in Angband... and that tends to reach the widest audience for feedback. It should also be noted that Vanilla itself is its own variant: who approved the reduction of 9 Mage Books to 5 in going from 3.x to 4.x? Was that sent to a Committee for final vote and approval? Or did the Supreme Leader of Vanilla decide and code that on his own? (If that is taken as bashing, so be it. It was not intended as such, just a point of clarity.)
Secondly, of course vanilla changes. Angband was not etched into stone tablets in the day of frogknows. Most maintainers are not Ben (and even Ben made huge changes to the gameplay; they were just dwarfed by his improvements to the base code). Any Vanilla maintainer should have a vision for where they want to take the game. Angband’s changed a lot from what it was back when I was last paying attention, (and I do not particularly like a number of the changes) but it’s still recognizably the same game.
Thirdly, maybe you don’t mean it, but you are definitely coming off as pretty abrasive.Comment
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