on heavy curses

[Magnate]

I think this game is being optimized only for people who like to dive. I like to explore the dungeon, kill most of the monsters, use only the best stuff etc. That is what I enjoy. If the game changes keep going in the current direction, like curse items reduce ?id, then for me the game will cease to be enjoyable. I don't know how many people feel this way but I think that there should be a balance in the game mechanics between people who just want to go right down and kill M and those that want to exterminate the evil in the pits of Angband. Maybe all these changes could be birth options, or ironman options or another variant or some such?

I see this allegation and it concerns me. I don't understand it: in what way would any changes to heavy curses make the game less enjoyable for players who like to play slowly and/or clear whole levels?

[Nick]

The old system of two-level sticky curses and (more or less) needing to ID everything before wielding certainly works - it has worked fine for a long time. It doesn't continue to work with ID-by-use, however. This is something which has been discussed a lot and over a long time, and essentially the community as a whole has come to a reasonable consensus that ID-by-use is worth doing. So heavy curses have to go.

IMHO this makes the game different, but not clearly either easier/harder or optimised to any particular playing style. I certainly think the ID-by-use mechanic leads to more interesting play than the sticky curses. I also think it's a more natural means of identifying objects.

[Rizwan]

I see this allegation and it concerns me. I don't understand it: in what way would any changes to heavy curses make the game less enjoyable for players who like to play slowly and/or clear whole levels?

Its not heavy curses per se. You can curse half the artifacts if you want to. Its coupling these curses with making sources of id scarce. If I want to play with only "good" equipment then its my problem but i have to be able to id the equipment before I wield it. In effect what I am trying to say is I guess that I like id-by-use but if I get stuck with some heavy duty cursed item, it will lower my enjoyment value. It might be blasphemy but then again i am not racing to kill M.

[Psi]

In effect what I am trying to say is I guess that I like id-by-use but if I get stuck with some heavy duty cursed item, it will lower my enjoyment value. It might be blasphemy but then again i am not racing to kill M.

I think that is actually the view of the divers too or am I missing something?

[buzzkill]

My quick 2 cents. I agree (mostly) with both Rizwan's and bron's posts in this thread. I also get the feeling the the game is being optimized for (power) divers and ironman players. I don't know if that is actually happening, but that's the way it feels, most likely because ironman and/or diving are used as justifications for proposed changes and players who indulge in these play options are giving a lot of the opinions. (I hardly ever play ironman, though I do enjoy it, and I do dive, but not suicidally so).

Getting a sticky curse is not a game ender, it's an inconvenience that can be avoided with careful play. Hevay curses are worse, but again, not game ending, just a huge pain in the butt, but no harder to avoid than heavy's. I've dealt with both before.

If your response to the above statement begins with "But in ironman it..." then we have a problem, and I hope you can see that.

The old system of two-level sticky curses and (more or less) needing to ID everything before wielding certainly works - it has worked fine for a long time. It doesn't continue to work with ID-by-use, however. This is something which has been discussed a lot and over a long time, and essentially the community as a whole has come to a reasonable consensus that ID-by-use is worth doing. So heavy curses have to go.

Even then, IDing everything wasn't necessary. Over the course of game play you have to weigh risks and make choices. Taking away options make the game less interesting and more often than not, easier (just my observation). Why does it have to be one or the other? Why not dial back ID by use (too easy in it's current form) a little and keep ID by scroll/item a valuable part of the game. Quite frankly, if pseudo was ever done right, ID by use, WHICH SHOULD BE RISKY (it's risky with potions, with mushrooms, why not with weapons???), would fall by the wayside.

[TJS]

My quick 2 cents. I agree (mostly) with both Rizwan's and bron's posts in this thread. I also get the feeling the the game is being optimized for (power) divers and ironman players. I don't know if that is actually happening, but that's the way it feels, most likely because ironman and/or diving are used as justifications for proposed changes and players who indulge in these play options are giving a lot of the opinions. (I hardly ever play ironman, though I do enjoy it, and I do dive, but not suicidally so).

Actually I agree with this as well. I am pretty much a rubbish Angband player (I get careless and die around level 60 if I make it that far), but that suits me fine because I enjoy playing anyway. I'm also not a big fan of sneaking about detecting and avoiding monsters all the time, because I like to kill stuff as I find it fun.

The game seems to be being changed to suit people who are happy to avoid most monsters and just pick up stuff off the floor or from novice mages on higher levels. Or perhaps find a vault and then use teleport other to get rid of the nasties and pick up the free loot.

I'd much prefer to see the game going more towards rewarding players for taking risks and killing difficult monsters.

[Nightmarjoo]

But taking risks is unacceptable in Angband ._>

[Psi]

I'd much prefer to see the game going more towards rewarding players for taking risks and killing difficult monsters.

Well I'd agree with that, but that is not what is being debated here. This thread was first about simplifying heavy curses and then whether they should exist at all. If the premise is that id-by-use is set to stay, then heavy curses need to change.

[the Invisible Stalker]

I think this game is being optimized only for people who like to dive. I like to explore the dungeon, kill most of the monsters, use only the best stuff etc. That is what I enjoy. If the game changes keep going in the current direction, like curse items reduce ?id, then for me the game will cease to be enjoyable. I don't know how many people feel this way but I think that there should be a balance in the game mechanics between people who just want to go right down and kill M and those that want to exterminate the evil in the pits of Angband. Maybe all these changes could be birth options, or ironman options or another variant or some such?

I have a lot of sympathy for this viewpoint, even though my preferred playing style is powerdiving and I like the occasional ironman game.

As a general rule, I think there should be as few obvious decisions as possible. Otherwise we are all just very slow borgs. So I don't want to return to the days when "identify everything before wear/wielding" was the obvious choice, but equally I don't want "try everything" to become the obvious choice. I think removing heavy curses would do that, and I am therefore opposed. I wouldn't be opposed to tweaking their frequency or the levels at which heavily cursed items appear, as long as trying unidentified items remains something you think very carefully about doing.

About balance between divers and level clearers, I think the game should be balanced in such a way that neither strategy is really easier, so that there is no disincentive to playing your preferred style. I tend to agree that the game is changing in ways that reward diving. At first this was addressing a previous imbalance in the other direction, but I think it has now gone too far.

Balance for ironman is a completely different matter. People who play ironman should
1) be incredibly good, or
2) play Ironband, or
3) enjoy dying.
The point of Ironband, which I enjoy playing, is that it can be balanced for that style without worrying about non-ironman players. For vanilla, I would say that if people other than Eddie are playing ironman and winning then something is wrong.

[Marble Dice]

I don't understand why different play-style camps feels threatened by charges that might facilitate or improve one camp without harming the others. I dive because it's more fun than steamrolling (level clearing). If steamrolling somehow became more fun than diving, well I'd start doing that. Nobody signed a contract.

Any recent change that favors diving or ironman is also helpful or neutral to steamrolling. No one is talking about re-adding food as a central gameplay mechanic that forces you to dive and move quickly.

Sticky curses are just annoying. The only purpose they serve is to prevent you from wielding unknown items. Fixing a sticky curse isn't difficult, it just takes a lot of keystrokes and sometimes lots of scumming. Normal ones aren't too bad, but heavy ones are a massive pain. I could tolerate them a little more if, once activated, you just couldn't drop the item, but you could still take it off.

[PowerDiver]

How much of the problem is that people view anything I propose as something to make life easier for divers? I try never to include anything about diving in my arguments about any game change. My wife likes to clear levels and averages maybe 3.3M turns to win, and anything I propose is something I think will improve her game as well, or at least not hurt it.

In a recent thread, someone suggested that my goal is to optimize the game for high stealth chars. They didn't notice my most common char at the time was a dwarf priest, and you can't get much less stealthy than that.

You might be shocked, but about half of id-by-use was already available, *if* you took copious notes. The big change is learning about a flag on other items when you know you have it on a particular item. Another big change, long overdue, is that you notice when a weapon in your hand is flaming. You learn damage plusses on an item after 1 hit instead of being +/- 1 after 3 or 4 hits for coding and presentation convenience. The changes are not nearly as large as people seem to think. The big deal is that everything is automated and you don't have to check your hp after each breath to see whether you resisted or not, note each * of damage done to every monster, scrutinize every message cross-referencing with monster info when "you are not affected" etc.

I am opposed to anything that promotes scumming, and in favor of the game providing all info that could be achieved with unlimited note-taking. I believe in consistency when possible. I believe the rules should be presented as simply, obviously, and cleanly as possible to the player. On top of that, when there is choice of roughly equal gameplay, I prefer the choice that is more in line with the fantasy literature. That's pretty much the main reasoning behind everything I propose.

This particular thread was about whether after you read a curse scroll, dropping your armor from +20 to +10, should you have to find a disenchanter before you try to break the curse. If you've read my advice posts, you know that I value AC less than anybody else, so it is not about me worrying about losing 10 AC. It just seems bogus. I guess I should have added "I am opposed to things that feel bogus" to the list of my motivations above. There's also the issue of how to tell people who have not read about it elsewhere that they should search out a disenchanter.

[Magnate]

About balance between divers and level clearers, I think the game should be balanced in such a way that neither strategy is really easier, so that there is no disincentive to playing your preferred style. I tend to agree that the game is changing in ways that reward diving. At first this was addressing a previous imbalance in the other direction, but I think it has now gone too far.

As Nick said, ID-by-use isn't about favouring one style over the other - it was debated over many years and is equally beneficial to both styles. Anyone who wants lots of cheap sources of ID obviously doesn't share this view, which is fine - but this is the prevailing view, and the maintainer's view, and it's why ID-by-use is staying.

What I'd like to know is, which changes are viewed as being detrimental to level clearers? If it's not ID-by-use, then what is it? Here's what I notice as the (other) big differences since 3.0.9:

- The change to monster drop levels, I can understand. I agree that this should be changed. There's another thread about this.

- The incredible scarcity of stat potions. This seems to me to favour level clearers over divers, so it can't be this.

- The equal and opposite abundance of ego items. I guess this favours divers, because you get more stuff quicker. I think this will be reined back as part of general drop rebalancing. (These last two were both side effects of Takkaria tackling TMJ - and let's give him credit, there is a whole lot less junk around these days ...)

That's it really. I don't notice anything else, so please tell me what I'm missing. FWIW I spent many years as a very happy level clearer, and I've been a diver for all of about ten games. I find diving *easier* than level clearing, which is why I do it. But I'm very happy to try and make sure the game stays enjoyable for level clearers - if I can understand the concerns.

[TJS]

Actually I was really referring to the drops from monsters making it easier for divers and discouraging taking on riskier monsters rather than ID by use, which is an excellent change in my opinion. Most of the changes have been good overall I think.

Noone like my idea for using rare enchant scrolls to break heavy curses? Perhaps if that is too easy then it only changes it from a heavy to a normal curse once the to-hit and to-damage get >= 0 rather than break it completely.

[Magnate]

Noone like my idea for using rare enchant scrolls to break heavy curses? Perhaps if that is too easy then it only changes it from a heavy to a normal curse once the to-hit and to-damage get >= 0 rather than break it completely.

I don't think no-one likes the idea - it's just that it's the kind of idea which is trickier to implement than the alternative (which is to give existing enchantment scrolls a chance to break curses which is separate from their enchantment process). Personally I prefer your idea - but it means creating a whole new scroll type, coding a new effect etc. etc. See the bug tracker for more on this.

[will_asher]

I don't think I should have as much say because I don't play much V anymore, but I thought I'd give my 2c.

re: ID by use

Even then, IDing everything wasn't necessary. Over the course of game play you have to weigh risks and make choices. Taking away options make the game less interesting and more often than not, easier (just my observation). Why does it have to be one or the other? Why not dial back ID by use (too easy in it's current form) a little and keep ID by scroll/item a valuable part of the game. Quite frankly, if pseudo was ever done right, ID by use, WHICH SHOULD BE RISKY (it's risky with potions, with mushrooms, why not with weapons???), would fall by the wayside.

I think ID by use is psuedo done better (not quite right yet, but better). I have nothing against ID by use, but I agree that it should have risks and not be as easy as it is now. (OTOH, I also kindof agree with Powerdiver that whatever's possible with endless note taking should be easier with id by use, but I think there's a middle ground somewhere.)

re: heavy curses
I wouldn't terribly miss them if they were removed.

Hmmm, just had another hairbrained idea for an alternate effect of sticky curses: Can't unweild the item until you've killed x amount of monsters which were no weaker than half your character level. (out of depth monsters could count extra.)