RNG is teasing a returning player

[Magnate]

I think the UI changes are good, but you are right that I am opposed to most changes. People keep taking things that weren't broken, and breaking them.

Do you remember when ...

(1) +15 damage per blow from a precious ring slot was considered a big number?

(2) if you wanted to heal more than 30 points, you needed to play priest or paladin [and might still have to deal with failure rates] or use dungeon-only healing potions? The changes to !CCW have made the paladin class irrelevant. Even 15% healing from !CLW may make paladins irrelevant. Oh no -- have I just inspired someone to add superpowered spells to paladins?

I could go on, but I'll just aggravate myself. Suffice it to say that game balance has been shattered.

When testing the gold drops recently, I went back and played 3.0. Even with all of the annoyances, it was a better game. So much so that I am currently coding changes to the nightlies to undo much of what has changed. I may never play unmodded V again.

What I don't understand is why you seem to believe that the devteam has somehow failed to acknowledge these problems, and/or doesn't intend to fix them. In my view, we have and we do. There are a raft of changes planned for 3.3 to address them (http://trac.rephial.org/wiki/DifficultGame). It's emphatically *not* an arms race - missile damage has come down, melee damage will be recalibrated, randarts will get less powerful. Why doesn't this plan pacify you at all?

I know that takk takes your views (and those of other players) very seriously - he has changed many of his own views after considering yours, Timo's, Pete's and others'. His latest position is that he wants to remove off-weapon brands from the game completely, though he introduced them and they exist on only four standard rings and one standard artifact. You can't get much better proof than that of a maintainer keen to fix game balance. (In my view this isn't a good way to address the problems, but he's the boss.)

You know takk would give you commit access if you wanted it. Even if you don't, you could submit patches instead of modding your personal copy and griping. You hate power-based pricing yet you have never bothered to submit an alternative - because it's easier to snipe from the sidelines instead of putting your own work out there for criticism.

I have much, much more respect for your views than you have for mine, but I am starting to get a bit hacked off at the relentless negativity, and what seems like an unwillingness to acknowledge that the devteam at least has good intentions (even if you disagree with some implementation).

It was I who namechecked you in the 3.2 changelog, btw.

[Nick]

Looks like my plan - egging on the devteam to break V so that everyone will come and play FA - is close to fruition

[Pete Mack]

@Eddie--
I too have a fondness for 3.0.8/3.0.9, but that is perhaps personal ego--I was writing a few of the UI changes. Incidentally, despite the added functionality, those releases are smaller than 3.0.6--the only time that angband went down in size.*

A modded V 3.2 back to most of the gameplay of 3.0.8 would be a very big win.


* The source tree shows doubling in size, but that's because the lib/xtra stuff was merged into mainline at that time.

[Nick]

A modded V 3.2 back to most of the gameplay of 3.0.8 would be a very big win.

That's why the separation of game from UI is such a good thing to get done - because once that is done, this sort of thing becomes much easier. And I think that is where a lot of takkaria's energy is going now.

On another note, there's an old Scottish saying - "Fools and bairns should never see anything half done". Don't know what made me think of that

[Antoine]

What I don't understand is why you seem to believe that the devteam has somehow failed to acknowledge these problems, and/or doesn't intend to fix them. In my view, we have and we do. There are a raft of changes planned for 3.3 to address them (http://trac.rephial.org/wiki/DifficultGame). It's emphatically *not* an arms race - missile damage has come down, melee damage will be recalibrated, randarts will get less powerful. Why doesn't this plan pacify you at all?

<Puzzled> I went to that URL and I can't see any tickets for making the game harder. Oh hang on, there is one at the bottom about making ESP granular... Could I be missing something?

A.

[Derakon]

Things I see that will make the game harder:

* Make traps relevant
* Make star draining and restoration relevant
* Make status effects worse
* Make curses relevant (and implicitly here, weaken many items by making them mixed-blessing)

Also, the entire "New combat mechanics" section has an implicit "We're going to completely rescale the player's damage sources" behind it, which will presumably make monsters harder to kill.

[Nick]

I too have a fondness for 3.0.8/3.0.9, but that is perhaps personal ego--I was writing a few of the UI changes.

Off-topic:

These changes were, IMHO, a turning point in the UI. It still has a way to go, and a lot of the improvement is not obvious, but it is the change that started here that is going to lead to future playability.

[Timo Pietilä]

I remember when Rings of Damage maxed out at +22 and +15 was considered merely average. Rings of Damage were standard equipment for the entire game that were only ever swapped out for speed, and even then it was painful because your melee damage dropped so much.

This is artifact of "small speed bonus" balancing effort. Someone noticed that all those added small speed bonus items made at least one ring slot free for RoDam and tried to balance it by cutting the damage bonus down. If those RoS were still needed so much, then that max would still have stayed, I believe.

Off-weapon bonuses just made things worse in damage section making RoDam practically useless "I'll use this if I don't get anything else" -items. Their percentile impact of total damage is diminished so much. Especially branding rings made them look bad in comparison (though if you have two ring slots free to use, one for branding and one for damage is better than two branding).

[Antoine]

Things I see that will make the game harder:

* Make traps relevant
* Make star draining and restoration relevant
* Make status effects worse
* Make curses relevant (and implicitly here, weaken many items by making them mixed-blessing)

Also, the entire "New combat mechanics" section has an implicit "We're going to completely rescale the player's damage sources" behind it, which will presumably make monsters harder to kill.

Oh, OK. Those all look like good changes.

I guess I'd thought more in terms of "nerf off-weapon brands, nerf off-weapon extra blows, nerf damage bonuses on non-weapon arts, nerf rune of protection, nerf extra shots, nerf percentile healing potions, and nerf vault-cracking with TO and mass banishment". [EDIT: and remove DObj from Clairvoyance, and reduce the ability to stairscum]

I know some of those changes are planned.

As it stands, it seems to me that even I could beat the game - and no self respecting roguelike should be winnable by me

A.

[PowerDiver]

What I don't understand is why you seem to believe that the devteam has somehow failed to acknowledge these problems, and/or doesn't intend to fix them.

Saying "We will make damage less in the future, so it doesn't matter if we double it now" is completely nonsensical. I view most of the "acknowledgments" as being in that light.

Was there a consensus that monster melee against the player was seriously unbalanced? That's the only reason for the ridiculous AC boost. Don't tell me there is plan to boost monster melee in the future to balance it.

You, personally, are the worst. You tell us that a sling, increasing ranged damage with an iron shot from 1d4 to 2 * 1d4, is too much for a typical starting player. That's *after* you increased damage for throwing oil from 2d6 to 2d6 * 3. Completely nonsensical.

I also see a thread in the discussions about what constitutes "weakening the player" that get written here that worries me. I see a possibility that the consensus will go to having a clueless adventurer wander around aimlessly with more deep OoD monsters, and he will have to be ridiculously overpowered for most things in order merely to survive bumping into new perils he cannot detect as being super-deadly in time to evade. I fear that this will be the eventual approach, and instead of reverting the overpowering it will need to increase even more, and the decline in the quality of gameplay will accelerate.

I did manage to think of one improvement of the current game compared to 3.0 with auto-*ID, which is the changes to launchers and branded ammo.

@Nick: I'd love to play more FA, but you know my views on connected stairs. You need to come up with an explanation for modeling disconnected wilderness somehow, or else make it semipersistent.

[CunningGabe]

Was there a consensus that monster melee against the player was seriously unbalanced? That's the only reason for the ridiculous AC boost. Don't tell me there is plan to boost monster melee in the future to balance it.

My understanding was that the AC boost was because pretty much nobody ever used the heavy armor types. The change was to make them more enticing, despite their weight and cost.

You tell us that a sling, increasing ranged damage with an iron shot from 1d4 to 2 * 1d4, is too much for a typical starting player.

That's not really true. Slings are affordable if you're willing to change your starting kit a little. You've probably had the same starting kit for so long that that seems alien to you. Less experienced players won't necessarily feel the same way.

Maybe slings should come down in price a bit. I'm hardly an expert on gameplay balance, so my opinion doesn't count for much. But I do like that they're not so cheap that they're a no-brainer purchase.

No one is trying to break the game. Just because you don't see the problem that certain changes fix doesn't mean that there isn't a problem. Can't you assume that the devs all have good intentions, and try to work with them on fine-tuning these changes, instead of pettily mentioning how bad game balance is now in every other thread?

[Pete Mack]

Hey Eddie-- tell us what you really think!
I am with you on the wacky low-level archery thing: given 3*2d6 oil, a bow doing less than 21 dam/turn is worthless.

The ones that bug me the most are the crazy damage per turn, and the effectively unbounded healing from weak potions. If you want to make !CCW, etc more powerful, make them scale with player level--not with player HP.

!CCW shouldn't be useful in melee without taking a rest, full stop. That means it absolutely can't heal more than 70HP/turn (at most!).

[Antoine]

I did manage to think of one improvement of the current game compared to 3.0 with auto-*ID, which is the changes to launchers and branded ammo.

+1

A.
(padding)

[Nick]

@Nick: I'd love to play more FA, but you know my views on connected stairs. You need to come up with an explanation for modeling disconnected wilderness somehow, or else make it semipersistent.

There are plans - although I can't guarantee you won't hate them

I may hack together a disconnected stairs in wilderness feature for the next release, which will probably be made by my descendants.

[Magnate]

Saying "We will make damage less in the future, so it doesn't matter if we double it now" is completely nonsensical.

That's a tendentious articulation of what's happened. Nobody has knowingly broken something without also knowing when they'll be fixing it. The game has become gradually unbalanced over a period of several years as takk has more or less succeeded in eliminating TMJ. We're now in a position of being able to look at all the different impacts of that as well as consider a fairly detailed roadmap, and make sensible decisions about the order in which to fix things. That we don't instantly revert anything someone doesn't like is neither negligence nor calculated offence - it's part of a bigger plan.

Was there a consensus that monster melee against the player was seriously unbalanced? That's the only reason for the ridiculous AC boost. Don't tell me there is plan to boost monster melee in the future to balance it.

Has the significant difference in numerical player AC actually made that much difference to game balance? Perhaps you didn't notice, but I rescaled the damage absorption so that it still caps at 60%, at 250 instead of 150. The only real change to combat is that monsters miss a little more often in melee - but since they almost never missed under the previous formula, I don't think anyone else has cited this as a serious balance problem.

You, personally, are the worst. You tell us that a sling, increasing ranged damage with an iron shot from 1d4 to 2 * 1d4, is too much for a typical starting player. That's *after* you increased damage for throwing oil from 2d6 to 2d6 * 3. Completely nonsensical.

Yes, I am the worst. Everyone is different, and every team has a strongest and a weakest member. I'm the weakest. I know that, which is why I defer to takk and others when there's any doubt. When I think (or get told) that I don't add any value I'll bugger off.

But your examples are again tendentious. I never said that slings are too much for a starting player - merely that they should cost in proportion with their utility. The fact that you don't agree with that premise doesn't make me stupid.

I added firebrand to oil flasks because there was an open ticket to do so. I treat trac as authoritative about what should and shouldn't be done to the game. takk opens and closes tickets whenever his views change, so this seems appropriate. Arguably triple damage for oil is a bit much, though the clearest impact so far seems to be reducing the excessive deadliness of Maggot's dogs, which IMO is a good thing. I think the best compromise would be to give oil the new x2 "weak fire" brand, when it comes in. 2* 2d6 for a one-shot item that weighs 1lb doesn't seem too bad - but we can try it and see.

I also see a thread in the discussions about what constitutes "weakening the player" that get written here that worries me. I see a possibility that the consensus will go to having a clueless adventurer wander around aimlessly with more deep OoD monsters, and he will have to be ridiculously overpowered for most things in order merely to survive bumping into new perils he cannot detect as being super-deadly in time to evade. I fear that this will be the eventual approach, and instead of reverting the overpowering it will need to increase even more, and the decline in the quality of gameplay will accelerate.

Well, fortunately most commentators don't seem to share your obsession with the tactical detection minigame, and the entire devteam favours Timo's view that we should mildly nerf detection in order to recapture some lost atmosphere. You're gonna hate what Gabe has done to mimics.

But again you paint a distorted word picture, like a Daily Mail journalist. Almost all development in the past two years has been aligned with your risk-taking diving mentality, and now the pendulum is swinging back the other way a bit, towards requiring a bit more caution and slightly fewer risks. It's a shame you feel a need to preach doom and gloom about this - though to be fair it's only what your detractors have been doing these past two years. Despite your increasing personal animosity towards me, I can still argue both sides of this issue.