Ideas from old angband.

[PowerDiver]

In my view the main priorities should be:
- bugfixes
- interface and accessibility work
- drip-feeding new content (monsters, objects, vaults etc) to keep people interested
- occasionally rejigging a mechanic, where there is general agreement that the status quo is unsatisfactory
- at all times maintaining balance.

You've got to be kidding. Haven't you been paying attention?

That's pretty much the antithesis of the development of munchkinband. The rule is that if it seems cool it goes in, the more changes the merrier, and game balance be damned.

[Antoine]

Hey don't stifle it

I can't stifle anything, I'm not even a V developer. I'm just trying to encourage people to (a) take a deep breath, (b) actually play 3.3 and the more recent dev versions a few times, and (c) finish implementing the gameplay reforms that the dev team has already agreed on - before proposing more sweeping gameplay changes.

A.

[Antoine]

That's pretty much the antithesis of the development of munchkinband. The rule is that if it seems cool it goes in, the more changes the merrier, and game balance be damned.

Don't be so cynical - there was a bit of that going around in 3.2 days, but the dev process has gotten much better since then IMO.

But the forum debate is speeding ahead of the development effort in a (perhaps unhelpful) way. [Edit: as it's entitled to if it wishes.]

A.

[flammableBen]

To continue to speed ahead of development in a perhaps unhelpful way: Am I correct in my understand that your scouts/ogres/orcs/etc. are more likely to drop better items if you fight them deeper down?

What happens if monsters dropped items which were only based on their natural depth with no input from the depth you were actually fighting them?

So if you were fighting a scout at 3000ft it would still only drop stuff from it's natural ~200ft(guessing) depth?

It would stop people diving and killing the same monsters for better reward.

It would solve the problem of stuff like Mushrooms of Vigor drying up early

It would improve the risk/reward ratio by forcing players to take on harder monsters earlier, instead of picking and choosing their way down.

I am willing to admit that I might be barking up the wrong tree here.

[Antoine]

> It would stop people diving and killing the same monsters for better reward.

Why would that be good?

A.

[Timo Pietilä]

To continue to speed ahead of development in a perhaps unhelpful way: Am I correct in my understand that your scouts/ogres/orcs/etc. are more likely to drop better items if you fight them deeper down?

What happens if monsters dropped items which were only based on their natural depth with no input from the depth you were actually fighting them?

So if you were fighting a scout at 3000ft it would still only drop stuff from it's natural ~200ft(guessing) depth?

That would have major problem of lack of deep monsters. After 3000' there is almost no new non-uniques to fight, nearly everything is shallower than that. Doing what you suggest would drop drop quality way too much.

[Narvius]

I generally wonder why so many things in Angband are considered broken.

For example, why is it so bad that FA is necessary? In non-ironman games it's usually not so hard to get (I play no_selling and almost always get at least one source before 1500'), and ironman games... well, it's ironman for a reason.
In real life, you wouldn't go beyond a certain height without a space suit, because hey, you'd die. *(warning: epic oversimplification)

Why is it bad that killing low-level stuff deeper down yields better stuff? You risk much more by being deeper, even if you're fighting weaklings. It's much easier to mow through snagas if you don't need to worry about time hounds emerging from the corridor behind you.

How exactly do *more* "unreliability mechanics" improve the game? What would that accomplish?

I personally enjoy how Angband is a game of carefully picking your fight, even if it means avoiding 90% of the dungeon populace. I can't recall another game that gives us as many ways to accomplish exactly that. Why get rid of that unique gameplay? There are other roguelikes out there. Angband doesn't need to be like them in order to be good. The four major roguelikes all have vastly different gameplay, and then you still have the even more esoteric ones.

[Magnate]

Bullshit.

You mean that we have disturbance options for nothing, because nobody is supposed to be running?

I DID detect, I ran, I died.

EVERYONE uses running (if they know how to). And no, I couldn't know where it was unless I wasn't running and detecting pretty much every other second. To me that counts as unavoidable death, because that is caused by game mechanics, not by my mistake.

First, we don't disagree that unavoidable deaths are bad. We do, however, disagree that your death was unavoidable. As fizzix pointed out, the key here is that the range of monster detection is greater than MAX_SIGHT, so that fact that MAX_SIGHT is the same as spell range is irrelevant. You can *always* detect monsters before they come into visual or spell range. Therefore your death was not unavoidable.

That said, we know there is a job of work to do on the whole detection issue. If we're going to make monster detection *less* infallible - including some of your own suggestions like not being able to 'l'ook at monsters outside LOS and having only the letter to go on - then we will have to reconsider MAX_SIGHT and spell range to ensure that we don't create problems in doing so.

I know you just want the change reverted, and that isn't how things happen. I hope the above gives you some reassurance that the issue isn't permanently closed.

[Magnate]

I generally wonder why so many things in Angband are considered broken.

For example, why is it so bad that FA is necessary? In non-ironman games it's usually not so hard to get (I play no_selling and almost always get at least one source before 1500'), and ironman games... well, it's ironman for a reason.
In real life, you wouldn't go beyond a certain height without a space suit, because hey, you'd die. *(warning: epic oversimplification)

Why is it bad that killing low-level stuff deeper down yields better stuff? You risk much more by being deeper, even if you're fighting weaklings. It's much easier to mow through snagas if you don't need to worry about time hounds emerging from the corridor behind you.

How exactly do *more* "unreliability mechanics" improve the game? What would that accomplish?

I personally enjoy how Angband is a game of carefully picking your fight, even if it means avoiding 90% of the dungeon populace. I can't recall another game that gives us as many ways to accomplish exactly that. Why get rid of that unique gameplay? There are other roguelikes out there. Angband doesn't need to be like them in order to be good. The four major roguelikes all have vastly different gameplay, and then you still have the even more esoteric ones.

Everyone who plays Angband plays it slightly differently and likes it for slightly different reasons. You can't please all the people all the time. If you read rec.games.roguelike.angband since it was created, you can see that there has never been a time when there weren't a lot of people saying (about the then current version) "this is broken", "this needs fixing", "how about this improvement?" etc. Also, you can see that for every one of those opinions, someone else was saying "no, this is fine", "don't change this", "I preferred it the way it was before".

So in that sense we're in no different situation than Angband has ever been. The difference is that for the last two or three years there's been a *team* of people working on it, rather than a single maintainer. This has meant more change, and (as Antoine pointed out), there was a phase around 3.1.2/3.2.0 where we had some difficulty regulating ourselves and things got a little out of hand.

Now we've moved to github and we have a much more stable development model: there's 3.3.0, and there are already some issues to fix for 3.3.1. Then there's the dev versions of what will be 3.4.0 (which will be available on rephial when takk returns from hols), which will contain some of the changes discussed previously in the Making The Game Harder threads.

The basic issue is that the devteam don't share Timo's view on how the game should be made harder, so every now and then he posts threads like this to generate some debate. This is fine - debate is healthy, and as I said in my first post in this thread, I agree with some of Timo's suggestions, especially about detection and traps. But the general gist of "stop changing stuff, and make it more like 3.0.x" has already been answered.

And yes, there will always be many more ideas and suggestions for change than anyone has the time or inclination to code. It's a matter of cherry-picking what sounds like it might be an immediate improvement, and is in the right direction of travel for both the gameplay and the codebase.

Now, Antoine, phase 1 of Magnate's Object Simulator is here: the contents of twenty-five million levels of 3.3.0 are here. When we've made some progress on overhauling item generation, we'll do another database for 3.4-dev and compare the results. Anyone who speaks SQL and wants to help write queries can have the password (especially if they can make pretty graphs like Derakon did) - PM me if interested.

[Antoine]

Now, Antoine, phase 1 of Magnate's Object Simulator is here: the contents of twenty-five million levels of 3.3.0 are here. When we've made some progress on overhauling item generation, we'll do another database for 3.4-dev and compare the results.

Can you retrospectively patch it into 3.0.something or other, to get a point of comparison?

Or is that harder than it sounds?

A.

[Magnate]

Can you retrospectively patch it into 3.0.something or other, to get a point of comparison?

Or is that harder than it sounds?

A.

It is quite hard, but I know that myshkin wanted to try to do that. I wouldn't want to speculate on how likely it is to happen - I'm just pleased we now have a way of tracking change from 3.3.0 onwards.

EDIT: Just to say, I used the term "Magnate's Object Simulator" because you did. I'd like everybody to know that all the real work was done by myshkin and fizzix.

[Timo Pietilä]

The basic issue is that the devteam don't share Timo's view on how the game should be made harder, so every now and then he posts threads like this to generate some debate. This is fine - debate is healthy, and as I said in my first post in this thread, I agree with some of Timo's suggestions, especially about detection and traps. But the general gist of "stop changing stuff, and make it more like 3.0.x" has already been answered.

Many of the things I posted in original were not suggestions, just observations of how old angband did things.

I'm past "stop changing things"-phase, now I want things to be changed, but in other direction than I fear devteam is planning to steer the game. I don't like weakening the reward part of the result of what has already been done. If you make game "harder" that way, people just stop playing because then there is no satisfaction in playing the game.

[buzzkill]

What happens if monsters dropped items which were only based on their natural depth with no input from the depth you were actually fighting them?

It would stop people diving and killing the same monsters for better reward.

This isn't a bad idea. Why would cave orcs at 3000' have better stuff? I see it accomplishing two things.

1. Less junk. The stuff early monster's drop in the late game would probably be considered junk, and therefore squelched. No more room full of egos after mowing through a lowly troll pit.

2. It would make the players actually want/need to fight in depth monsters. Why kill an dracolich when killing a forest troll yields the same reward? Actually, most pushovers appear in groups, so the same reward x12 or x100.

[Timo Pietilä]

This isn't a bad idea. Why would cave orcs at 3000' have better stuff? I see it accomplishing two things.

1. Less junk. The stuff early monster's drop in the late game would probably be considered junk, and therefore squelched. No more room full of egos after mowing through a lowly troll pit.

2. It would make the players actually want/need to fight in depth monsters. Why kill an dracolich when killing a forest troll yields the same reward? Actually, most pushovers appear in groups, so the same reward x12 or x100.

Reward is not the same with shallower monsters. It gets better, but it is (monster native depth or (monster native depth + dungeon depth) /2) whichever is higher. That means that dracolich and scout have a bit over thousand feet difference in drop quality at dracolichs native depth.

In depth monsters do give better drops, also OoD monsters give better drops than in depth monsters.

IMO current system is quite OK.

[fizzix]

This isn't a bad idea. Why would cave orcs at 3000' have better stuff? I see it accomplishing two things.

1. Less junk. The stuff early monster's drop in the late game would probably be considered junk, and therefore squelched. No more room full of egos after mowing through a lowly troll pit.

2. It would make the players actually want/need to fight in depth monsters. Why kill an dracolich when killing a forest troll yields the same reward? Actually, most pushovers appear in groups, so the same reward x12 or x100.

In order for this to work you'd need to remove DROP_GOOD from deep monsters, or add consumables to those drops. Otherwise, you could only get the high level staves from the floor. I think this removal should be done anyway as DROP_GOOD should actually be interpreted as DROP_JUNK_THAT_YOU_NEED_TO_IDENTIFY.

Also, there is a more pernicious problem. Monsters like white wolves are very annoying in the late game. They pose no danger at all, but you still have to kill them. They give no XP and don't drop anything either. Now imagine what would happen if every monster had the same lack of reward. It's already annoying to have to wade through a group of orcs at dlevel 90, without even the possibility of a stat potion drop, it'd be almost unbearably boring.

(My solution of course, is to make orcs not appear deep in the dungeon at all, so you can instead deal with more interesting/dangerous monsters with better drops)