All four rings of power found before 5000'

[BlueFish]

Maybe I just got lucky. It's the most recent "official" build, 3.3.2 I believe. Winner, with the One Ring and all three other Rings of Power (the two best of the four wielded - the second best (Vilya?) only for its damage and speed, as everything else seemed redundant with The One Ring). Resisted everything but sound. Used Ringil but never found cubragol or great boots of speed, and had 29 natural speed, which meant that hasted and gorged got me 29 speed too, making the fight with Morgoth a bit dicey. But the RNG allowed me to win, and I retired in the doorway of my home. Not an impressive win, but a fun one.

Sort of sad that the One Ring has such a nasty disadvantage - aggravation. I was playing a rogue, so it destroyed the role playing of the sneaky guy. But by the time I found it I was pretty unstoppable, and the aggravation didn't outweigh the four immunities. I sort of had to try it on, you know. That whole aggravation thing isn't canonical at all, it's really just a bit of mean-spiritedness on the part of the game. Wanting to punish the player for finding the most rare thing in the game. I see no reason for that. It should be a great find, and it should be stealthy. It's a ring of invisibility, and it was taken off many times in the books. I think this should be changed.

There's no way to take it off after putting it on? Is that the case?

I want to try Ironman, but I have a really stupid question about it. What exactly is it? I know the basics (no going up), but what are the birth options which qualify one for "ironman"? Just the "restrict stairs/recall" thing?

[Derakon]

Congrats on your win! The Rings of Power are more common than they used to be, that's for sure, though the One Ring's still pretty rare.

The One Ring instantly got Sauron's attention when worn and brought his wraiths down on Frodo. I believe that's what the aggravation is meant to emulate. Unfortunately there's no way to do "stealthy against mundane targets, aggravating against magical ones."

Yes, permanently cursed items cannot be removed once worn, in Vanilla. Variants may treat this differently (I believe FA simply prevents you from dropping them, for example).

The classical Ironman is just the recall/stairs provision, yes. You can make the game even harder with the other restriction options, but just not being able to go up or return to town is more than enough for most players.

[PowerDiver]

Maybe I just got lucky. It's the most recent "official" build, 3.3.2 I believe.

The game has been nerfed beyond recognition. Placing many restrictions on myself, diving as fast as possible, I cannot make even an ironman human game in 3.3 challenging. If you care about replay quality, do what I do, which is to play 3.0. 3.0.9b is available at rephial.

[LostTemplar]

play 3.0. 3.0.9b

Good old angband.

[Fendell Orcbane]

The game has been nerfed beyond recognition. Placing many restrictions on myself, diving as fast as possible, I cannot make even an ironman human game in 3.3 challenging. If you care about replay quality, do what I do, which is to play 3.0. 3.0.9b is available at rephial.

You could also give Sil a try....
I think Sil is just as hard if not harder than an ironman game.

[Nick]

The game has been nerfed beyond recognition. Placing many restrictions on myself, diving as fast as possible, I cannot make even an ironman human game in 3.3 challenging. If you care about replay quality, do what I do, which is to play 3.0. 3.0.9b is available at rephial.

So, what would need to be done to get 3.3 to a form where you would play it again? I know there are object rarity issues, and price issues, but what else?

There have been a lot of advances (in UI and code modernisation, if nothing else) from 3.0.9 to 3.3 - I don't see why we couldn't just toughen things up again and everyone be happy. Especially given that a lot of energy is going into v4, which is so completely different that it has to be balanced without reference to 3.x anyway.

[PowerWyrm]

Hmm what makes 3.3 easy compared to 3.0? The gameplay didn't change that much no?

[Starhawk]

The game has been nerfed beyond recognition. Placing many restrictions on myself, diving as fast as possible, I cannot make even an ironman human game in 3.3 challenging. If you care about replay quality, do what I do, which is to play 3.0. 3.0.9b is available at rephial.

Complain, complain, complain. I'm still trying for my first human winner.

[Magnate]

Hmm what makes 3.3 easy compared to 3.0? The gameplay didn't change that much no?

Lots of little things changed, and they added up to a significantly easier game (3.2.0 was easiest, apparently 3.3.x is a little harder but not much). Some stuff got cheaper to buy (speed). Some stuff got better (ego DSM etc.). Some instadeaths got fixed (summoning scrolls). Those, along with many others, were all intentional, if not properly balanced as a complete set of changes (they all happened at different times).

Then there were some unintended changes as well. Artifacts are much more common in 3.3.x than in 3.0.x, but nobody really knows why. (We think we might have addressed this in 3.4). This seems to apply particularly to the special artifacts (rings, amulets, lights). High-end ego items seem to appear too early too often. High-end consumables seem to be a bit too common.

If you search the forum for "making the game harder", you'll find five or six long discussion threads on fundamental changes to the mechanics, almost none of which was ever implemented (though detection is a bit fuzzier now) - part of the reason for the v4 fork was to try some of this stuff without risking breakage to V. But it seems to me that the basic problem with 3.3.x is that it's still just too generous with loot. If we halved all the drops it would certainly be more challenging (though it might be less enjoyable, I don't know).

[buzzkill]

But it seems to me that the basic problem with 3.3.x is that it's still just too generous with loot. If we halved all the drops it would certainly be more challenging (though it might be less enjoyable, I don't know).

Half is a nice starting point. Play a little Steamband and get fresh feel for limited drops/limited items. One of my favorite things about Steam is that finding most anything is exciting.

[PowerDiver]

So, what would need to be done to get 3.3 to a form where you would play it again? I know there are object rarity issues, and price issues, but what else?

How about a maintainer who gives a damn? It seems as if anyone on the dev team adds anything they like, and nothing is reverted unless I whine for a year, no matter how badly it breaks game balance. If you allow gameplay changes to be made in the nightlies to test them out, Sturgeon's law applies. Reversions should be the rule, not the exception.

I've got V combat working. Really working. I like it better than S combat. However, to get it right, they would have to undo all of the things they made worse about light weapons combat. No early rings with damage bonuses, gain-one-lose-one potions no shallower than DL25, revert all light weapon artifact boosts, and some more stuff. They'll never agree, at least they refused for years, so why bother arguing about it?

I hack and play based off of 3.0. I believe it will be less time spent to personally implement every good change in 3.1 through 3.3 than it would be to try to remove all I hate from 3.3. AFAIAC 3.3 has reached FUBAR status. I've completely given up on trying to make suggestions about things to fix. There's no point. I usually don't even look at the v4 discussions.

Let me summarize some changes since 3.0.

(1) Player damage output is doubled.
(2) Player healing is doubled for non-priest-casters.
(3) Hounds are reduced in number.
(4) Drain attacks are nerfed.
(5) Paralysis attacks are nerfed.
(6) If the "repair item" scroll exists, disenchantment attacks have been nerfed. I can't keep track which versions that applies to.
(7) Speed boosts are more common, so a midgame or later char will be significantly faster than an equivalent char in 3.0.
(8) Stat bonuses in general are boosted. A lot.
(9) It is much easier to collect resists.
(10) Too many powerful egos for sale in town, at ridiculously low prices.
(11) Baby bronze dragons are gone.
(12) Stat gain happens much faster.
(13) The quiver, which IMO is too powerful for any class with spellbooks. Above all, angband is a game of slot management.
(14) Level feelings are too useful.

Some of those are interrelated. There are plenty more things I don't like, but I don't want to get bogged down on small details, and I'm probably forgetting a couple of big things.

I still remember my first ironman win. I scummed the town for money to buy a potion of restore strength, because I wasn't good enough then to win without one, and I tortured myself holding off on quaffing it as long as possible. Giant red frogs, homunculi, and baby bronze dragons were oh so scary and killed plenty of my chars. Now they are laughable [or removed]. Playing 3.3 I usually didn't even bother to devote a few keypresses to walk around stat drainers or paralyzers when they were sleeping in the middle of an open room. I just ran straight.

Here's a comment by ranger jeff on my submission to a previous 3.3 comp.

Yeah, the last Angband I played was 2.9-3.0.6 or so, and I remember it being extremely hard. For me to be able to just pop into a competition, my first ironman attempt at any game, and to get a win... that says a lot about how much easier the game must have become.

Still, it was fun. And great to get a victory. But my first victory in 3.0.6 was 100x sweeter.

Reread that last sentence.

Plenty of people give advice not to savescum. When you savescum, you are cheating yourself out of the sweetness of the win. IMO, compared to 3.0, playing 3.3 is cheating yourself worse than savescumming.

[Magnate]

How about a maintainer who gives a damn? It seems as if anyone on the dev team adds anything they like, and nothing is reverted unless I whine for a year, no matter how badly it breaks game balance. If you allow gameplay changes to be made in the nightlies to test them out, Sturgeon's law applies. Reversions should be the rule, not the exception.

I've got V combat working. Really working. I like it better than S combat. However, to get it right, they would have to undo all of the things they made worse about light weapons combat. No early rings with damage bonuses, gain-one-lose-one potions no shallower than DL25, revert all light weapon artifact boosts, and some more stuff. They'll never agree, at least they refused for years, so why bother arguing about it?

I hack and play based off of 3.0. I believe it will be less time spent to personally implement every good change in 3.1 through 3.3 than it would be to try to remove all I hate from 3.3. AFAIAC 3.3 has reached FUBAR status. I've completely given up on trying to make suggestions about things to fix. There's no point. I usually don't even look at the v4 discussions.

You're probably the single biggest reason that there isn't a maintainer who gives a damn. With the amount of criticism you're keen to offer, and the negligible amount of praise, it's not really surprising nobody's stepped up to the plate. Ever since takkaria moved from a single maintainer to a dev team you've constantly worked against that model instead of with it. I look forward to your fantastic 3.0-based variant, as I have been for the last few years.

I don't disagree that the game has become easier; nobody does. Personally I think it's pretty easy to fix: reduce the number and quality of drops and slow down/lengthen stat gain. 3.4-dev already has a significant set of changes to ego and artifact drops, and an across-the-board reduction of drops will probably get us most of the way there. I hope that whoever bothers to release 3.4 will sort that out.

I'm very pleased that you don't look at v4 threads. I lobbied for the fork precisely to achieve this.

[Derakon]

Thanks, Eddie, for the list of things that bug you. I agree with many of your points, as it happens; the game's currently much too generous in many ways. To answer a few points:

1) Player damage is completely reworked in v4 and seems to be promising so far, though it still needs a lot of work before we can consider moving it to Vanilla.

5) I've yet to survive a paralysis attack after the change to non-stacking durations, so I don't think they can reasonably be declared nerfed. I mean, yes, obviously the game is a bit easier if you can theoretically survive being paralyzed, but in practice you still absolutely have to have FA before considering fighting paralyzers.

6) Repair Item was removed. Bad idea, everyone agrees, it's gone now.

7/8/9/10) Generally speaking, the game can be made much harder simply by being more stingy with drops, without worrying about what exactly is in those drops. Early on in the v4 split, drop quality was reduced to maybe 10% of normal -- I played and won a game with that version and it was much harder than 3.3 or 3.1. Dunno about 3.0; it's been too long since I played that version.

14) Personally I think level feelings are silly, and I've been running a low-level campaign for their removal for awhile. Currently they're optional (as a birth option), but a lot of people seem to be attached to them for some reason...

Bottom line, though, is that many of the changes that made the game easier also made it much more accessible to new players, and so they're simply not going to get reverted. What needs to happen instead is to make the game harder again in other ways. We have craptons of threads discussing ways to achieve that, and some of the ideas in them have been implemented in v4, with more to come. Just because we're not making the changes you personally want doesn't mean we're not cognizant of the problem.

Development's pretty slow right now, though, which unfortunately means that the "broken" (overly easy) versions of Angband have been and will be the most prominent ones for a rather long time. But we'll get there! Angband will never be precisely like the 3.0x versions, but it'll still be a good game.

EDIT: I have a change that adds baby law/chaos/balance drakes in alongside baby MHDs. Seems like a good idea to me.

[Nick]

How about a maintainer who gives a damn? It seems as if anyone on the dev team adds anything they like, and nothing is reverted unless I whine for a year, no matter how badly it breaks game balance. If you allow gameplay changes to be made in the nightlies to test them out, Sturgeon's law applies. Reversions should be the rule, not the exception.

I've got V combat working. Really working. I like it better than S combat. However, to get it right, they would have to undo all of the things they made worse about light weapons combat. No early rings with damage bonuses, gain-one-lose-one potions no shallower than DL25, revert all light weapon artifact boosts, and some more stuff. They'll never agree, at least they refused for years, so why bother arguing about it?

I hack and play based off of 3.0. I believe it will be less time spent to personally implement every good change in 3.1 through 3.3 than it would be to try to remove all I hate from 3.3. AFAIAC 3.3 has reached FUBAR status. I've completely given up on trying to make suggestions about things to fix. There's no point. I usually don't even look at the v4 discussions.

I've snipped your substantive complaints; I agree with some (maybe most).

What I completely disagree with is the way you've gone about this.

Under takkaria's maintainership (and remember, takkaria took that on reluctantly and with a sense of trying to do the best by the game and the community), Angband has moved from a maintainer-as-god model to a much more open, community-driven model.

This means that anyone can contribute. A bunch of the changes that you dislike were included because someone suggested it, made a patch, and submitted a pull request. Probably the devteam should have been more picky about what they accepted.

So given a change that you thought was bad, you had the choice between

1. Submitting a patch with a reversion or an improvement and
2. Whining for a year

Obviously you can choose to play modified 3.0; what you do in your own time is your choice. What I would prefer to see from you, though, is constructive community engagement.

OK, rant over

[buzzkill]

Ever since takkaria moved from a single maintainer to a dev team you've constantly worked against that model instead of with it. I look forward to your fantastic 3.0-based variant, as I have been for the last few years.

Maybe the dev-team model is itself the problem. Instead of a single maintainers pet project/vision, it introduced the wants of a whole mass of well intentioned individuals/ideals, and not as much concern for the actual needs of the game. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

Is there a PowerDiver 3.0 custom distro available somewhere?