[3.4.0] feedback

[Estie]

Not finding a general feedback thread, I`ll start one.

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=13602 is my character.


1. Big thing first: poison counter has been increased and that is horrible. Early game now has me staring at the screen for long amounts of real time, mechanically plonking at the rest key while waiting out the poison duration. The increase in danger is marginal; the increase in annoyance is huge. May I ask that this be undone ?
If the intent is to make poison more dangerous, it will have to be something like increasing damage per tick.
I had to force myself to keep playing, but I dont think I am ever going to do this again unless maybe with a kobold.

2. The affix quality has been drastically reduced: good items are harder to find and artifacts have fewer properties.
I assume this was done in the neverending quest to make the game harder. It succeded; my winner troll had several predecessors who ended up dead.

So now I am expecting the big influx of ladder posts from all the people who asked for a harder game. Its here! You can finally play it!

Vanilla has come down from the lush jungle of 3.1.2v2 to this desert of 3.4.0. If I had to pick, I´d choose to stay somewhere in a temperate middle.


There was more, but I forget. I should have taken notes while playing. And dont take my feedback as negative only; while its hard to pinpoint down any single improvement done for Vanilla recently, the overall effect is such that I don`t see me playing older variants like Z or ToME 2 again, simply because they are lacking so much compared to V.

[Magnate]

Thanks for the feedback - it's always welcome.

1. Big thing first: poison counter has been increased and that is horrible.

Um ... I'm pretty sure this wasn't intentional. I do remember debates about making poison more interesting/challenging, but I don't think we just upped the duration as a result. It could be a side effect of something else changing, I guess. Not sure if any other devs can shed any light on this.

2. The affix quality has been drastically reduced: good items are harder to find and artifacts have fewer properties.

They shouldn't do - the artifacts were hardly touched since 3.3, nor was the randart code. (Are you comparing with 3.3.x, or with an earlier version?). V doesn't use affixes, but yes there are fewer ego items in 3.4

So now I am expecting the big influx of ladder posts from all the people who asked for a harder game. Its here! You can finally play it!

Vanilla has come down from the lush jungle of 3.1.2v2 to this desert of 3.4.0. If I had to pick, I´d choose to stay somewhere in a temperate middle.

Interesting description - the consensus seems to be that 3.2.0 was the easiest, though it's probably pretty similar in difficulty to 3.1.2v2. I think if you didn't play 3.3.0 then 3.4 probably does seem like a bit of a desert by comparison.

[Philip]

About hard games, my favourite variant has to be O. O is hard enough that you keep finding new items, monsters, ways to die... It just doesn't give you a free ride. When people complain about their characters dying, something is wrong. You should be surprised to win, or the game gets boring once you play all the classes.
I've played O somewhat intermittently ever since I was eight or so, am now fourteen years old and still play it. With V it took me a year or so to first win in 3.1.1, then I played with 3.1.2 and won as a Warrior, played with the all stores are storage patch as a priest, easily won and then played th nightlies, won with a mage and got bored. I am thankful for V 3.4.0 because it is hard, and I am playing it occasionally.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Not finding a general feedback thread, I`ll start one.

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=13602 is my character.


1. Big thing first: poison counter has been increased and that is horrible. Early game now has me staring at the screen for long amounts of real time, mechanically plonking at the rest key while waiting out the poison duration. The increase in danger is marginal; the increase in annoyance is huge. May I ask that this be undone ?
If the intent is to make poison more dangerous, it will have to be something like increasing damage per tick.
I had to force myself to keep playing, but I dont think I am ever going to do this again unless maybe with a kobold.

2. The affix quality has been drastically reduced: good items are harder to find and artifacts have fewer properties.
I assume this was done in the neverending quest to make the game harder. It succeded; my winner troll had several predecessors who ended up dead.

So now I am expecting the big influx of ladder posts from all the people who asked for a harder game. Its here! You can finally play it!

Vanilla has come down from the lush jungle of 3.1.2v2 to this desert of 3.4.0. If I had to pick, I´d choose to stay somewhere in a temperate middle.


There was more, but I forget. I should have taken notes while playing. And dont take my feedback as negative only; while its hard to pinpoint down any single improvement done for Vanilla recently, the overall effect is such that I don`t see me playing older variants like Z or ToME 2 again, simply because they are lacking so much compared to V.

It looked like you where playing with randarts, It always seems to me that randart games are harder when hunting for artifacts, because of not what is going to be generated and when, I find this to be more interesting.

It seemed that you had a really good turncount however, despite the difficulty, and you may have had a string of bad luck from the rng, I can relate to this, I have had many frustrating randart games. Try a standart game and compare the difference, I find DL60 and up to be pretty generous in item generation, you just have to survive the mid levels of the game. As far as warriors go try a dwarf, their resist blindness and improved saving throws make them an easier class to play with IMO.

As far as difficulty goes try a game of sang with no artifacts relying soley on your skills and crafting abilities, now that's fun.

I think the V develpoers are heading in the right direction, 3.12 to 3.4 has been a huge attempt at rebalancing and redoing the game in general. I think they are getting closer to finding the right balance to the game. Playing and reporting your experience of the game is the best way to help them.

[Derakon]

I agree with Malak that randart games tend to be harder than standart games. Not just because you don't know what's coming, but because the standarts are somewhat designed to work well with each other. For example, Thorin is an immensely powerful shield, but it doesn't give the basic 4 resistances -- but several body armor artifacts (Isildur, Rohirrim, Belegennon...) do. It also tends to be easier to cover important resistance holes with standarts, since e.g. blindness, confusion, and poison resistance tend to show up on artifacts that you'd want to wear anyway. In randart games, while the total number of artifacts with a given flag tends to be similar, it's often the case that you find no artifact that you want to wear that provides the needed protection. Maybe confusion protection is only on the myriad weak weapon artifacts and on the so-powerful-you-never-find-them artifacts this game.

This shouldn't be taken as evidence that randart games are broken, but they are (usually!) harder than standart games.

[Malak Darkhunter]

My personal take on this I believe that birth_preserve artifacts should be permanenetly turned off, in old angband if you found an artifact it was a great achievement because you didn't know if you were going to find that many artifacts or not because artifacts were not preserved. This adds mystery to the game, you are more likely to use something in place of an artifact. Stronger ego items(amulets of trickery, weaponmastery) make the need for artifacts much less nessasary. If birth preserve were turned off permanently, everybody would have different end-game kits.

Honestly I would up artifact generation a little more and turn off preserving of artifacts to balance this out.

[Magnate]

My personal take on this I believe that birth_preserve artifacts should be permanenetly turned off, in old angband if you found an artifact it was a great achievement because you didn't know if you were going to find that many artifacts or not because artifacts were not preserved. This adds mystery to the game, you are more likely to use something in place of an artifact. Stronger ego items(amulets of trickery, weaponmastery) make the need for artifacts much less nessasary. If birth preserve were turned off permanently, everybody would have different end-game kits.

Honestly I would up artifact generation a little more and turn off preserving of artifacts to balance this out.

I'd happily support this, if there was any sort of consensus. I pretty much share this view (except that I don't think artifacts need any upping), but I bet a lot of people don't.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I've been told by many that aggressive diving is the most fun way to play Angband. Wouldn't preserve off make this strategy worse, or at least lead to situations that feel bad? Should the player be punished for not being prepared to kill everything on the level? I thought this was the playstyle that devs recommend.

If you only want to stop a number of random artifacts from being generated, you could simply do that, without side effects.

[Malak Darkhunter]

I've been told by many that aggressive diving is the most fun way to play Angband. Wouldn't preserve off make this strategy worse, or at least lead to situations that feel bad? Should the player be punished for not being prepared to kill everything on the level? I thought this was the playstyle that devs recommend.

If you only want to stop a number of random artifacts from being generated, you could simply do that, without side effects.

I think aggressive diving is discouraged because it will quickly get you killed unless you know precisely what you are doing and are a very experienced player, not recommended for noobs.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Still, a mechanic that encourages slow diving doesn't sound fun to me...

[fizzix]

I think aggressive diving is discouraged because it will quickly get you killed unless you know precisely what you are doing and are a very experienced player, not recommended for noobs.

I disagree entirely. I think aggressive diving is not only less likely to get you killed, but if it does lead to death it's not going to be a death that pisses you off. (deaths by inattention piss me off)

Why aggressive diving is not likely to get you killed has everything to do with the so called "law of large numbers". The idea is, if you have enough samples, even extremely rare events will take place. In angband the rare events are a series of unfortunate rolls that lead to death. Everyone takes these 1 in 1000 chances because hey, there's a 99.9% chance everything is ok. 99.9% is fine if you're only dealing with say 100 times a game. But if you're taking that chance 2000 times per complete game, you're going to be dead a lot more often than you'd like. The longer you stretch out the game the more chances you have for the RNG to throw a string of bad rolls your way.

[Derakon]

It really depends on how aggressive your aggressive diving is. If you're at dlvl 98 at clvl 30, then no matter how you slice it most of the monsters can kill you easily. You have to know what you're doing if you're to have any hope of survival. Thus such levels of aggression are not recommended for beginners -- there's little room for error and beginners are going to make errors without even realizing it.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Preserve off encourages taking tactical-level risks, which is very good, but discourages taking strategic-level risks, which is very bad. If there only was a way to take the first part without the other...

[Malak Darkhunter]

I disagree entirely. I think aggressive diving is not only less likely to get you killed, but if it does lead to death it's not going to be a death that pisses you off. (deaths by inattention piss me off)

Why aggressive diving is not likely to get you killed has everything to do with the so called "law of large numbers". The idea is, if you have enough samples, even extremely rare events will take place. In angband the rare events are a series of unfortunate rolls that lead to death. Everyone takes these 1 in 1000 chances because hey, there's a 99.9% chance everything is ok. 99.9% is fine if you're only dealing with say 100 times a game. But if you're taking that chance 2000 times per complete game, you're going to be dead a lot more often than you'd like. The longer you stretch out the game the more chances you have for the RNG to throw a string of bad rolls your way.

I have to think in terms of a new player, many experienced players including myself, know the monster list, and how challenging the monsters are, Once I get decent stuff and consumbables, I have no problems diving straight down to stat gain, because I know what to expect, new players do not, and thus I can't recommend aggressive diving to inexperienced players.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

For many beginners, diving and dying is much more fun than taking it very carefully and eventually winning. For many, roguelikes are at most fun when survival is at stake at all times, more or less.

I actually don't think I would enjoy trying to seriously win Angband. But learning to survive out-of-depth is a different game, and fun. I like to be rewarded for taking stupid risks occasionally. In this context, preserve off seems unfair and unfun.