No-sell

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Life is too short to sit around clicking a mouse. My own personal time is by far the most limited and valuable resource in any game that I play.

IMO using player boredom as a resource is bad game design. I prefer games that don't do that at all.

[buzzkill]

My same old 2 cents.

1) I don't like that no-selling is on by default;
2) I think no-selling is a good idea, but ruined by increased $ drops;
3) I think the devs, on some occasions, act as developers rather than maintainers.

No selling as the default option is not only wrong in light of Angband's history, but more importantly in means that future changes will be biased upon the (now default, and IMO preverted) no-selling option.

Despite the opinions of others of whom I have respect for, I think the gold drops are absurdly high. Devs seem to have based the increased compensation upon a player who sells everything in sight, and then erred on the high side of that. It devalues gold even further in game in which it's mostly irrelevant already.

Angband has plenty of known, existing problems, balance, and UI issue that need maintenance. Instead, "devs" rather then going after the old problems (for any number of reasons, lack of expertise, lack of motivation), create potential new ones.

[nothing new here]
If you don't have expertise or motivation to maintain Angband, then don't be a maintainer. If you want to do your on thing, start a variant. If my general understanding of GIT is accurate, just about anybody can put forth patches to the codebase, they just need to be OK'd and integrated by a (for lack of a better title) maintainer. Let the players with the motivation and expertise do the work, and leave the rest of the game alone.
[/nothing new here]

[Derakon]

Let the players with the motivation and expertise do the work, and leave the rest of the game alone.

And, for what must be like the 5th time in this thread alone, "True Angband" is a community consensus. If you don't like what the current Vanilla is, then make a branch off of whatever version, make your changes, and publish it as the new True Angband. The fact that nobody has done this indicates that the only people who are capable and motivated to make changes are:

1) already on the dev team,
2) already working on their own variants (i.e. not trying to make a new Vanilla), or
3) quit the community in a huff (i.e. Eddie)

The only reason why the dev team version of Angband is labeled as "Vanilla" is because the community calls it that. If the community wanted to declare, say, NPPAngband as the new Vanilla, that would be their prerogative. Nobody is doing this.

Frankly, I'm getting sick of non-coders saying that the dev team should quit. If you don't like what the dev team is doing, then play an earlier version. If you still want new versions, but with different changes? That's your problem. You want a better maintainer? Step up, learn to code, and take over. Plenty of people learned to code by modifying the Angband codebase. You wouldn't even be the first person to go from "can't code" to "Vanilla developer"! In the meantime, if you won't do that and you can't provide constructive criticism, then I invite you to go shout your complaints into a hole in the ground, because you'll do much more good that way.

The dev team has demonstrated many times in the past that they are willing to listen to constructive criticism. We have threads every bit as big as this one that are debating the minutiae of how some feature ought to work or if it belongs in Vanilla at all. Don't try to pretend they aren't reasonable people.

[Nick]

3) I think the devs, on some occasions, act as developers rather than maintainers.

I would say always. That's the attitude they are taking. It is quite valid to say you don't like that, but the devteam have taken the attitude, as enunciated by takkaria some time ago, that just maintaining leads to stagnation and death.

This can, and probably will, be argued back and forth endlessly, but I don't see the situation changing any time soon. Angband is not a fixed idea that was handed down on stone tablets in perfect form - it's a game that a bunch of uni students came up with a while ago in their spare time. Any time one of the originals checks in here, they tend to say "Wow, Angband's still going. Cool." and then leave because they have lives now. I also think it's cool that there are still people playing and developing and arguing about it. It's a sign of life. Relax and enjoy it. Or go back and play 3.0.9 and complain about the crap interface. It's all good.

I have a feeling that I had a point when I started this post, but whatever. It's 1am here, why won't you let me sleep?

[scud]

It's 1am here, why won't you let me sleep?

Because you know that the moment you fall asleep Australia will slump to 221 all out.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

It's good to see developers making decisions. My favorite from recent times: Charisma is gone, finally, after tens of years of debating! Wow.

In some ways Angband has never had a developer with a unified vision. Those Moria developers just took things from Rogue or D&D somewhat randomly. Like charisma, or having to eat -- things that don't actually have much function in the Angband gameplay.

[DaviddesJ]

IMO using player boredom as a resource is bad game design.

I don't think "using player boredom as a resource" is a good description. Any game that gives players the freedom to play as they want gives them the freedom to do stuff that is boring. I mean, forget about connected stairs, in theory you could decide never go below level one until you accumulate enough gold to buy enough stat gain potions in the black market to max all of your stats. Sure, it would take forever, but in theory you could do it. It's inherent in games like Angband that your goal is to kill Morgoth, there are lots of ways to do it, and it's up to you to have fun pursuing that goal. You can spend more of your time and effort grinding to power up, or you can spend more of your time and effort diving and playing carefully to survive. Two different approaches, each can be fun in its own way, each may appeal to different people. The idea of Angband is that you don't have to dictate one or the other, it's almost a sandbox model, play as you like. Maybe that's too unstructured and flexible for you, but unstructured and flexible is not the same as "bad design".

[DaviddesJ]

3) I think the devs, on some occasions, act as developers rather than maintainers.

WTF? What do you think that "devs" stands for? Of course they are developers. It's not a big secret that the game is not frozen in amber, and there are changes other than those needed to support new platforms or operating systems.

I also can't really understand the observation that gold has always been essentially irrelevant in Angband (true) and therefore giving players too much gold is somehow screwing things up (huh?). I've been playing with no selling, you could give me half as much gold, it wouldn't change anything. Maybe I'd tunnel and bother to dig treasure out of veins a little bit more. But it's not going to make any real difference. It's just a non-issue.

[DaviddesJ]

Angband has plenty of known, existing problems, balance, and UI issue that need maintenance.

Like what? There are certainly some UI improvements I could imagine (although some of those would be controversial too---the monster memory option is essentially a UI improvement) but what are the "known, existing problems" and "balance issues"? I predict there will be way less agreement with you on what those are and how they should be changed, than you are implying. But I could be wrong because I haven't seen your list.

[Derakon]

An anecdote: with no-selling on I find my money supply to be a major limiting factor through at least 1000'. I often have barely enough money to afford vital consumables, and barring the occasional lucky adamantite drop certainly can't afford to buy nice goodies from any of the stores. After that point I start to build up a bank balance which gets periodically depleted to buy a stat potion from the Black Market. I wouldn't say money becomes irrelevant (in the "can afford anything remotely likely to be for sale) in a no-selling game until at least 2500' and probably later.

From what I recall of selling games, I actually have less money early on (when I was selling all those Wands of Sleep/Slow monster for massive cash), and approximately the same, or less, money later on too.

[DaviddesJ]

I wouldn't say money becomes irrelevant (in the "can afford anything remotely likely to be for sale) in a no-selling game until at least 2500' and probably later.

I don't think that's what "irrelevant" should mean. Money is irrelevant if you end up at the same place in the end with or without it. If you're spending money on stat gain potions, that already indicates that money is essentially irrelevant to you, since you could just wait and find those stat gain potions in the dungeon instead.

If you couldn't afford to buy enough CCW potions, and you died because of that, that would be something different. But that just never happens. Having more money might at most let you buy more consumables in the very early game and play more aggressively and level up faster. But you're going to end up at the same place, right?

From what I recall of selling games, I actually have less money early on

Do you dig out all of the treasure on every level?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I don't think "using player boredom as a resource" is a good description. Any game that gives players the freedom to play as they want gives them the freedom to do stuff that is boring. I mean, forget about connected stairs, in theory you could decide never go below level one until you accumulate enough gold to buy enough stat gain potions in the black market to max all of your stats. Sure, it would take forever, but in theory you could do it. It's inherent in games like Angband that your goal is to kill Morgoth, there are lots of ways to do it, and it's up to you to have fun pursuing that goal. You can spend more of your time and effort grinding to power up, or you can spend more of your time and effort diving and playing carefully to survive. Two different approaches, each can be fun in its own way, each may appeal to different people. The idea of Angband is that you don't have to dictate one or the other, it's almost a sandbox model, play as you like. Maybe that's too unstructured and flexible for you, but unstructured and flexible is not the same as "bad design".

You're perfectly right. I was using too strong words. Many people like grinding in games.

EDIT: I don't think I actually meant grinding per se, and I didn't mean that Angband's basic gameplay is "bad design". Digging gold or townscumming may be a better examples of using player boredom as a resource.

[Derakon]

Do you dig out all of the treasure on every level?

Hell no. Digging is boring. Why would I waste time on non-tactical mining when there's dungeons to explore and monsters to kill?

Also, money becomes irrelevant when you can buy anything you're likely to want. It is relevant when you can't buy everything you want. As long as you're feeling the squeeze from your bank account, money is relevant. You may not agree with these definitions -- and I'm not here to argue them with you. They are the definitions I used to write that post, that's all.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Perhaps shopping just can't be very interesting in Angband, where grinding for more stuff is always possible? The town is just a convenient timesaver so you don't need to grind for basic items.

In games where you can't choose your own difficulty level (like Halls of Mist), shopping decisions often mean life or death.

[DaviddesJ]

Hell no. Digging is boring. Why would I waste time on non-tactical mining when there's dungeons to explore and monsters to kill?

I don't, either. But it illustrates how irrelevant money is to you---it's right in front of you and you don't even bother to pick it up because it would take a few keystrokes. Nothing wrong with that but it illustrates the lack of significance of money in the game. Call it "trivial" or "unimportant" rather than "irrelevant", if you like those words better