The Hardest part of Angband

[Mondkalb]

Well, without any monster info, it is obvious that experienced players are in advantage because they know a lot about angband monsters.

[Timo Pietilä]

Well, without any monster info, it is obvious that experienced players are in advantage because they know a lot about angband monsters.

Obviously, but for competition I fail to see why that would be a bad thing.

[krazyhades]

It depends on whether you're interested in getting more (and therefore, usually meaning newer) players into the competitions. Heck, I'm a longtime player and I've only recently submitted to the general ladder, much less the competition ones. They're intimidating enough as-is.

[buzzkill]

Since full knowledge would mark @ as a cheat, I shamelessly savescummed through the new version a few times, Probing everything. Now, with a full-knowledge Savefile I play without savescuming. It was a pain, but if I win the character won't be marked as a cheat. Seems to me that the competition characters should always have full monster knowledge to level the playing field.

Presumably you endure this penance so you won't be marked at a cheat on the ladder. If so, wouldn't it be far easier just to edit the char dump (txt file), remove the bit about cheating, and maybe put in a note about having full monster knowledge.

[debo]

You can get full monster memory using debug-mode. There is a command to acquire full monster memory: ^ar which writes monster memory to your savefile. If you then quit and start fresh using that same file you have full monster memory. You can do reverse with ^aW (wipe recall).

I was thinking reverse for competition. No monster memory whatsoever. It is people that compete each others, no need to level the playing field. Unless whoever comes up with competition char wants to. It's pretty arbitrary, and I feel that monster memory is not necessity in any way.

As much as I hate not having full recall in normal games and think it's utterly stupid, this could actually be a really fun idea for a competition!

HallucinationMushroom took it a step further in Sil, where I think he changed all monsters to have the same name and glyph, so that you never knew what you were fighting until it did stuff. That might also be a hilarious comp mode