Angband Philosophy I: Player choice

[Raajaton]

I agree on one level that it's nice to have everybody in the community playing the same game, however variants exist because people like to try new things. I would certainly encourage somebody to play around with radical changes in their own variant, rather than stifling their creativity by veto'ing their idea saying it's not suitable for Vanilla. There are lots if ideas people have that would be lots of fun to try out, but deviate too far from Vanilla's design. I know I would enjoy playing through with some of the neat ideas I've seen people come up with, but I wouldn't necessarily like them to be implemented directly into V.

[Timo Pietilä]

I'm not sure about encouraging people to play different versions.

There's something good about the community all playing the same game. I think when v4 appeared and also later on pyrel the dev teams and community fractured a bit and things weren't quite the same for a while after that. It's easier to lose interest when you aren't playing/working on the "official" version of the game.

I think community was pretty much the same, but development fractured. Current 3.5 is good, but at one point angband development was way too ... sloppy I think is a good word for it. There were lots of changes that didn't interact well with each other making game way too easy.

[TJS]

I agree on one level that it's nice to have everybody in the community playing the same game, however variants exist because people like to try new things. I would certainly encourage somebody to play around with radical changes in their own variant, rather than stifling their creativity by veto'ing their idea saying it's not suitable for Vanilla. There are lots if ideas people have that would be lots of fun to try out, but deviate too far from Vanilla's design. I know I would enjoy playing through with some of the neat ideas I've seen people come up with, but I wouldn't necessarily like them to be implemented directly into V.

Sure variants are great, but I thought this was more about encouraging people to not even play Vanilla at all but rather change small things they don't like about it.

I think having a base game that people play in pretty much the same way is what has allowed Angband to maintain interest as long as it has. If no one was playing the same game as me I'd have got bored years ago.

[Nick]

Sure variants are great, but I thought this was more about encouraging people to not even play Vanilla at all but rather change small things they don't like about it.

I certainly don't want people to not play Vanilla at all. I guess I feel like the trend has been away from people modding the game, and I want to remind people that they can, and also make it easier for them to do so if they want to.