Two suggestions

[Pete Mack]

I guess the trouble with fuzzy detection is it leads to an unbalance in the quality of equipment compared to the quality of the player. I *know* I can find suitable equipment for the endgame. Just kill some DROP_GREAT monsters, loot some minor vaults, and you are set. The same does not hold for dungeon spell books and stat potions. For those, you absolutely must have exactly the right object drop. If you get mage books as a priest, you are out of luck.
I can think of various ways to fix the problem:
* make stat potions and dungeon books more common. Examining object.txt in 3.0.5, they were once extremely common. This isn't necessary, since getting from 18/80 to 18/100 no longer takes so long, and selling dungeon books/speed rings is passé. Instead, getting from 14 to 18/10 takes a long time.
* Bring back detection
* Add "themed" chests at some deep level, with potion/book drops.

My most recent (sigh, I forgot about inscriptions and macros) priest character was carrying only 1 dungeon book...and it came from the black market. I never did find Godly Insights, all the way to dl ~75.

Like how? Feel free to make suggestions; you're
not the only one that doesn't like the "vague object detection" change, so a reversion that doesn't also result in "boring-but-optimal" playstyles would be welcome.

The big problem is addressing the stairscumming that fizzix mentioned. Even if you coerce connected stairs to off (which would be a huge can of worms itself), players who are convinced that there's nothing interesting on the level will make a beeline for the closest stairs to generate a new level. Forced descent also "fixes" this by making dungeon levels a limited commodity, but that does go against one of Angband's big concepts of allowing the player to grind as much as they like.

[Timo Pietilä]

I can think of lots of ways to make the game harder that don't require this change...

It's not "making game harder" it is making game more interesting. Unknown is interesting. Big part of the game is exploration. If you take that out then game gets boring really fast.

[Mondkalb]

Sorry, but for me it is extremely boring to search a level for something I need just to find out that every fuzzy detected thingy was nothing of worth.

Since the change I am nearly only playing rogues because they still get true detection.

[Timo Pietilä]

Sorry, but for me it is extremely boring to search a level for something I need just to find out that every fuzzy detected thingy was nothing of worth.

So to you exploration is not fun. For me it is. What would it take to make it fun to you too? I ask this because IMO that's one of the major point of the Angband, and if you take that off then the point of playing it goes away.

[Mondkalb]

To me here isn't much to explore in Angband, once you have seen all room layouts. You know that somewhere in the dark are more rooms with some monsters and hopefully some useful things.

FAangband is way more fun on the exploring side than Angband.

[Timo Pietilä]

To me here isn't much to explore in Angband, once you have seen all room layouts. You know that somewhere in the dark are more rooms with some monsters and hopefully some useful things.

So, what to do to that?

[krazyhades]

Like how? Feel free to make suggestions; you're not the only one that doesn't like the "vague object detection" change, so a reversion that doesn't also result in "boring-but-optimal" playstyles would be welcome.

The big problem is addressing the stairscumming that fizzix mentioned.

In the spirit of trying to somewhat work within frameworks that already exist (and hopefully limiting need to re-train the player to totally new things, though maybe this is still too obtuse), I suggest having fuzzy detection up until you get a level feeling, and good detection after.

[Mondkalb]

In the spirit of trying to somewhat work within frameworks that already exist (and hopefully limiting need to re-train the player to totally new things), I suggest having fuzzy detection up until you get a level feeling, and good detection after.

Interesting.

[fizzix]

You could also do a half measure on fuzzy detection. So you know it's a scroll or a mage book, or a potion, but you don't know which one.

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but personally I don't find detecting an item and beelining for it to be fun, *unless* you're playing a stealthy character.

[krazyhades]

I *do* have a soft spot for stealth characters...

[Timo Pietilä]

In the spirit of trying to somewhat work within frameworks that already exist (and hopefully limiting need to re-train the player to totally new things, though maybe this is still too obtuse), I suggest having fuzzy detection up until you get a level feeling, and good detection after.

Other than fixing what isn't broken, how would you add to exploration -aspect of the game. If you somehow make wandering around fun with full detection I would agree with that, but as it is currently full detection would plain make game boring.

[krazyhades]

Other than fixing what isn't broken, how would you add to exploration -aspect of the game. If you somehow make wandering around fun with full detection I would agree with that, but as it is currently full detection would plain make game boring.

Yeah, agreed it's not really broken, and I'm not committed to crusading for a change in Vanilla, especially as I can/do modify my copy. I'm personally very partial to the roguey-style of gameplay even on non-rogues (maybe because my first winner was one...), cautiously poking about unhealthy depths early with the help of a detection kit. I don't really know why I find this detect-and-decide gameplay to be fun, but I do, and it's one of the things I really enjoy in poschengband these days.

That said, I think that appealing to exploration isn't really quite right, at least beyond the extreme early portion of the game. The *bands, including fuzzy-detect Vanilla, already provide the players with lots of powerful detection tools (mapping, doors/stairs, monsters, traps, enlightenment) that are heavily used, critical for a dungeoneering kit (see: the windfall from rod of detection for freeing up slots), and for the most part available in abundance. It doesn't feel very exploration-y to me to peek into an already-mapped-and-detected room just to see whether any of those red *s are worthwhile. I guess this is really an issue with Angband and its variants more generally, based on the plentiful detection and its binary power (the only exception being "rarely but sometimes detected by telepathy" monsters, if that trait exists in Vanilla).

In large part the power of item-detection comes into play when trying to grind out consumables (!Stat, !*Healing*, ?*Destruction*, etc) which is pretty boring, and at least for me anything that lets the player approach it in a more targeted approach is a good thing. The other part, of course, is abusing player knowledge to figure out, for example, that the long sword on that vault 8-tile is likely Ringil. Outside of the vault item detection scenario or superpowered base types (PDSM), nonfuzzy detection is rarely that important for equipment. So I see it as a way to make the consumable hunting fun and less grindy/timewastey. Edit: good detection for known-flavor consumables alone would satisfy me, I think.

I'm not sure what the best ways to encourage exploration that feels like exploring would be, but I don't think fuzzy item detect is a great tool for it. I'm not sure that I've really hammered out a complete direct response to your post and query, as this wall of text is more in the manner of fleshing out my disparate related thoughts, but I'm interested to hear your (and others'!) take on what I've written.

[Timo Pietilä]

Edit: good detection for known-flavor consumables alone would satisfy me, I think.

My vision for detecions is that game should get rid of magical means of detection wherever possible. Traps especially, and maybe also doors and stairs. Item detection should remain fuzzy, but, like you said, maybe get more accurate when you have encountered items often enough. Monster detection should also be more in passive side of the game, a bit like ESP is now, maybe hearing or perhaps from magical items that detects types of monsters.

ESP in particular could be divided to two: ESP (extra sensory perception) that detects pretty much anything (including items, doors, traps etc.), but stays fuzzier about what the thing is and more powerful telepathy which detects monsters accurately, but only if the monster mind is something you can recognize (and perhaps very high level monsters could block that so that you get ESP sensing for that monster that "there is something" instead). Telepathy would obviously not detect anything but monsters.

Traps should 1) be positioned in places you would actually expect to be protected by traps (like vaults) and never randomly everywhere and 2) be LoS detection based on your ability to detect traps (searching). Doors similar: hidden doors in LoS search, not next to you only if you actually search.

You could keep the magic for detecting stuff, but make it less "I do this whenever I stop running for any reason whatsoever", more expensive manawise and maybe even far deeper spells.

[fizzix]

One thing that I'd like to point out is that I don't think any game does exploration well. Even games that put a lot of effort into their level designs, tend to have exploration that gets stale after a few playthroughs. This is in a sense a limitation of what you can do with procedural generation. You're always going to come across repeat situations unless the game is completely new to you.

If there's a way to go forward then it's a matter of making situations where you don't know what lies around the next corner and you're scared to find out. But in a long game like angband this is tough, because you only want a couple scenarios like this a game, otherwise you run into fatigue.

I also find the detect and sneak playstyle fun, but it's only fun if I'm sneaking around monsters that I really don't want to wake up. Angband doesn't do stealth all that well (namely because monsters, once awake, will always track to you, and never sleep again). But improving that could make sneaky rogue more fun.

I also think we should be thinking about the playstyle of the 6 archetype classes we currently have, and making sure that they all are distinct and interesting in their own way.

[Carnivean]

My vision for detecions is that game should get rid of magical means of detection wherever possible.

Ugh, that sounds terrible. Improve things for fighters so they don't need magic, and can't actively use it, sure. Change how magic classes work? No thanks.

If you want to play with the mechanics of detection, make it a buff, so that it is constantly draining mana, but don't remove it.

I also mod fuzzy detection out, as I don't like travelling across the map to find a squelched item.