New scoring system

[t4nk]

Lucky you're working on them then

I'm mostly doing things with the ui; better graphics means tiles, and I don't like any of Angband's tilesets. And I'm not going to draw any... As for fancier text mode, there are concerns like "the main problem is figuring out how to use color meaningfully without penalizing the player for not noticing subtle color differences". Brogue solves this issue by using color meaninglessly while penalizing the player for not noticing subtle differences (really, that's exactly what it does). I assume Angband's old timers won't allow that (oh, I just remembered that grey mushroom patches exist. Maybe there is still hope? )
As for score calculations; looking at the ladder, the high scores are from the versions 2.8.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.5, 2.8.2... looks like currently Angband's players don't care about high scores. Why not change it to something that would be more interesting to at least some of them? And what can that be, other than the fact of winning the game, and turncount? So I think that those should be the two main, or only, variables in the score formula.

[xorzac]

I would go with something along these lines:

( ( (Max depth * max depth * max depth) / (clvl * clvl) ) * 5) - ( (turns / 1000) ) + ( ( depth of lowest unique * 5) )

+ 50% ironman
+ 33% only sauron
+ 100% morgoth

these numbers should be tweaked but it rewards speed and difficulty.

Race and class modifiers could be thrown in too - ex. minus (class or race exp penalty / 5)%

[Nomad]

How about an achievement-based points system, where you get awarded a bonus to your score each time your character breaks a "personal record" like:

- max depth reached
- max character level attained
- number of items and runes identified
- number of uniques killed
- number of artefacts found
- max damage done with a single blow/spell
- max EXP gain for killing a single monster
- highest value or rarest item found
- greatest difference between character level and dungeon depth

etc.

That way score doesn't climb infinitely from grinding repeated actions, but only rewards the player each time they achieve something new/better than they've done before. Plus it would be easy to show the player a scoresheet of all these tracked statistics to give them some feel for what they're getting the points for.

[AnonymousHero]

How about an achievement-based points system, where you get awarded a bonus to your score each time your character breaks a "personal record" like:
[...]

I like it, but it is quite similar to the "track some stats" thing. (That's a great start for a list of stats worth tracking, though!)

[ekolis]

A lot of people complain about Angband promoting grinding because they played it 15 years ago and that was their impression then and they want a reason to ignore it in favour of other games (or, you know, life).

Wouldn't a simple solution be to reward winners who do so quickly, so you'd be encouraged not only to play well, but also win quickly? Don't modify scores for players who don't win, though; playing longer if you don't win is a *good* thing because you're surviving longer and doing well! Hoplite does this by giving some sort of score multiplier (not sure how it's computed) based on how quickly you win.

[redlumf]

How about an achievement-based points system, where you get awarded a bonus to your score each time your character breaks a "personal record" like:
...

I like it! Plus:

* total (real) time played per toon/class/total
* total number of monsters killed
* total deaths
* max number of dungeon levels (unique) between town visits
* total gold
* total number of objects
* total number of keys pressed
etc...

[Pete Mack]

Monsters killed is a terrible stat, like the infamous use of lines of code written as a quality metric.
Did you kill morgoth, or how close did you get? How efficient were you about doing it? And yeah, a modifier for ironman--no artifacts, no stores, and forced descent--makes some sense. The other difficulty options make little difference.

[bron]

Sorry to be a bit late to this discussion. This is something close to my heart, since I personally like "difficulty" (whatever that might happen to mean) rather than "speed" as a measure of accomplishment. I would very much like to see some sort of difficulty modifier optionally available in the game. While I entirely agree that one cannot truly capture all the nuances in a single number, I also think that doing anything more complex than a simple multiplier is going to be too annoying. I guess I'd be in favor of keeping the "score" and the "difficulty" numbers reported separately. This would keep the existing ladder the same, but allow for new sorting options (i.e. sort by difficulty, or sort by difficulty*score). A competition could then require a minimum difficulty number, or sort by score*difficulty (or both).

I freely admit that finding good values for each possible challenge setting will be hard. And some combinations probably have more-than-linear effects on each other. But I very much think that this is something worth doing.

[tangar]

Anyone got some new ideas about score system? I'm looking into implementing achievement system in my variant, so it will be fun to get some new ideas in this field.

[emar]

Anyone got some new ideas about score system? I'm looking into implementing achievement system in my variant, so it will be fun to get some new ideas in this field.

I wonder what Angband would look like if there were something like an experience clock rather than a food clock. Even with the relatively recent overhaul to food, I still barely pay attention to it. If relying on resting and neglecting your turn count and efficiency moving had direct penalties on the player's ability to win, I think the point behind food would be better addressed and also make turn count and experience simultaneously more meaningful metrics in scoring.

[tangar]

I wonder what Angband would look like if there were something like an experience clock rather than a food clock. Even with the relatively recent overhaul to food, I still barely pay attention to it. If relying on resting and neglecting your turn count and efficiency moving had direct penalties on the player's ability to win, I think the point behind food would be better addressed and also make turn count and experience simultaneously more meaningful metrics in scoring.

Oh.. you can try Tangaria to get such feeling in Tangaria food is very important resource which you should mostly find in the dungeons

[dos350]

cool idea would be fun to add some more meaning to score

[Sky]

there is only one valid metric of scoring and that is
1. how massively OP is your character when you retire.

[ewert]

Defined by having all resist covered, all relevant stats at 18/220 or over, and all uniques killed. XD

[tangar]

IMHO score should define not the grind, not the luck, but your skill. getting OP items by luck or by grinding lvls is meh... while killing Morgy when you wear rugs - is skill