look at my dumps

[PowerDiver]

Eddie, do you have a mission here (beyond 'talk to people about stuff')?

My mission is the same as it's always been.

I've played a fair number of games, and 3.0 was the best by a lot.

I love the game.

I see people playing who don't know enough to appreciate how sublime it is. I want to help them get to the point where they can experience as many of the things that make it truly awesome as is possible. That's all I ever wanted.

[PowerDiver]

Eddie-
Traps are much nastier than they used to be.

I don't think the quiver is so unbalancing as all that. The real imbalance was from massive archery damage from brands, which has been largely but not completely nerfed.

The point of my comment about traps was a response to them being meaningless. Forcing a char to use a slot provides meaning, and it makes a rod of detection a more exciting find later in the game. I'm sure your changes are improvements.

I didn't have a problem with out of control branded ammo damage. If you have small piles, and they cost a slot, they are *very* interesting. I might possibly be opposed to your fixing of archery branding. Maybe. Nothing is important by itself. What is important is how things play off against each other. I'm not saying I disagree with what you did, but I have that nagging feeling.

I combined the warrior and archer classes. That works in the context that a warrior devotes inventory slots to swap weapons, and an archer devotes inventory slots to assorted ammo. Spellcasters get powerful books that save slots, so I really want to make them give up a slot for each extra ammo type they want to carry. A quiver breaks this approach.

[the Invisible Stalker]

The thing is, he's right.

I know. That's why I wrote "I agree with most of your complaints about modern vanilla" in the post you quoted.

Angband 3.2-3.5 had poor replayability because they really were too easy once you had mastered them. One reason I left back then was that I got bored with it. A better way to make it noob friendly is to add Maia class, not reduce replayability. Note how many old time players are playing Poschen now because V is too easy.

In my case it was switching, or rather switching back, to O, and then later to FA. But I think our objections to later versions of V are somewhat different. I don't really care very much how easy or hard a game is. I care about how many of the decisions I have to make are interesting. At the extremes these are related, because if you always win or always lose then the decisions before that point become kind or irrelevant. But between those extremes there's a wide range where I could be happy, if there's enough to hold my interest en route to that win or loss.

The interesting decisions tend to be the painful ones, with inventory management providing a lot of examples. Also, the interesting decisions tend to be the ones where either choice could be fatal, and you need to figure out which one is more likely to be fatal. That's where I think modern V started to go wrong. Somehow the idea took hold that character death is something you should be able to avoid.

[Pete Mack]

Welcome back again Eddie. A conversation about V balance was too long in coming.

[AnonymousHero]

Thanks for the answers.

I think your questions are misguided.

It's quite possible. Though I may give off that impression, I certainly don't think good games can be designed-by-numbers[1], but I do think that such statistics may be used to inform decisions about game play and that it's a sound basis on which to do so. (Or, at least "sounder". I mean we can ignore information, but that just means we're guessing, so...)

I think I do agree with most of your observations, if the basic premise is that Angband is a game of inventory management. For me, personally, that's not just a game I enjoy playing -- it's just too "artificial" for my taste. For the last few years I've actually been mostly playing Baldur's Gate (Trilogy + SCS) no-reload and find that much more satisfying than any *band, honestly[2]. I think it ultimately comes down to a dichotomy between a) always possible to win 100% reliably, given perfect play (BGT/SCS), and b) *not* always possible to win, but you can drastically improve odds in your favor. Just as an aside, in BGT you can actually sort of choose where you are between those extremes by choice of class -- there are a few classes that may be outright impossible, some that require a certain degree of luck during the early game (<L15, say) and some that are near-100% reliable given perfect play in any given situation. Asides aside, I'm a more of an (a)-type of player, i.e. the "chess" player type.

[1] Unless, I guess, you're just designing the maximally addictive pay-to-play type MMO or whatever.

[2] It's almost definitely not to do with the RPG-type elements. I metagame the hell out of it and will choose any favorable alignment and then act completely contrary to alignment, etc.

[Pete Mack]

But this preference is almost orthogonal to the issue. What you are describing is not a roguelike. If you try the original Rogue, Angband is only weakly a roguelike, since the other feature than inventory management (food, light, healing) was that escape options were extremely limited: Basically the rare-as-hen's-teeth scroll of genocide and the stairs down (neglecting the arrow exploit).

Sil is very much more a "true" roguelike. The single biggest risk in V used to be drolems, because without detection, they were the one monster where having an escape was simply not a reliable option. Changes away from the roguelike basics really cut replayability. The one gameplay change I most appreciate is that wands of teleport other are now quite rare.

[Nick]

A conversation about V balance was too long in coming.

Well, next time game balance gets broken (which is likely to be soon), I'll try and break it in the direction of making the game unwinnable. That should make people happy

[Derakon]

Well, next time game balance gets broken (which is likely to be soon), I'll try and break it in the direction of making the game unwinnable. That should make people happy

Follow longstanding roguelike developer tradition and treat YAWPs as bugs that need to be fixed.

[AnonymousHero]

But this preference is almost orthogonal to the issue. What you are describing is not a roguelike.

I'm not sure... who, exactly, is "you"? Is it me, specifically? (As in: are you replying to me?)

[Pete Mack]

I'm not sure... who, exactly, is "you"? Is it me, specifically? (As in: are you replying to me?)

@AH--
Yeah. Comparing it to Baldur's Gate is apples and oranges.

[AnonymousHero]

@AH--
Yeah. Comparing it to Baldur's Gate is apples and oranges.

I think you missed a couple of critical words, namely "no-reload". If you try it, I think you'll find that no-reload BG (+SCS) is actually quite close to the "roguelike" experience. Granted, levels/maps are fixed, but the spells are lethal, but randomized(!). Interestingly there's no WoR/TeleLevel type escape at all. The only real escape that you have is either insta-cast invisibility or run-away using Boots of Speed (or similar for e.g. Monk). Also, it's a lot harder to actually win than any version of Angband that I've played... but then I started playing vanilla at 3.1.x, so probably actually at the height of "easy mode"

(No, I'm not going to go into the whole "what is a roguelike" debate because it's absurd. What mostly matters about a game is that players enjoy playing it.)

Anyway... my point was: There are different ways of playing and different people may not enjoy the same things.