"Nick is going to butcher the game"

[tangar]

At least consider the possibility that the people calling you out on rudeness (multiple people) has more to do with the way you're saying things then simple disagreement.

It's very pretty how you quote this 'rude' word:

fanboys

And do not notice any rudeness this message:

I think you should go away and never come back. You are a toxic piece of garbage who chased away T4nk who was a valuable contributor with a nasty, vile piece of trash series of comments.

I don't know if you suffer from some kind of mental illness, but such is the delusion of grandeur in your posts that I don't care. This forum would be better without you.

wobbly, thank you very much for providing such beautiful evidence to typical double standarts! Good job!

There are always people who do not have anything to say about topic of the discussion and their the only argument is to 'go personal'.

[wobbly]

One word, but I had a billion to choose from. Simple fact: you're rude, I'm rude. Neither of us have special privilidge.

Done.

[PowerWyrm]

Edit: Honestly it's a shame Nick the butcher would be out of place as a unique.

Too late! This is gonna be a unique in my variant now!
The Butcher of Baddu-Bak is having a new husband!

Look, Vanilla was ruined from the moment that Nick decided to not have rockets in it. Who cares about the rest.

Rockets pfft. Final Fantasy has nuclear bombs, so why just play with small rockets, we need some BFGs...

I donno why some other folk with whom I discussed this matters in Discord are silent..

Because it was not the time to say something. The current monster overhaul is WIP, not finished work.

PWMAngband and your own variant are very welcome to keep the old monsters, or add to them or mix between the different monster lists to your heart's content.

Exactly, and that's what I've been doing for the past 12 years. PWMAngband started as a fork of MAngband, because I wasn't satisfied with the turn TomeNET was taking and wanted to play a real-time version with stuff I liked while keeping the core Angband feel. That's why I'm following all the changes while porting only some of them for PWMAngband -- that's what variants are for. If you look more closely at the latest PWMAngband source, you'll probably find out that most of the changes from latest V are there... but not all of them. This will also be the case for post 4.1.2 chances about races and monsters. I will not contest the changes in Angband, just adapt them for my variant if I dislike them.

I think it's fair to say that everyone who has seen your posts on the forum, tangar, understands you have a strong attachment to the current monster file as of Angband 4.1, and that you don't want to see things removed. It sucks when games change in ways you don't like. But maybe give the changes a go? You might find that an updated monster list is a new challenge to master, rather than a loss of hard-won knowledge. Personally, I've been playing the game more recently than I have in ages because I'm excited to see the changes.

I understand Tangar, as the change to the monster list is BRUTAL. I felt the same way 10+ years ago around v3 when half of the list was switched around, many monsters removed and replaced. Who here remembers the name given to The Balrog of Moria (Muar) or to the Witch-King (Murazor)? I used to play and fight Cerberus and suddenly he was gone... But then I thought... why we would have to fight Cerberus in the Pits of Angband? This makes no sense... And Carcharoth was adopted. And I felt happy with the changes.

[Sphara]

Only time I've felt strongly about Angband development was few months ago, when traps were just obnoxiously dangerous. I don't know if dragon/demon summoning traps are nerfed nowadays, but those did one-shot me few times. Also it wasn't rare to lose majority of your town-bought healing supplies to early spiked pit traps. And if you did not have any, you could just die to bleeding+poison.

These incoming changes today, I just look forward to and wanna see how they play. Every change is likely displease some players, there's no way around that for a game with this long of a history. I bet there are people who still miss ant lions and evil iggies.

[eMeM]

Hei,

long-time lurker here (7 years??), player of Angband since 1995 or so, done my Nethack, ADOM etc...

I made an account just to come here and post my couple of cents. What the OP wrote is in my opinion completely wrong.


I'm not bothered by the mixing of different ages of Middle Earth - what irritates me is the mixing of religious mythology, D&D monsters, David Eddings and who knows how many other sources to Middle Earth context.

Angband to me represents Tolkien's world. Removing all the outliers, D&D monsters and "funny" monsters just enhances the game - makes it more coherent and unique experience.

Going through the monsters, giving epic Tolkieny villains (for example Nazguls) their rightful place at the top of the monster food chain instead of just being pushovers is exactly the right choice.

What Nick has done to the game is great! It feels vibrant, evolving game once again, not stagnant pit that tries to preserve "a mix of bit of everything".

So I say go for it Nick! Realize your vision while taking feedback like you have done so far - those who want to stay with the old Angband can do so, but it's my opinion it's high time this great, classic game got someone with your vision to maintain it

From day 1 when Nick was "appointed" as a Angband maintainer it was obvious from his previous work he will make it more Tolkienised. And from day 1 I knew I will not like that sort of changes because I'm not into Tolkien's books or any other fantasy books. I just liked Angband as a ASCII roguelike game played on a fullscreen DOS/Linux. Side note it's not possible to play it that way in Windows for many years and no maintainer cares enough to fix it.

Overall I admit that I don't like changes in Vanilla in last 15 years. There are some nice user interface improvement but much more things are made in what I perceive as a wrong direction. Some of fun is removed because maintainer feels it's annoying to him. Some annoying things are introduced because maintainer feels it's more fun to him. I just know that if I don't follow current maintainer's philosophy then I will just get disappointed reading what's going on in Angband development. Might be a reason why I quit playing in last few years.

Back to main subject of Angband LORE changes. I understand tangar's concerns. I understand that some monsters should stay in the game with their non-Tolkien roots, non-Tolkien names. On the other hand I agree that some monster needs to be moved to different depth. I'm not attached to a monster's name.

Myself I though that 50' depth should be different from any other level. More safe, single monsters, no packs, no invisible monsters, no paralise monsters, no OOD monsters. But for someone else that would be a LORE change and maybe they would quote Tolkien that dungeon is never a safe place to be.

[Huqhox]

Myself I though that 50' depth should be different from any other level. More safe, single monsters, no packs, no invisible monsters, no paralise monsters, no OOD monsters. But for someone else that would be a LORE change and maybe they would quote Tolkien that dungeon is never a safe place to be.

50' depth is now considerably safer than it was 15 years ago...

[Pete Mack]

Yup. No lethal traps, no instadeath to floating eyes found with a torch, or around a blind corner.

50' depth is now considerably safer than it was 15 years ago...

[tangar]

Angband: epilogue

a) it's my last word (like before execution) - my last message about this topic.

b) this thread got in it a lot of interesting opinions, but it lacks of proper analysis and facts (except Takkaria's answers). I myself want to propose some; to combine my main ideas from past messages in paragraphs, so it would be easier to see the whole picture.

c) it would be fun to see a proper answer to this (last) message. What is a proper answer? It's an answer with facts and specifics, without common words. I write there particular paragraphs - 1, 2, 3, 4... Proper answer is to take this paragraphs and provide an opinion based at facts and evidence; if you are not agree with particular paragraphs - you should explain why you are not agree and to provide logical arguments towards your position.

d) I do not expect that something would be changed because:
- Angband got authoritarian dev system (it's not a defect, I'm also using such managment when I play in MMORPG and create guilds; it's good for small-scale operation).
- I'm among minority.. But even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth (Gandhi).

So it's just my last words with some facts (which could be wrong, please take a go to prove it):

1) Angband as the heritage.

- Angband could be considered as 'Rogue 3' (while 'Moria' is 'Rogue 2').
- Angband got it's own unique world and lore, which is focused in it's bestiary.
- Angband lore based at mixed fantasy universe, mainly DnD which consist of greek, norsa, Tolkien etc
- As Angband got ~40 years history (counting from 'Rogue 1') and it's lore should be threated with huge respect.

2) Monsters knowledge as the only persistent gameplay factor.

- Angband as all rlgs is RNG-based game.
- It's gameplay learning curve is heavely based at it's monsters knowledge - as it's one of the few factors which is static.
- Not rebalancing, but removing/renaming/revamping monsters is a mistake as it destroy knowledge of thousands Angband players which they accumulated during long years.
- We are (community) too old to learn this changes (or at least to have fun from such learning). It's good to continue development and make game more interesting, but devs should add new monsters for this reason, without removing old ones. I'm not 14 y.o. boy to have time to re-learn monsters' names after each revamp. Renaming monsters - is like destroying players' brain cells.

3) Angband as an educational game.

Multi-lore universe gives Angband an unique advantage to be a educational game. Each monster got a description which often contain poetic and beautiful quotes from the books which players could start reading after playing the game.

4) With new monstrers Angband loosing it's compatibility.

Technically it would become almost impossible for old versions of Angband and it's variant to be up-to-date with 'new Angband'. The end of continuity.

5) Angband already took everything it could from Tolkien lore.

- All Tolkien's lore which is possible to extract from his works was already extracted and added to Angband in past years.
- Most of stuff which is currently renamed/revamped is kinda pulled out of thin air (or other 'a' place) and not well-known even by Tolkien fans. This looks like strained effort to replace stuff with 'at least something'.
- There are always would be stuff which Tolkien doesn't have and which Angband players love (eyes, krakens etc) which leads to a lot of subjectivety in assessment - which monsters should stay and which should go.

6) No one asked to change Angband lore.

- I didn't find players requests considering changes in current Angband lore. Of course, most of the players do not really care about it, they are mostly neutral.. and they trusting maintainers. But even in this topic there some opinions that players miss old monsters.
- It looks that this revamp of Angband lore is an initiative of one person which is kinda 'forced' it by his authority. No one asked for it (no offence meant, just a fact).

7) Splitting community. (coming from previous one)

- As lore changes do not really bother most of the players there were no need to make them.
- At the same time for some players, who takes the game seriously - it's very painful changes and it's split's community (this topic is good example; there are a lot of personal offencive words - words not about particular facts of this discussion, but about personal properties. Bad sign).

7) Pure-Tolkien games is a danger of copyright.

Angband was a 'loosely' Tolkien-based game. Current lore revamp makes it quite 'strongly' focused. This is the least important factor imho, but it still exist.

8) Nostalgia.

As I said in #2 - we are not young. Among Angband and roguelike community in general are not too much new players in this stupid age when modern graphics overcome the gameplay.

And each of us have a lot of stories about Angband monsters - funny and exiting stories. We love this monsters. We love Angband LORE.

ANGBAND LORE - EXIST.

Not much players realise that. But actually everyone got it's in their hearts. Lore is this stories and memories. Removing traditional lore from the game, this monsters which everyone know - it's a position that "Angband do not posses it's own lore". But it's there. It was there.

Good bye.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Now on politeness, I think you've got it the wrong way round (speaking only for myself, of course). The reason I didn't reply was not out of politeness and not wishing to offend. Rather, the reason I didn't reply was because I felt the original post was too impolite to warrant a reply.

+1 !!! At this point, I find the Tangar posts to have "become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." To quote the Bible when referencing those of sharp tongues that have not charity in their hearts.

[Philip]

Wait a sec, Krakens are not and have never been a monster in V. You don't care about the V monster list at all, do you? Hell, you don't apparently even care about being right enough to check.

Anyway, the notion that Angband has some sort of pure unspoiled continuity from Rogue is nonsense. The 3.x.y series monster list isn't even similar to the Moria one (aside from early levels), let alone to Rogue. One reason for this is that Angband has more than 5 elements, which Moria did not. Angband has been ruining the lore and continuity of itself since the very first release.

The fun part of Angband is learning the game. If this change ruins all your game knowledge then great, you get to learn again.

If you want a grab-bag variant, then that's what the various iterations of frogcomposchengband are for.

[Nick]

So it's just my last words with some facts (which could be wrong, please take a go to prove it)

OK, then!

1) Angband as the heritage.

- Angband could be considered as 'Rogue 3' (while 'Moria' is 'Rogue 2').
- Angband got it's own unique world and lore, which is focused in it's bestiary.
- Angband lore based at mixed fantasy universe, mainly DnD which consist of greek, norsa, Tolkien etc
- As Angband got ~40 years history (counting from 'Rogue 1') and it's lore should be threated with huge respect.

Angband does indeed have a rich history and lore, and some of that is focused in its bestiary. But it is also in its objects, in the construction of its dungeons, and in its players.

I first started playing Angband in the early 2000s, and loved the objects, the monsters, the messages. Then, a little later, I discovered the community, at that time centred at rec.games.roguelike.angband. Here, then, was the true heart of Angband in my opinion - people from around the world coming together to tell stories and discuss possibilities for this game (or many games really) that they all enjoyed.

There was a lot of talk about the history, future and variants of Angband, but little about Moria and none about Rogue. In the interests of respecting Angband's history and lore I've been determined to keep the community involved in the development process, and give everyone a chance to have their say.

2) Monsters knowledge as the only persistent gameplay factor.

- Angband as all rlgs is RNG-based game.
- It's gameplay learning curve is heavely based at it's monsters knowledge - as it's one of the few factors which is static.
- Not rebalancing, but removing/renaming/revamping monsters is a mistake as it destroy knowledge of thousands Angband players which they accumulated during long years.
- We are (community) too old to learn this changes (or at least to have fun from such learning). It's good to continue development and make game more interesting, but devs should add new monsters for this reason, without removing old ones. I'm not 14 y.o. boy to have time to re-learn monsters' names after each revamp. Renaming monsters - is like destroying players' brain cells.

I think you're assuming here that the Angband community is a static group of people who started playing when the game began and are all growing old together. I don't think this is true - although I think that developing as if that were true would probably make it true. There are new people arriving and old ones leaving from this forum all the time. Moreover, there is plenty of interest in Angband from the wider roguelike community, and Angband in my view needs to have an appeal to the potential new player who knows they like roguelike games and is looking for one to play.

Plus monsters have been being removed/renamed/revamped all through Angband's history. As such a keen student of Angband's lore, surely you've noticed this.

3) Angband as an educational game.

Multi-lore universe gives Angband an unique advantage to be a educational game. Each monster got a description which often contain poetic and beautiful quotes from the books which players could start reading after playing the game.

So surely the new monsters are another great educational opportunity? They all have descriptions too.

That said, like takkaria I think your "having other mythologies represented is a gateway to them" argument is probably the best one you have. However there are plenty of variants which are a much bigger melange of mythology from everywhere - notably the currently popular Poscheng/Compos/Frog etc ones - and I think it works quite well for Vanilla to stick to the core mythology.

4) With new monstrers Angband loosing it's compatibility.

Technically it would become almost impossible for old versions of Angband and it's variant to be up-to-date with 'new Angband'. The end of continuity.

I don't even know what you mean here. New versions are always different to old versions, and there have been like 50 new versions of Vanilla Angband, let alone all the variants. Look at 3.5.1 and see how compatible that is with 2.4.f-k - I think you'll find not very.

5) Angband already took everything it could from Tolkien lore.

- All Tolkien's lore which is possible to extract from his works was already extracted and added to Angband in past years.
- Most of stuff which is currently renamed/revamped is kinda pulled out of thin air (or other 'a' place) and not well-known even by Tolkien fans. This looks like strained effort to replace stuff with 'at least something'.
- There are always would be stuff which Tolkien doesn't have and which Angband players love (eyes, krakens etc) which leads to a lot of subjectivety in assessment - which monsters should stay and which should go.

This is clearly not true, as I have just put in a lot of Tolkien stuff which was not there before.

Yes, there is always subjectivity about what to keep and what to remove. As I've explained a number of times to everyone, and directly to you in particular, my view was basically to remove things that were boring or that clashed with Tolkien stuff - so things like eyes stayed, but trolls drawn specifically from a different mythology were changed to be more Tolkienian.

6) No one asked to change Angband lore.

- I didn't find players requests considering changes in current Angband lore. Of course, most of the players do not really care about it, they are mostly neutral.. and they trusting maintainers. But even in this topic there some opinions that players miss old monsters.
- It looks that this revamp of Angband lore is an initiative of one person which is kinda 'forced' it by his authority. No one asked for it (no offence meant, just a fact).

No-one asked for this particular set of changes, but I've been talking about it for a long time and have got quite a lot of encouragement. Also it is a topic that comes up from time to time here, and I judged that community sentiment wasn't against it.

7) Splitting community. (coming from previous one)

- As lore changes do not really bother most of the players there were no need to make them.
- At the same time for some players, who takes the game seriously - it's very painful changes and it's split's community (this topic is good example; there are a lot of personal offencive words - words not about particular facts of this discussion, but about personal properties. Bad sign).

I don't really see this as having split the community. It's generated a lot of discussion, but it's mostly been civil, and there's been no-one saying "these monster changes are going to make me leave the Angband community and never come back".

7) Pure-Tolkien games is a danger of copyright.

Angband was a 'loosely' Tolkien-based game. Current lore revamp makes it quite 'strongly' focused. This is the least important factor imho, but it still exist.

I don't think that's even a remote danger. The Tolkien Estate is chiefly concerned with protecting the author's intellectual legacy; making Angband truer to his works probably makes us safer, if anything, but I think we're so far below the radar that we never have to think about that.

8) Nostalgia.

As I said in #2 - we are not young. Among Angband and roguelike community in general are not too much new players in this stupid age when modern graphics overcome the gameplay.

And each of us have a lot of stories about Angband monsters - funny and exiting stories. We love this monsters. We love Angband LORE.

ANGBAND LORE - EXIST.

Not much players realise that. But actually everyone got it's in their hearts. Lore is this stories and memories. Removing traditional lore from the game, this monsters which everyone know - it's a position that "Angband do not posses it's own lore". But it's there. It was there.

I've already addressed the we're not young bit. As for stories - now there are new monsters to have stories about, and changes don't invalidate the old stories.

Of course Angband lore exists, and mostly it exists in the community. We're contributing to it right now. Changing a few monsters in the monster list certainly doesn't destroy Angband lore.

[fph]

It looks like most of your arguments boil down to "we've always done it this way".

[Pete Mack]

Rogue had only a handful of monster types--less than 52. It also had no spells, minimal scrolls,etc. If you want a proper successor to it, try Sil. It is much closer to Rogue 3 than Angband ever was (or was intended to be.)

[Derakon]

Angband was basically "maximalist Moria" when it first came out. Moria has 50 levels? Angband has 100! You can beat Moria at around clvl 30? In Angband you can go all the way up to clvl 50! Moria has warrior, rogue, paladin, mage, and priest? Angband has rangers too and everyone (except the warrior) gets twice as many spellbooks! Moria has ego items? Angband has artifacts! Moria has 150 monster types (or however many it was)? Angband has 500, and some of them are unique!

Neither game was particularly serious in tone. Moria had the Grape Jelly and Evil Iggy, and Angband had Qlzqqlzuup and potions of Slime Mold Juice.

[Carnivean]

Neither game was particularly serious in tone.

I remember a story about the original Moria maintainer and his sense of fun. He'd developed the game for his college, but another college had gotten word of it and wanted in. The dev changed the monster list for the town to make a "football fan" of his college that was a rapid breeder and always awake, so as soon as the new college students started playing they were swarmed and killed. After both sides had a laugh he showed them how to revert the monster list and play normally.

Clearly the whole thing is a sacred tome and should never be changed.