NetHack Poll 2009

[bhaak]

Hi there!

After the big success of the Crawl poll in August (the results can be downloaded from http://crawl.akrasiac.org/poll_results.txt) and in loose cooperation with the Crawl developers responsible for that poll, we present you the "NetHack Poll 2009".

The intention of this poll is to gather some information about NetHack players, both currently active and past players for helping us variants developers with design decisions and to get a small insight into the NetHack community as a whole.

Even if you no longer play NetHack regularly, please take part in this poll. Most questions make sense also for former players and one question asks explicitly why you no longer play NetHack (although I can guess why people in here don't play it anymore ).

This poll will run through the month of November. Afterwards the results will be released to the public and a pointer will be posted here.

Please spread the word about this poll to other NetHack playing people you know.

You can either directly reply to this as mail and send it to
nethackpoll@gmail.com

Or post it in here.

Or fill out the online form on

http://nethack-de.sf.net/poll.html

Many thanks,
Patric Mueller (lead developer of NetHack-De and UnNetHack)

Note: Your e-mail address will not be shared with any third parties.
After the poll is closed and the final results have been published all replies will be deleted.

Questions:

1. What is your age and gender?
2. Which country do you live in?
3. Do you play locally, on a server or both?
4. Do you play Tiles or ASCII or both?
5. On which Operating Systems or Devices do you play NetHack?
6. Where did you get your copy of NetHack from?
7. Do you play a patched NetHack or variants of NetHack?
8. Which other Roguelikes have you ever played? (Crawl, ADOM, Angband, etc.)
9. Where did you learn about NetHack?
10. And when?
11. How often did you win NetHack? (If never, you may specify your best game.)
12. To what extent do you use spoiler for playing NetHack?
13. If you no longer play NetHack regularly, why and when did you quit?
14. If you take part in the NetHack DevNull tournament: where did you hear about it?
15. Did you ever recommend NetHack to someone?
16. Which computer game other than NetHack did you play most in the last three months (August, September, October)?
17. Please specify a valid e-mail address if you would like to receive the results of this poll directly.
    

[Nick]

I've cross-posted this to rgra.

[bhaak]

I've cross-posted this to rgra.

Thanks, I've already posted it on rgr.announce but if a regular member of the community considers it okay to post it also in rgra that's great.

[Bandobras]

Hi!

lead developer of UnNetHack

Heh, an UnVariant with more randomness and higher difficulty?

Questions:

1. What is your age and gender?
   36, M
2. Which country do you live in?
   France
3. Do you play locally, on a server or both?
   locally
4. Do you play Tiles or ASCII or both?
   ASCII, of course
5. On which Operating Systems or Devices do you play NetHack?
   Linux
6. Where did you get your copy of NetHack from?
   Debian
7. Do you play a patched NetHack or variants of NetHack?
   No
8. Which other Roguelikes have you ever played? (Crawl, ADOM, Angband, etc.)
   All?
9. Where did you learn about NetHack?
   older initiates at the university
10. And when?
    1995
11. How often did you win NetHack? (If never, you may specify your best game.)
    win?
12. To what extent do you use spoiler for playing NetHack?
    maximal
13. If you no longer play NetHack regularly, why and when did you quit?
    after a week, after YASD avoidable only via spoilers and after noticing the mood is not serious enough to call it a high fantasy world (which does not have to be mortally serious, BTW)
14. If you take part in the NetHack DevNull tournament: where did you hear about it?
    nope
15. Did you ever recommend NetHack to someone?
    5 persons
16. Which computer game other than NetHack did you play most in the last three months (August, September, October)?
    sadly, Desktop Tower
17. Please specify a valid e-mail address if you would like to receive the results of this poll directly.
    no, thank you

[bhaak]

Heh, an UnVariant with more randomness and higher difficulty?

Yes, more randomness is one of the targets.

Higher difficulty depends on your play. If you're used to (ab)use some of the exploits in vanilla then UnNetHack is probably much harder for you as those exploits have been fixed.

Making it more difficult is not a primary aspect but there a few additional, more interesting monster included.

[Bandobras]

UnNetHack

Heh, I was laughing, because there is an Angband variant with more randomness and more difficulty than Vanilla (both arguably and in many respects), called UnAngband. It's also a bit more Nethackish, e.g. creative use of objects, many themed dungeons, a sense of humor. It's as netchakish as I can stand and only very rarely more so. (And yes, I'm known to post on random threads advertising this wonderful variant, which I have a stake in. :> )

[bhaak]

The results of the NetHack Poll 2009 are online.

They are downloadable in text form from here:

http://nethack-de.sf.net/nethack_poll_results.txt

There's also a thread on rec.game.roguelike.nethack where I
commented on some parts of the results:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.nethack/browse_frm/thread/5d5fdb7d6976fb44

Thank you for participating in the poll!