YASQ - mutation roulette

[Turukano]

Yet another stupid quit.

<playername> identified a potion of mutation, quaffed it...

1295 | D:6 | Gained mutation: You are frail (-10% HP). [potion of mutation]
1295 | D:6 | Gained mutation: Your spells are a little harder to cast, but a little more powerful. [potion of mutation]
1295 | D:6 | Gained mutation: You are very frail (-20% HP). [potion of mutation]
1299 | D:6 | Quit the game

... quit the game and started a new one.

Yes, I know the reason, speedrunners want low turncounts and (e.g.) species highscores, so many of them gamble in early game. Mutation roulette is only one possibility of this early gambling.

I personally wouldn't feel fine with a "strategy" like this.

  Code:

296 <playername> the Charmwright (level 6, 31/31 HPs)
             Began as an Octopode Skald on Jan 28, 2016.
             Was a Follower of Cheibriados.
             Quit the game on level 6 of the Dungeon.
             The game lasted 00:20:19 (1299 turns).


[Bart]

First of all, that could be quaff-ID, couldn't it? I can understand why somebody did not want to bother with seriously crippled character after 20-minute investment. There are no bonus points for trying to win the game with super-crappy HPs.

It is of course possible that the potion of mutation was drunk deliberately. That reminds me of recent words of CBLF:

Turn-count shaving? It takes:
cheap tactics ( yea... it is about abusing broken game mechanics (...)

Also Sapher, who still holds the highest score ever, told me once that if you want to break a record, you just eat mutagenic corpses until you get a set that allows you to finish lair branches quickly (particularly rPois).

If you don't like the rules of speedrunning... you know, just don't speedrun. Speedrunning resembles professional sports in terms of being unhealthy, time consuming and hardly pleasurable.

[Turukano]

First of all, that could be quaff-ID, couldn't it?

Well, I watched the game. <playername> identified the potion and quaffed it immediately.

[Bart]

Haven't you ever?

If <playername> drank the potion deliberately, I think it is not really an issue. If start-scumming was necessary to achieve anything in the game - that would be an issue.

Start-scumming is a "feature" of every permadeath game, as there is no drawback to restarting (except of lost time), whereas benefits can be significant. Crawl can give you many reasons to quit (some of them apply even if not-speedrunning):
- no decent weapon has been found early (more generally - no interesting item)
- a desired altar did not spawn
- Ds did not mutate nicely / Dr did not get a desired color
- staircases were placed far apart from each other
- no strong, yet easily killable monster spawned
- a pack of monsters forced player to retreat and waste time
- finally, (deliberate) mutating did not turn out well.

Shall/can we discourage start-scumming?
Is scoring system just and interesting?
I find status quo unsatisfactory, but so far I've also learned that
a) most of discussions in tavern lead nowhere and have no impact on the game
b) there are too few people concerned by these problems to attract devs' attention.

[Clownie]

Shall/can we discourage start-scumming?
Is scoring system just and interesting?
I find status quo unsatisfactory, but so far I've also learned that
a) most of discussions in tavern lead nowhere and have no impact on the game
b) there are too few people concerned by these problems to attract devs' attention.

What would discouraging start-scumming fix? Does it have any impact on your game that other people enjoy speedrunning and startscum because of it?

You can either care about score or not care about score. It's entirely your choice. I sometimes play for score, sometimes I don't. I enjoy both – otherwise I wouldn't do them. I don't care how other people play.

[Bart]

Oh, believe me that even people who enjoy speedrunning aren't passionate about startscum, except that in order to achieve great scores they are willing (forced) to scum.

The problem about scoring is psychological. Once you are capable of beating the game, you might look for some qualitative way of assessing how good you really are. Outside of tournaments, Crawl is pretty lousy at tracking your achievments... except of scoring. That makes scoring the main system to assess your progress and to compare to other players.