Okay, xentronium, thanks for starting a new thread. Maybe a mod can move the relevant stuff to the top of this one; I don't know. But since it's here, a little background might help better clarify my position and exactly what I mean by "winscumming."
As I mentioned elsewhere, I was a Diablo II player for many long years. Before that, I was a Moria player for many long years. Pretty much those were it. I'm not even a "gamer" really by that metric. In both of those games, I played "scummy;" that is, in Moria I alternated between real play and savefile backup play. In Diablo, there was no such distinction. They allowed for both kinds of play as a matter of personal preference: hardcore or softcore. I always preferred softcore, and just couldn't stand the idea of losing everything by something as simple as dying. As wheals mentioned, this is a personal preference, and one that Blizzard simply recognized and catered to. But then, Blizzard lost the beat, did a bunch of stuff I thought was unethical, and took a big fat dump on their entire legitimate player base, so I quit playing their game in protest. Then, I found Crawl.
At first, when I read the design philosophy and first encountered the term, savescumming, I was offended. Who were they do debase those who preferred a different style? It put me off quite a bit when I got online and realized "scumming" was attached to all kinds of different behaviors. It was clearly a philosophical underpinning that such behavior is anathema in all its forms. So I continued to play offline, wondering what was wrong with those people.
Here is what I mean by playing offline: I played one character, over and over and over, scumming everything to the max, including mutations (eating chunks, quitting and eating again until good ones showed), zig floors (quitting until getting the loot i wanted), and on. After finally managing to "win" with that character (which was incredibly difficult, to me), I literally could not believe that anyone could win the game without doing that. So I got online, and started playing to win legitimately. I decided to adopt the philosophy of Crawl, and play it as it was intended. I became a convert.
Now, perhaps the worst kind of believer is the convert, because in the fervor of adopting new beliefs and in the process of internalizing new philosophies, one inevitably notices the contradictions that longtime believers may never give a moment's thought to. I almost immediately saw how the practice of manipulating one's winrates was philosophically identical to any other kind of manipulation to improve results, and I first posted my observation
here, several moons ago, soon after first joining.
This is not rocket science, but it is also not a judgment of preference for my choice over anyone else's. It is rather an observation about the prejudice inherent in the term itself, in that it allows a double standard to operate unquestioned because the practitioners are the ones defining the game.
You really can't have it both ways. If you are going to sneer and shudder at certain kinds of behaviors, then to not do so universally is hypocritical. In the end, that is the entire problem with rigid philosophies, because there are always exceptions to man-made rules.
I have my wins now to prove it possible, and I continue playing. But comparison of my winrate to anyone else's winrate will never reflect anything about Crawls's difficulty, no matter how many times the argument is raised. Unless winrates cannot be manipulated, they are meaningless. That's all.