Wahaha wrote:I am under the impression that the devs changed the reason from "it was a bad item for bad players" to "it was too good because it ignored torment and ignoring torment is wrong because it's the only threat in extended". At least the new reason makes sense.
The reason wasn't "changed," it just that the commit message wasn't exhaustively crafted to justify the change for all those who might disagree. As gamma said,
gammafunk wrote:MPA mentioned how the item functions as a trap for new players, and people siezed upon this as insufficient justification, but its biggest problem is what Lasty wrote above. He brought that up at the time of removal discussion and the rest of us devs agreed (including MPA and wheals). Sometimes commit messages don't reflect all the reasoning put into changes, but I'm willing to forgive and forget in this particular instance.
Whenever you feel like a commit message isn't enough, the ##crawl-dev logs are available, and they're generally edifying. Commit messages often are only the end of a longer conversation, after all. The c-r-d archives aren't hard to find either, or the developer wiki, or any of the other myriad ways the devs discuss the game.
File200 wrote:I don't care about whatever semantic runaround people will give me to discredit whatever parts of my post they don't want to address.
It isn't a "semantic runaround." Your entire point rests on the premise that the devs don't care enough about the players, which is absolutely wrong. Let's try this instead of flippant one-liners: above, you said, "I just don't understand this philosophy of obsessively controlling how people play and enjoy a single-player game." Try replacing "play" and "single-player game" with "read" and "book," or "watch" and film."
Crawl is a hobby project being crafted by volunteers who care enough about the game to try and continually make it better. Of course they want to control the experience of players; that's what game design is. They listen to the concerns of players -- there are several here, directly addressing the criticisms -- but that doesn't have to mean they agree. That doesn't mean the conversation is over, of course, but having a conversation requires not twisting their words into absurdities like "It's for their own good, you see."
And people also need to admit that the postgame needs an overhaul.
I'll chalk this up to you not being around for that long, but literally no one thinks extended is good. But a) the devs rightly think that improving the part of the game that most people play is more important than catering to expert players who can steamroll endgame content and b) nobody has really come up with a significantly improved extended paradigm. Oh, and c) it's also an enormous amount of work, and since we're not exactly paying anybody (several devs spend their own money on crawl every year!), enjoying the game we all already like enough to bother posting on a forum devoted to it seems like a fine solution.
If you don't like it, you have the same options you have with any open source product: you can contribute ideas the devs find valuable, you can fork your own version, or you can leave. Quit gettin' mad about (free) video games.