The Tavern

I will, with a probabilty that borders certainty, get banned for saying this, so I'll make it brief.

It was publicly admitted that they make changes regardless of player opinion, feedback or input, so why give them the illusion that they "can add an ingredient to the stone soup"?

Don't get me wrong, I personally dont mind this fact because I think that they make great changes to the game that make it better and that crawl is an amazing game, but I think it's time to change the philosophy accordingly, making it clear that they are the only ones needed to take care of everything.

Mabye just dungeon crawl continued. short and to the point.

It is quite rare that people (as opposed to spambots) get banned. (I do think it is very unlikely that the name stone soup will be changed, though.)

People who aren't "full" developers or anything do add ingredients to stone soup. Less often, but not exactly rarely, player input on Tavern semi-directly leads to changes in the game, though of course how exactly the game changes won't necessarily be identical to what the person requested or wanted to happen. ("Not following word-for-word" is not the same as disregarding.)

If anything, I think there is a problem in people's expectations of what Tavern is, and its relationship to game development.

This is mostly a fan site for the game DCSS. Several active developers do read Tavern threads and comment here, and some even actively seek player feedback on this forum, from time to time. But, yeah, this is primarily a fan website.

Actually you can check CREDITS.txt to see that there are several hundreds "Members of the Dungeon Crawl community who have contributed to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup".

As a random member of the community, I've had three patches committed to DCSS. If you include changes to the webtiles server-specific code, that number is closer to fifty.

It's true the devs won't accept any patch, only ones they think are good ideas. If they don't like you/your idea, it will be hard to change their mind. But this is like every group ever, and isn't the same as "they are the only ones needed".

When I was 15 my parents bought a new house, and in the course of renovating it we had some friends over that wanted to see the house. Me and some of the other kids went into the big walk-in closet that was in one of the bathrooms, and we found a big wooden box that was attached to the wall, a couple meters tall and maybe one meter wide; the front looked like it was removable. We had a little map of the house with all the rooms etc. on it, and the box was on the map, labeled with "HM". So we started trying to figure out what "HM" could stand for, and at the same time tried to get the front off the box. We could get it to move slightly, but it was stuck and wouldn't come out. Eventually, with four 13-16 year olds prying at it at once, and after getting a bunch of splinters, we managed to get the front off. Upon seeing its contents, we realized that we had been looking at the map upside down, and it was actually "WH" for "Water Heater".

In the story of stone soup, people were asked to contribute foods that go into soup. I suspect that they would have turned away people who wanted to add their favorite magazine or a treasured piece of clothing.

Edit: Which is my snarky way of saying what several others have said before: DCSS has contributions from a very large number of people, but like all projects, not just any contribution will be accepted. A large group of project caretakers (the devs) try to winnow out the best contributions to include, and also the best contributors to become future caretakers.

One consideration is that when it comes to making soup, tangible ingredients count for more than ideas as to what might make it taste better. In the context of DCSS, that includes code patches, but it also includes vaults, tiles, text and, of course, the playtesting that goes on in trunk to find bugs. And, even if your ingredient isn't chosen for the community soup, there's no reason you can't add it to your own bowl to enjoy or even allow others to try it out as well. Ideas are important, but raw ideas, in particular, are a dime-a-dozen. Fleshed out ideas are a bit more valuable, but they still might not fit with the overall flavour or might be too difficult to manufacture given the limited resources available for actual soup-making.

The thing with any creative process (game development included) is that the vast majority of raw ideas are ultimately either discarded or dramatically mutated in the process of incorporating them. For the best creations, this is true for even the ideas of those who have the most direct control over what gets incorporated; what seemed like a good idea at the time may eventually have to be removed to suit the evolving flavour of the soup. The best contribution is the one given freely, with no worry as to its eventual fate in the course of events. This is art for its own sake.