The Tavern

Hm, now that I read it again, the proper term would've been "extrapolate", right?

I noticed that too, but I didn't say anything because I'm pretty sure most people knew what you meant.

Extrapolate is a great word.

FWIW, I used some hyperbole when calling it extremely tedious. I consider it very tedious, but I imagine the opinion of most players would be something along the lines of "too tedious." as opposed to my quote in the OP.

It barely exists for 90% of the game, it's hardly tedious. If there was passive autoID past a certain XL there would be almost nothing to complain about.

tabstorm: Not sure how serious you are with this, but that could be a feasible rule change. Off the bat: reaching the ends of each of the D subbranches could identify a certain (predefined) set of consumables. Flavour-wise, that could certainly be reasoned one way or another. Of course, I am interested in rule changes that don't just make gameplay more pleasant -- they should have a chance to help with the choices. Would something like this do?

No, I'm completely serious. It's in DCSS-CA and is extremely good because in practice the relative impact on your win chances of scroll-IDing whatever potions and artefacts past early game is small, but because there are a few things that exist only to troll you for being lazy like *contam and !mut, there's a good reason to scroll-ID things aside from avoiding unecessary potion waste. This is really a non-decision because there is no shortage of ID scrolls and the player quickly finds out how bad it can be to wear an artefact with contam or quaff a mut pot.

The idea you wrote sounds fine. It's less inventory fiddling per game, which is always good.

Lair:8 currently has nothing in it (compared to e.g. rune branches, or the Orc shops).
Maybe stick a "stone of lore" in there that passively IDs everything after the player picks it up. Put it in the rune inventory.

orb of scrying

Cheap Plastic Replica of the Orb of Zot

Put it in the temple instead please, and remove scrolls of ID entirely. Lair is too far into the game, by the time you reach the end of lair the relevant part of the ID mini-game has completely dissipated. I think the temple is a much better milestone for the Stone of Lore since it will appear.

I was suggesting "remove ID at the point where the ID minigame has already ended because at that point it's mostly superflous".

An argument can be made to remove ID earlier on but at that point you're arguing about removing (part of) the ID minigame, which is another debate. And there's a thread about that right now!

So what is the point in removing consumable ID minigame when it is "mostly superfluous"? It's not like you suddenly lose all your scrolls of ID at some point, and you still need them for randarts and such.

If anything, ID scrolls could be made a bit more rare.

Well, it can be argued that ID adds something to the game early on when you don't know if that stack of 3 potions is degeneration or haste, but later in the game when you have a stack of 9 ID scrolls and 12 remove curse and can instantly identify every randart or unrecognized consumable you see, I'd say that it's no longer creating interesting gameplay.

The other way to go is to make ID more rare and to try to improve the ID minigame even at high levels. But currently it doesn't do anything particularly interesting there. Not using ?ID just means you have a small risk of wielding a randart with *drain, *contam, *fragile, or distortion.

This poll took a 180.

From a design standpoint crawl's identification right now is really bad because it's almost entirely at the point of "everything is identified", so mostly the player is just forced to press extra buttons for no real reason. You get few of the potential benefits of having identification exist, with most of the drawbacks.

If making the player use unidentified things is good, then crawl should reduce the amount of identification available pretty significantly, since then it would actually happen. Instead it sort of matters for like 3 floors sometimes, and the main function of making things unidentified seems to be to reduce by 1 the number of e.g. scroll of teleportation the player might find (since you are somewhat likely to read-ID teleportation even if you then use your ID scrolls on scrolls). If you actually want to reduce the number of scrolls of teleportation a player finds by 1, it's better to just, you know, generate one less scroll in the first place. It's also better since players don't feel like they wasted an item when it just never got generated in the first place (see item destruction).

If, on the other hand, having the player know which resources she has available is desirable, which is the case for like 90% of a win, crawl should just do that. If you like, you can keep "identification" around as it currently works on wands, which is not identification at all but rather as a "scroll of enhancement" (but perhaps that should be merged with ?ew and ?ea and ?recharging, which helps also since crawl keeps increasing the number of inventory items the player wants to carry, which is its own problem).

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From a player standpoint I much prefer the everything-is-identified approach, so perhaps I shouldn't even be making this post (I'd prefer the status quo to crawl moving in the direction of less ID, even if that is better from a design standpoint, and really crawl is so close to everything-is-identified already that as a player it's not much of a change if crawl goes all the way).

Also as I said above, note that wand "identification" is not actually identification in my opinion: you already know what that wand does, and you have a good idea of how many charges it has (especially for the higher-charge wands). In fact an un"identified" wand works a lot like a sack of spiders or the like, which you cannot "identify" anyway.

I like tabstorms idea of the orb if identification. ID actually has significance until about lair:8, which is where it really stops mattering.