dynast wrote:Azarkon wrote:I think everyone can agree that strictly unavoidable deaths, even with perfect play, are bad, because they are a waste of time, and you learn nothing from them.
Nope. The moment you know beforehand that you gonna win a game you have no purpose playing it.
Winning alone isn't everything. Plenty of people have never won and still enjoy playing. Isn't knowing that you're
not going to win basically the same as knowing you will? Why do these players play? There are also players good enough that they will almost always win on their first or second try; why do they play? Obviously they enjoy
playing the game, which is a much more lasting and fulfulling attitude to have. If you only care about winning, you're going to be either very frustrated or very bored. If random unavoidable losses are enjoyable to you, go play a slot machine or something. A game that is about tactics, strategy, skill and knowledge should not have random unavoidable deaths, even if that means some people can win almost every time. Because again, winning isn't everything, or even the main thing:
what happens matters.
Back to the main topic. I think that shafts should not be in the game as they currently are. The reason is not to do with random deaths but because of the amount of tedium that playing around the possibility of a shafting induces. As a player who started in 0.10, took a few years off and started again with 0.18 and current trunk, I am impressed with how much less tedious the game is now, compared to back then. The removals and changes have added up to an experience where playing sufficiently well to win, if not exactly "good," is a much better experience than it was.
I think this is a good direction for the game to be going. There hasn't been an obvious reduction of depth, breadth or difficulty, and removing tedium is always excellent. That's why shafts should be removed or changed. Most of the time the tactics to deal with them are just generally good things to do anyway, like exploring on full hp/mp. But the tactic of walking only where you've already stepped is a level of tedium that seems inconsistent with the overall direction that the game has been going, which, IMO, has been a steady improvement. So to continue in the same direction they should be changed or removed.
Currently shafts act as a "situation generator:" they put you in a different tactical situation than ordinary exploration, which might require different play to resolve. This is in general a good thing: putting the player in difficult
and genuinely different situations is a core element of the game. Only the way in which it is accomplished is wrong. I'd argue that the game generates enough difficult situations already that shafts could be removed to no ill effect, but a change which keeps the core idea intact while not encouraging tedious play would be ideal.
Slightly off-topic, but related to removing tedium: One situation that comes up too often is "there's a lot of enemies that I can't deal with all at once." The standard tactic is to try to split them up and take them on one or two at a time. In my experience this situation gets repetitive and therefore tedious throughout a game. Maybe it's not that this comes up very often in a numerical sense, but that these situations take too long to resolve, so most of your time is spent resolving these situations rather than others. In any case, I'd like to see fewer cases of many-monsters and more of interesting tactical limitations that encourage you to play differently, rather than use the same tactic over and over. But overall the game is in a pretty good place and moving in a good direction, and it's been enjoyable to play these recent versions.