[proclick] new fork, hellcrawl


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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 13:34

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

amaril wrote:Why should a player have to fight every monster?


Good question. Let's assume there is just one (probably dangerous) monster left on the floor and it is in your view. What is better for the game - running away from it to the nearest stairs to earn XP or killing it to earn XP?
I believe the latter is better as you still have choice: award for risk (if you fight) or unpleasant actions (arrow-pressing) with no risk if you choose to run away. While with former approach we do the opposite things: we give risk without any award (fight for nothing and die) and we punish optimal play (run away) with unpleasant actions (arrow-pressing).
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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 13:42

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

If there is one monster left on the floor, the floor has been solved already. It doesn't matter whether you decide to fight or not. If the monster is so dangerous that only strong characters can kill it, and by killing it those characters become even stronger, you get the exact sort of power snowballing I wrote my rant in protest of.

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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 13:44

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I disagree with your premise that there should not be snowballing effect. I believe it is good to have large difference between combos so players with different skills can choose different combos.
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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 13:56

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Except that good players will choose to build a powerful character that overshoots the game's intended difficulty curve every time if their goal is winning. Such a game is a strategy test. (Obviously speedrunning changes this, but every game can be speedrun. Why not envision a game where winning is a sufficiently challenging goal?)

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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 13:59

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I don't see anything wrong in it. I play other games also, with explicit difficulty levels, and I often play them at not the hardest level even if I win at the hardest one too.
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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 14:01

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Fighting and killing every monster on the floor is "optimal." It is also bad gameplay. You never know what the last monster on the floor is, so you should always check for more monsters by reexploring as many times as you can get away with. I am sure I don't need to explain why this is bad.

It is obviously ridiculous to get the experience for entering a floor that you would for killing the monsters on the floor. Circus Animals is awful. It is not ridiculous, though, to get the same experience for exploring a floor that you would from killing all the monsters on it. This is the stairkill concept I was pushing a while back. The general idea is that after exploring a high percentage of the explorable floor space of a level, you can kill the remaining monsters on the level and get their items as well as all items you've spotted on the level by walking over downstairs. It's a good solution to the reexploring issue and it enables a stealth-exploration style that is not as goofy as the circus animals thing.

There would probably be issues with some vaults, but in point of fact there are a lot of problem vaults in hellcrawl, especially ones with neutral monster and environment kills that interact poorly with the full-xp-for-ally-kills commit.
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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 14:03

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

VeryAngryFelid wrote:I play other games also, with explicit difficulty levels

Yeah, but in most games difficulty level is a choice made before the game begins, not a player decision to gimp themselves/follow a self-imposed conduct for the sake of a more challenging experience.
Last edited by amaril on Thursday, 5th October 2017, 14:07, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 14:06

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Well, circus animals was not awful, there were 8 experience mods including classic crawl model.
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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 14:08

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Actually, it was awful. "You know what the problem with crawl is? The levels are too small."
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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 14:08

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

amaril wrote:Yeah, but in most games difficulty level is a choice made before the game begins, not a player decision to gimp themselves/follow a self-imposed conduct for the sake of a more challenging experience.


Exactly. So I do not see anything wrong if good players play 10 MiBe's in the row. I just want to still have NaWn much harder than MiBe and we need snowballing effect because good players don't die on D:1 as NaWn. It means difference between MiBe and NaWn is not large enough on D:1 and it should be larger on D:15.
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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 14:09

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:Actually, it was awful. "You know what the problem with crawl is? The levels are too small."


I haven't played hellcrawl with small levels yet so I cannot comment, sorry. I won zigsprint once and no longer play it so I suspect I won't like small levels of hellcrawl either.
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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 14:24

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Circus animals had larger than standard levels. It was ridiculous.
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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 14:27

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

VeryAngryFelid wrote:Exactly. So I do not see anything wrong if good players play 10 MiBe's in the row.
We are talking about different things. I like having a few 'combos' to choose from at the start of the game, and I am ok with them being of different difficulty levels. I take issue with 'character building' decisions made over the course of a game that result in drastically different power-levels by the end game.

So, to reference a previous part of the discussion: the character who decides not to kill the big mook left on the level is, next level, so underpowered they have to flee before they can kill the last two big mooks. They still don't die yet. Every level they have to kill fewer and fewer monsters, and consume more and more consumables in order to survive. From a tactical standpoint, they are playing well. Maybe they make it to zot 5 and face an impossible situation bar ludicrously lucky rng, because the end game was designed to be challenging for characters who killed every single mook. What decision led to their death in the impossible zot 5? Is it good game design to be punished for choices made a gillion turns ago?

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Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 14:42

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

amaril wrote:We are talking about different things. I like having a few 'combos' to choose from at the start of the game, and I am ok with them being of different difficulty levels. I take issue with 'character building' decisions made over the course of a game that result in drastically different power-levels by the end game.


Do you mean DECj of Vehumet with Fire Storm is much stronger than DECj of Trog? Or do you mean that melee characters are more powerful because it is hard to restore MP without stairs?

So, to reference a previous part of the discussion: the character who decides not to kill the big mook left on the level is, next level, so underpowered they have to flee before they can kill the last two big mooks. They still don't die yet. Every level they have to kill fewer and fewer monsters, and consume more and more consumables in order to survive. From a tactical standpoint, they are playing well. Maybe they make it to zot 5 and face an impossible situation bar ludicrously lucky rng, because the end game was designed to be challenging for characters who killed every single mook. What decision led to their death in the impossible zot 5? Is it good game design to be punished for choices made a gillion turns ago?


Well, when I have a character like this in standard crawl, I quickly realize that I am below difficulty curve and if it is not fun to play, I either quit or die while tabbing. Probably there are too many consumables on early floors if they allow to reach Z:5 with "weak on D:10" character.
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Post Saturday, 7th October 2017, 23:00

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Played it once, made DsEn to "Vaults5" (actually vaults3 I think) at xl18. Ctrl-Q yes after it told me the dungeon is becoming hostile after clearing half of vaults5. Probably never playing hellcrawl again. Get rid of this idiotic "hostile dungeon" BS, not everyone wants to speedrun and there is no reason for the game to just kill off a character that made it that far. Also would be nice if there were some XP pots at branch ends to make up for the reduced monsters. Reduced XP isn't the benefit of reducing the dungeon IMO, the point of reducing the dungeon is reducing playtime. I'm also not interested in trying hellcrawl "easy" mode because I resent the implication. Name it something else if you want a speedrun mode. "speedrun" and "normal" perhaps instead of "normal" and "easy."

Negatives aside, it was enjoyable up until that point what with killing less monsters. That much is good.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 01:57

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

You can literally just walk to the stairs and leave. I love how people go nuts if they're not allowed to spend 3000 turns clearing a floor. If it were 5000 people would come in saying "Well, I cleared about 80% of vaults:3, then the game said I had to move on. Quit right there, not fair to kill the player just because he doesn't want to speedrun!"

Anyway, I was going to post a "bro, do you even lift?" type comment here, but minus the complaining, I gotta give points for the honesty. You need to work at it to meet hellcrawl's standards of thickness, solidness, tightness, etc.

The point of reducing the number of floors has always been both to shorten the game and to fix the difficulty curve. You don't hear people saying a game of hellcrawl is over at lair or d:15. If you want more experience, casual mode gives it to you. I've played a lot of casual mode myself. Difficulty level is similar to dcss. It's good for testing things, playing quick games. No shame in playing casual now and then.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 02:12

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

What's the purpose of the rune then if you can just walk away from vaults3 without taking it? Anyway, it's bull because I already proved my character could handle vaults3, by clearing 50% of it. Then "hostile dungeon" prevents me from taking half the loot and XP that's rightfully mine.

I am the type of player who prefers to win most games he plays. I don't want to do stupid speedrun shit and lose/quit 99% of games.

All the "hostile dungeon" does is penalize weaker characters. Many times you will have a weaker character that is capable of meeting the threats on a floor, but slowly and with difficulty. "hostile dungeon" will then force that character to move on and lose out on XP and loot, making it even weaker on the next floor, and leading to a vicious cycle that kills off the character. There is no purpose to this unless you're playing like a speedrunner and don't care if your weak character dies. Yes, "casual" is insulting to a player like me, and I refuse to play a mode with such a name. I'm not a filthy casual.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 03:01

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Runes are purely for scoring. I would say that you only proved your character could handle half of vaults:3. Though I don't play for winrate in hellcrawl generally, I am pretty sure I would win more than half the time doing normal 2 or 3 rune branch games. Hellcrawl is harder than dcss, but it is still pretty easy if all you want is the W.

The purpose of the hostile dungeon is to prevent various kinds of scumming based on waiting and reexploring. I believe checking high turncount playstyles is a useful side effect. Ways of bringing the bottom tiers of the combo system up to a more reasonable standard are being looked at though. This "I lure and kite all the time because I play weak characters, like all good players do" stuff is pretty tiresome. The world speed record is under 18k for like 80 floors of dcss where you have to waste turns eating, identifying shit, recasting duration spells etc. and you're talking about how spending less than a projected 6k turns on one floor is "speedrunning."
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 03:06

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:The purpose of the hostile dungeon is to prevent various kinds of scumming based on waiting and reexploring.

Oh my god just disable random spawns, all monsters should spawn when the floor loads and none afterwards and then this type of scumming becomes thoroughly impossible. I've been saying that for years.

Also, nobody actually does this hypothetical scumming. If a player spends 6k turns on a floor, it's because the floor initially had tons of dangerous monsters and the character was underpowered. Nobody is sitting around waiting for more monsters to appear.

I believe checking high turncount playstyles is a useful side effect. Ways of bringing the bottom tiers of the combo system up to a more reasonable standard are being looked at though. This "I lure and kite all the time because I play weak characters, like all good players do" stuff is pretty tiresome. The world speed record is under 18k for like 80 floors of dcss where you have to waste turns eating, identifying shit, recasting duration spells etc. and you're talking about how spending less than a projected 6k turns on one floor is "speedrunning."

Sure 18k for 80 floors and how many hundreds of characters did that player let die, first? And also that player was playing an ideal super-strong character type, and got super lucky on loot. Speedrunning is completely different from playing to win, and cannot and should not be compared.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 03:28

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Random spawns were removed from hellcrawl over 6 months ago. The main offenders for scumming are: doomRL style scumming where you camp for wandering monsters and reexploration scumming where you reexplore levels to find wandering monsters you've missed on the first clear. Unfortunately, the clock is not strong enough to prevent the latter. I am pretty sure doomRL scumming is actually advantageous for some characters without the clock.

You were the one who invited a comparison with speedrunning. Finishing vaults:3 in less than 3000 turns is not speedrunning.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 03:53

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:Random spawns were removed from hellcrawl over 6 months ago. The main offenders for scumming are: doomRL style scumming where you camp for wandering monsters and reexploration scumming where you reexplore levels to find wandering monsters you've missed on the first clear. Unfortunately, the clock is not strong enough to prevent the latter. I am pretty sure doomRL scumming is actually advantageous for some characters without the clock.

Literally nobody does either of those things and if they did the amount of XP from monsters they didn't find, after fully exploring the first time, would be negligible.

You were the one who invited a comparison with speedrunning. Finishing vaults:3 in less than 3000 turns is not speedrunning.

Hellcrawl invited the comparison; with "hostile dungeon," hellcrawl is forcing people to play in a manner similar to speedrunning, though it's not actually speedrunning. It requires them to discard weaker characters, as a speedrunner would do.

At XL18 with a character not particularly strong, clearing vaults:3 is an unlikely and dangerous proposition regardless of the amount of time. Who are you anyway, that you didn't know this?
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 04:13

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Dude, I have cleared vaults:3 many times with characters of xl 18 and less. It is not that dangerous, it just takes a willingness to spend resources. 3000 turns on a level is not any kind of speedrunning. It is qualitatively different from speedrunning.

The standard for whether scumming needs to be dealt with is not whether people do it, it's whether people should do it. The fact is you should reexplore and you should doomRL scum. And that's bad.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 04:15

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

That ignores Berder's basic point: he was not, in fact, "scumming". So the timer is really not an "anti-scumming" timer. Rather it's a "you have to play this way" timer.

I seem to recall some crazy person saying that a hard breakpoint is bad because it doesn't take into account the different hardness of floors.

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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 04:30

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The kiting and luring tactics that people who talk about "weak characters" (like DsEn, apparently...) take pride in using to comical excess are scumming. Constantly resetting fights, kiting, and luring is scumming. Get it? I've done this vaults:3 with turn limits a number of times, usually without doing a lair branch. I've never been forced out with half the damn level uncleared. Something is going wrong there.

If the player is forced out of a rune level because they were not fast enough to get the rune, that is good. That is new gameplay that does not exist in dcss. The only possible objection is that some rune vaults do not allow the player to bail without getting into a position to get the rune, although "get the rune or die" is also a reasonable gameplay concept. How can you come this far with a game and get cold feet now? "Oh, it's not enough like dcss, where you can scum and do levels in whatever order you want so that you always win no matter how bad your tactics are."
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 05:05

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:The kiting and luring tactics that people who talk about "weak characters" (like DsEn, apparently...) take pride in using to comical excess are scumming. Constantly resetting fights, kiting, and luring is scumming.

Resetting fights, kiting, and luring are not scumming, they are part of a dcss player's skill when playing to survive and win.

Get it? I've done this vaults:3 with turn limits a number of times, usually without doing a lair branch. I've never been forced out with half the damn level uncleared. Something is going wrong there.

What is your account name? (Also, how do you query hellcrawl games on sequell?) I would be interested to learn your success rate with such tactics. From what you're telling me I think you are someone who splats a lot.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 05:05

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

bel wrote:I seem to recall some crazy person saying that a hard breakpoint is bad because it doesn't take into account the different hardness of floors.

I was not that crazy person but I agree with him/her. Timer should have nothing with entering a new floor, it should be gradually decreased by every bit of earned XP AND every explored tile. If player finds new tiles, he is not scummung. If player kills monsters, he is not scumming. Affect of exploration should be constant (we see 8 tiles far all game), effect of earned XP should probably depend on player XP so if you kill a jackal as XL:1 character, you get greater timer decrease than if you kill it as XL3 character. And ood monsters should not instantly be overpowerer, their danger should depend on high much you violated timer
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 05:14

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Berder wrote:
watertreatmentRL wrote:The kiting and luring tactics that people who talk about "weak characters" (like DsEn, apparently...) take pride in using to comical excess are scumming. Constantly resetting fights, kiting, and luring is scumming.

Resetting fights, kiting, and luring are not scumming, they are part of a dcss player's skill when playing to survive and win.

Get it? I've done this vaults:3 with turn limits a number of times, usually without doing a lair branch. I've never been forced out with half the damn level uncleared. Something is going wrong there.

What is your account name? (Also, how do you query hellcrawl games on sequell?) I would be interested to learn your success rate with such tactics. From what you're telling me I think you are someone who splats a lot.


DCSS is bad. That's what this is all about. A game where "hard" means you take more turns doing the same thing you normally do, but to a greater extent is bad.

I'm not 100% sure since I've taken it easy lately and some new highly active players have shown up, but I'm pretty sure I've won more games of hellcrawl than anyone else. (I don't say this to brag, there've been times that I played too much.) You are someone who has a 100% splat rate in hellcrawl. Your history in this game is literally complaining about how hard a middling combo was. I think you need to establish a positive line of credit in this game before you start making claims about other players.

@sandman25: I tend to agree that there are possibilities for improvement in how the clock works, but the complaint that someone got kicked off a level after 3000 turns clearing only half of it does not militate in that direction imo. I think exploration is a good thing to tie anti-scumming mechanics to.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 05:16

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Berder wrote:(Also, how do you query hellcrawl games on sequell?

Sequell doesn't query hellcrawl games IIRC.

If the game is on a public server, you can get the morgue file, however.
Last edited by bel on Sunday, 8th October 2017, 05:21, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 05:19

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I believe the disagreement is caused by different relation to situations when you get to low HP/ zero MP while killing monsters and then retreat to heal. It is extremely far from speedrunning yet it is valid crawl strategy and should not be punished. What's the point of training fighting/spellcasting otherwise???
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 05:30

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

DCSS is bad. That's what this is all about. A game where "hard" means you take more turns doing the same thing you normally do, but to a greater extent is bad.

The solution to that is not to just say "Okay your xl18 character that you spent 3 hours on is too weak, give up, kill it off and start over!" A design goal should be to prevent unavoidable deaths.

In my opinion, the solution should be to just have fewer monsters in later levels, so that it's not tedious to kite and lure and take every fight with caution. Make every monster count. But don't make it more inherently difficult - let the character still be as strong, just have fewer monsters or levels. (Also not talking about sprint because tactics and character builds in sprint are totally different from normal crawl and hellcrawl). This is what I wanted to see in hellcrawl and to some extent I was gratified to see it, until "hostile dungeon" came into play.

I'm not 100% sure since I've taken it easy lately and some new highly active players have shown up, but I'm pretty sure I've won more games of hellcrawl than anyone else. (I don't say this to brag, there've been times that I played too much.) You are someone who has a 100% splat rate in hellcrawl. Your history in this game is literally complaining about how hard a middling combo was. I think you need to establish a positive line of credit in this game before you start making claims about other players.

My record in normal dcss speaks for itself. Also wouldn't really call that game a "splat" since nothing killed me. Why are you afraid to share your account name?
Last edited by Berder on Sunday, 8th October 2017, 05:38, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 05:37

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Weird mix of tough guy and "this game is too hard" going on here. I am not going to get in a record comparing pissing match with someone who can't win a game of hellcrawl.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 05:47

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I think I can take that as confirmation of my assumption. Also, I'm not saying the game is too "hard" exactly. If the game kills off your character unavoidably, that's not real difficulty. It's only real difficulty if your own skill could have prevented the death.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 05:53

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

lol, you literally could have walked to the stairs and left the level. Win a game or two and come back to regale me with your theories on hellcrawl.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 06:13

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

You might not have noticed, but the reason I am posting is that I am *not* going to play more games of hellcrawl, because of this defect. But I might like to, if the defect was fixed.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 07:02

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:you literally could have walked to the stairs and left the level.


By the way this "try to get N runes on N levels before a separate timer on each of N levels expires" is a bad design IMHO, it's like playing a series of games instead of just one.
I really hate timed portals in normal crawl and here we have the same mechanics on each level. I have never even tried to play hellcrawl with new mechanic for the same reason I will never play Gozag again: it punishes autoexploring, makes it uncomfortable to play (for instance, it becomes too far from optimal to press 5 when you are wounded unless you edit RC file to stop resting at 80-90% HP, the number depends on combo you are playing, current XL and which branch you are currently in), encourages hoarding or just makes you feel bad when you find a storm bow and you cannot even pick up arrows from previous floors.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 07:38

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:lol, you literally could have walked to the stairs and left the level. Win a game or two and come back to regale me with your theories on hellcrawl.


See, this looks like a textbook example of how games or mods get designed purely for the most extreme, hardcore players. Rather than accept that somebody might not agree with you and be driven off by a difficulty-increasing feature, you just get angry and use winning at the mod as a proxy for how valuable those opinions are.

I see this all the time; Xcom mods that make the game even longer and more punishing and more reliant on pod system abuse, NWN mods that make things super reliant on broken combos, etc, and if this is how Hellcrawl is defended I foresee it happening to Hellcrawl as well; nobody cares enough to offer feedback except the people who want it more hardcore and drive people off.

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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 08:11

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Oh please. Berder is a well-known crawl personality, not some poor newbie being driven off. He came here to whine and posture. He's never going to like a version of crawl where the odds of losing a given game are more than 1%. "What? The tactics that make me 'good' at dcss make me lose at hellcrawl? WTF???"

@sandman25: Tell it to the designers of super mario bros. I have no idea what you're talking about re: gozag, but there has been not a single report of a player running into the timer because they used autoexplore. 3000 turns is enough to clear a normal, non-vaults:3 level and reexplore it six or seven times with autoexplore.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 08:26

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

...well-known crawl personality...

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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 08:30

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:3000 turns is enough to clear a normal, non-vaults:3 level and reexplore it six or seven times with autoexplore.

watertreatmentRL, you can't keep your characters alive unless they get lucky on gear, so then you always play with lucky gear and strong combos. This skews your perception of the later levels because you're always playing them with crazy gear. I see a lot of weak players who play like this: if they make it to the late game, they always have some ridiculous items and stats. Your false sense of confidence is built on the skulls of combos you couldn't keep alive.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 08:30

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

"I find the standard difficulty too hard, but playing the easier difficulty offends my sensibilities to I'd prefer to go on the forums and complain"

What is so hard to understand about the notion that if you pick a difficult combo at character creation, you might not be able to take your sweet time and clear everything?

Git gud, scrublords.


Also, dynamic opt-in reward timers would sidestep this whole player psychology issue, appropriate balance of those rewards* could presumably find a way to make it suboptimal to sit and DoomRL camp, which frankly isn't nearly as big a problem in Crawl as some players make it out to be to begin with. (Certainly not one that demands an immediate hard solution.)

*(Increased retroactive floor-XP / adjusted upcoming floor modifiers for taking > in time is an approach I think has potential, as does nuking rest-to-heal and replacing it with explore-to-heal; although that starts down the path of requisite magic system reform. Also this would bring the game closer to speedrun-Crawl and Hellmonk has expressed a disinclination to take Hellcrawl down that path, but never say never!)

milski wrote:Xcom mods that make the game even longer and more punishing

If you are talking shit about Long War I think your opinion has invalidated itself

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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 08:32

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:Oh please. Berder is a well-known crawl personality, not some poor newbie being driven off. He came here to whine and posture. He's never going to like a version of crawl where the odds of losing a given game are more than 1%. "What? The tactics that make me 'good' at dcss make me lose at hellcrawl? WTF???"

@sandman25: Tell it to the designers of super mario bros. I have no idea what you're talking about re: gozag, but there has been not a single report of a player running into the timer because they used autoexplore. 3000 turns is enough to clear a normal, non-vaults:3 level and reexplore it six or seven times with autoexplore.


Yeah, but what about the people who are driven off by this sort of posturing? I know my interest in Hellcrawl dropped off a cliff when I swung into the thread and saw arguments for making a harsher timer when people were already having difficulty clearing gnollfort.

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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 08:39

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I'd like to know who is the guy on cbro that recommended I play hellcrawl and was complaining about nobody playing it. Was that a Hellmonk alias?
streaks: 5 fifteen rune octopodes. 15 diverse chars. 13 random chars. 24 NaWn^gozag.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 08:45

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

@milski: I'm not going to be taken hostage by people threatening not to play hellcrawl, lol.

@implojin: I think there's a hardcore of resistance to changing one's approach to the game from people used to playing a safe style of dcss that is fundamentally irreconcilable. As I understand Sandman25, a player who in my opinion is the poster child for luring and kiting heavy tactics (no offense, bro), he would not accept any mechanic that places a check on turncount. He's against timed portals! I don't think it's a player psychology issue, these are reasonably sophisticated players who are not going to be placated by slight of hand.

I think there's definitely space for a more sophisticated take on anti-scumming, but I think it's crucial for anti-scumming measures to actually do what they're supposed to do in a recognizable way. When people put together these weird roundabout solutions like OOD spawns or XP debt or whatever, I think it's hard to avoid just not doing anything, like OOD spawns, or putting the player into a death spiral. We don't want death spirals, we want clean deaths. The current hellcrawl clock gives players a clean death. People underrate this imo.

edit: Also, exploration-based regeneration would be great. I bet hellmonk would be interested in a patch on that.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 08:54

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

yet it is valid crawl strategy
I feel it's worth pointing out that just because a tactic is good vanilla strategy doesn't mean it has to be good hellcrawl strategy. Luring and kiting every fight back to ssafe territory is great vanilla strategy, but it's not always a great idea in hellcrawl.

I think there's a real psychological aversion to players "not finishing" levels. Also, the current mechanic feels "gamey". There is no in-universe explanation for it, which makes the mechanic feel arbitrary and even unfair. Yes, the mechanic encourages shorter, riskier games, both of which are good things. But perhaps this mechanic can be reworked so it's more palatable.

Ideas:
* The dungeon is collapsing from D:1 to the bottom. If you spend too long on a floor the collapse catches up with you and you start suffering (very weak) shatter damage each turn, which opens up the level.
* A few thousand turns after starting, an invincible warden/rival adventurer spawns at the starting location and begins to stalk you. It takes the warden a few thousand turns to use a staircase down, so you can accumulate a large buffer of turns for hard levels if you clear other levels quicker
* The dungeon is radioactive. The downwards staircases are actually partially working decontamination units. Every turn in the dungeon slightly contaminates/drains you, while the decontamination units reduce your contamination/drain level.

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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 09:01

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

We don't want death spirals, we want clean deaths. The current hellcrawl clock gives players a clean death. People underrate this imo.

A character in a death spiral for you in normal crawl would likely be a victory for us. What is a clean death for you in hellcrawl from "hostile dungeon" is a death spiral for us. Where your character would quickly die to the "hostile dungeon" mechanic, giving you your clean death, our characters would likely survive many levels of everything getting gradually worse under that mechanic, giving us a death spiral.
streaks: 5 fifteen rune octopodes. 15 diverse chars. 13 random chars. 24 NaWn^gozag.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 09:04

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:Tell it to the designers of super mario bros. I have no idea what you're talking about re: gozag, but there has been not a single report of a player running into the timer because they used autoexplore. 3000 turns is enough to clear a normal, non-vaults:3 level and reexplore it six or seven times with autoexplore.


Now I have no idea what you are talking about, it's weird to assume that a player who plays crawl is familiar with "super mario bros".
I am not sure why there are no reports, I have just checked my last DCSS games and found it took me 2.6k turns to get silver rune with XL 27 DrCj and I can assure you I was not scumming.

  Code:
 89884 | Vaults:5 | Entered Level 5 of the Vaults
 92491 | Vaults:5 | Got a silver rune of Zot


Another example, same character
  Code:
67902 | Elf:3    | Entered Level 3 of the Elven Halls
70782 | Elf:3    | Identified a +0 pair of boots of running (You found it on level 3 of the Elven Halls)


There are players who dislike speedrunning, I don't see why a normal way of playing has been removed or is given XP boost ("casual" mode).
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 09:15

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:As I understand Sandman25, a player who in my opinion is the poster child for luring and kiting heavy tactics (no offense, bro), he would not accept any mechanic that places a check on turncount. He's against timed portals!


Lol, what?
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20303&p=274002, for example.

Timed portals are stupid because it is easy to miss one due to plain luck and then I feel disappointed, doubly so if I burned some consumables to get inside and then it has a player ghost so I leave immediately. By the way did I tell you that I have been playing crawl 3 years believing that "distant" means "really close"? :)
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 09:20

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

chequers wrote:
yet it is valid crawl strategy
I feel it's worth pointing out that just because a tactic is good vanilla strategy doesn't mean it has to be good hellcrawl strategy. Luring and kiting every fight back to ssafe territory is great vanilla strategy, but it's not always a great idea in hellcrawl.


Please don't take it as general argument, I was specifically referencing healing to full HP/MP before exploration. Do you believe it should not be a valid strategy? Then I can just repeat my question - what's the point of training HP/MP if you are rarely at full value? Would you like all species have Deep Dwarfs-like or exploration-based regeneration by the way?
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 09:44

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

"Being taken hostage by people threatening not to play hellcrawl" isn't exactly my point. In the end, argue for whatever you want and try to get the hellcrawl you like the most; just don't be surprised if nobody wants to play it if you want an extremely specific experience and to shit on people who want some hellcrawl reforms, but not your ideal hardcore dream mod.

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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 10:06

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Dude, these guys are complaining that they can't spend 3000 turns on a level. Yeah, that's a normal game experience every crawl player holds close to their heart. "Some of the best times I've ever had playing crawl happened after the 8000th turn on vaults:5..."
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