PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles


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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 05:29

PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Relevant reddit post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/ ... urself_to/

Looks like someone finally sacrificed himself on the altar of the dev's hubris and manually marked (with exclusions) and walked on known non-trapped tiles in order to score a largely trap-free win.

Now that someone has sacrificed 18 hours of their life to prove that the current system is BROKEN and encourages ridiculous tedium, perhaps we can finally do something about traps.

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 05:59

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

He did not spam Spammals to check every non-checked tile? Boy, am i disappointed.

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 06:09

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

I now feel better about putting Eustachio out of his misery. Imagine his suffering. Constantly stopping at every tile to spam summons and check for traps. Little wonder he went mad and attacks the player on sight for your crime of not playing optimally.

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 06:37

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

What an idiot

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 07:09

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Made an account just for that huh? Stick around, we need someone with your level of dedication.
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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 07:16

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

What's amazing is that they were actually shafted once despite all that effort. I'm pretty sure I'm shafted on the average 0 times in a typical game...
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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 07:21

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

e: nevermind

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 08:09

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

lethediver wrote:Made an account just for that huh? Stick around, we need someone with your level of dedication.


I have an account for bug submission. Never realised it worked on the forum as well.

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 12:52

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Lord Haart wrote:He did not spam Spammals to check every non-checked tile? Boy, am i disappointed.


This is a bad idea because of Zot traps.
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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 16:46

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

ultraviolent4 wrote:Put another way, the disincentive to having to exclude so many tiles is that you have to exclude so many tiles. As chequers said after he spectated my game: "this is the best argument against optimal play I've ever seen".

This sounds like another quote.
The DevTeam has arranged an automatic and savage punishment for pudding farming. It's called pudding farming.

I thought it was against Crawl's design goals to have systems that reward/punish the player for being too lazy to sit through mind-numbing tedium.

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 18:28

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Ultraviolent4 wrote:What an idiot

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 20:05

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
Lord Haart wrote:He did not spam Spammals to check every non-checked tile? Boy, am i disappointed.


This is a bad idea because of Zot traps.

These don't matter without strong monsters around, unlike shaft or tele. Then again, when zot traps start appearing, all traps are mostly harmless for some time already.

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 20:10

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

stickyfingers wrote:These don't matter without strong monsters around, unlike shaft or tele. Then again, when zot traps start appearing, all traps are mostly harmless for some time already.


My experience is different.
My last character who picked up the orb was banished to Abyss 5 during orb run by Zot trap.
Also I remember a game where I abandoned last Lair floor after getting a Hell Sentinel from Zot trap.
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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 21:09

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Call it madness. Call it a disgrace.

Whatever it is, it arises logically and inevitably, given the current implementation of traps in DCSS, when the will to ascend has grown too strong.

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Tips and Tricks

+ If you develop a consistent movement pattern for exploration, corners and other common dungeon features it will make exclusion placing quicker and make travel feel more natural.
+ Use guaranteed trap-free tiles as much as possible. These include shops, stairs, altars, portal entrances, etc.
+ While it can be difficult to see the exact movements of fast enemies such as adders, you can usually infer the path they took if you think a little about it.
+ Don't try to move too quickly or play too sloppily or you will invariably move off the carpet and risk trapping yourself
+ Use . if you are throwing or using a ranged weapon so that the ammunition falls on a safe tile.
+ Don't move towards enemies at all over untested terrain - let them come to you and reveal any traps themselves.
+ Monsters that are chasing you won't care at all about your exclusions. If you're retreating to a stair or doorway, you will need to consider whether it's better to walk on unsafe tiles or let the monster(s) take free swings at you. Letting a yak hit you twice might be better than being shafted or teleported at 50% HP.
+ Once they are no longer threatening, monsters such as bats and unseen horrors make very good minesweepers. You can wait while they test the area around you.
+ Monsters with repositioning abilities are uniquely dangerous. Against elephants and the like, you should position in a way that means any tramples will be onto safe tiles.
+ If you end up in a dire situation where a shaft or teleport trap would be better than what you're presently facing, you should walk on untested tiles as this will increase the chance of escape.

Further Thoughts

+ I frequently found myself joining up paths purely because it was aesthetically pleasing or because I was too lazy to walk around the long way. Ideally, this shouldn't be done as it was exposing my character to greater risk.
+ Sometimes 4 or 5 untested tiles would need to be traversed to reveal 1 or 2 tiles in a corner. I'm not sure at what exact point the danger of exploration becomes worth the potential reward of finding a good item in a corner.

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 21:29

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

I like how this character fell through a shaft trap anyway despite all the effort. Looking through my past morgues, I typically fall through 0-1 shafts a game. Maybe with a higher sample size we would see more such games that never fell through a shaft trap when playing "optimally".

ydeve wrote:
ultraviolent4 wrote:Put another way, the disincentive to having to exclude so many tiles is that you have to exclude so many tiles. As chequers said after he spectated my game: "this is the best argument against optimal play I've ever seen".

This sounds like another quote.
The DevTeam has arranged an automatic and savage punishment for pudding farming. It's called pudding farming.

I thought it was against Crawl's design goals to have systems that reward/punish the player for being too lazy to sit through mind-numbing tedium.


It usually is, but a nonzero number of developers are ideologically attached to traps and consider the end result of having them interesting enough to be worth keeping, which makes the trap system actually good, despite everyone knowing it's bad according to the design philosophy. You can't fix every bad system in crawl. Since it seems you will still hit a shaft trap or two whether or not you engage in hypothetical optimal play, you may as well just not bother. Of course it would be better to just invent pseudo-Hell effects for the rest of the game as a punishment for taking too long, or trigger traps when you enter LoS, or whatever, but the winrate effects of hypothetical optimal floor tile choice vs. just hitting o seem to be negligible, so it's not that big a deal. It's still deeply triggering and problematic when I fall through a shaft as o takes me through a previously explored area though.
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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 21:39

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

tabstorm wrote:It's still deeply triggering and problematic when I fall through a shaft as o takes me through a previously explored area though.


To my mind, this is the bigger issue. When pure bad luck hurts your character in a way that you could have avoided with tedious game play, in a game with a design philosophy that takes a stand against "grindy and tedious" game play — that is pretty annoying!

The hypothetical "optimal player" is a useful thought experiment for identifying these sorts of problems. That hardly anyone should or would play in exactly the manner of this hypothetical player is beside the point. (cf. frictionless surfaces and idealized particles in physics problems.)

Admittedly, some of the problems that are identified via this process are not easy to solve, but traps certainly would be.

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 21:44

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

For what it's worth, immediately after seeing ultraviolent's posting on reddit (again, many thanks for this), I wrote an email to the public crawl-ref-discuss list. I don't feel like regurgitating all of that over here, but rest assured, the matter is being taken seriously. I don't think immediate action is necessary, but ultraviolent's effort will not have been in vain.

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 21:52

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
stickyfingers wrote:These don't matter without strong monsters around, unlike shaft or tele. Then again, when zot traps start appearing, all traps are mostly harmless for some time already.


My experience is different.

Notice how I said "mostly". Freak accidents can happen.

My last character who picked up the orb was banished to Abyss 5 during orb run by Zot trap.

By that time it shouldn't be too dangerous. Abyss has no orb run spawns, and it's not like you have to conserve resources.
I remember a game when I was banished by first hit of a chaos spawn on the orb run while worshipping Chei. Still, nothing happened, outside of a few hundred wasted turns.

Also I remember a game where I abandoned last Lair floor after getting a Hell Sentinel from Zot trap.

And I had a very similar experience, except with a brimstone fiend. It's not like you direly need the items or exp from Lair:$ though.

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Post Wednesday, 28th September 2016, 23:24

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

dpeg wrote:For what it's worth, immediately after seeing ultraviolent's posting on reddit (again, many thanks for this), I wrote an email to the public crawl-ref-discuss list. I don't feel like regurgitating all of that over here, but rest assured, the matter is being taken seriously. I don't think immediate action is necessary, but ultraviolent's effort will not have been in vain.


If you say it like that, it sounds really serious, I mean, it sounds like if you wanted to affirm the power of the Petrograd Soviet on the Provisional Government or something of the like.

Not that I don't appreciate it, BTW, you devs are very professional in handling the game and the community.
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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 05:14

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

dpeg wrote:For what it's worth, immediately after seeing ultraviolent's posting on reddit (again, many thanks for this), I wrote an email to the public crawl-ref-discuss list. I don't feel like regurgitating all of that over here, but rest assured, the matter is being taken seriously. I don't think immediate action is necessary, but ultraviolent's effort will not have been in vain.


What i imagine the response from the other devs will be:

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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 07:49

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

So my question is, do we have any evidence that this improves your chances of winning, and if so, is the margin remotely significant?

I mean, I usually think of traps as "that thing that might interrupt my buisness-as-usual plans and cause me to think (often only slightly) differently about how to proceed, perhaps in some cases forcing consumable use" not "that thing that randomly kills me unavoidably out of the blue"

I know it happens, but seems almost ludicrously rare.
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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 11:29

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

I don't think that this sort of approach has any significant impact on win rate, but I do think that the theoretically possible and tedious gameability of the system is bad, even if purely psychologically.

If I had more time, I'd try implementing los traps in trunk and also try the doom clock trap/food replacement system in a branch.

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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 16:41

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

First the goalpost was "does anyone actually do this", now it's "does it actually improve your chance of winning". When we show you proof of that, you'll just move it again. Why so eager to justify this awful feature?

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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 17:11

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

duvessa wrote:First the goalpost was "does anyone actually do this", now it's "does it actually improve your chance of winning". When we show you proof of that, you'll just move it again. Why so eager to justify this awful feature?

It's a roguelike tradition! How can you have a roguelike without floor traps?!
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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 19:03

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

"very easily"

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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 19:37

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

duvessa wrote:First the goalpost was "does anyone actually do this", now it's "does it actually improve your chance of winning". When we show you proof of that, you'll just move it again. Why so eager to justify this awful feature?

I have never moved my goalposts, my goalposts for tedium-based removal are: 1. It must be possible, 2. It must require little to no risk 3. It must provide some measurable benefit.

If it is tedious but provides no measurable benefits, then it is not a problem (for example, walking around in a circle with nothing in sight just to waste turns)

Now that doesn't mean that traps ate or are not justified as a feature that brings benefit to the game, only that until someone has any evidence that this behavior provides any benefit, this behavior *by itself* doesn't merit the removal of traps.

Lasty, i will have to disagree with you about perceived, but not real benefits being cause to use tedium to justify removal, it is quite possible for someone to (wrongly) perceive any number of things as beneficial when they are not, (If someone thinks that not training any weapon skill on a conjurer is beneficial, should we force them to? )

Now as to the larger question outside of this specific example of whether traps merit being in the game. I have an opinion that they do, but an argument could probably be made that they do not.

Also, here is a counter suggestion: when a tile passes *out* of your LOS, any undiscivered trap that might have been on it is destroyed.
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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 19:46

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Siegurt wrote:I have never moved my goalposts, my goalposts for tedium-based removal are: 1. It must be possible, 2. It must require little to no risk 3. It must provide some measurable benefit.


I believe duvessa meant that some guys are doubting the obvious instead of doing something about trap problem. It is pretty obvious to anyone experienced that current traps answer "yes" to all 3 questions.

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Answer for those non-experienced: when you are low on mana as primarily caster or health as any character, you need to restore it before fighting more monsters so you must run away from unexplored territory, this way you minimize chance to meet new monsters and carefully stepping on already stepped tiles guarantees you will not be shafted/teleported/abyssed/summoning hostile monsters
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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 19:46

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Siegurt wrote:Also, here is a counter suggestion: when a tile passes *out* of your LOS, any undiscivered trap that might have been on it is destroyed.


So when you go onto a new level you hit <> then move forward-back-forward-forward-back and so on? This is not an improvement over the current situation...
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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 19:52

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Does this work in tomb?
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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 19:55

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

I think we should clarify what we are trying to achieve with traps before we can reform them in some way.
1) Hell like effect when you are teleported/shafted etc. randomly?
2) Encourage you to stay and fight on current tile without moving to corridor, around a corner or rushing forward?
3) Encourage you to stay on the tile where fight ended to restore HP/MP so monsters who heard the noise can come and see you?
4) Prevent picking up items from dead-end area to save turns while you are wounded?
5) Having a free teleport/shaft to escape a monster?
Something else?
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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 20:58

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

VeryAngryFelid (above): Different things: I think that Zot traps are intended as a sort of area denial, whereas teleportation and shaft traps can get you into a dangerous situation right away (and teleportation traps are not good at this; they'd be better if they worked like the mutation).

I really like shafts, and I think the encounters they create are definitely worth the few "unavoidable" deaths we here about from time to time. However, you can have the effect without actual tile-bound traps, for example through a monster.

Shard1697 (below): Yes!
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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 21:00

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Zot traps could also always be revealed and still function as "area denial".

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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 21:54

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

dpeg wrote:VeryAngryFelid (above): Different things: I think that Zot traps are intended as a sort of area denial, whereas teleportation and shaft traps can get you into a dangerous situation right away (and teleportation traps are not good at this; they'd be better if they worked like the mutation).

I really like shafts, and I think the encounters they create are definitely worth the few "unavoidable" deaths we here about from time to time. However, you can have the effect without actual tile-bound traps, for example through a monster.

Shard1697 (below): Yes!


So it looks like the goal is just first item from my list and we should stop traps affecting other points. in other words, we can easily replace traps with hell-like effects so movement is not relevant. Some hell-like effects create Zot traps (and it can be created on previously stepped tile or even a shop or downstairs), other hell-like effects might teleport or shaft player. You might even connect it to turns spent on the current floors if you are cruel:

  Code:
You spent too much time on this floor. A mystical force teleports you. Deep Troll comes into view. x3
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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 22:19

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

In the c-r-d discussion, I mentioned Hell-like effects. This sounds horrible at first, but I think it can work.

First, the name "hell-like trap effects" is slightly misleading, because they should kick in about as often as current traps (which is much less often than real Hell effects occur).
Second, if we find a reasonable way to declare a level *safe* (and trigger no trap effects on safe levels), then we can avoid auto-travel inconvenience (e.g. shafted when walking from Elf to Depths) -- this is something than can already happen now. For safe, I could only come up with stuff like this: 50% of the level discovered.

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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 23:38

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

I disagree with the assertion that shaft traps create dangerous situations. According to Sequell I've been shafted 386 times, and I cannot think of one occasion where it felt remotely dangerous. The only effect they've had is to make me miss portal vaults occasionally.
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Post Thursday, 29th September 2016, 23:46

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

duvessa wrote:I disagree with the assertion that shaft traps create dangerous situations. According to Sequell I've been shafted 386 times, and I cannot think of one occasion where it felt remotely dangerous. The only effect they've had is to make me miss portal vaults occasionally.

I guess the solution then is to make shafts drop you further down, say 5 - 10 levels. Maybe then some dangerous situations would arise.
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Post Friday, 30th September 2016, 04:10

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Siegurt wrote:So my question is, do we have any evidence that this improves your chances of winning, and if so, is the margin remotely significant?

I doubt it improves overall winrate much but for someone like zxc, the concern isn't winrate but dying at all and losing a 30+ game streak.

The most amusing thing to me out of all this is that zxc seems to think this exclusion placing is a totally reasonable way to play. He's going to implement it for the first 5 floors at least.

I would have no problem with the current traps if they were always revealed when you were next to them. That way you could make a decision on how to proceed and you would still have the tactical options of trying to trap monsters etc.

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Post Friday, 30th September 2016, 06:44

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Ultraviolent4 wrote:The most amusing thing to me out of all this is that zxc seems to think this exclusion placing is a totally reasonable way to play. He's going to implement it for the first 5 floors at least.

Heh, I totally get that. The natural way to play roguelikes for me was for a long time 'take a step, search about 5 times for traps, take another step' and so on...
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Post Friday, 30th September 2016, 17:17

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Ultraviolent4 wrote:
Siegurt wrote:So my question is, do we have any evidence that this improves your chances of winning, and if so, is the margin remotely significant?

I doubt it improves overall winrate much but for someone like zxc, the concern isn't winrate but dying at all and losing a 30+ game streak.

The most amusing thing to me out of all this is that zxc seems to think this exclusion placing is a totally reasonable way to play. He's going to implement it for the first 5 floors at least.

I would have no problem with the current traps if they were always revealed when you were next to them. That way you could make a decision on how to proceed and you would still have the tactical options of trying to trap monsters etc.


No, I didn't say that I would do that. I said it's probably a good idea since those are the only floors where traps can outright kill you despite best play. But I would rather just wait for trap reform.

Sprucery wrote:
Ultraviolent4 wrote:The most amusing thing to me out of all this is that zxc seems to think this exclusion placing is a totally reasonable way to play. He's going to implement it for the first 5 floors at least.

Heh, I totally get that. The natural way to play roguelikes for me was for a long time 'take a step, search about 5 times for traps, take another step' and so on...


This is a problem that plagues Brogue.
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Post Friday, 30th September 2016, 22:06

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

zxc23 wrote:This is a problem that plagues Brogue.


In Brogue, trap-searching introduces a fascinating strategic dilemma: How many turns are you willing to spend searching for traps to avoid a guaranteed death, considering the possibility of hitting 's' too many times and dying of starvation another half-hour into the game? It's strategic decisions like these that makes it so well-designed.
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Post Friday, 30th September 2016, 22:13

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

tabstorm: I agree, although I also think that Brogue should do something to ease the pain of step-search-step-search-etc. I'm sure there are ways to go about it... Of course, this can also be seen the other way around: if you have a tight clock, you get away with lots of otherwise very dubious design moves.

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Post Friday, 30th September 2016, 22:19

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

dpeg wrote:tabstorm: I agree
...tabstorm was being sarcastic...

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Post Friday, 30th September 2016, 23:23

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Rule #4 for survival on these mean dcss tavern streets: assume non sarcastic posts are the exception rather than the rule

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Post Saturday, 1st October 2016, 02:03

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

maybe dpeg was being sarcastic and I've been japed!

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 21:21

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

I like the idea of a "Doom-Clock" trap.

You step on it and it triggers, but nothing immediately happens. Instead, you get a short timer. You have until that timer runs out to get to the next level (can't appear on branch ends) or it does something bad. Summons some OOD mobs, banishes you to the Abyss, teleports you to an unexplored area of the dungeon... something fairly not-insignificant.

Either way, interesting share.
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Post Monday, 14th November 2016, 17:26

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

I just lost a potential streak to not marking stepped-on tiles. Discuss.

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Post Monday, 14th November 2016, 19:26

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

sounds like you need to get better at committing every safe tile to memory

(really can we just remove hidden traps already please. replace hungry ghosts with shafted ghosts that kill themselves to forcibly shaft you if that needs to stay)

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Post Monday, 14th November 2016, 19:47

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

Mfw thread got bumped and I realize devs still did nothing about the problem

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Post Monday, 14th November 2016, 21:41

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

duvessa wrote:I just lost a potential streak to not marking stepped-on tiles. Discuss.

lol git gud scrublord :P

What were the actual circumstances? Was your death at least interesting?
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Post Monday, 14th November 2016, 22:38

Re: PSA: Some guy just spent 18 hours avoiding trap tiles

I can understand people doing whatever it takes to reserve their streaks. Hell, I've tried to do that but never went to the extremes.

Streaking is something you do for yourself. Maybe it shows up in your statistics but as far as I know, its just not the thing this community cares about.

Nevertheless, even a two-game win streak will almost certainly make the player feel good about his qualities as a roguelike-player. It should.

Going extremes not-dying on early levels will make you win more often. Does it make you have more fun? THAT is debatable. I played that way, while trying streaking.
I can assure, it was more of a burden than it was fun. But.. I still played only for the win. I do not experiment on anything. I just want to win every fucking game. Back when I was sober, it was easy as hell.
.
So, for zxc and other streakers, keep on doing what you do if you do feel like it. There are plenty of challenges in the DCSS and streaking a big time is not one of the easiest one
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