Pakellas Situation

[CypherZel]

Is this god going to be re added to the game?

[Psieye]

Last I was aware, there was interest to reform him as a god of rods but not sure what devs will do with that interest. God of wands is probably too broken to bring back.

[CypherZel]

Last I was aware, there was interest to reform him as a god of rods but not sure what devs will do with that interest. God of wands is probably too broken to bring back.

I thought the reason for his removal was due to bugs . It would be interesting for there to be a god of rods since they are one of the least used methods of attacking in the game

[lethediver]

Thats sad. Rods are the best late game weapon imo. Powerful upgradeable ranged/aoe attacks with no MP cost that recharge automatically between fights? Sign me up.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Pakellas removal was the worst change in all versions I played. Now we have no-hunger fork (hellcrawl) so spriggan with rods is a fun option but sadly you would need to join Xom for a reliable rod.

[Sprucery]

Now we have no-hunger fork (hellcrawl) so spriggan with rods is a fun option but sadly you would need to join Xom for a reliable rod.

Is Xom different in hellcrawl? I don't think you can count on getting a rod from Xom (or at least getting it early enough to base your game on it, my HaCK got a rod on V:3).

[VeryAngryFelid]

Is Xom different in hellcrawl? I don't think you can count on getting a rod from Xom (or at least getting it early enough to base your game on it, my HaCK got a rod on V:3).

Xom is the same as far as I know. I remember reading some players press 5 repeatedly in portals like Ice Cave with Mummy waiting for Xom to give some rods, does it no longer work?

[Nebukadnezar]

15 rune-win with XOM: no rods as gift in 115k turns.
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Nebuk ... 193707.txt

[duvessa]

pakellas wasn't removed because of bugs, pakellas was removed because every aspect of its premise and design were terrible
i really really hope it stays removed and doesn't come back

[VeryAngryFelid]

pakellas wasn't removed because of bugs, pakellas was removed because every aspect of its premise and design were terrible
i really really hope it stays removed and doesn't come back

I wonder what people mean when they are talking about terrible design. For me terrible design is when I don't have fun playing because I have to spend my time on something as stupid as running away from popcorn or manual exploration. According to that "definition" DD is terrible design, Vp is terrible design, Gozag is terrible design. Pakellas is not, it was the most fun god for me probably. Only Okawaru can be more fun due to excitement from unknown gifts.

[Rast]

Gozag is terrible design.

Wait, why?

Gozag is all over the place but he's definitely fun. At least for me.

[Shard1697]

pakellas gave you effectively unlimited wand charges and a guaranteed rod

presumably, wand charges are supposed to be a limited resource, and rods are supposed to be rare. all the fun I've had with pak was because I had a rod, but "god of gives you a rod" is quite lame(and it's more cool for runs with early rods to be rare, imo), and the recharging was basically just busted and stupid

[VeryAngryFelid]

Wait, why?

Gozag is all over the place but he's definitely fun. At least for me.

It forces me to use manual exploration to save food, discourages resting to restore HP/MP, basically makes game less fun. It is fun with Mu/Sp though, but with Mu I treat it as cheating because of potions.

[VeryAngryFelid]

pakellas gave you effectively unlimited wand charges and a guaranteed rod

presumably, wand charges are supposed to be a limited resource, and rods are supposed to be rare. all the fun I've had with pak was because I had a rod, but "god of gives you a rod" is quite lame(and it's more cool for runs with early rods to be rare, imo), and the recharging was basically just busted and stupid

Potions of berserk are supposed to be rare too and Pak at least does not change the way wands work unlike Trog with its protection from paralysis.
Antimagic weapons are supposed to be rare too (or vampiric for Makhleb).
Late game I ignored recharging and early game it is interesting choice during fight to either spend a turn on recharging or waste some potential MP.

[Rast]

It forces me to use manual exploration to save food, discourages resting to restore HP/MP

What the hell. There is tons of food in almost ever game. In 21 gozag wins (not counting the ghoul and troll games) I have purchased maybe two food shops, and bought food from existing shops a few more times.

Also it is not the worst thing in the world if you have to buy one food shop and empty it out.

Also food is dumb and will be removed in .21.

Also Gozag is the most generous god out there in terms of piety decay (he doesn't have any), so he encourages autoexplore and and constant resting.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Maybe I was unlucky but both Tr and Op were losing permanent food too fast and I abandoned Gozag with former and tabbed a hydra with latter. I know I am very slow player (especially turn-wise) but I don't enjoy playing in a different way. I tried Gozag in hellcrawl (no hunger in the fork) but still it wasn't fun and Gozag is too weak in that fork unless you are playing OP combo.
I did win a Mummy of Gozag long time ago but I have no plans to try the god in normal crawl again.

[dowan]

Gozag's piety decay is hunger. If you use autoexplore and have to buy an extra food shop, then you've gone and made autoexplore quite sub-optimal.
I just played a FO of gozag, very high speed killing, no real waiting around, and i had to empty out 2 food shops because very little food generated.

Anyway, Pakellas should be brought back, because every aspect of its premise and design are fantastic. I really really hope it comes back and doesn't stay removed.

Pakellas wasn't easier or simpler to play than trog, there was just a popular meme bandwagon against him.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I think some bad thing of Pakellas was that it encouraged you to pay attention to MP to optimize recharging. I believe it is possible to find a workaround for it, for example, create a toggle on/off and assign a wand to automatically recharge it when the toggle is on.

[Rast]

TR^Gozag is different of course, it's understood that you will have to buy food shops. Op^Gozag I have not tried yet, but my understanding is that you don't get offered jewellery shops more often, so that could be frustrating. Besides which, Op is very squishy. Try one of the other 25 races, preferably an average one like human.

Dowan: Gozag's piety is gold. Hunger is only an issue if you are going nuts with the rods or spellcasting, and even then you can spend a little piety on a food shop.

Pakellas design issues have been discussed in many other threads and some good/obvious fix suggestions were made, but devs removed him instead.

[WingedEspeon]

TR^Gozag is different of course, it's understood that you will have to buy food shops. Op^Gozag I have not tried yet, but my understanding is that you don't get offered jewellery shops more often, so that could be frustrating. Besides which, Op is very squishy. Try one of the other 25 races, preferably an average one like human.

Dowan: Gozag's piety is gold. Hunger is only an issue if you are going nuts with the rods or spellcasting, and even then you can spend a little piety on a food shop.

We all know Gozag's piety is gold. the piety decay being hunger is that you will only have to spend gold (piety) on food shops if you wait around a bunch.

[dowan]

In my experience, that's not the case.

But that's not terribly relevant to Pakellas anyway.

[duvessa]

No, your fix suggestions weren't good. They were bad. If they were good they would have been implemented.

This is where people usually link that stupid-ass "developers shouldn't read their forums" article so I'll cut that off right now. Player feedback is actually really really good. It's really really good at identifying problems. The worst thing you can possibly do as an artist is ignore criticism because the problems people identify are almost always real.
But, people with no game design education or experience whatsoever have a tendency to think they're the best game designers in the world, so they also tend to offer solutions, and because they have no game design education experience whatsoever their solutions are usually worse than the problem, and very rarely better than the problem, and vanishingly rarely good enough to actually be, well, good solutions. It's not worth developers' time to take the years to teach game design to these people, especially the absurdly egotistical ones like Rast who assert they're better designers than the entire devteam (and that's assuming the developer has the knowledge to teach that in the first place which they usually don't). But it's still worth it to look at the problems they identify. This is what that article should have said, except the author recognized it'd be more popular and controversial if it took the side of a self-aggrandizing developer against self-aggrandizing players, despite the fact that developers can very much make the choice to not be self-aggrandizing, as demonstrated by gammafunk, claws/r-i, MarvinPA, and many other members of DCSS's devteam.

This is what happens in almost every field, incidentally. It's why "if you don't like it, why don't you draw/write/make something better?" is a ridiculous thing to say: identifying problems is much easier than fixing them and is valuable nonetheless, because as the saying goes, a million eyes are better than two.

Keep criticizing and identifying problems. It's the best thing you can do for the creative process. And it's fine to keep offering solutions too, once in a blue moon someone will actually stumble on a good one. But for your own sake, whether you're a player or developer, don't make the mistake of thinking any more than 0.001% of the ideas you think of are good. Exception: if you have education in game design you can get away with thinking 0.002% of your ideas are good. For most people here, if you look at your own feature ideas with a tenth of the criticality you do at the devteam's, you should find this pretty easy.

[CanOfWorms]

good post, but who are you replying to in the first line?

[duvessa]

Rast

[Sprucery]

So why is Rast "absurdly egotistical"? And who others are?

[Reptisaurus]

Now we have no-hunger fork (hellcrawl) so spriggan with rods is a fun option but sadly you would need to join Xom for a reliable rod.

Is Xom different in hellcrawl? I don't think you can count on getting a rod from Xom (or at least getting it early enough to base your game on it, my HaCK got a rod on V:3).

My current MfCK is on depths 2, no rod.

(Great early mutations, a + 7 war axe on D:3, and an early phial of floods. I am not complaining! Just no rods. )

[VeryAngryFelid]

I see, I was just very lucky with rods in my MuCK game:

  Code:

 50652 | Snake:3  | XOM: god gift: knobbly smoking rod {god gift}
105260 | Zot:2    | XOM: god gift: short jewelled rod {god gift}

[CypherZel]

You must be joking if you think you need education in game design to design a good game. Game design courses are relatively new and also have very low credibility. Most Top game designers did not have an education in game design and the reason they are in their position is either do to their artistic capabilities or their management skills. You do not even need experience to make a good game. Please stop speaking like the people who play crawl are all retarded and are unable to come up with good ideas because that is just untrue.

[Rast]

So why is Rast "absurdly egotistical"? And who others are?

I never asserted that I was a better designer than the entire devteam, not sure where that came from. There were suggestions from many people, including IIRC some devs, for improving Pakellas, or at least making him less clunky. But even those improvements might not have been worth doing compared to just removing the god entirely, and that's what the dev team decided.

[duvessa]

You must be joking if you think you need education in game design to design a good game.

I never claimed to think that???? or any of the other strawelf positions in your post

"good/obvious fix suggestions were made, but devs removed him instead" sounded like an assertion of personal superiority over the devteam to me, I guess I must have wildly misinterpreted it.

[Lacuenta]

Incidently, Gozag is the new Pakkellas, just built a few gadget shops to get everything you wand.

[Rast]

Duvessa, I see what you're saying. No, that's not what I meant at all.

If I can offer an analogy, say you have a beat up old car. You take it to the mechanic, who lists off all the things that can be done to fix it. You think about it for a bit and then decide to just recycle the car instead. RIPakellas

[duvessa]

ok then, apologies

[pubby]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-5kvqZBRVg

[CypherZel]

The way you spoke was as if players seldom have the ability to come up with good ideas, which is a ridiculous idea to propose for a open source game

[savageorange]

The way you spoke was as if players seldom have the ability to come up with good ideas, which is a ridiculous idea to propose for a open source game

Good ideas to try out? Maybe.

Good ideas to keep? Generally no

(As duvessa also points out, coming up with good ideas for anything, not just game design, is actually amazingly hard; most ideas for anything are bad [==something to do a postmortem on but not sensible to keep]. Hence his comment to the effect that 'if you are a developer, most of your ideas are still bad. Slightly more of them may be good but that's all'. )

[scorpionwarrior]

You must be joking if you think you need education in game design to design a good game. Game design courses are relatively new and also have very low credibility. Most Top game designers did not have an education in game design and the reason they are in their position is either do to their artistic capabilities or their management skills. You do not even need experience to make a good game. Please stop speaking like the people who play crawl are all retarded and are unable to come up with good ideas because that is just untrue.

Formal education is not the only kind of education, I see nowhere where duvessa implied people should be taking vocational classes lol

[VeryAngryFelid]

Formal education is not the only kind of education, I see nowhere where duvessa implied people should be taking vocational classes lol

Do you mean experience/expertise? That has nothing to do with education then.

[dowan]

No, your fix suggestions weren't good. They were bad. If they were good they would have been implemented.It's not worth developers' time to take the years to teach game design to these people, especially the absurdly egotistical ones like you who assert they're better designers than the entire devteam

Please devs, please just paste this quote every time duvessa makes a suggestion you don't plan to implement.

I mean, jesus, talk about extremely egotistical people... This coming from someone who states every single opinion as fact, and doesn't deign to explain his reasoning...

I love this too. Egotistical people think they know more than the devs, then this :

(and that's assuming the developer has the knowledge to teach that in the first place which they usually don't).

You just implied that in fact you are a better designer than at least some of the devteam...

Please get over yourself. And CanOfWorms should be embarrassed to have called that a "good post"

[CypherZel]

]

It's not worth developers' time to take the YEARS to teach game design to THESE PEOPLE,

10 out of 10 would kek again

[CanOfWorms]

I love this too. Egotistical people think they know more than the devs, then this :

(and that's assuming the developer has the knowledge to teach that in the first place which they usually don't).

You just implied that in fact you are a better designer than at least some of the devteam...

no, that's just a fact about people in general. the art of teaching is actually really hard and only someone that's never tried teaching would think otherwise. it's especially relevant for game design because learning game design works best by on hands experience (i.e. actually designing, making and playtesting a game) instead of theory

And CanOfWorms should be embarrassed to have called that a "good post"

sorry, duvessa's post is actually good, because it's correct and informative, even if it's not couched in terms to make other people feel better.

[dowan]

It's correct and informative that rast is an absurdly egotistical person? Oh OK...

And duvessa said "They don't have the knowledge to teach that". That clearly being game design. The inference being that the devs don't have the required knowledge of game design, they're just as ignorant as the factually absurdly egomaniacal Rast.

There's good points in it, plenty of nonsense, and there's also naked insults. In a post that quite effectively derailed the conversation.

But, at least you didn't lock the thread after your response.

[CanOfWorms]

It's correct and informative that rast is an absurdly egotistical person? Oh OK...

if you're incapable of separating (what is a digressive) opinion from fact that's your problem, not duvessa's problem. the focus of duvessa's post is on point: it's easy to notice problems, but people are not capable of judging their own expertise on a subject (cf Dunning-Kruger)

And duvessa said "They don't have the knowledge to teach that". That clearly being game design.

uh no, it's the knowledge of teaching. like i said, only people who have never taught think that teaching isn't hard. just because someone is a genius doctor or physicist or chemist doesn't mean they know how to effectively pass on that knowledge to others

[Shard1697]

The way you spoke was as if players seldom have the ability to come up with good ideas, which is a ridiculous idea to propose for a open source game

It's absolutely true, though. Why does it being open source make that ridiculous? Open source games still don't take the majority of ideas offered, even if work is done on them.

[Rast]

It's correct and informative that rast is an absurdly egotistical person?

Yeah.

[pubby]

What's wrong with being Episcopalian?

[ZipZipskins]

godrod the rod god

[MainiacJoe]

If we just had an item that enhanced evokables, that's everything good about Pakellas right there.

[archaeo]

But, at least you didn't lock the thread after your response.

CanOfWorms isn't a mod, but I am, and I only just saw this thread. Which I've now locked.

In the future, folks, please report posts you think break the rules, including the rules about harassing or insulting other posters.