Player ghost aggravation

[stoneychips]

Maybe I can explain my thought process...

I don't play formicids, and I'm not quite sure what "shaftrobin" is. Other than that, while I'm not sure I quite agree with quite all of it, I do appreciate the relatively clear post.

But ghosts as implented right now can not be balanced. Hellmonk said it better than I could so here you go

Player ghosts are essentially impossible to balance. They have a massive range of possible attributes based on the character that died (including HP, AC, EV, spell selection, melee damage, melee weapon brand, movement speed, resistances) and zero checks to ensure that they are a reasonable spawn for their dungeon level. Hence you can get a D:6 ghost with glaciate or you can get a spriggan ghost with no spells and 1 melee damage. A lot of player attributes don't translate well to monsters, which exacerbates this problem. I am thinking specifically of AC, where 20 is endgame material for monsters and achievable in lair for players. Then there's stuff like monster dazzling spray, which works different from the player spell for no apparent reason other than to make conjurer and wizard ghosts abnormally dangerous. Other monsters can get pushed around or have stats tweaked to make them an appropriate threat; ghosts cannot because of the way they're generated.

It might be talking past each other. But I thought adjusting the code would generally mean changing the way things are implemented, to some extent. Or does "essentially impossible" just mean 'more work than most people would ever wish to consider'? It seems to me checks being added would be one obvious response, but I don't know how many pieces of code would need to be changed to get that done. I don't code as well as not knowing the material, so I don't know what the time involved or limits are.

It wasn't that long ago that draconian ghosts started with the neative energy bolts... I know that is just one factor, but it's one that has generated a pretty heavy (maybe disproportionate?) amount of talk about ghosts, too. So it's a little odd to me that this was changed and it did have a pretty dramatic impact on the discussion about ghosts -- and yet now I'm hearing that ghosts cannot be fundamentally changed in a way that will matter to many people. I don't know, perhaps limiting AC or EV by dungeon level requires a hundred more entries in the code to be toggled somehow? Slightly confused.

On the other hand, I also feel like it's been an exceedingly rare issue for me. I tend to place ghosts in the occasional challenge/annoyance/random death box rather than a "systemic unfairness" box -- perhaps just because I don't have enough people trolling me with them or because I'm not concerned about the scoreboard, I don't know. I just don't feel like all this stuff that "can" happen bothers me that often courtesy of ghost, as compared to courtesy of other monsters and layouts which are even more "normal" and frequent. Dead is dead, regardless of whether it was by Glaciate or speedy spriggan versus my clunky one-wrong-move ogre (natural or ghostly on the spriggan doesn't really matter) or "Oops, that gnoll did have a blue weapon dammit and damn D:1 randomness, it was venom too before I got any curing totally unfair"...

And I'm not pushing very hard for most of the "normal" randomness to go away anyway, frustrating though it sometimes can be. I don't feel like the range of awful situations in the regular game is maybe entirely fair (or I haven't decided what "reasonably fair" is consistently enough perhaps?), but I don't equate non-random or non-player-influenced even with fair necessarily. I would probably go for a bit more player-influenced, actually, if only there were some level limits and randomness (not super predictable player control) in the mix then there could be more of it and the world would feel that much more interactive and on-theme to me.

I totally wouldn't object to others being able to turn ghosts off, though. If it were up to me and fully assuming, scoring might be sorted out (not that I care about score very much -- but it would probably come up next).

[ezero]

Ezero. You argue pro ghosts in a very wierd way: you agree that they are bad but then you keep mentioning other monsters who share their problems. I don't know what to tell you except what I have already told: presence of other problems is not an excuse.

You dont see me arguing about the removal of uniques, because i dont see a problem with them. And i dont see you arguing about the removal of uniques even though i just showed you they share the same problems with something that you want to remove because of those problems.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I would be happy if Sigmund/Grinder/Ijyb were removed but I am not arguing about it because I know it's hopeless.

[ezero]

Once again, why current ghosts are different from uniques and cannot be fixed:
1) They can be unkillable.

FOR YOU! Never in my life i had a player ghost i couldnt kill, many more times had i got a ood spawn or just a unique that i had to completely and constantly avoid. d:2 sigmund with a scythe of distortion? thats fair, maybe i should engage it and see if he also quaffes haste or zaps my ass with acid. alright, made it to d:3, why there is a two headed ogre climbing down the stairs i just came from?

2) They cannot use stairs so you can try killing them multiple times with zero chance to die (just retreat upstairs) until you are lucky with damage rolls.

ANY enemy with a polearm, undead or with a blink spell falls into that exact same problem. And you know whats funny? thats actually better than having a enemy latch on to you so you have to: go upstairs, find a pillar, do a 0.5 aut gear swap, go to the next stairs, rince and repeat.

3) They can have crazy resistances. All ghosts are immune to draining, venom. I remember ghosts with rF++, rC++ and rElec. It's ok for late game monsters but even then crystal guardians have just 42-86 HP.

Yeah, imagine playing a fire elementalist and a efreet shows up. Resistance to everything or resistance against your only type of damage is the same thing. And as you said, everything later starts having resistance against a lot of things, so you just go with physical damage or conjurations, which is great against ghosts since they dont have shield and you can just orb their asses. You sound like someone who didnt figure this game out yet to act like having a shit ton of resistances is in any way relevant. It just means that player ghost is gonna be a challenge to anyone and not that ghost is now unkillable.

[VeryAngryFelid]

ezero
You continue to talk in "But there are other problems also" direction, sorry, I am not interested.

[ezero]

ezero
You continue to talk in "But there are other problems also" direction, sorry, I am not interested.

Yeah, its because i dont share those problems, whatever you say about ghosts is something regular with everything else regarding this game. You just sound traumatized.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Yeah, its because i dont share those problems

Yes, I got what you mean. If a problem is shared, it is not a problem and it is not shared

ANY enemy with a polearm, undead or with a blink spell falls into that exact same problem

i just showed you they share the same problems

[watertreatmentRL]

FOR YOU! Never in my life i had a player ghost i couldnt kill,

Do you ever get killed by player ghosts? You don't get to say this if you do.

[NhorianScum]

FOR YOU! Never in my life i had a player ghost i couldnt kill, many more times had i got a ood spawn or just a unique that i had to completely and constantly avoid. d:2 sigmund with a scythe of distortion? thats fair, maybe i should engage it and see if he also quaffes haste or zaps my ass with acid. alright, made it to d:3, why there is a two headed ogre climbing down the stairs i just came from

You do realize the inherent flaw in argueing extreme examples of rng bullshit as direct comparisons to something that will happen on a game-to-game basis right?

[ezero]

Yeah, its because i dont share those problems

Yes, I got what you mean. If a problem is shared, it is not a problem and it is not shared

ANY enemy with a polearm, undead or with a blink spell falls into that exact same problem

i just showed you they share the same problems

They are a problem by YOUR view. Again, you will not see me complaining about these or expecting them to be removed anytime soon.

Do you ever get killed by player ghosts? You don't get to say this if you do.

I genuinely do not remember the last time i died to a player ghost. i will look that up and answer you later. But sure, what i meant to say was that i never left a ghost alive because i couldnt kill it. Now ood enemies or entire vaults, that actually happens.

You do realize the inherent flaw in argueing extreme examples of rng bullshit as direct comparisons to something that will happen on a game-to-game basis right?

game-to-game basis? yeah, go look up "i dont love it when" thread, its filled with ghost stories.

[mibe420]

Maybe I can explain my thought process...

I don't play formicids, and I'm not quite sure what "shaftrobin" is. Other than that, while I'm not sure I quite agree with quite all of it, I do appreciate the relatively clear post.

Shaftrobin is a Robin account. So the password is Robin and anyone can login. Because of the way ghosts work(if a ghost spawns, and the player dies on another level, the ghost is gone forever)using a formicid's self shaft ability let's you quickly generate lots of levels, and then quickly die on d:15. This process is extremely fast and easy with rcfile options and macros.

So if you do this a few times before descending to a new level in dungeon, it is likely or even almost guaranteed, depending on how many times you 'play' shaftrobin, that you will have already spawned all the ghosts for that level. Its even more likely if you play on less popular servers, versions, or a few hours after peak activity.

My understanding of 'essentially impossible' to balance means that unlike most monsters where the stats are intentionally selected and tweaked if they turn out to be problematic, a ghosts stats are semi-randomly generated. Maybe implementing some checks or caps on certain stats would mean its not impossible to balance. I also have no idea how hard it would be to code such things.

And yeah, there are ways to fix my issue with ghosts besides removing them. Any mechanic that decoupled things like playing during peak hours, or at the same time as a bot, or how many ghosts have spawned in other games; from how ghosts spawn in your game. I have no idea how this could be achieved, but it would pretty much solve my problem.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Ezero.
If you see nothing wrong in getting one-shot by fire storm on d:5, I can do nothing.
Wise people learn from mistakes of others, smart people learn from their own mistakes, fools never learn.

[ezero]

If you see nothing wrong in getting one-shot by fire storm on d:5

I cant because:
a) it never happened to me.
b) it will never happen to me.
c)im still hoping it happens to me.

Crawl's instability is why i still have a collection of screenshots(like the ones i posted before) for a very long time, having stupidly rare things happens to you is something i crave for. Otherwise i would just play some other roguelike that doesnt have such random factors.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Why are you so sure it will never happen to you? Did you miss post by duvessa with link to such death?

[Siegurt]

I think one low-hanging fruit and easily definable thing for reforming ghosts would be to eliminate the chance of generating ghosts while on the orb run. This at least ensures that if a character died on a level while not *intentionally* griefing, they are probably at least vaguely correlated to the level they died on in terms of experience with the level they are on.

(I know this only solves one of the host of complaints about ghosts, but it's an incremental change, easy to implement, and is probably better than doing nothing.)

[bel]

So i apologise for dragging this on, you can lock this thread for all i care, i have nothing else to add.

I think you should follow your own advice.

[Siegurt]

Another slightly-less-low-hanging fruit: Retain at least one ghost file per level (So don't delete the last one for a given level when it's used), slightly lower the chance to generate a ghost to compensate.

To get an even higher level hanging fruit along the same lines: if there is no ghost file for a given level, but one would otherwise generate, make a ghost up (I like the idea of making a ghost of the current player if there is no ghost file..)

[Doesnt]

My ideal state would be if the only ghosts the game ever generated were fabricated, since then you keep the flavor of the dungeon having claimed previous victims and the mechanical consequences of undead uniques, but without the walking brick walls and metagame nonsense and potential for griefing.

[VeryAngryFelid]

(I like the idea of making a ghost of the current player if there is no ghost file..)

Mara on every floor? Current situation does not encourage player to wield a bread ration when entering new level...

[Hellmonk]

Since people keep quoting my post I guess I should clarify. When I said that ghosts are essentially impossible to balance I meant that you have to fundamentally change how they work in order to balance them. If you wanted to make ghost stats more palatable, you would at minimum:

• cap the level of the ghost (in both directions) on every floor. Level 1 ghosts on D:15 and level 27 ghosts on D:5 are both stupid.
• Not generate slow ghosts
• Not generate fast ghosts in the early game unless their other stats meet some defined parameters for reasonability (probably easier to not generate them at all)
• Not make dazzling spray a monster spell that works differently from the player spell for no fucking reason at all
• Sanity check ghost HP, AC, EV, and damage, else scale them in some fashion. If you were going to sanity check you would need to develop criteria for these stats for every floor.
• Sanity check ghost spell lists. This would include things like "don't put fireball ghosts on D:3" as well as "don't put blink only ghosts on U:5"

But if you're going to put in all of these parameters to make sure that you don't generate harmless ghosts or bullshit ghosts or annoying stat wad ghosts, I think you either end up throwing out a ton of morgues or generating a monster that doesn't resemble the dead player. At that point you might as well just make them a generic monster or a non-monster dungeon feature, which would also solve a couple of the other ghost problems.

What I don't "get" from the pro-ghost side is what the gameplay benefit of ghosts is supposed to be. The "novelty" of getting oneshot by D:5 firestorm is, as has been repeatedly established, exceedingly rare. So that can't be it even if you think it's somehow good gameplay (it's not). Tactically interesting ghost encounters are uncommon and would be better replicated by predictable monsters; if the tactical challenge of D:6 CeFe ghosts is good for the game then it would be better to make a regular monster with similar attributes and spawn it at that depth. Player interaction can be accomplished in mechanically cleaner ways by decoupling it from monster stat generation so it's not like you'd never get to laugh at penismuncher or dickylongcocking's latest death.

[ezero]

Why are you so sure it will never happen to you? Did you miss post by duvessa with link to such death?

Because im not that dumb of a player to get stuck in d:1-5 with an entire inventory of unindentified gear, including 6 scrolls of identify to EVENTUALLY find a firestorming ghost.

So i apologise for dragging this on, you can lock this thread for all i care, i have nothing else to add.

I think you should follow your own advice.

I apologise for dragging this on, but i wont stop dragging this on if you keep sending me this type of reply, because you are asking for it.

[ezero]

Do you ever get killed by player ghosts? You don't get to say this if you do.

I remembered, it was actually pretty recent, it was during the last tourney, i was playing sptm and feel down a shaft 3 floors into a GrEE ghost who one shot me with LRD.

[gameguard]

why not make a gravestone that tells you the lvl and combo of the ghost that will generate somewhere on the floor if you open it. I think this might be how its done in nethack.

This lets you interact with other players without making bs ghosts mandatory to fight.

[gameguard]

why not make a gravestone that tells you the lvl and combo of the ghost that will generate somewhere on the floor if you open it. I think this might be how its done in nethack.

This lets you interact with other players without making bs ghosts mandatory to fight.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Why are you so sure it will never happen to you? Did you miss post by duvessa with link to such death?

Because im not that dumb of a player to get stuck in d:1-5 with an entire inventory of unindentified gear, including 6 scrolls of identify to EVENTUALLY find a firestorming ghost.

I am not sure you have played DCSS if you think you will always have a scroll of blinking, a chance to read it or be able to use it.

[watertreatmentRL]

Man, this is a bad thread. NEVERTHELESS!!! :

I may have come off as too pro-ghost in this thread, when in reality I am 100% anti-ghost. Again I will risk coming off as pro-ghost, so let me be clear that the best thing course of action for ghosts is removal.

Making ghosts reasonable monsters (but not necessarily a good game feature) is actually extremely easy. The whole problem is an overly literal correspondence between dead character stats and player ghost monster stats. Player and monster stats are totally different things. What's a high monster AC value? 20 AC is a lot for a monster. What's a high monster hp value? 150 hp is a lot. High monster EV is like 15 or 20. What about those values for players? AC would be like 50, HP 300, EV 40. Those are all insane values, or at least very large, for monsters. So probably a good way to go is start by scaling 50 character AC to 20 ghost AC, 300 character hp to 150 ghost hp, 40 character EV to 20 ghost EV. Big nerf, but now ghosts are a lot more like normal monsters. Scale it linearly, who cares?

This isn't rocket science. Like just do it and see if it needs adjustment. A couple weeks of screwing around with these values in trunk and you come out on the other side with a vastly improved ghost situation. I think a lot of the inertia here is just devs thinking they have to talk this shit over carefully and get it right on the first try. Guys, the current situation is so fucked up you can't do worse.

The best thing you can do to avoid ghost trolling is not generate ghosts in portals. I've done my share of ghost trolling (never with bots, plz don't blackball me). The best way to do it is drop insane ghosts in sewers because they are sometimes totally inescapable if the player is in shallow water and teleport will often be an unsafe option or not save the player from further encounters with the ghost. The best ime is TrWz with meph and slow, amnesia magic dart, use cflame to kill yourself with brilliance active so that you needn't waste skill points on magic. Players are reluctant to bail on portals. This strat produces excellent KDRs with hilarious termTVs, often showing absolutely no hope of escaping death one or two turns into the encounter. TrWz's of this kind are also very fast and easy to generate because of Tr's insane early game.

The stuff people are talking about with orbrun deaths and LogicNinja ghosts would be good things to look at too.

[ezero]

Why are you so sure it will never happen to you? Did you miss post by duvessa with link to such death?

Because im not that dumb of a player to get stuck in d:1-5 with an entire inventory of unindentified gear, including 6 scrolls of identify to EVENTUALLY find a firestorming ghost.

I am not sure you have played DCSS if you think you will always have a scroll of blinking, a chance to read it or be able to use it.

You wanna keep playing dumb? My point is that i dont spend 100 games dying on d1-5 before making it to lair, my odds of finding a player ghost there are lower. Most of my ingame time is not spent there. By the time i finish a run, other players could have already played 500 games on these early floors. Whenever a firestorming ghost appears in the dungeon, my odds of being the chosen one are 0.2%, So i will get one when i have around 400 wins(assuming i lost 100 games in between). None of that is precise, but it should give you an idea.

[VeryAngryFelid]

None of that is precise, but it should give you an idea.

Yes, I got the idea: 0.2% means never in your math universe. Similar to simultaneous "I have never seen unkillable ghosts, they are not dangerous" and "I was killed by a ghost". I agree, we should stop talking to each other in this thread, we use different meaning for the same words.

[ezero]

Similar to simultaneous "I have never seen unkillable ghosts, they are not dangerous" and "I was killed by a ghost". I agree, we should stop talking to each other in this thread, we use different meaning for the same words.

Whenever i say something you interpret it to fit your bias because you treat this as a debate instead of a conversation. I died to a player ghost after falling down a shaft from d:4 to d:7 where a centaur(who was wandering about, amongst other creatures) could have killed me, i still would have to make all my way back to d:4, where i was already having trouble exploring because of my poor combo choice's start. But yeah, blame it on the ghost if that makes you win the argument.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Now I am interested to see how you justify 0.2% chance as a guarantee to never meet a firestorming ghost...
Let me guess. Events with less than 1% chance never happen, right?

[ezero]

Now I am interested to see how you justify 0.2% chance as a guarantee to never meet a firestorming ghost...
Let me guess. Events with less than 1% chance never happen, right?

I will probably stop playing crawl before i get the chance to meet that ghost.

[Shard1697]

Now I am interested to see how you justify 0.2% chance as a guarantee to never meet a firestorming ghost...
Let me guess. Events with less than 1% chance never happen, right?

I will probably stop playing crawl before i get the chance to meet that ghost.

I have, personally, by myself, played 3,518 games of crawl(not counting offline games). A 0.2% chance of something happening per game is extremely likely to happen over a sample size this large. Amusingly, it has almost exactly a 0.2% chance of not happening(0.246390445%, to be specific). And I can assure you I am not the only person who has played this many games of crawl.

Also, it doesn't even matter, because in the context of game design in a game that many people play(not just you!), and where other people like me who play a lot exist, someone is going to get unlucky and get the rare unfortunate event(early firestorm ghost) early on in their crawl career. Just because that unlucky person doesn't happen to be YOU doesn't mean that shitty, unfair situation shouldn't be removed. It could be a vanishingly small percentage chance of happening, but there is still no reason to let early firestorm ghosts stay in the game. especially when there are many other really shitty things about ghosts which have already been covered in this thread

[Alphaeus]

To comment, one of the big things I see on the server I use (Berotato) is that people run hordes of MiBe/MiFi builds. If I'm playing something tanky, I do fine, but on anything that's not pure melee I end up against something fast with ridiculous damage output for that level, and too hard to kill. So I have to stair dance. Then I go down two floors, and there's another one. Get's annoying after awhile, especially for softer builds or ghosts with resistances.

[Blomdor]

I concur, as a regular on the same server. MiBe/Fi ghosts are so common there as to seem ubiquitous at times. They're almost all the same; high ac, high damage, high hp, sometimes with a dangerous brand. I have seen ghosts as early as in Lair and Orc with fairly ludicrous stats in those areas and capable of as much as 49 damage per hit. You often know you can't fight the stupid thing, and it also can't do anything to you if you just stay the hell away from it, so it just amounts to a big annoyance forcing lots of stair dancing and generally making the game more tedious than it ought to be. And there are often a few of them in a single game if you get that far. It gets very old, very fast.

[ezero]

I have, personally, by myself,

I have looked up your player page on previous occasions already. You still havent won more games than i have won nagas, and cant even win 4 games in a row with all that experience. But its ok, you are probably just a casual player who doesnt care about rng and is just having a good time. But you want me to believe that, while splatting the way most of the players like you do, somehow you actually care about what kills you? This whole "ghosts are bad for new players" argument sounds a lot like extreme parenting from a complete stranger. This firestorming ghost example sounds like a vegan showing a scenario of someone who had terminal cancer and saying "this is what meat will do to you!"

Trying to pretend you are advocating for someone when in truth you are just trying to feed your ego is why i dont care to be banned from this forum. The very idea of trying to advocate for others on a game as subjetive as this is very egocentric. I came back here to see if the game had any new interesting features but got caught on another discussion about something i enjoyed being removed after reading about something else that i also enjoyed having already been removed. This is probably gonna get deleted along with this account so...

[Alphaeus]

I concur, as a regular on the same server. MiBe/Fi ghosts are so common there as to seem ubiquitous at times. They're almost all the same; high ac, high damage, high hp, sometimes with a dangerous brand. I have seen ghosts as early as in Lair and Orc with fairly ludicrous stats in those areas and capable of as much as 49 damage per hit. You often know you can't fight the stupid thing, and it also can't do anything to you if you just stay the hell away from it, so it just amounts to a big annoyance forcing lots of stair dancing and generally making the game more tedious than it ought to be. And there are often a few of them in a single game if you get that far. It gets very old, very fast.

**^Despite this thread having gone a bit run-away with posts bantering about single random OP incidents, THIS is the moral of the thread. Random grinding (or botting) or the same, highly lethal build over and over generates ridiculous numbers of ghosts that take an already powerful build and make it nearly unbeatable at the time you encounter them.

The biggest reason I dislike these ghosts is that if I'm in a large fight, I'm playing a balancing game to keep myself alive. If you toss in something capable of taking out 50-90% of my HP in one hit that also has TONS of intrinsics...that battle becomes death. So, I have to stair-dance. Every time I hop downstairs to pull up other monsters, I'm risking a smack from that lethal ghost.

Additionally, the ghosts keen. Now I've not checked my noise bar, but I do know that I almost never can start fighting a ghost without attracting other monsters, which makes that battle hell.

ADDITIONALLY, even if I CAN kill it, it forces me to usually down several consumables that would help me later.

I mean, I was a gargoyle in lair a few games back. Powerhouse melee build, but with only about 70 HP. I encountered a MiFi ghost that had impossible stats, so I dug through morgue for awhile. Apparently the player died in enchanted plate armor and had been wielding a +4 Vorpal Battleaxe. They were about the same lvl as me (XL 11), but had over double my HP.

I did manage to eventually kill it luring it into a herd of yak and then casting Meph Cloud to confuse them. Yaks helped soften it up, but I STILL had to use up a pair of Heal Wounds potions to get the job done.

Now, had I met this player ALIVE, I could probably have killed the living MiFi because of my stats and skills. But the problem here is that ghosts cut away most key benefits.

Evoke Invisibility? Nope, Ghosts can see you.

Hex them? They have above-average MR almost always.

Wands and Spells? Almost all of them have some resistances, and I've met several with essentially immunity to everything.

Melee? High AC, plus they have rather good EV as well.

Ranged? Possibly, but you'll take forever to kite them, and at most danger-levels you'll still struggle to combat their AC.


Overall, if I meet a ghost, I only fight it if I have at least 3 Heal Potions and a couple enhancing potions like Might and Haste. Otherwise these common ghosts screw you over.

Half of this problem is that you get players who use (possibly) the most accessible build in the game (MiBe/Fi is admittedly a powerful build that is relatively simple to play and easy to win) over....and over....and over. And Over. And did I say over?

Here's a thought -- Don't allow duplicates of ghost TYPES. Create a filter that doesn't allow the consecutive storing of the same race/class over and over again. Thus, if there is one Mi ghost, you won't get another for quite some time.
^^On second thought, nvm. Remove them all

[Shard1697]

I have, personally, by myself,

I have looked up your player page on previous occasions already. You still havent won more games than i have won nagas, and cant even win 4 games in a row with all that experience. But its ok, you are probably just a casual player who doesnt care about rng and is just having a good time. But you want me to believe that, while splatting the way most of the players like you do, somehow you actually care about what kills you?

I would certainly care about getting oneshot by a ghost with firestorm on d6, yes! I don't see what is hard to understand about this. Why do you want something like that to stay in the game? How is "it's rare" an excuse?

ps: I don't know why you're acting like you're trying to bring me down off my high horse when I have never said I am good at this game. Crawl is indeed my casual relaxation game. The point of my post was that not only do a lot of people play this game, but individual people play many games, so your example of a low probability, in context, is not a good enough reason to leave something like that in the game.

[Blobbo]

So, I have to stair-dance.

Agree, problem isn't the inherent difficulty of surviving ghosts, problem is that it's almost never a good idea to fight most of them and avoiding them is both trivial and time-consuming.

[stoneychips]

I went back and read Hellmonk's later post where changed/capped ghosts might somehow not "resemble" players enough, but I don't think I really agree with it. It gets into arguing about what ghosts "are" in a way that I don't really see any need to buy into.

I'd be fine with capping the range of ghost stats more or less as WT suggests. That is pretty much what I had in mind when I said perhaps some "tweaking" would help.

I'd also be happier, actually, knowing there was some limit on how often you would see the same sorts of ghosts over and over. Perhaps not so much shutting "off" a particular species/class for ages, but what I usually look at is actual abilities. I wouldn't precisely force ghosts to rotate from say Fi to Wz at every turn (although it's not the worst possible idea maybe)... But if the last ghost to maybe even 2 or 3 ghosts) generated on a certain few dungeon levels had or averaged EV++++, then the probability of the next ghost to appear having oh, EV+++ or less should start to rise, and similar balancing trends could be implemented for numbers of high level spells, AC, branded weapons, what have you.

If there aren't enough ghosts in the bones file, then the AI should have the ability to fabricate a less impressive version of one that is, or randomly create one -- whatever. Everyone should have accesss to some pushover ghosts with some frequency this way -- not only those of us on sparse population or less-OOD-deaths server scenarios.

There are of course more and less complex ways to arrange such a system, but I do agree that constantly facing the same type of threat over and over gets old -- particularly those few examples (on my server, more apparently there are more frequent ones on others?) that are running on steroids. It's stepping out a little further for me, but I still feel it shouldn't really be all that technically inconceivable to place some limits or hijinks in the code.

Maybe a ghost "purist" would say that changing anything whatsoever means it's just "no longer a ghost," but that seems a kind of odd argument to me in a thread where some people are sometimes just going nuts trying to insist on "removal not fixing" at all costs. One thought: Are some of us taking too much from what little devs have said on the issue? Saying they don't plan to remove ghosts... Have they said they would never change them again, either? I wonder. (Note the again, because, hey they have been changing them.)

[VeryAngryFelid]

the AI should ... randomly create one

Could you please explain what you find so good in ghosts (comparing to normal monsters) that you want to create them?

[stoneychips]

So, I have to stair-dance.

Agree, problem isn't the inherent difficulty of surviving ghosts, problem is that it's almost never a good idea to fight most of them and avoiding them is both trivial and time-consuming.

Couldn't this kind of thing be solved by a set of rules for all sorts of encounters... Without mucking up the notion that perhaps players having some impact left in the world they died in, could be kinda fun if not a bit of challenge? (Yes, I realize that not everyone cares for trying to keep implementing that notion. Just saying.)

For example, mine might include: No OOD mobs will appear within 6 squares of a newly placed staircase. This would help with not only ghosts but things like walking into a pack of death yaks on the level of the Lair entry.

And all mobs have a quickly increasing chance to themselves get bored and wander away after pursuing you with constant movement for 10 turns? (Note that sooner or later, such a rule would also reduce player ability to lure things across the floor endlessly to whatever situations they might wish for. So it's not strictly a one-way change, whatever else it is.

Arguably, such changes might also be seen as messing too much with the nature of the game. But I think this shows how people are often about against things which the vast majority of the time, don't require ghosts or no ghosts -- they're much more global questions about the game, and something else will often serve you or kill you on the same basic principles.

[watertreatmentRL]

I noticed a response to my previous comment on ghost trolling from a very good boy in another venue of crawl discussion. Ghost trolling is a natural approach to this feature of the game. Yes, you "kill" other players, omg. What an outrageous and transgressive thing to do in an online game, to use what is essentially a PvP feature in that spirit. "If only everyone in the world were as good a person as me," the thinking goes, "we could have silly, poorly thought out features like this and it would be okay."

Also, though I did advise the operator of the chudwraith account on best practices, I made ghosts on a robin account that a certain member of the online crawl community set up some time ago apparently for this purpose. While my ghosts were fewer, they achieved significantly better KDRs than the chudwraith ones.

[stoneychips]

the AI should ... randomly create one

Could you please explain what you find so good in ghosts (comparing to normal monsters) that you want to create them?

Why can't I read this without feeling it's getting a little weird? Maybe it's just me though.

First off, I didn't say I needed them to appear more frequently. I think they show up often enough, if not a little too often as things are (and I am on a low pop server). It's rather in the context of, what if tweaks I suggested created situations that would normally result in no ghost where one normally would have appeared. Well, there are multiple possible issues with that situation.

1) Balance -- unless you replace with something, the floor is out a monster which all else being equal otherwise would have appeared. Technically, I suppose that system works the same for everyone and maybe some players are fine with that so far, but aren't ghosts worth XP too?
(And yes maybe some players are fine with skipping that sort of XP source too, but still it's a reduced level of choice in that sense.)

Could you replace it with another 2-headed ogre or trap or something else in the dungeon? Functionally, perhaps at this level yes. If you really must have a comparison to other monsters, oh I dunno, the trap that dropped redback spiders all around my lovely OgFE (AC 11 EV 11, post-Lair and Orc on D:13 I think) the other day struck me as damn nigh inescapable I suppose. So to play that game with you, I guess I'd have to ask, is the principle you are against "anything surprising and apparently overwhelming" and then would you also wish to redo the trap system or have Hellmonk come through and let's say, argue how it would be too much work because I presume there are lots of variables there too... At some point even when I agree there's overwhelming stuff occasionally dropping, I may say maybe let's not be so hasty to regulate too strictly or remove all such possible surprises, because that would run further into below:


2) Novelty/thematics -- which gets more at the sort of philosophical, dammit I do enjoy the concept of players leaving "something" behind and/or having a monster show up which isn't going to be quite so much in the standard appearance and stats mold of most everything else in the Dungeon anyway.

If you go removing whole features and not suggesting tweaks or at least other sources of surprise, this drops off pretty quick. Whether or not stuff is interesting or surprising if it isn't rather dangerous, in a game like Crawl, is at best debatable I guess. (I like a low to moderate average feeling of "horror" so having my hair stand up briefly while I wonder whether this is one of the rare "just run away" ghosts as opposed to oh, look, only two pips of EV and I'm going to blast it at range despite its insane armor, cause hey it's got some weakness just like 4/5 or more of ghosts I usually meet and I'll just have to hold my breath about the rest..." That counts for something.)


3) Immersiveness/realism/interaction -- I'm the type who also thought players dropping items and monsters picking them up, or even item destruction, was a whole lot more interesting too.

I think it should be obvious, but it's possible to be taken with the notion that the dungeon is a place that also reflects some impact from all these player adventurers passing through, and offer later travelers some flavor partly feeding off that, at least in small ways... And still not necessarily be too interested in it as a more PvP tool that seems to potentially reward "trolling" builds (sometimes at least, in opposition to stronger PvE builds which would only carry what's most effective against monster or terrain of the moment, not players in general to come).

And I'd rather fuss about implementation than just have this stuff all removed wholesale. (You don't have to agree. Some of us like thunderstorms because we just like the atmosphere, some of us hate them for being wet or reminding us of disasters, or the off chance this particular storm might just be related to a flood or tornado if it's a particularly bad one this time.)


Those are a few that come to mind. I'm not sure if it's quite exhaustive. I don't expect everyone to agree about it all.

[duvessa]

i had a dream last night that i was a level 77 night ghost and i checked into a crappy motel at 4 am to sleep. then at 5:30 am someone knocked on my motel room’s door so i let them in, and it was a level 3 human girl who was afraid she’d get killed by all the monsters and cars marauding outside (there were cars flying everywhere and crashing into things constantly in this world). so we just kinda sat there on the bed and talked for about half an hour and decided that we’d stick together until she could get somewhere safe. we left my room in the motel only to find that the motel had turned into a gigantic maze with no exit (i could tell because one of my night ghost powers was seeing a bird’s-eye x-ray view of my surroundings so i could see all the walls and stuff). so i used one of my level 77 night ghost powers: phasing through walls. i just had the girl hold my hand and we walked out of the motel through the walls. (apparently i could extend this wall phasing power to anyone whose hand i was holding)
then we were attacked by a band of orcs, so i used another of my level 77 night ghost powers: slowing down time for everyone else. my level was so high that time was pretty near frozen (like, slowed down by 99.9% at least), so now that the orcs basically weren’t moving, i night ghost punched them in their stomachs until they died. a “night ghost punch” is the same as a regular punch, but i was a night ghost so it was called a night ghost punch.
then i deactivated my time slowing power and the girl and i walked into a giant hollow tree nearby, which led to an underground tunnel network, which led to a nice, safe meadow with a pond. solid snake was skinny dipping in the pond. i woke up around that point
i don’t remember what a night ghost actually was, except that i looked exactly the same as i do as a human