The Tavern

Killed by another player ghost. I know the creature is a ghost but it should have a chance at least of dropping some of the loot it had when alive:(

Nod2003 wrote:Killed by another player ghost. I know the creature is a ghost but it should have a chance at least of dropping some of the loot it had when alive:(

No. Bones-stuffing is a thing in Nethack, let's not implement it into Crawl.

Player ghosts should be either a) removed, b) made optional (because they already are in a way) or c) have randomized equipment, spells and abilities.

Sprucery wrote:
Nod2003 wrote:Killed by another player ghost. I know the creature is a ghost but it should have a chance at least of dropping some of the loot it had when alive:(
Player ghosts should be either a) removed, b) made optional (because they already are in a way) or c) have randomized equipment, spells and abilities.

a) please

Ghosts should not exist, let alone have a greater impact on the game than they already do by dropping usable equipment.

They're a terrible influence on game balance; some are incredibly disproportionately dangerous for the area they appear on, some are free bags of experience, and many are pointless blobs of AC, EV, and/or HP that can't do anything to a character that simply walks away from them, yet at the same time are too strong to kill. This last variety of ghost encourages tedium, a dirty word in Crawl design, by forcing repetitive stair dancing in order to explore the level they are occupying. They are not even entirely accurate reconstructions of the characters that they are supposed to represent. Aside from being undead and insubstantial (and thus completely unaffected by some common tools such as nets and curare), their spells don't necessarily work in the same way that the player's do, their melee capabilities are calculated differently, and it is impossible to know either of these things in the game without outside information. So you are not encountering the lost characters of other players, but grotesque imitations that play by their own rules. Sane offline players can simply delete ghosts and thus avoid all of this nonsense, while those online are more or less harassed by them depending on the current popularity of the server they use.

I sincerely cannot fathom why these things are still extant in Crawl at all.

Does anyone know what the developers think about that? Will they heed all these complaints (not here for the first time), or can we expect more incarnations of DCSS with ghosts?

Blomdor wrote:I sincerely cannot fathom why these things are still extant in Crawl at all.

The answer to that question is always "Because someone once wrote the code that way, and devteam consensus isn't strongly enough against it to motivate someone to write it differently."

DCSS is a game hacked together by unpaid volunteers. They started from an old codebase that needed quite a bit of work. Any changes to the game represent time from someone's day given to the community.

Fortunately, the code is open source. You are free to clone the git repository, write your own patches, submit pull requests, make arguments on behalf of your changes in ##crawl-dev on freenode, and even release your changes publicly as your own fork if it turns out you have a differing vision than the folks on the devteam. The existing Crawl server admins are remarkably helpful with hosting forks online and setting up new servers!

Any time you feel strongly about a DCSS feature, please remember that you always have the option of sitting down and rewriting the game to do what you want. If you aren't willing to take the time to write it yourself, you're part of the reason why things like that are still extant in Crawl.

Implojin wrote:Any time you feel strongly about a DCSS feature, please remember that you always have the option of sitting down and rewriting the game to do what you want. If you aren't willing to take the time to write it yourself, you're part of the reason why things like that are still extant in Crawl.

Most people, even crawl players, don't have the technical background to do that and the fact is that a fork that just represents some dude's opinion about what to change in crawl isn't going to go far. It makes sense to advocate for changes in dcss simply because that's where the players are and if you want to talk crawl, that's what other people are mostly playing.

Luckily, there's a lot of stuff that a lot of people agree is wrong with dcss and that bunch of stuff has spawned the legendary crawl pro-mod, hellcrawl. If you want a clean dungeon crawling experience, I suggest you check that action, Jackson.

edit: By the way, "player ghosts are bad and should be removed" is an example of a popular position hellcrawl has acted upon.

Ghosts don't bother me all that much, although occasionally I find a really difficult one.

One thing I would like to see is some mechanism to control how often a ghost of a certain species or class shows up, if that isn't around already. I've seen certain players leaving the same kind around over and over again, and it's annoying to be constantly looking out for the same kind of extra threat. Particularly if it's one that a character type you want to build is particularly unprepared for.

It would be nice if they dropped some rewards of interest at least some of the time, say a modest chance of a somewhat randomized item appropriate to the level of difficulty or maybe even tied to the duration/damage taken by player during the fight (for those who are so fussy about chances of people going to the trouble to stuff them as pinata). But heaven forbid anyone add anything particularly something that might also affect early levels of Crawl these days, I know. Much less to ghosts, according to popular opinion it seems.

You can still remove the bones folder from the client at least, as far as I know to destroy the chance of offline ghosts -- if they really, really bother you. For what it's worth.

So what would it take to write ghosts out of non-Hellcrawl Crawl? Do their tentacles weave their way throughout the code in hard-to-extract ways, or can commenting out a couple of strategic lines in the level-generation function poof them out of gameplay even if there's zombie code in a few places? I suspect it's more like the latter.

It's a one line change in hellcrawl. See this commit, I just changed a definition to make the max number of ghosts allowed per floor zero. Obviously there's a lot more extraneous stuff you can clean up if you decide to do a proper removal.

Player ghost like stuff remains from mara/illusion card, so that might be the best way to do it.

I personally would like ghosts as vault monsters behind runed doors and transporters. Given how dangerous and unforeseeable they can be, they look like the perfect treasure guardian to me.
They should lose teleport other, though.

Shtopit wrote:I personally would like ghosts as vault monsters behind runed doors and transporters. Given how dangerous and unforeseeable they can be, they look like the perfect treasure guardian to me.
They should lose teleport other, though.

I wouldn't say they are all that reliable... Depending on your own build/fortune and what exactly led to their death and what they were wearing at that moment, they can be pushovers too.

Still, for those who find them especially annoying, I can see this as something of a fair compromise. Probably in vaults that have some other things going on too (in case of total pushover ghost), such as the transporter rooms.

Player ghosts pose the most threat, imo, to caster builds/stabbers. They are typically resistant to just about everything an early caster/stabber has in their repertoire, and can easily kill.

Ghosts of casters are generally pushovers, as are light-melee builds. The problem, however, is that things like MiBe ghosts are regulars, and inordinately powerful. The other thing I dislike is their spawn rate -- if they're gonna be kept, drop the spawn rate to something EXTREMELY rare.

For example, I was grinding a build earlier today ("Foo Fighter" FoFi of Chei/Oku). Had terrible luck with encounters, and left a lot of ghosts in D:1-8. Within an hour later I encountered 3 of my own ghosts on one run, and ghosts of myself on nearly every run after that. A friend was running too, and I took out two of his ghosts.

Last run I think I encountered 4+ ghosts, some of which were at awful times and forced me to use up potions to deal with them.

Overall, I like occasionally running into a Ghost because it's a fun little "oh, this is a cool element of the server" quirk. But 1) give them drops. Not pinatas, but I'd say maybe a heal potion or two for your efforts, and to help you save face if they showed up at a bad time, and 2) reduce the rate of spawn so that you're meeting only 1-2 ghosts in a full 15 rune run.

Ghosts are already often worthwhile to kill, and that's not a good thing. If you make them MORE worth killing, you just incentivize people looking up morgues to find exact ghost stats more than you already do.

Ghosts being possible to kill but extremely annoying is the largest problem with them imo. it sucks kiting them around with higher regen or missiles weapons, spells etc. to slowly whittle them down, even more than it sucks running away from them.

I also don't like the metagame where you can (should) assess a ghost's threat level by digging around server morgues to find the exact stats of the player that was killed.

I don't really buy that features should be removed simply because it's possible for people to cheat by digging around in the game folders.

Supposedly it's possible to figure out what's likely in vaults or around the whole dungeon by simply spying on various files in the system. So then we'd need to toss much of the game to avoid it being possibly cheated? If it's already an honor system, so be it. Whatever. I've never messed with this stuff. It isn't interesting to me. It only matters for ensuring the integrity of bragging rights. It's a question more of do we have egotistical people, than do we have a bumpy feature.

Perhaps some "purists" might also wish to argue that even using fsim is a form of one-upping the intended shock and horror of the game.

Either fix the system or don't (or maybe one can't), but don't argue with me for tossing out whole features on that basis.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23984&p=317750

stoneychips wrote:I don't really buy that features should be removed simply because it's possible for people to cheat by digging around in the game folders.

I disagree, but in the case of player ghosts people aren't arguing that they be removed simply because they reward digging for spoilers/"cheating." The fact that you are incentivized to dig through morgues is just one of many problems with ghosts:

'Random' enemies are terrible from a game balance standpoint. Super-high ac speed 10 monsters have a terrible ratio of threat-level/tediousness. Enemies that can't climb stairs don't function as threats, but if ghosts could climb stairs a greater % of them would be unsurvivable (and in most cases the kiting experience would be made even more inconvenient). Ghosts affect the difficulty of dcss depending on the server you play on. Many monster versions of player spells are absolute jank and shouldn't exist. etc. etc.

It's not impossible for player ghosts to become a reasonable feature and even a half-assed attempt at doing it would have a lot more impact than some stuff that's on the plan for the next dcss release. People say they have too much AC, EV, HP, and melee damage. Very true in my experience. So how about set up some correspondence between those values for player characters and those values for monsters to map them into reasonable monster values? That's a weekend coding project at most. Some spells and weapon brands easily create overpowered ghosts? Figure them out and veto them.

To deal with the morgue issue, you get some milage just by making the correspondence between the dead character and the monster more complicated. Add a layer of randomization to wash out the advantage even more and provide a better display of the monster's properties in the normal interface.

As for worries about troll names like "pedohitler1488" or "SWERFandTERF" that's a server administration issue. I'm sure some simple scripting solution exists for a lot of the most obvious stuff and the few people who are going to be enough of a nuisance to bother with and clever enough to get around some script you can deal with individually.

I don't see how it is different from renaming existing monsters. For example, you find a pack of orcs and there is a "VeryAngryFelid Orc Warrior" among them.
There is an unsolvable internal problem with "ghosts":
1) if they are interesting and good to have in game, they should be generated no matter if some players died on current floor or not so we will have just new monster types.
2) if they are not interesting or are not good to have in game, they should not be generated, again no matter if some players died on current floor or not.

One middle way towards making ghosts less spoilery would be to make them hd based and ignore all skills and such. Hd could uniformly determine their melee precision and damage, as well as spell power and hp. This would mean ignoring the weapon carried at time of death, with the exception of brand. Other defences can all be displayed, speed too.

Let's create some monsters with random hp, ac, ev, speed, weapon and spells, they should be rare but sometimes you will see several of them on the same floor. I suggest to call them pan lords.

Player ghosts at best will be a mediocre feature that stays around for reasons of tradition. There's a certain amount of silly fun in running into your buddies' ghosts. This makes it good for them to be modeled on actual dead characters, but not to the extent that it's useful to look at morgue files. Just dumb down the ghost creation process a bit, throw in some noise, but leave enough behind so that the dead character is somewhat recognizable and you get all the theme and fun of the current implementation with enough wiggle room to get rid of the sharp edges.

Why are ghosts worse than OOD monsters or early level uniques?

Shtopit wrote:One middle way towards making ghosts less spoilery would be to make them hd based and ignore all skills and such. Hd could uniformly determine their melee precision and damage, as well as spell power and hp. This would mean ignoring the weapon carried at time of death, with the exception of brand. Other defences can all be displayed, speed too.

I don't really understand how it becomes such a big issue... Unless you are constantly flipping to watch other players and see what they're wearing, or going to the trouble to dig in the file system, or purposefully leaving behind a lot of deaths for yourself to start farming.

I don't do any of these things, and except for times when the server has too few players and one keeps running iterations of the same background over and over and over... This stuff just doesn't occur as such a bother to me.

Sometimes I do feel that a few particular ghosts seem a little tough for the level, and a few things may not have been translated so well between player assets and ghost abilities (the odd take on draconian breath has been mentioned many times). But if one was going to do any fixing, I would think these would be moderate-to-easy things to adjust.

TeshiAlair wrote:Why are ghosts worse than OOD monsters or early level uniques?

And if randomness is bad, then do we like shops, the current level of dungeon levels, variability in what branches appear... List goes on. And why?

(There is always gnollcrawl... And this is at least partly why I don't find myself interested in that, personally.)

By the way I know one rogue-like where player ghosts are perfect because they:
1) are optional. You need to dig a grave and the grave can create a ghost and/or give you items.
2) are never overpowered, there are no upstairs in that game so all ghosts had about the same XP as you do now.
3) can give you nice ideas for your future characters (there are great synergies among different skills in that game, for instance, the dead character might have great defense and "aura" skills when every monster who hits you in melee has a chance to get damaged/poisoned/paralyzed/slowed/charmed etc.)
4) can give you a second chance to hire an ally you missed in your game or can give you a chance to hire an ally with abilities which were not generated in your game. The whole game is about allies so that would not work in DCSS of course.
5) are completely described in "xv" screen: all stats, skills, allies etc. so there is no any benefit in checking "morgue" files
6) have names removed (you don't see what name the ghost had when was alive).

TeshiAlair wrote:Why are ghosts worse than OOD monsters or early level uniques?

Early uniques cannot one-shot you with glaciate. Uniques don't have 1 max damage and no spells. You don't need to check external files to know what unique has. Uniques can use stairs. Most uniques don't become hilariously easy with Dispel Undead and extremely hard when you have a dagger of draining/venom.

VeryAngryFelid wrote:By the way I know one rogue-like where player ghosts are perfect because they...

Which rogue-like is this?

TeshiAlair wrote:Why are ghosts worse than OOD monsters or early level uniques?

You cant change the odds of OOD monsters or uniques spawning by choosing a different server, waiting until the middle of the night, or reinstalling the game.

You also cant spawn all the OOD monsters or uniques in other games and then play a game where you dont meet any.

Uniques chance of spawning and spawning depths for monsters are selected by the developers and are presumably balanced to enhance gameplay. But with a ghost its just a random grab bag.

mattlistener wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:By the way I know one rogue-like where player ghosts are perfect because they...

Which rogue-like is this?

http://demon.ferretdev.org/

@Stoneychips

I personally also have never checked the morgue, but I mostly play locally. There was one case in which an orc fighter of mine died on z5. It turned into a very powerful ghost, also very resilient. I decided that it had to die, because I could have found myself sandwiched between it and who knows what else, with teleport having a good chance of throwing me into an uncleared lung. If I had been online, I probably would have checked the morgue.

In general, this is a subset of "optimal means boring", which I think is bad. If things were clearer, you would have all info in x v.

I like the idea of randomly generated player ghosts, at least for D. Ghosts probably become more interesting (and scarce) in U, and so could be kept as player dependent in U and Z. But random instead of player ghosts (leveled based on floor) would make griefing much more difficult online, and D more varied locally.

Also, maybe we should do away with the little piece of simulation that stops undead from becoming ghosts.

I just don't see my experience matching up very neatly with most of the various complaints. I'm still surprised that people are quite so bothered about ghosts as they are, because pretty often I find them avoidable with a little work (at least, kitable enough to make them more or less avoidable) if not killable. It is usually convenient to run away up stairs while whittling down other threats on a ghost's level, but there have also been a good few times when I wished I could drag a ghost upstairs just to lose it again and get it out of my way on the level where I wanted to progress. Yes, there is the occasional super beast blocking off an area due to evil placement and narrow layouts, etc. Maybe it's because I play melee more often than casters? I don't know. I can say that I've encountered some caster ghosts that I also found downright evil, though for what that part is worth (and they didn't even need Teleport Other, more bolts/blasts and clouds rather).

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
TeshiAlair wrote:Why are ghosts worse than OOD monsters or early level uniques?

Early uniques cannot one-shot you with glaciate. Uniques don't have 1 max damage and no spells. You don't need to check external files to know what unique has. Uniques can use stairs. Most uniques don't become hilariously easy with Dispel Undead and extremely hard when you have a dagger of draining/venom.

As dramatic as it sounds to say "Glaciate!"...

Ogre FE on D:3 who once had all 39 HP:

You climb downwards.
Level annotation: Ijyb
Ijyb shouts!
There is a stone staircase leading up here.
q - a +0 hunting sling (weapon)
Firing (i - inventory): m - 45 stones (quivered)
Press: ? - help, Shift-Dir - straight line, f - Ijyb
Aim: Ijyb, wielding a club and wearing a leather armour
You shoot a stone. The stone completely misses Ijyb. Ijyb zaps a wand.
The bolt of acid hits you! You are splashed with acid! The acid burns!
It is a wand of acid (?/15).
Ijyb zaps a wand. The bolt of acid hits you!
Ouch! That really hurt!
You die...

... Went to -12 HP in two hits without a second chance (or was it barely? not shown if so but still).

I have also had characters die much later, like in Vaults to an unexpected Crystal Spear from ogre magi when not particularly wounded. It isn't super enjoyable, but it's a known possibility and it does happen every so often.

Most uniques don't become hilariously easy with Dispel Undead and extremely hard when you have a dagger of draining/venom.

So....? Try and take on most uniques like Louise, Donald, Mara or Nikola in Swamp/Elf with Dispel Undead and low venom-branded weapon skill (not to mention needing to stay close to hit them). "Totally unfair to necromancers! Totally unfair to people without rElec! Totally unfair because can't kill Mara's illusion of me!" On and on.

But these are all familiar threats. And you don't know if Donald is definitely going to get the shield of reflection or not, which brand if any they're going to be carrying, what wand they're going to be carrying. And I don't always feel compelled to look even before they use it -- at least not in the name of "fairness."

"As dramatic as it sounds to say Glaciate, I played badly and died to Ijyb" is a really strange whataboutism.

All these suggestions to save ghosts by revising the bad parts and keeping the good parts are missing the fact that, to the people who want to remove ghosts, literally everything about ghosts' design is bad. That's why they want them removed. There's no baby to throw out from their perspective, just bathwater. We think the metagame aspect is bad, we think the inter-player interaction is bad, we think basing monsters off player characters is bad.

My impression is that some devs have dug in on this one, so it's more of a question of how much bathwater you can get rid of, not whether there's a baby to save.

Ghosts have something that every other equivalent problem in this game doesnt: Novelty. You cant understand why the only reason to play webtiles still a thing in crawl?

Ghosts are a reason *not* to play Webtiles. I play online because I've met some cool people there and I like the record keeping and the tournaments and such.

The novelty wears off after the 300th MiBe blob of HP, AC, and EV with a weapon of insert brand here making the game more of a chore than it ought to be on D:4 without ever actually threatening you. Really.

ezero wrote:Ghosts have something that every other equivalent problem in this game doesnt: Novelty. You cant understand why the only reason to play webtiles still a thing in crawl?

but this discussion isn't about stat tracking???

Blomdor wrote:Ghosts are a reason *not* to play Webtiles. I play online because I've met some cool people there and I like the record keeping and the tournaments and such.

The novelty wears off after the 300th MiBe blob of HP, AC, and EV with a weapon of insert brand here making the game more of a chore than it ought to be on D:4 without ever actually threatening you. Really.

Its like you expect infinite novelty from ghosts. Besides, doesnt the exact same thing can be said about any other enemy currently in the game? You missed the entire point of my comment. If you forget all the novelty, ghosts are just another enemy in the game, so why should it be removed? For me, ghosts have something other enemies dont, for you they dont, so why does it bothers you and not me?

There are a lot of things that can be said about player ghosts that can't be said about any other enemy in the game, and coincidentally all of those things are bad.

It didn't occur to me before, but ghost removal, as Hellmonk says, is a matter of one line of code. That means removing ghosts could also be made a server administration thing, if administrators decide to go that route.

The question is: If one or more server administrators decided to run versions of dcss without ghosts, would they be regarded as renegades for scoring purposes? Or would akrasiac and the irc bots continue to index them without sanction? Ghosts have real server administration implications, as events of the summer showed. The power is there if people are willing to take it.

I guess devs don't like to have no ghost version servers for scoring purposes. I think it is easy to implement technically: just add another version like "trunk no ghosts" to existing servers.

If ghosts are removed from crawl I will fork it to readd them and update CPO to only host my fork. Ghosts forever.

chequers wrote:If ghosts are removed from crawl I will fork it to readd them and update CPO to only host my fork. Ghosts forever.

Hey now... You should, at the very least, say keep all or several forks that still have ghosts enabled.

I want to keep Yiufcrawl available too, after all. :ugeek:

Blomdor wrote:Ghosts are a reason *not* to play Webtiles. I play online because I've met some cool people there and I like the record keeping and the tournaments and such.

The novelty wears off after the 300th MiBe blob of HP, AC, and EV with a weapon of insert brand here making the game more of a chore than it ought to be on D:4 without ever actually threatening you. Really.

The 300th? Seriously?

How much time are you spending on D:4 normally, anyway. Hmm.

I just can't help feeling the whole topic is a bit overblown. Maybe more people are playing on servers crammed with elite ghosts than I realized? But I dunno.

duvessa wrote:"As dramatic as it sounds to say Glaciate, I played badly and died to Ijyb" is a really strange whataboutism.

All these suggestions to save ghosts by revising the bad parts and keeping the good parts are missing the fact that, to the people who want to remove ghosts, literally everything about ghosts' design is bad. That's why they want them removed. There's no baby to throw out from their perspective, just bathwater. We think the metagame aspect is bad, we think the inter-player interaction is bad, we think basing monsters off player characters is bad.

In my view, it isn't whatabouttery at all. Aren't there whole threads fussing about the frequency of random "small" monsters appearing with super strong wands in recent versions of Crawl? I'm sure there are whole threads complaining about Ijyb, or Sigmund, or Mara (even without wand chances).

It's odd that there is so much fuss about ghosts being randomly powerful, unless equal removal demands are going to be directed at similarly random dynamics elsewhere in Crawl. We need to know what the scope of this conversation is and why really, that is all.

Now a reasonable "what about" as I see it: Why so much fuss about a few overpowered ghosts, when I run across so many ghosts that are really wimpy to not all that bad? It's possible to land a pretty awful early vault or wyvern, too -- but these things get so much less fuss. The only thing I recall coming really close to this thread lately, is the fuss over 2-headed ogres showing up earlier. Which if I'm not mistaken, may have died down a bit by now.

Again, though I mostly just play on CPO these days. I have seen a few pretty hefty ghosts (and a fair bit of too-repetitive ones, as we have too few players there). But I don't feel like most ghosts are seriously often all that impossible to deal with one way or another. I have no desire to join the "git gud you idiots" crowd -- not in the slightest. But I can't quite understand why this is such a huge deal to some people.

stoneychips wrote:In my view, it isn't whatabouttery at all. Aren't there whole threads fussing about the frequency of random "small" monsters appearing with super strong wands in recent versions of Crawl? I'm sure there are whole threads complaining about Ijyb, or Sigmund, or Mara (even without wand chances).

Even if those uniques are bad and still exist in the game, it does not mean we cannot talk about removing ghosts, otherwise we are in "let police ignore thieves as long as last killer is not in prison yet" situation and I believe the "killer" here is player ghosts, not those uniques. If we had multiple "Sigmunds" on every floor, I would agree with you that our priorities are probably wrong.
I had many games where I didn't meet any of these 3 uniques but I don't remember any online game where I didn't meet a ghost.

Hellmonk wrote:There are a lot of things that can be said about player ghosts that can't be said about any other enemy in the game, and coincidentally all of those things are bad.

Such as?

The Tavern

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