Barkeep
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Re: Enchanter and Conjurer are way too luck dependent. And m
I don't know why damage formulas in Crawl are the way they are, though.
Ask fellow adventurers how to stay alive in the deep, dark, dangerous dungeon below, or share your own accumulated wisdom.
Barkeep
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byrel wrote:mps wrote:for example the idea that estimation of probability distributions is something human beings are uniquely bad at
It is. And this isn't just a crawl thing. We're hyper-sensitive to patterns, and spot them when they aren't there. There have been studies of V2 bomb targets in Britain, gamblers, etc. It just happens. We're bad at estimating probability distributions.
If you want to talk about probabilities being wrong, there's a valid empirical way to do it. Record 100 consecutive results, and post THAT. That's actually data we can work with. 'I feel like my hexes fail way more than the number' isn't.
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mps wrote:Not all players know that they can look up this information in the source code. Not all players know how to do so if they want to. Not all players who know how to will bother. Those who do will not necessarily easily connect the properties of these complicated formulas with their experience playing because they're pretty damn complicated and relevant information that would help connect these two things is concealed in-game. All of these factors contribute to the difficulty in discussion of crawl combat damage in a way that favors keeping crawl combat damage the way it is.
Whenever you say "Hey, you say something is hidden and that has negative effects, therefore you are saying there must be a nefarious agent responsible for the hiding who wills those negative effects, which sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory and can't possibly be true," you should slap yourself. People say this kind of thing a lot, so we'd live in a better world, but one where people slap themselves a lot more, if everyone followed my advice.
Actually, it would be more fair to say that many probability distributions that appear in crawl are hard to estimate based on samples as a matter of mathematics and their being far from normal -- which is arguably a questionable design choice. The clustering illusion trope has a spurious, built-in defense of that choice.
mps wrote:Estimation of probability distributions is not an easy thing to do in general, but it's something that's been studied carefully for a long time. Some distributions can be usefully and accurately estimated by naive heuristics with relatively small numbers of samples. Others can't. This is not an observation in psychology. It's a fact of probability. Crawl combat uses the latter kind of distributions, whereas in systems used for the entertainment of human beings, the former is probably more appropriate.
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jejorda2 wrote:PowerOfKaishin wrote:Is there a way to quickly kill ice trolls? Wandered into one in the ice cave without any rC (don't ask; I was doing just fine until that thing showed up thanks to confuse + dazzle).
And while I find it hard to believe fist only does one damage less, it doesn't really change the fact that a Tengu Conjurer can't one-on-one a Jackal.
Was it a troll simulacra? Those are slow, so you can walk away and hit them from a distance. Weak to fire and dispel undead.
I can't think of what else might be confused for an "Ice Troll," which I don't recall being an enemy in the game.
njvack wrote:As I understand it, hex chances are wrong when a monster has extra MR but you don't know.
tasonir wrote:Imho a lot of the very complex formulas were probably inherited from ancient versions, and while I'm sure most devs would prefer simpler formulas for most things, it's a lot of work for marginal gain. And if you change them significantly then there's weeks of playtesting and balance concerns afterwards. It'll make some number crunchers happy, but players interested in statistics are the minority, even if it does include the most important player (that's me). No need to be hostile to any devs, current or otherwise. I have not tracked down the history of exactly how old the formulas are, feel free to let me know if you know.
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PowerOfKaishin wrote:
Why not just display the correct percentage?
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mps wrote:I can't think of any other game where you could double player combat damage and it wouldn't be immediately, blindingly obvious to absolutely everyone, even without explicit damage numbers being available.
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mps wrote:I hope you're trolling me about double damage. I can't think of any other game where you could double player combat damage and it wouldn't be immediately, blindingly obvious to absolutely everyone, even without explicit damage numbers being available.
About clustering illusion, if your primary way to address discussion of probability is clustering illusion, that's a problem. I don't care how many times it's the right thing to say. A lot of times it isn't.
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Sar wrote:I was talking to some person about Half-Life 2 another day and he was sure that it didn't have locational damage (basically, headshots) when it in fact does have locational damage (headshots) and they triple all the damage, too. He just never noticed it while playing it. I've also seen people being not aware that the first Half-Life has headshots (again, triple damage) after playing through the game. Like, maybe they played on Normal and there are a few weapons that one-shot certain enemy classes on Normal even without headshot, but those aren't always available. So, some people just don't pay attention, I guess.
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archaeo wrote:\
Uh, except they're not actually hidden, since this is an open source game? It's not like dpeg guards the source code at his German castle or anything.
The devs aren't keeping anything a secret here. From what I understand of the reasoning, there's just some point in between "give players all information" and "say nothing about the game's mechanics" where they think you can find a happy medium where players have enough information to make decisions but not so much that crawl becomes less about playing the game and more about exhaustive minmaxing.
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WingedEspeon wrote:archaeo wrote:\
Uh, except they're not actually hidden, since this is an open source game? It's not like dpeg guards the source code at his German castle or anything.
The devs aren't keeping anything a secret here. From what I understand of the reasoning, there's just some point in between "give players all information" and "say nothing about the game's mechanics" where they think you can find a happy medium where players have enough information to make decisions but not so much that crawl becomes less about playing the game and more about exhaustive minmaxing.
except it isn't a happy medium, It's just saying "Ha Ha, now you have to spend hours scouce diving to do your min maxing that you are going to do regardless of weather I show you the numbers." Hell, which are a lot harder to understand than how much damage something deals.
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savageorange wrote:I'm pretty sure the correct response is, to reference Nethack: 'The punishment for pudding farming is pudding farming'.
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byrel wrote:I think you misunderstand the reference. Pudding farming is a highly tedious theoretically endless method of farming a splitting monster (a pudding) which can, if done properly, result in having as many of any item you want, since they drop a random item 1/3 deaths. Pudding farming is clearly optimal, but insanely tedious. Some people claim it's cheating, but the general consensus is that anyone doing that is obviously already being punished quite enough by doing it.
Optimal but tedious exploits are their own punishment. Like old kill-outside-LOS summoners.
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