The Tavern

It's been about 18 months since I last picked up the game. In everyone's oh so humble opinion, do you think the game has become easier or harder in the past few years? Reasons for your opinions would be appreciated.

Played 0.10 for a long time, and switched to 0.15/0.16. The game definitely has become harder.

Exhibit A: Rune lock on vaults. You are now forced to get a rune before farming xp in vaults. Might seem minor, but for some character builds its annoying.
Exhibit B: Change from D:27 to D:15 + U:5, we have an enormous spike in difficulty by giving up 7 dungeon levels.
Exhibit C: The vaults itself. Wardens, sentinels and convokers are just... an insane step in difficulty from before.
Exhibit D: Have you been to Tomb recently? All the new nifty deadly monsters in trunk have really shaken up that place. Before it was really a bit boring and predictable, but now...There are even holy monsters in there for all the fools who want to lichform it.
Exhibit E: Abyss is considered to be more deadly than ever.

Less tedium, less boring so it's simpler to progress and focus in tactics. Therefore you are less prone to lose by boredom or fortuitous accidents but it is easier to die by overconfidence or obliviousness.

No weight restrictions! The reason why I started playing again.

i think the game became easier (item destruction removal) and less tedious, but even after pruning excessive floors it still has too much filler content. do something about orc mines already

I do think the removal of item destruction makes things easier, conditioned on you actually arriving at the point where you have meaningful numbers of identified items. Fewer consumables early does make the early game a little harder, and in principle this just means the game is harder. In practice, most players are not at the oft-claimed point where "if you get to Lair you win," and so I think this does in fact lead to the game being a little easier for most players, at least in 0.15. I think most substantial changes in 0.16 seem to be trying to increase the difficulty a bit (frequently in ways I didn''t like), although I'm now a couple of months out of date on that.

Gargoyles and Vine Stalkers are big/huge jump in power. Missle combat is far more effective. Item destuction is gone. Your inventory is virtually bigger. All the new monsters are still mostly just popcorn. It is much easier in my oppinion.

And if you want to see it graphically:

https://shalott.org/graphs/6d37372f0f09 ... aa0bc.html is the graph generated by that, although I think it doesn't last forever so if you want to see it just do the command again.

Summary: game has gotten easier, and/or players have gotten better.

This subject comes up pretty often; here are most of my thoughts on the subject.

If asked to measure the overall difficulty of the game I will make the assumption that the player does not deliberately play badly or have any huge misconceptions about the game. Therefore I would say that, for example, versions 0.5 and earlier become much easier than any later version as soon as the player picks up a spellbook containing Detect Creatures (a level 1 spell that gave you almost perfect knowledge of almost every monster on your level). An early-game difference will also obviously dwarf any difference in difficulty that happens after the first few dungeon levels, so since detect creatures wasn't in any starting books (?) the example I gave is not really that great of a claim for 0.5 being easier unless, again, you assume deliberately poor play (increasing the relevance of non-early game "difficulty"). You could probably argue things either way (-heavy armour -floor item enchantment -some starting equipment; +starting hp +skill costs +some starting equipment).
If we are also only looking at the strongest character combination* then the addition of DD is possibly relevant since it is possibly as good or better than Ce (no other species comes anywhere close, and Ce has been basically the same since forever).

*Looking at only the strongest combo is a reasonable assumption in my opinion, but if you think character combos should act as "difficulty levels" then it is possibly not a good one to make, since almost all games with difficulty levels are extremely easy on the lowest one. Judging difficulty based off of MuCK doesn't sound very good either though.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't at any point. In Linley's Dungeon Crawl it was in books of Divinations, Wizardry and Beasts, none of which were starting books. Divinations could have been, if the Diviner background would have been implemented. That was a great book:

Yeah I only checked the books in 0.5, so I left open the possibility of it being present in some older version. Sounds like it didn't change at all since Linley's Dungeon Crawl then.