How bad am I?

[ablip]

I've been playing a couple months now, and if my morgue is an accurate account, I just hit my 500th game. The height of my effort has been experience lvl 19 with only two runes collected. This is in no way meant as a complaint; I absolutely adore crawl's unforgiving nature and the sense of accomplishment when even marginal progress is made.

On reaching that 500 game milestone, I do need to take a step back and ask myself and the larger crawl community if perhaps I am embarrassingly bad at my new pastime? In that spirit, would other players who've completed DCSS mind sharing roughly how long it took them(in months/years or games played)?

[rebthor]

Took me years of play, off and on, before I got my first win. To put things in perspective, I started playing around version .4.3.

[jejorda2]

It took me four years and three thousand games to get my first win. It was a fluke; I haven't won in over 800 games (8 months) since then.

[BlackSheep]

I think I started playing around version 0.5 and only got my first win a couple months ago on 0.91 when I finally gave up playing what I thought were "interesting" combinations and just went for a DECj.

[TehDruid]

I've had 3 wins total since 0.6-0.7, when I started playing. Still not calling myself good at this game. I do make it to the late midgame/endgame quite often though. Especially with combos that pack a punch like melee Minotaurs I tend to clear the pre-extended content quite easily. I tend to try weird combos and gods though, just to make things fun (and because deep down inside I might be the biggest hipster of them all!). My latest YASD as of now: http://crawl.develz.org/morgues/0.10/TehDruid/morgue-TehDruid-20120305-175629.txt

[Konebred]

Same boat here too. I am at the point where I am not too worried about winning, even though I almost had one a couple weeks ago. I stick with mino berserkers since they are so easy and will probably be my first win, but I like to goof off with other combos too.

[Zicher]

I've been playing a couple months now, and if my morgue is an accurate account, I just hit my 500th game. The height of my effort has been experience lvl 19 with only two runes collected. This is in no way meant as a complaint; I absolutely adore crawl's unforgiving nature and the sense of accomplishment when even marginal progress is made.

On reaching that 500 game milestone, I do need to take a step back and ask myself and the larger crawl community if perhaps I am embarrassingly bad at my new pastime? In that spirit, would other players who've completed DCSS mind sharing roughly how long it took them(in months/years or games played)?

Don't worry at all. With two runes, you made quite a significant progress into this game. A win is yours in little time, I guess.
You are no bad per se. Perhaps you would like to share your personal favourite builds and the way you play them? If you are consistently making a mistake, we may spot it and point it out.

And if you are interested - on my side, nearly three months for the first rune, approx. half a year to grab my first win, and slightly over one year for my first all-rune win. Online, I firstly won on my 279th attempt. So don't worry - you _will_ get there in time.

[defen]

I had around 700 games before winning. Granted, I mostly played KoBe, which had considerably better survivability back before the fighting nerf.

Edit: only found runes two or three times before the win. You're just about there

[ablip]

Don't worry at all. With two runes, you made quite a significant progress into this game. A win is yours in little time, I guess.
You are no bad per se. Perhaps you would like to share your personal favourite builds and the way you play them? If you are consistently making a mistake, we may spot it and point it out.

And if you are interested - on my side, nearly three months for the first rune, approx. half a year to grab my first win, and slightly over one year for my first all-rune win. Online, I firstly won on my 279th attempt. So don't worry - you _will_ get there in time.

My preference has been toward casting builds, I started out using a stealthy SpWz build that I eventually abandoned because of trouble in dealing damage to npcs with good MR toward midgame. The second build I used heavily was DDNe/Kiku that made the early/mid-teens more comfortable courtesy of an abomination/death channel army. I could have perhaps taken that build much further but I learned not long ago that allies reduce total experience gained. I reasoned that with the way I was playing DDNe I was probably stunting my progression by over reliance on allies.

My current project is a DEWz focusing on more fire/necromancy/transmutation. While I could probably get a win sooner with a melee heavy build, I'm guessing that I'm like many other players that prefer casters simply for the complexity and options offered, despite being more challenging.

One of the reasons I became concerned about my slow progress in the game was that I had read about some of the winners of a recent DCSS tournament who gotten numerous consecutive wins. The replies so far have me far less concerned with my rate of progression. My thanks to everyone who's posted so far.

[randoark]

One of the reasons I became concerned about my slow progress in the game was that I had read about some of the winners of a recent DCSS tournament who gotten numerous consecutive wins. The replies so far have me far less concerned with my rate of progression. My thanks to everyone who's posted so far.

As in every population, there are those who excel far beyond most everyone else, and Crawl is no exception. There are some amazing players. They're outliers and there are plenty of us who just enjoy playing the game but who are not quite as good at is. If this was a sport, they'd be the pros and we'd be the ones playing in a recreational league, and thanks to webtiles we can also watch them play as spectators and I really enjoy watching the really good players during tournaments as they often play weird combos to get points or string together a bunch of wins.

The people who string together multiple wins with crazy combos without dying are not the norm. I only started playing in 0.9 but this game has really captured me. I played obsessively and finally got a win with an easy combo (KoBe) before continuing on. Playing in the tournament has been really fun, too. You should check out all the people who have played games online since the tournament started as it'll give you an idea on just how varied the Crawl population is in terms of progression.

http://seleniac.org/crawl/tourney/12a/all-players.html

[TehDruid]

The win rate across all games is a little lower than 1%. You understand what that means...

[Happy Corner]

What everyone else said. You're not bad at all, and there are many other players who wish they had even your level of success to brag about.

I remember something that another user posted here, after someone was brooding over their YASD: that you might die zillions of times, but every time you get farther with a combo than you did before, that's Crawl losing, man.

[TehDruid]

You might die zillions of times, but every time you get farther with a combo than you did before, that's Crawl losing, man.

Sounds more uplifting than that scene in Braveheart...

[dmurray]

You aren't bad.

Don't think of it as "winning" or "losing". Think of it more as: Okay, I died, I'll restart and think about how I died and what could have been done to avoid it.

See two Ogres, a Centaur and three Orcs while you're near a hallway? Back into the hallway, and see what you can do to prolong the chase.
Mepehtic Cloud, wand of enslavement, confusion, anything like that works. Just learn to utilize everything you have. And something I wish I would remember myself; unless you're fighting a bat or something like it; autofight is a bad idea to hold the key down.

Many times I've lost characters to holding down tab, being noticed by a centaur and being a target for it.

[Gianozzolo]

Just got my first win, started playing this december and I am pretty sure that I have way more then 500 games as 90% of my char used to die in D:5 .
One advice I could give you is: experiment with different races \ classes. I tried everything form MiBe to DDFi to DrWz to DECj to VpEn untill i eventually finally found out that SEEE is a lovely combination to slap things with your huge stone fists (statue form ftw), if you stick too long with a certain combination and you never seem to get too far, maybe that combination is not good for you!

[Confidence Interval]

I think you are by no means bad but probably, if you'll forgive me for saying it, pretty average. I've played over 3000 times and haven't won yet though I've done about as well as you: got a couple of runes once or twice, got to level twenty-something on a small number of occasions. It's easy to get discouraged by looking at the few people who complete 15-runers in 20,000 turns or whatever but you should look instead at the vast numbers of people who die repeatedly on low levels.

If you're like me you keep going because you're improving slowly over time: seeing a little more of the Dungeon, getting a little better, finding new things. You (and I!) will get there eventually.

[dhex]

i have two wins in about five years of playing crawl. there are people who are good at crawl, but their win/lose ratio is still going to be absurd.

[Blade]

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/geodew.html

This guy got to zot:5 in his first-ever game of crawl.

He is not a typical example.

[absolutego]

i can't say anything about that, but i can say there are quite a few guys who win at a 40% rate. and 70% is not unheard of.
hell, i'm pulling about 10% on random characters and i'm not a very good player. it took me a long time to get there though.

[Dustbin]

Don't be stingy with consumables, unless you have conservation half your stuff is likely to end up going mia anyway.

I still splat sometimes trying to save my heal wounds to kill an almost dead guy when I have 10 hp etc.

[eharper256]

Started with 0.8, it took me nearly a year for my first and only win, though this is only 300~ games due to me not having a huge amount of time to dedicate to just playing Crawl. I did get to Lair 4 with my very first character, before finding a 7 headed Hydra on low health with a slashing weapon and yaks closing behind me.

Generally, though, if I can get a character to survive as far as Temple, they're nearly guaranteed to pick up at least 1 rune before an untimely demise.

Alot of playing Crawl is learning to ditch bad habits from other games: ditching the 'I can take it!' mentality, and the urge to be a packrat and horde items.

I also play lots of different race/background combos and tend to deliberately avoid 'easy' choices, though. I have never, for instance, played a SpVM or MiBE and won't, since I like winning with less played (if viable) selections; and I always come up with backstory, however small and vapid, for each dungeon delver I use~ makes me more emotionally attached and hence less likely to do stupid things with them.

[hayenne]

I played 2.5 months before I got my first win (SpEn), but I heavily used Crawl knowledge base - checked all the monsters I see - and wiki (it was relevant back in 0.4.5 days).

Depending on your play style - if you don't mind spoiling Crawl surprises - you might perform better if you read the knowledge base and be very careful.

Don't play tired, Crawl does not forgive that and will kill you.

Overconfidence is also a major death cause.

[Yet Another Stupid Noob]

boredom/inattentive playing is probably the second biggest cause of death after overconfidence.

Since I tend to play in the evenings to relax after work, most of my characters tend to die pretty early. My win percentage is sub single percent. (2 wins in about 1000 games)