KoboldLord wrote:galehar wrote:I hate scaling difficulty with player XL. That's very meta-gamey and uninteresting. Scaling over time spent in the abyss is much better. If you're abyssed too often early on, then you're screwed. And you should be, or else, what's the point of the Abyss?
While I can certainly see your point, character level is a whole lot more likely to be relevant from a gameplay perspective than time spent. What happens if I don't get Abyssed during the course of my game? Do I have to grind through thousands of turns worth of newbie Abyss before I can reach the point where the Rune starts spawning? I don't think 'not metagamey' should trump 'fun' in the hierarchy of desirable gameplay qualities.
Making Abyss' difficulty based on Character Level, in addition to being metagamey (and probably hard to explain in a way that doesn't make the player aware of the metagameness of it), would have a rather annoying side effect -> Abyss would be more punishing for fast levelling races. This would probably create all kinds of purely spoiled behaviour based on the fact that you don't want to get banished more if you are a human than a demigod. Even if it was a marginal effect it would make the game less fun for at least some of the more paranoid players (which might not be a small subset of the playerbase, roguelikes breed paranoia
).
Instead, to be fair for all races, the function of Abyss' difficulty could be based on both time spent in the Abyss and time spent in the whole game. Perhaps time spent in the game could only have influence on the acceleration rate of difficulty in the Abyss, so if you get Abyssed late and don't want the rune, you can get out without too much trouble, but if you linger in the Abyss, things get interesting fast. Another option would be to scale the potential threats according to time spent in the abyss and the density of them according to time spent in game or the other way around (e.g. if you get banished early once you'll see just imps and stuff; if more times, you'll get an executor or two; if you get banished for the first time in the late game, you'll see mostly imps at the beginning, but once you stay too long, it's all executors). Perhaps an even more sophisticated function is needed to tailor the Abyss to all needs, but this is an issue which is complex and probably requires a complex answer.