Thursday, 15th September 2016, 13:30 by Implojin
A question to anyone in this thread who prefers the existing behavior of displaying the level where you originally picked up the hide:
Why?
There are only a few use cases that I can think of where displaying pickup location is interesting to the player:
1) You're autoexploring, and autopickup grabs something without you noticing. You check your inventory later, and are like "Woah, where did this come from?"
2) You got something from ?acquirement or as a god gift. People love to bash on the -2, -2 club of Okawaru's Attic (gifted to you in level 27 of the Dungeon).
3) You picked up something neat like a fixedart, a randart, or a particularly terrible randart. See above.
Have I forgotten something? Is there another case where players like to see where their items came from?
To me, under these conditions, displaying pickup location of hides seems pointless to begin with. They aren't particularly interesting items -- they're just mundane drops from any of the plethora of dragons or trolls that you encounter by late midgame. There is precedent here in Crawl's code; it doesn't show the pickup location of every potion or sling bullet or +0 hat. Are hides rare enough drops that they are standing out in players' minds as a milestone event within a game?
TLA/*DA is slightly different: If you've found or crafted an early hide armour, it might feel interesting to have that noted on the item. At least for this case, players might be viewing the armour with some excitement, similar to an early acquirement or god gift. To my mind, the OP's suggestion seemed pretty straightforward.
Evidently my interpretation doesn't follow the sentiment expressed in this thread, though, hence my question: What do people get out of seeing the pickup location listed on hides?
(As PF has said, this is a pretty unimportant issue. I'm just surprised to see defense of the existing behavior!)