VeryAngryFelid wrote:Our brain cannot easily differentiate ******** from **********
dowan wrote:why are we forcing players to count the !!!!!
As dpeg said, I don't think anyone expected players to count !s and then use that as a crude numeric comparison. The increasing numbers of !s is, as I understand it, simply an unobtrusive way to say, "hey, you hit that monster really hard just now!" As for number of pips in AC/EV displays, humans are bad at counting a long sequence, but are fine at counting short sequences. *** *** ** is really easy to count. We should just add some breaks to the display to make them easier to count. Again, the point isn't perfect accuracy, but instead to let players go "huh, that's a lot of pips. That one must have lots of AC."
Hurkyl wrote:How much science is behind this? While I recognize the noble intent, my impression of the actual execution is that obfuscation is done for the sake of having obfuscation rather than being tuned for usefulness -- and the quality of the result judged by people who don't really care about having the information presented to them.
VeryAngryFelid wrote:please remove knowledge bots and close source on monster data. otherwise how do we know that if many good players check ac, ev and damage out of game?
VeryAngryFelid wrote:This is root cause of the problem IMHO. All devs have easy access to monster data, they know all those monster AC/EV/HP/damage/spell damage etc. That's why I suggested to remove that access, add some new monsters and see how you will like fighting it knowing nothing about its damage and not that much about AC/EV (in stable it would be even worse because average HP is not shown). You should try playing like you are unspoiled player, stop using beem/knowledge bots etc.
VeryAngryFelid wrote:Nothing currently stops the same players from saying "use knowledge bots to check monsters and fsim to check weaposn". And the most funny thing is that some players are grateful for such advices (I remember one such thread recently).
There are some pretty inaccurate (and, to me, strange) assumptions here: That devs have more information about monster stats because they are devs than other players, and that we design the game around the assumption that others should have the same level of knowledge. This is just not true. First, any player has the option of getting perfect info about monster stats from out-of-game sources, not just devs. Second, at least two devs in this thread (dpeg and I) really don't use out-of-game monster stats and haven't memorized many if any monster stats.
I have used the knowledge bots a few times in game over the many years I've been playing, but doing so taught me that it almost never gives me info I needed that I couldn't have figured out myself, except during the periods where certain monster characteristics weren't well-documented in-game. I also don't have many monsters' stats memorized. I'm pretty sure the only monster stats I know precisely offhand are 1) hydras have 0 AC; 2) death yaks hit for 30 and yaks for 20; 3) stone giants can deal 45 in melee and 65 with a thrown rock; 4) juggernauts attack for 90 and 30 (because I worked on them recently). I don't think I know with any degree of certainty any other monster damages, AC, EV, HP, etc. And it turns out that that is just fine. I have a ballpark idea of how dangerous and tough the involved monsters are based on having had encounters with them before, and that is more than enough to make good decisions. I play in sudden-death challenges like CDSC and dieselrobin, and when I do I'm no more likely to seek out monster data than normal.
Really, playing well has almost nothing to do with knowing any exact monster stats. It has a lot more to do with mastering basic tactics, being able to predict how a situation will develop, having an escape plan, and leveraging all your resources creatively as needed.
One could raise the argument that this is well and good for very experienced players and it screws over new players, and there's some truth to that. But that's more or less how crawl is intended to work. And, more importantly, that's about equally true whether you have the numbers or not. Looking at xv and seeing "this monster has a fair amount of AC" gives a new player just as much to work with as checking a knowledge bot and seeing "this monster has 15 AC". Both have very little context until you have the experience of fighting a monster with that much AC in a variety of conditions.
Imagine if there were some resource in-game that could tell you either a monster's accurate stat or a wildly wrong one: "this monster has 0 or 10 AC". I would have no difficulty telling which one was accurate using only in-game feedback. Wouldn't you?
As for the science behind this, this discussion isn't about science. It's about user experience, and how to present information to a player in the ideal way to allow them to best interact with the game. AFAIK, no one is obscuring the numbers just for the sake of obscuring them. The question is "what's the best thing to display for the quality of the game experience?" I'm sure there's room to improve, but I'm also sure that it doesn't mean displaying every number a player might think to ask about.
Experienced players may well suggest that fsim and knowledge bots are the correct way to learn about the game, and new players may well be grateful for the advice, but that's not evidence for anything except that some experienced players feel that knowing certain numbers helps them, and some new players are grateful to hear an experienced voice tell them that once they know the numbers their problems will go away. The knowledge bots are a useful tool, but IMO not because they're giving specific monster numbers for use in live play. fsim is a great testing tool for devs making potentially balance-affecting changes, but my experience is that it isn't at all necessary to play at a top level.
HardBoiledGargoyle wrote:For a long time I thought that giant frogs are tougher than spiny frogs!
VeryAngryFelid wrote:One of my recent deaths was a death to Snorg, I didn't expect to lose 72 HP in a single attack.
There are a lot of specific examples in this thread, and in general my response is going to be that it's easy to cherry-pick a specific moment and say that yes, at that moment if you knew that a monster could do exactly fatal damage to you, you might blink instead of walking away. However, it's usually correct to blink away in those circumstances anyway; randomized energy, a wandering monster, or any number of other things could finish you off if you let a monster hit you down to extremely low HP. Good play involves trying to avoid going below a significant fraction of your max hp.
For example, a player can easily see that Snorg hits 3x/turn, that normal trolls can do considerable damage, and that berserk monsters do extra damage and can act twice per player action. You look up all the numbers of monsters, and somehow they made you feel it was safe to stand next to berserk Snorg, even though it's not. Giving you more numbers wouldn't have helped, but reminding you that berserk shit is scary probably would have.
As for the giant frog/spiny frog thing, I'm not sure what to make of that.
HardBoiledGargoyle wrote:Lasty wrote:Uncertainty changes your experience of the game
We have uncertainty from random rolls - is it insufficient? What, we want uncertainty from ignorance too? If so, shouldn't we deprive the player of the feedback/information rhat we so generously bequeath? Hide resists, hide pips, let them figure it out.
Uncertainty from ignorance isn't a bad mechanic in some games -- survival horror games tend to trade heavily on it. But no, crawl isn't trying to use uncertainty-from-ignorance, except the standard ignorance-of-what-rolls-will-happen and -what-the-future-holds. That said, knowing the specific values for a lot of things changes your attitudes towards them, even if you can't meaningfully leverage those values. It gives a feeling of control even in the absence of control. I think that the absence of that feeling of control is a happy side-effect of displaying the most useful amount of information in crawl.