Rework/Remove Labyrinths (or at least remove map rot)

[HardboiledGargoyle]

Recently, I prepared a list of things I believe should be changed in Crawl

Please post that, it will be a blast to read.

[TeshiAlair]

Another idea:

Labyrinths add power at the cost of "some players don't want to do the thing that gives them power"

What about a hybrid portal vault? Like, two spawn next to each other, and you pick one to go in. Maybe like "Arena/Labyrinth" where the arena is a series of increasingly difficult 1 on 1 fights culminating in a minotaur fight or something. This way, the net power available in the game isn't reduced (sorry duvessa) but players who find labyrinths fun as hell don't have to lose a feature that they enjoy because some people hate them and feel obligated to do them.

[Quazifuji]

What about a hybrid portal vault? Like, two spawn next to each other, and you pick one to go in. Maybe like "Arena/Labyrinth" where the arena is a series of increasingly difficult 1 on 1 fights culminating in a minotaur fight or something. This way, the net power available in the game isn't reduced (sorry duvessa) but players who find labyrinths fun as hell don't have to lose a feature that they enjoy because some people hate them and feel obligated to do them.

I like the idea of dual portal vaults overall, but one potential concern with this particular concept: Right now, Labyrinths offer very little danger, outside of the minotaur. An arena with a bunch of fights culminating in the minotaur would probably be more dangerous. So choosing the Labyrinth would essentially mean solving a maze and spending a bit of food to get the same loot with a reduced risk of death. That seems like the obviously optimal choice if your goal is to win, which means the issue of Labyrinths being "tedious but optimal" for players who don't like them would still exist, it would just be not quite as bad.

[andreas]

What about a hybrid portal vault? Like, two spawn next to each other, and you pick one to go in.

Perhaps you could fix the problem of choosing the maze always being better by tweaking the quality of loot of the two options, to keep expected risk to reward ratio similar for the two options.

There's a harder to fix issue with the idea: if it is right that the lab is currently poorly designed from the perspective of the game as a whole, then the problem isn't really solved by adding another, separate option. (Analogously, if ranged combat is badly done right now, it does not fix the problem to point out that you can always play melee instead.) At least many of the people who want to change or remove the lab are contesting that it is badly designed in the context of crawl (not merely saying that they don't like it.) So although adding another option might be nice for players who just don't like doing mazes, and make the game more fun for more people, it's a bit beside the point where the argument is about whether mazes fit into crawl's overall design.

[TeshiAlair]

I think it's an interesting idea for something to be explicitly anti-design (Vampire blood management comes to mind), so long as the anti-design feature is always opt-in. Currently, you always SHOULD do labyrinths, even if you don't like them, but having something that is an optional outlier I think has some benefit.

[yesno]

when i have a weak character with access to speed, i just kite the minotaur and steal the loot. if the labyrinth were much more linear this would be impossible or much more difficult to do.

[lobf]

That's kind of the entire point of the Labyrinth,

what a terrible point

In general I appreciate your contributions to these discussions... but c'mon man, you don't need to be so rude all the time.

[duvessa]

if the point of labyrinths is indeed to go against the game's design philosophy, that is a terrible point. i know it's rude to point out bad things are bad, but i'm comfortable doing it anyway

[eliotn]

What could make the labyrinth an interesting challenge:
1. Remove map rot.
2. Players cannot regenerate health before the minotaur. They also (slowly) start taking damage. But there is a mercy full heal beforehand. This would be a more interesting clock.
3. Multiple branching paths that all eventually will reach the labyrinth (player knows which paths will lead to the minotaur), but with different dangers that can whittle players down. The dangers can be seen in advance, so players must decide what they want to brave to reach the end of the maze. Proceed quickly, the minotaur has all the treasure.

I think the aspect of whittling players down (food clock feels like a bad way to do this) is what makes the idea of the maze so interesting. But it feels more like tedium and a food sink at this point.

[Quazifuji]

As I said in a previous post: I believe right now, solving the labyrinth is about 10% player skill and 90% trial and error/luck. As long as this is the case, I would be very strongly against any change that penalizes the player for taking too long to solve the Labyrinth. If it penalizes the player by reducing the rewards received, then doing the Labyrinth is still optimal, is no less tedious, but even more frustrating because hitting a series of dead ends through bad luck or getting a weird layout would now not only be boring, but also mean you get less loot. If it penalizes the player by potentially killing them, I would simply never enter a Labyrinth, ever, under any circumstances.

Removing map rot would reduce the frustration, but I still don't see how solving the Labyrinth quickly would be skill, rather than trial and error in that case. It would just be less tedious trial and error, because at least you'd never accidentally try the same thing twice. So while I would prefer the removal over map rot over no changes whatsoever, removing map rot would not be enough for me to support the addition of a time penalty.

[TAS2012]

(doesn't make sense to call it a Labyrinth if it's linear)

Actually, that's the technical definition of "labyrinth": a maze with only one path and no branching or loops, also called a unicursal maze. Here's a famous example, the Chartres Labyrinth:


You can't get lost, so it's more about making a cool shape than creating a puzzle. Of course, in modern usage we treat labyrinth as just another word for maze, but it certainly doesn't need renaming.

1. The argument "a labyrinth really should not be branching" doesn't matter in the discussion if "a branching thing called labyrinth should be in Crawl".

2. The original/mythical λαβύρινθος/laburinthos (the one on Crete, created by Daedalus, with Minotaurus, and "won" by Theseus with the help of Ariadne) was certainly branching judging by all the information we have on it. You have probably heard that Theseus used Ariadne's thread to be able to find his way back out. The non-branching versions were very popular at some times in some cultures, but the way you describe the history is plainly not correct. There is a book by Penelope Reed Doob on Ithaca press, The Idea of the Labyrinth, that sorts these things out very nicely, a lot of the Wp Labyrinth article is based on it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth.

So let us just drop that line of argumenttion, mmkay, and get back to what really makes a good labyrinth in Crawl and the pros and cons of its existence.

[TAS2012]

Honestly if there's one change to labyrinths I'd like to see the most, it's to have the minotaur be a more powerful monster which stalks you throughout the maze(if the minotaur loses track of the player+exits field of view, secretly transport the minotaur somewhere nearby just barely out of view) so you have an incentive to find the exit quickly(before you are killed) and something to avoid so it's not just walking down corridors and sometimes fighting a hungry ghost or something.

I really like your "stalking minotaur".

I play labyrinths (in Crawl) now and then and *slightly* like it, I also sometimes do not play them because I do not feel like it (even though I know it might not be the best strategic decision). I feel they are very similar to Sokoban in NetHack: they are both areas that provide gameplay that is vlearly more different to the base gameplay than other branches/portals, and they are both often defended with the arguemnt that you can skip them if you don't want to do them. To be fair, Sokoban has bigger problems than labyrinths, because 1. Sokoban is a spoiler-lookup-trigger (unless you use the dynamic Sokoban generation patches) and 2. it is more out of synch with the rest of the game.

I don't have a big problem with labyrinths in their current form, but they could certainly be improved.

Though I really dislike doing the pretty automatic (90+%) tedious work that is labyrinth solving when it seems it could mostly (90+%) be handled by a Lua script I should rather write. (Yes, I know it is just not in-game character memory maprot but also mapshift going on, there seems to be some confusion here about that, but still it is not really interesting.)
The stalking, and much more threatening, minotaur would be one way to make things more interesting.

[andreas]

1. The argument "a labyrinth really should not be branching" doesn't matter in the discussion if "a branching thing called labyrinth should be in Crawl".

2. The original/mythical λαβύρινθος/laburinthos ....

I think you misconstrued the point of ontoclasm's post, which was not an appeal to tradition to show that a labyrinth should not be branching (i.e., not an ''argument 'a labyrinth really should not be branching''') but meant to defuse the idea that it is inappropriate to call a non-branching structure ''labyrinth.'' His narrow claim about the ''technical definition'' was not meant to show that we should abide by the technical definition (it is obvious that we can always just change the name of the vault, anyway, if really necessary), but to respond to Quazifuji (who I take it was suggesting exactly that linearlizing the vault requires changing the name). Anyway there is no good reason to be sure that the character of the labyrinth in the original labyrinth myth should directly correspond to this feature of the meaning of the word, now.

So let us just drop that line of argumenttion, mmkay ....

More importantly, please don't be condescending.

[TAS2012]

Hi Andreas, I read your post directed to me and was very surprised, in a sad way. I have posted to game developer forums, newsgroups, mailing lists and IRC channels for many years without ever getting my points across so badly. This was a new thing for me, I hope it will not happen again.

(doesn't make sense to call it a Labyrinth if it's linear)

Actually, that's the technical definition of "labyrinth": a maze with only one path and no branching or loops, also called a unicursal maze. Here's a famous example, the Chartres Labyrinth: [...]
You can't get lost, so it's more about making a cool shape than creating a puzzle. Of course, in modern usage we treat labyrinth as just another word for maze, but it certainly doesn't need renaming.

1. The argument "a labyrinth really should not be branching" doesn't matter in the discussion if "a branching thing called labyrinth should be in Crawl".
2. The original/mythical λαβύρινθος/laburinthos ....

I think you misconstrued the point of ontoclasm's post, which was not an appeal to tradition to show that a labyrinth should not be branching (i.e., not an ''argument 'a labyrinth really should not be branching''') but meant to defuse the idea that it is inappropriate to call a non-branching structure ''labyrinth.'' His narrow claim about the ''technical definition'' was not meant to show that we should abide by the technical definition (it is obvious that we can always just change the name of the vault, anyway, if really necessary), but to respond to Quazifuji (who I take it was suggesting exactly that linearlizing the vault requires changing the name). Anyway there is no good reason to be sure that the character of the labyrinth in the original labyrinth myth should directly correspond to this feature of the meaning of the word, now.

As I hope can be construed from my post, my intention was similarly to underline that there is no reason to bring the etymology into the argumentation. I felt that with the strong wording of the post ontoclasm really believed that the "technical definition" of labyrinth is a non-branching maze, and perhaps also other people reading that post, even more so since it was made in argument to a post stating the opposite (which would be more true, in the sense that Crawl's labyrinth seems heavily rooted in the story of the Knossos labyrinth).
To be clearer I guess I could have directed my first point more in the direction of Quazifuji, but I didn't bring the whole quote context with me, and it regrettably came to primarily target ontoclasm instead. I am sorry about that. I am though happy that we (me, you, ontoclasm) all seem to agree that the etymology really doesn't have much place in the game play discussion, which was the message I wanted to communicate.

So let us just drop that line of argumenttion, mmkay ....

More importantly, please don't be condescending.

And here I was apparently unclear again, this was some intended good humor passing by seemingly without getting noticed, sorry about that. There was never any intention to be condescending, not to ontoclasm or anyone else, and to be honest I really don't understand what I did to earn that, even after re-reading. The use of the "mmkay" ending was rather the opposite, intended to portray myself and this whole etymological bikeshedding discussion in the light of the Mr Mackey character who famously uses that phrase while famously no one is interested in what he says - to take the edge of things, like a smiley emoticon could have been used.

English is obviously not my first language so that might be the reason for these misunderstandings?

(I would be more interested in hearing if ontoclasm thinks that I misconstrued the statements or were condescending, the post was after all directed to him/her, but I felt that I had to give you, and possibly others, a response because of the confusion/upset I have unwillingly apparently created.)

[andreas]

In that case I am sorry to have misunderstood you.

[Quazifuji]

And here I was apparently unclear again, this was some intended good humor passing by seemingly without getting noticed, sorry about that. There was never any intention to be condescending, not to ontoclasm or anyone else, and to be honest I really don't understand what I did to earn that, even after re-reading. The use of the "mmkay" ending was rather the opposite, intended to portray myself and this whole etymological bikeshedding discussion in the light of the Mr Mackey character who famously uses that phrase while famously no one is interested in what he says - to take the edge of things, like a smiley emoticon could have been used.

English is obviously not my first language so that might be the reason for these misunderstandings?

Yeah, I think the problem is that, depending on the context and wording, it can be very easy to interpret "mmkay" in a condescending way. Especially when written, it can be very easy to misinterpret it - in a verbal conversation, you can at least make it extremely obvious that you're doing a Mr. Mackey impression. I'm not sure how to explain why a non-Mackey "mmkay" is condescending (maybe I'll have a better explanation when I'm less tired), but it definitely can be.

The other issue is that, while you're correct that adding humor can take the edge off an argument, it can also be used to insult the other person's argument, treating it as something that doesn't warrant an entirely serious response. It wasn't entirely clear that you were trying to make fun of the ridiculousness of your own arguments too here.

Basically, there were just subtle connotations that were extremely easy to misinterpret through text that made your comment come across as condescending. Hopefully that helps you understand what happened.