crate wrote:apparently a design goal is to have all the monsters in the game able to appear anywhere in the game
there's no other reasonable explanation for adding snake monsters to depths
News to me. I like empty disparaging of irresponsible dev principles and open declaration of bad design trends as much as the next cynic, but come on, letting particularly bad recent trends being an excuse of depression for being inaccurate ruins the lofty authority that makes the toxicity towards never improving the game work as a position in the first place.
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Raiju and the abyss guests were both meant to cut into the commonness of two strategic-damage Abyss demons (neqoxec mutations and smoke demon sticky flame), both very easily arguably good designs for the endless, malformed terrain of the Abyss but clearly so unbearable that several months of brokenness (indiscriminate choices of any branch's floor spawn produce things like Lair chaff or excessively dangerous things like vault sentinels / ironbrand convokers and, yes, for a brief period, orbs of fire) were acceptable up until this point in comparsion. Even at 1/9 chance of guest choice per spawn, the potentially much higher chance of bands from other branches make it feel higher, and it explodes upwards when abyss shifts change the set without killing wandering monsters and produce a messy slew of random other monsters. Some pithy comment about karma would work here.
I've been doing
some patches to address both this and abyss depth-scaling through heavy monster set tweaks, have
another in the works, and even have a
long write-up of a proposal (scroll down to "worldbinders") to preserve the variety and flavour of abyss guests while cutting into demons and actually looking for balance via a new monster that's been approved by several devs (not that I have the knowledge needed to code that last one myself). These, alongside some more subtle things (generate_awake shapeshifters in Abyss are very naughty, really) were meant to provide an alternative solution, not that the monster set changes are particularly visible with the current scenario, and if the last of these was done some devs have agreed it'd be enough to revert the abyss guests feature (again, not that I have knowledge of preserving save compatibility myself). Of course, this is clearly just as terrible in replacing some autofight-fodder with a long list of non-Abyss monsters, and introducing a non-lethal, complex summoner, so the community echo chambers can brush off my efforts as slightly-less-insane bits of ruination and move on to complaining about other things (like banishment itself or whatever).
(Also, there's a trivial possible change that could be done to sticky flame to make abyss smoke demons more palatable in reducing the pointlessly-high item destruction rate chance from
12% (yes, plenty of arguments can be made over making it 0%), but the last time item destruction itself was addressed the forums here exploded into a frenzy that thought it could actively change development by arguing itself into pieces, so whatever.)
Monday, 6th January 2014, 17:32 
