Okay, here we go.
galehar wrote:I wonder what's the point of posts like this one. It uses exaggeration and broken logic to imply that the devs are stupid and keep making the game worse with bad design decisions. It doesn't contain any actual analysis or even basic reasoning.
I am not saying that this should be moderated. It doesn't break any forum rule, and we don't want to forbid people from saying bad things about the game. My point is that the only effect it has is to drive devs away. Most of us have gained a thick skin and we usually just ignore it. But it's not the case for everyone, and I believe that this kind of attitude is why DracoOmega left.
So, what's the point? I guess the people posting it does so because it makes them feel good. It's quite obvious that it doesn't make anyone else feel good and that it's useless for the game, so they must be doing it for themselves. Probably, it amuses the other cynics and they can thank each others.
I really don't care what you guys think, I'm just asking that you don't litter this forum with your petty bitterness. Keep it to Yiuf, reddit, SA and ##crawl.
Thanks.
And what I wonder is why overt insults are heavily moderated, while posts like this one, containing nothing but bile and hate, get a free pass just because they use back-handed insults and hurtful implications rather than direct statements. You make an entire thread for no reason other than to spew bile about me and accuse me of driving people away, which is of course bullshit because unlike you and dpeg, DracoOmega was overall an awesome dude. And you even include the bonus implication that any place of discussion you don't frequent is equivalent to the literal joke section of YOUR place of discussion. Your arrogance, at least, is worthy of such lofty placement. Meanwhile my post, as I will now endeavor to make clear, had plenty of real, useful content and was firmly grounded in analysis and extensive consideration.
Volteccer_Jack wrote:The goal here is to come up with an idea that sounds terribly overpowered, like cleaving, but is in actual practice usually useless, like cleaving.
This is because anything that is actually useful becomes terribly overpowered as soon as monsters get a hold of it.
Note that these first two sentences contain no personal opinions on my part. They are simply description of the current situation. If you think I am being cynical or that I don't like cleaving, you are projecting your own bias onto my words. When I played Crawl, I liked cleaving quite a bit, even if my preference was usually to not use it. The only change I would make would be to revert the unnecessary and in any case overly harsh Damage nerf Axes received, which was the real reason I largely stopped using Axes.
It is certainly unfortunate that cleaving is useless most of the time (except for the purpose earning a better turncount/score, but scoring mechanics in an intentionally random game don't interest me), but it is something we have to accept as long as monsters are allowed to have the same abilities. Anything strong enough to be properly useful will be overpowered in monster hands. There's no way around this fact. Monsters just have too many advantages and shortcuts and cheats and come in too many varieties. Anything really properly good will find a way to be dumb and overpowered when given to monsters (reaching has several good examples already). And I'm not saying monsters shouldn't get those abilities either - it absolutely benefits the game in some respects - but it comes with the cost that weapon abilities must be very weak.
Likewise, I believe it is a very good thing for abilities to look and sound overpowered. Being flashy and cool has little cost or downside, and makes these abilities much more attractive to players who might otherwise not spend much time with them, TSO's bitchin' halo being a prime example. Nothing cynical happening here, quite the opposite. It's one the things Crawl generally does well, to the point that if you don't like it, I would wager you don't like Crawl very much.
This way players can still delude themselves with feelings of badassitude as they cleave away at the mobs of rats until any kind of actual threat walks into view (at which point go back to standard tactics of obsessively refusing to engage more than one target at a time).
I imagine this maybe hurt somebody's little feelings but "delude" is the correct word to use in that sentence to get the idea across. And "obsessively refusing to engage more than one target" is one the fundamental rules you must follow in order to reliably succeed at crawl. Harsh truths, I suppose.
Reaching by the way, fails at basically every criteria ever given for weapon effects, and only remains as-is because changing something would mean an admittance of failure, either in the design of reaching or the design of the aforementioned criteria.
This remark was admittedly snappy, but only because it was a direct response to dpeg and galehar, who were, as usual, being extremely defensive and answering the concerns within the thread with politicking non-answers like "We adapted autofight to make it work, so it's acceptable" (why can't you do whatever that vague answer is supposed to mean for other abilities?). It's one thing to gloss over or simplify a complicated situation, but answers like that - vague noncommittal phrases that nevertheless assume a tone of finality - are clearly not designed to encourage or enliven discussion.
Toxic feedback goes both ways.Reaching, like summoning and pacification, is an absolute failure. All three are obviously overpowered to anyone with an understanding of crawl mechanics, and all are "balanced" only by the fact that, when used heavily over the course the game, they are incredibly annoying and unfun. That's a simple objective description of the situation. Not trying to be hurtful to anybody, but that's the situation and if the devs continue to ignore it, then it will continue to be an awful situation.
Here's me being hurtful:
If you want me to call the devs stupid, I'll point out that recent "nerfs" to summoning and pacification have had virtually no effect whatsoever on the fundamental problems with summoning and pacification (so that they remain very nearly as overpowered as ever) and by far the most noticeable effect of these "nerfs" is to make summoning and pacification EVEN MORE annoying and unfun. And since these changes have not been reverted, I will then draw the rather unkind conclusion that either A) it is the intention of the devs to balance overpowered mechanics by making them tedious and annoying and generally awful to use, or B) the devs value balance much more highly than fun and basic playability.
galehar wrote:VJ's posts are systematically contentless, outright insulting or just cynical.
My posts are some of the most consistently content-full in this forum. Compare to clowns like yourself and Xuaxua who are happy to fill thread after thread with meaningless unhelpful crap. And for the record, describing a flawed situation as flawed is not cynical, it is honest. I don't know how you can expect to improve the game if you refuse to take its problems seriously.
dpeg wrote:On "it makes good people leave". We had a dev leave because of abuse.
How come only the good devs leave because of abuse?
MarvinPA suggested a ban from GDD. That sounds like a good idea to me, and I've already set up the group. Volteccer_Jack is likely to have the honour to be the first member of this new group.
As long as folks like dpeg are exempt from the group, it will not substantively improve the quality of discussion. Meanwhile I don't even play Crawl at the moment, and won't play it again as long as mimics are allowed to waste the player's time, so I have literally no reason to even post here other than the intellectual pursuit of making a hypothetical roguelike that is better than another hypothetical roguelike. The idea that banning me would be an improvement is therefore amusing to me, but apparently you are pretty worked up so maybe it will prevent a nervous breakdown or something.
Wednesday, 15th January 2014, 14:32 
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