What are labyrinths for?

[MrMisterMonkey]

labyrinths but good: hells
(even better now that hellbanishment is gone)

[dpeg]

When I read a question like "why is [foo] still in the game?", I ask myself: "Why is [bar] still playing the game?".

Do rhetorical questions demand answers?

minmay: For comparison: Suppose for a moment that someone opened a thread here stating: "Why are minmay's vaults still in the game? They suck and I keep dying in them. All other vaults are better."

[7hm]

Bit strong there dpeg. It's simply a way for minmay to open a discussion.

It's a valid question, if only to validate why labs are in the game.

I think they're an interesting change of pace, and that justifies at least having a conversation for keeping them in the game. I think they could be a MORE interesting change of pace with the addition of some monsters / vaults along the path. Right now they seem very tame, and that's largely tied to the complete randomization. Crawl is random, yes, but the dungeon itself would not be nearly interesting if not for the non-random features and vaults. The lab suffers from that lack, and as a result a logical fix would be to add more vaults would probably correct that. (I would only have you get 1 or 2 vaults if they're actually interesting, but 1-2 per lab would make the choice to enter them far more obvious, especially if there was a large pool of vaults to draw from).

That said, the teleport ending fucking sucks and needs to be removed for the moment. Labs are not fun the way they are now, they're tedious with a decent ending (kinda chellenge, loot). Adding more vaults might make the teleport trap interesting, but right now it just makes you go back through the boring lab a second (or even third) time.

[mageykun]

I'm locking this before things go further downhill. This thread opened with a fairly unhelpful rhetorical opposition of a game feature, and degraded into a personal attacks and further cursing about existing game mechanics in two more posts.

This is not polite or helpful behavior, guys.

If someone wants to have a thoughtful and constructive discussion of labyrinth improvement, that's fine, but just complaining about features you don't like isn't the way to do it.

[danr]

FWIW, I thought minmay's OP had some good points about labs - in their current form they seem to me also to be a feature that "encourages the player to bore themselves." Perhaps we could start a new thread and try to keep it on a very tactful keel.