The Tavern

Roughly 10% of Crawl's online players use CKR, the Korean crawl server. I don't know how many of those players are actually Korean, but I think it's reasonable to assume it's a significant fraction. Normally we don't hear much from them - mainly due to the language barrier, there's not much communication between the Korean- and English-speaking crawl players.

One of my friends does Korean-English translation professionally. A few days ago, I asked him to go to a Korean roguelike forum and post a few feedback questions, and then translate the results. He very kindly did so (please give him your thanks!), and just finished the translation earlier tonight.

The results are here. I figured they might be interesting to some of the people who post here!

Feedback trends:

Many of the players (perhaps half of those who responded) have concerns that the game is being overly simplified. The listed reasons for their concern vary - jewellery auto-ID, weightless, and the removal of item destruction tend to feature in some combination.
There seems to be a consensus that the Demigod race is very boring - not weak, but boring.
Similarly, there's widespread agreement that Poison magic needs to have late-game utility.
Rspondents felt that the composition of extended branches (Pandemonium/Hell) had unfortunate effects on balance, making certain gods (e.g. Fedhas) very weak, others (TSO) quite strong, and generally making the game more boring through 'demonspam'/'tormentspam'.
Multiple players requested more 'multiplayer content'.
Reasons given for play seem to range across the typical gamut - from players trying to speedrun, or to win a wide variety of characters, or simply to win at all. Speedrunners, unsurprisingly, made up a small fraction of the respondents.
Several respondents seemed to think that western players/developers were obsessed with speedrunning, which is... kind of ironic.
Only a small fraction of respondents seemed to have any opinion on Beogh, though that may have in part been caused by the restrictive way in which the feedback question was posed. Feeling on recent beogh changes seemed to be roughly evenly mixed.

Other notable responses:

Player "크롤러" ("Crawler") reported a truly remarkable bug - when saving & loading in Pan, divine companions (from Beogh or Yred, or mercenaries that you acquired while following them) vanish & reappear fully healed when recalled. This has apparently been in the game for nearly a year and a half (added as an accidental byproduct of a fix for a beogh/yred follower cloning bug, amusingly), and no one here noticed. It's fixed in trunk now, but wow!
One respondent described crawl's support for foreign languages as being in 'valvetime'. (If only, alas. )
Vp apparently translates into Korean as "dracula", which is fantastic.

And more stuff that I didn't excerpt here, of course.

I'm going to bed now, but I'll put up a response (to be translated back to them) tomorrow.

Huh. I'll agree with them on demigods, they're basically humans minus gods, and humans are already kinda boring. Whatever happened to that abstract worshipers thing that was being cooked up a while back?

If you think humans are boring then you might actually just dislike crawl

I think I am Korean and I didn't know

These responses could pass as having been culled from the SA forums. I guess English-speaking and Korean-speaking players have a lot in common.

That said, I don't know how immediately useful a quick poll like this is going to prove to be. Poison magic being bad in the post-endgame has always been a topic of discussion, even though poison has just as many or more good level 7+ spells than almost all of the other magic skills. Misperceptions like Necromutation/Fire Storm being a good build are probably always going to be common, but unfortunately I can't think of anything useful that they tell us. Mummy complains, demigod complaints, etc. Recent Change X means the game is Ruined Forever. This proves that many complaints have a very wide basis of support, I suppose.

Code:: [16:25:50] <Bloax> I can attest that flaying is much more interesting than torment. [16:26:36] <Bloax> it does pretty much the same thing as torment except it rewards you for killing the root of the problem

Just tell them to comment out the crap they don't like and recompile. It's what I do.

I just changed Beogh's gifting ability to let me do it as many times as I want to my orcs (and not just the named ones). I also agree that torment sucks and poison should be more viable in the late game. It's an interesting read, Fungus.

msot of the stuff they said is pretty common around here.
" Playing as Demigod is boring. It should be fixed, somehow"
"As far as I know ants are supposed to have 4 arms but I don’t get why you can’t equip two sets of gloves or four rings.
You can re-add the weakness to poison you removedbut I really want that to be applied to the game.
I’m also disappointed that they don’t get poison fangs but they would be OP so I accept it."
I think I had a deja vu

fwiw I think torment is a most excellent monster ability, though it is possibly overused in the parts of the game where it exists (and is underused in 3 rune games)

crate wrote:fwiw I think torment is a most excellent monster ability, though it is possibly overused in the parts of the game where it exists (and is underused in 3 rune games)

That's a fair assessment. I agree on all points.

i think torment is a lot better than flay tbh, since you can actually figure out how much damage it does and also it's on good monsters instead of a bad, useless one

what makes flaying ghosts bad, and tormenting monsters good?

flayed ghosts are harmless and a lot of tormenting monsters (fiends, mainly) are a lot less harmless

Would flay be a decent ability on a non-useless monster?

well I also think it's redundant with torment

It's not redundant with torment since unlike torment you can actually get your HP back if you focus on killing the monster that flayed you in the first place.
The more interesting part is that this monster doesn't have to be otherwise harmless nor does it have to be easy to get to.

Which I think is more interesting than "oh hey i just halved your current hp! ~ enjoy ~ resting that up if you survive the fight, chum" on regular encounters.

Another trend seems to be that they think 15 runes is part of the game, rather than the "some silly self-flagellation thing" attitude that seems to be prevalent here.

Many of the players (perhaps half of those who responded) have concerns that the game is being overly simplified. The listed reasons for their concern vary - jewellery auto-ID, weightless, and the removal of item destruction tend to feature in some combination.

Fully agree...

Well at least the great Korean Beogh mystery is resolved - a subcommunity of players found exploits in Beogh, and exploited the heck out of it! So it's not a Korean thing, just a very human thing. Though probably the language barrier kept it from being fixed for longer than it should.

PleasingFungus wrote:Several respondents seemed to think that western players/developers were obsessed with speedrunning, which is... kind of ironic.

I think there was only one respondent who said something like this, and the context makes me think he's conflating anti-tedium measures with "speedrunning". Here's the quote:

5. Recently the game focuses too much on speedruns and combat and to me it’s disappointing. It seems the Western playstyle loves speedruns. And removing everything annoying and making players focus on combat seems like good intentions, but too much and the game becomes chess without knights/bishops.

But I agree that most of the comments are similar to stuff that can be found in Tavern. But thanks PF, and to your translator friend, for going to all that effort.

Wow, a lot of the exact stuff that people complain about on the english forums. I guess there's no korean duvessa to make a one liner shutting them down every time they dare make such complaints.

Oh well I'll give the responses we hear on these forums, maybe someone can let them know why their feedback is wrong, just like the majority of players here:

There seems to be a consensus that the Demigod race is very boring - not weak, but boring. - Tavern Response: Less options = more interesting. More vanilla = more interesting
Similarly, there's widespread agreement that Poison magic needs to have late-game utility. - Tavern Response: Well other spell schools already have late game utility. Making things the same = less interesting.
Rspondents felt that the composition of extended branches (Pandemonium/Hell) had unfortunate effects on balance, making certain gods (e.g. Fedhas) very weak, others (TSO) quite strong, and generally making the game more boring through 'demonspam'/'tormentspam'. Tavern Response: extended doesn't count.

Reasons given for play seem to range across the typical gamut - from players trying to speedrun, or to win a wide variety of characters, or simply to win at all. Speedrunners, unsurprisingly, made up a small fraction of the respondents. - Tavern Response: Win% is the only right answer, people playing for other reasons are wrong.

I don't think many people disagree with the idea that extended has issues, it's just that working hard to fix them for tiny percentage of players/games that go there doesn't make much sense when there's stuff earlier in the game to improve that will affect a lot players.

damiac wrote:There seems to be a consensus that the Demigod race is very boring - not weak, but boring. - Tavern Response: Less options = more interesting. More vanilla = more interesting

There is no shortage of Tavern people who think that demigods are relatively boring. Not felid-level boring, but more boring than median, sure.

damiac wrote:Similarly, there's widespread agreement that Poison magic needs to have late-game utility. - Tavern Response: Well other spell schools already have late game utility. Making things the same = less interesting.

Poison magic is strong all the way through Zot. Poisonous Cloud and Poison Arrow might not be Ziggurat fare, but there's loads of stuff for Poison Arrow to kill even in Hell and Pan. It's really good, and it's stupid-good in Vaults and Depths. If Poison Arrow drops early enough, I'll often pick up 10-12 level of poison magic on a completely unrelated elementalist just so I can one-shot every single really annoying type of enemy in the late game.

damiac wrote:Rspondents felt that the composition of extended branches (Pandemonium/Hell) had unfortunate effects on balance, making certain gods (e.g. Fedhas) very weak, others (TSO) quite strong, and generally making the game more boring through 'demonspam'/'tormentspam'. Tavern Response: extended doesn't count.

I think the post-endgame imbalance is well-documented by this point, and as far as I know nobody is seriously challenging it. Fixing it would be really hard, though, and it would benefit only the 5% or so of the playerbase that can actually reach that point in the game. I am willing to respect the devteam's decision to concentrate their resources on the parts of the game that more people actually play. Given infinite devteam-hours, I'm sure the post-endgame could be improved quite a lot, but that's a rather demanding expectation considering that we don't actually pay them anything.

Damage comparable to LCS with almost double the range for 2 spell levels less? Sounds pretty lame to me

it's shit vs Cerebov so it's shit

Looks like a lot of the same stuff as you see elsewhere, particularly the misplaced idea that a roguelike's primary focus should be on flavor/roleplaying and not mechanics.

But please, not so mechanical. In version 0.20 I don't want to win just holding the auto-play button (in fact if wasn't for the stairs, one could already do that).

giovform wrote:But please, not so mechanical. In version 0.20 I don't want to win just holding the auto-play button (in fact if wasn't for the stairs, one could already do that).

I don't think you understand my post. Focusing on flavor/roleplaying often leads to bad/stupid/annoying mechanics, fitting flavor around good mechanics is much better. Many complaints here, on this Korean site, and elsewhere don't understand this difference and just want flavor without thinking about the mechanics.

I understood perfectly. There are too many constraints here on what is considered to be a good mechanic, then it is very difficult to fit flavor in the game.

But new mechanics are being added all the time... Just a few examples from recent versions include transient mutations (wretched stars), flaying (flayed ghosts), marking (vault sentinels/alarm traps), shadow step and shadow mimic (Dith), jump attacks (felids)... and I could go on. Not even to mention the numerous adaptations of pre-existing mechanics; for example, Formicid digging.

Meanwhile we've lost things like nausea, permanent summons, item destruction, and item weight. In my opinion the developers have done an excellent job of weeding out the mechanics that contribute the most to player aggravation. So while you can make the subjective argument that the new mechanics are worse or less fun than the removed mechanics, it is just plain wrong to say that the trend in Crawl recently is simplification and mechanic removal. That's just short-sighted and incorrect.

Leafsnail wrote:Damage comparable to LCS with almost double the range for 2 spell levels less? Sounds pretty lame to me

Because poison immunity isn't a thing, especially late game, and 30% = 100%.
But perhaps we mean different things by 'late game'. I'm thinking OOFs and demons, maybe you're thinking of draconians and such. Both are reasonably valid 'late game' threats, my complaint about poison is that it's largely useless in extended, and also pretty useless against the biggest 3 runer threats, OOFs and Aliches.

Poison is awesome against non-poison immune enemies though. Maybe that makes it ok, I just hate having something I spent XP on turn useless later in the game, and I always plan to go for extended, so to me, poison will be useless eventually, so I don't want to waste XP on it. I suppose there's a place for a skill that's hugely useful early, and largely useless later on, but it does mean it's a skill I"ll probably never use.

The biggest 3 rune threats are kobolds, but you probably won't have PArrow when those are still threatening.

...mechanics that contribute the most to player aggravation.

- I disagree with you right here. "I want to play the game, and fast! What is holding my travel screen??? Damn menu..."

giovform wrote:
...mechanics that contribute the most to player aggravation.
- I disagree with you right here. "I want to play the game, and fast! What is holding my travel screen??? Damn menu..."

Players want to be "fast" in that they want to skip useless, tedious things like manual traveling/exploration or retreating from los to drop scrolls every time a fire drake comes into view. That's because these things are not interesting, meaningful decisions and yet they occupy a lot of the player's time. People don't enjoy autotravel or autofight, they just significantly truncate even worse parts of the game

If you think the game is very easy to automate now and everything is very by the numbers, then it shouldn't be very hard to win with high consistency. Yet winrates have not been spiking, and many experienced players feel the game has gotten generally more difficult...

That's just where I see the number of useless fights and the excessive number of useless levels is a problem.

The game sometimes gets boring because it is tedious to have to fight and explore a lot to see new things and char improvements (we want to see things going), while having to stop to deal with mini-games. Maybe if the game were reduced in fights and levels, the mini-games would be fun again (and the playing time would still be just the same).

The item dropping takes a while, and makes you vulnerable while doing it - this could be balanced to drastically reduce the advantage of dropping items instead of fighting, by for example making noise while dropping the items on the ground, calling the attention of the drake.

Auto-explore and auto-fight are just remedies to the problem mentioned above.

No, I don't think that exploring the dungeon and fighting fantastic beasts is more boring than picking stuff up and putting other stuff down, or running back and forth through empty corridors to carry exactly the right number of items. If Crawl is so screwed up that exploration and combat is less fun than inventory management, it's probably better to scrap the whole thing and play some other game.

I don't think this is the case, and I cannot see eye-to-eye with anyone who does.

KoboldLord wrote:...poison has just as many or more good level 7+ spells than almost all of the other magic skills.

Um. What?
I don't think Poison magic has *any* spells above level 6. I think Poison Arrow is basically the best it gets (which isn't bad, but it's not going to help you kill demons or undead).

KoboldLord wrote:No, I don't think that exploring the dungeon and fighting fantastic beasts is more boring than picking stuff up and putting other stuff down, or running back and forth through empty corridors to carry exactly the right number of items. If Crawl is so screwed up that exploration and combat is less fun than inventory management, it's probably better to scrap the whole thing and play some other game.

I don't think this is the case, and I cannot see eye-to-eye with anyone who does.

With all the respect but we better then turn it to first person view, real time, add a gun sight and change the name to Dungeon Destruction.

Edit:

To be constructive: I don't see combat and exploration as less fun, but there's just too much of the former that is just trivial (and the game is adjusting to this, not the opposite).

spudwalt wrote:Um. What?
I don't think Poison magic has *any* spells above level 6. I think Poison Arrow is basically the best it gets (which isn't bad, but it's not going to help you kill demons or undead).

Ah, crud. I guess I have to explain the joke. Almost no level 7+ spells are worth the xp it costs to make them usable, and zero spells is 'as many as' the number of good level 7+ spells in most other magic skills because those numbers are also zero.

Poison Arrow still kills executioners, hellions, and neqoxecs just fine. You can't mash ` on Poison Arrow there like you could through Vaults and Depths, but it can still be useful depending on where your build went with all the free Vaults and Depths xp.

I fully understand the complaints against level 7/8/9 spells, and my last mage never cast anything higher than level 7 (controlled blink, spellforged serviator - and actually casting these was rare - 23 and 19 times respectively). I passed up the chance to memorize fire storm, primarily because I wasn't that into fire, and I was a spriggan. If I was a deep elf, I probably would learn firestorm, but that aside, I understand the complaint that firestorm isn't that good of a spell.

It's still a good idea to have a similar high end poison spell, in the level 8/9 range, and probably aoe. It doesn't have to be aoe in the sense that it's a storm spell, but something that can hit more than 1 target somehow. A well designed spell in this area would only benefit the game. The critically hard part is making a well designed poison spell, tough because of how it has to interact with mobs which are poison immune, and the limited design space of poison. I have no answers for that one. I could throw out rough ideas, which have been suggested in the past, but I don't think they'd gain any traction. I think the best bet is going to be a multi-targetted spell like dazzling spray, which hits 2-4ish targets for high damage, and still does 50-60% damage to poison resist/immune mobs. I guess the actual design of it would be somewhat offtopic here; but something like that should exist one day.

I also think there should be a high level transmutations which is defensively focused, which is currently somewhat lacking. Statue form is close, but it's pretty narrowly useful for only some builds, comes with slow, etc. Necromutation is generally terrible, and dragon form is all out offense. Something that is the blade hands equivalent for your defenses would be wonderful, imho.

Anyways, enough dreaming for now. You've left the truly burning question unanswered, though: do Koreans like Chei? Can they endlessly argue over unarmed vs weapons?

giovform wrote:
...mechanics that contribute the most to player aggravation.
- I disagree with you right here. "I want to play the game, and fast! What is holding my travel screen??? Damn menu..."

I respect your disagreement, and it seems clear that you and I enjoy Crawl in different ways. The thing I love most about Crawl is its stated goal of reducing tedious player behavior (thus, no grinding or farming or etc.). I think most "simplifications" are in line with this philosophy.

My favorite way of thinking about content removals is the following: If the game never had {feature} and someone made a proposal to add it to the game, could you justify the addition (i.e., is it in-line with the stated design goals)?

To me, in 99% of the cases where a feature is removed, the answer to that question is "No".

WalkerBoh wrote:
giovform wrote:
...mechanics that contribute the most to player aggravation.
- I disagree with you right here. "I want to play the game, and fast! What is holding my travel screen??? Damn menu..."

I respect your disagreement, and it seems clear that you and I enjoy Crawl in different ways. The thing I love most about Crawl is its stated goal of reducing tedious player behavior (thus, no grinding or farming or etc.). I think most "simplifications" are in line with this philosophy.

My favorite way of thinking about content removals is the following: If the game never had {feature} and someone made a proposal to add it to the game, could you justify the addition (i.e., is it in-line with the stated design goals)?

To me, in 99% of the cases where a feature is removed, the answer to that question is "No".

Oh well, I think I was not very clear.. for me the tedious player behavior is just showing more right now on these later releases. Playing mages are still fun (as for example I have to worry about which spells to memorize, and fight with a combination of them - that is, until someone decides it is boring too - a kind of spell weightlessness), but fighters, bleh... my macro was: p+Tab+o and playing basically just doing this, for me is.... boring. When there where other little things to administrate the game was more deep. If you are strong enough, hold this macro and watch (you will miss a lot of interesting dungeon feaures and unique enemies dialogs for example - the console becomes the Matrix movie computer display) - if I try to play without it, It takes ages to finish the game due to the current world size.

WalkerBoh wrote:But new mechanics are being added all the time... Just a few examples from recent versions include transient mutations (wretched stars), flaying (flayed ghosts), marking (vault sentinels/alarm traps), shadow step and shadow mimic (Dith), jump attacks (felids)... and I could go on. Not even to mention the numerous adaptations of pre-existing mechanics; for example, Formicid digging.

Meanwhile we've lost things like nausea, permanent summons, item destruction, and item weight. In my opinion the developers have done an excellent job...

I might have totally different (and wrong) idea what a mechanic means. But many of your examples only affect a certain race or god, while all those removed nauseas etc affected every game despite race/god choises.
If you play some boring old GrBe that get's the classical 3 runes (2 from lair and 1 from vaults) he doesn't see any shadow steps, shadow mimics, wrecthed stars, is unaffect by flaying so doesn't see that either. Nor formicid dig... He may be lucky to get jump attack boot thou.

What he does see is a sudden ability to carry everytinhing (weight removal) and no need to stash any consumables (destruction removal).
So basically he would mostly see just affects of removals. Admittably he also will fight summonres to be really really easy since now you can just kill one monster instead of many.

For me mechanic is something that affects every game. Gods, race abilities, spells etc are just features.

But as I said, I really don't know what crawl comminity defines as mechanic.

I haven't played this game for a while, since I've disliked most the recent changes.
mainly because reasons given by giovform. I'm looking for my games something else than just few hours of play that mostly consist pressing tab + o and then killing the few mosnters that actually require any attention.
Sometimes I pop in to see if things have gotten better, see that they don't and watch a few games my friends play.

ps.I really don't miss nausea, good riddance to that. But ability to carry 200+ huge rocks is just stupid.
pps. I mostly played fighter characters, just because I liked them best. So all my view are biased towards fighters.
ppps. I do hope that those who still play find the changes for the better and get their kicks from the game.

Carrying 200 huge rocks is not particularly game breaking. They mulch more often now, and carrying 15 is approximately the same as carrying 200, since you aren't gonna use more than that in a fight. This also only affects two races out of 20+, definitely not a good reason to keep weight in the game.

If I am a weak mage, and can carry 20+ rations, then starvation will never "await me" on the Labyrinth. That was a price for being weak. Now everything goes into INT and/or DEX.

Well, maybe you shouldn't play simple combos like GrBe without setting up your own challenges (like speedrunning?), because it sounds to me like it was a fairly simple combo before weight changes and it is a fairly simple combo after weight changes (meaning, you will encounter life-or-death situations extremely rarely unless you do something extremely dumb), but now it's just more apparent because you don't need to go into inventory and drop crap you don't need occasionally.

I mean, if have any Crawl experience and grab a really strong combo, it reveals to you that Crawl is a pretty easy game to win; but is boggling down the road with mechanics that pretend to do stuff, but don't actually do much is the way to make it better? I mean maybe it is, I have no idea.

PleasingFungus wrote:He very kindly did so (please give him your thanks!), and just finished the translation earlier tonight.

The results are here. I figured they might be interesting to some of the people who post here!

This is great, and I'd love to thank your friend—but how would one go about doing that?

Looking through what's on pastebin, yes, it does read a lot like SA or the Tavern threads.

What were you planning to write back to them, PF, aside from thanking them for their contributions? As this thread demonstrates, there is (far from) unified feeling about these matters amongst the Anglophone Crawl playerbase.

let duvessa send the response, it will be funny.

and into wrote:This is great, and I'd love to thank your friend—but how would one go about doing that?

Here; I sent him a link to the thread.

and into wrote:What were you planning to write back to them, PF, aside from thanking them for their contributions? As this thread demonstrates, there is (far from) unified feeling about these matters amongst the Anglophone Crawl playerbase.

Probably a quick, high-level response; damiac & koboldlord covered most of what I'd want to say pretty well, I think.

It'd be nice to start up a bit more of a dialogue, particularly with the guy who complained that many crawl mechanics were obtuse and hard to figure out (I wonder how much of that is a language problem?), but I think I've asked enough of my friend as is.

Hirsch I wrote:let duvessa send the response, it will be funny.

tempting, but perhaps unwise.

thanks, PleasingFungus's friend, for going out of your way to get us feedback from Korea!

Sar wrote:Well, maybe you shouldn't play simple combos like GrBe without setting up your own challenges (like speedrunning?), because it sounds to me like it was a fairly simple combo before weight changes and it is a fairly simple combo after weight changes (meaning, you will encounter life-or-death situations extremely rarely unless you do something extremely dumb), but now it's just more apparent because you don't need to go into inventory and drop crap you don't need occasionally.

I mean, if have any Crawl experience and grab a really strong combo, it reveals to you that Crawl is a pretty easy game to win; but is boggling down the road with mechanics that pretend to do stuff, but don't actually do much is the way to make it better? I mean maybe it is, I have no idea.

What I hope, like every other player, is that the game is fun and challenging with combos that I like playing the most.
It just doesn't give me any pleasure if I have to make my own challenges (I shall play with my left eye closed and don't use any items with letter "g" in its name).

I wasn't really criticising the difficulty, but rather that i feel it's mechanics are being removed and only features are being implemented.

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