Liking all the changes!

[danr]

I have not played DCSS in a while - like, a long time - and I'm liking a bunch of things that have changed. It seems like a lot of things that used to be kind of annoying are gone:

Carrying capacity - I see no reference to weight of items anymore. Not being able to carry stuff was a drag and promoted a lot of tedium with stashing etc.
Corrosion - no longer have to worry about permanent damage of equipment - yay!
Spellbooks now get identified - yay!
Weapons only have a single enchantment factor - yay!
No more contaminated chunks - yay!

Has there been some kind of change in philosophy? It seems like the game is less out to irritate me. However, it seems just as determined as ever to kill me.

[Lyrick]

Somewhere along the line, the devs probably agreed that interface screws, inventory minigames, holdovers from Nethack and flavorful but uninteresting mechanics were pointless to a game whose goal was interesting gameplay and not an attempt at realism.

Most of these changes happened around 0.14 and 0.15.

The game's gotten more simpler and since crawlers can fully focus their attention on gameplay, they've made monsters more interesting.

(And even if its temporary, corrosion is still quite deadly!)

[and into]

There hasn't been a change in philosophy, and many of the things that were changed had been discussed, and had dev support, for quite some time before they were finally implemented. Presumably the developers had other things they felt were higher priorities, or just hadn't gotten around to them before now, which is understandable.

[Roderic]

You forgot that item destruction is no more.

In 0.16 trunk the wand id is also done automatically instead of the silly test zap. The partially id wands waste more charges that those fully id; it is a smart way to integrate them in the id game.

[danr]

Yeah, it seemed like there was no item destruction but I wasn't sure. I also did not mention above that all wands ID on first zap - and there's been similar changes with scrolls, they all ID on use now.

I think the inventory management was an issue where there was some discussion here, some ideas were advanced to make it better/easier, and those ideas were shot down on the basis that the current philosophy required them to be thus - specifically, that it wouldn't do to let players carry everything they found as it would not force them to "make interesting decisions" about what to stash and what to carry. And There Shall Never Be Bags of Holding.

The 52 item limit is still a bit of a pain in the butt, but maybe that is preserved for a reason, or would just be harder to change in terms of the interface.

Anyway, I like the changes.

[xentronium]

For purposes of providing more glory to trog, I need to go win with a SEBe in 0.12.
It's hard to go back! Nausea is really awful, thanks so much for removing that