The Tavern

This seems to be running off the rails. Please keep posts constructive and on-topic, and avoid gratuitous insults to each other or broad categories of humanity.

Sar wrote:
greedo wrote:For example, I just finished a FeCj with 3 beef jerkies in inventory.

how did you even manage that? cats have built-in gourmand

Sif muna character that burned most of my food because I took on snake pit early basically. Character tried to take on shoals but found the shoals level 2 from hell.

yesno wrote:
dynast wrote:You dont know? You want the game to have a clock but not gonna take into considerantion the infinite branches and their infinite source of food? what about necromutation, or gozag?

perhaps if you considered compromise a worthwhile concept you might offer some suggestions for these difficulties rather than demand i immediately draw up a full plan for you

Here is the problem of not putting any thought on your ideas, now other people have to think for you.

If you want to pressure players to dive faster you dont need a food clock but a actual clock, for example "you have 15k turns to get the first rune, otherwise you lose". This idea is enough to make you run in the problem that i already told you which you ignored by elaborating on the same idea, that is some people have different pacing so you need a window that everybody will narrowly fit through otherwise its trivial or punishing, and i have no idea how you gonna do that.

greedo wrote:The problem with having a "strong" hunger drive, or other variations like removing just removing chunks but adding more permafood, or other alternatives to food, is that races and characters have a high variability in their need for food. Consider what a troll would go through in a chunkless crawl, they have what, 3 times the hunger?

i agree. the problem with closing my garage door is that then my garage would fill with the fumes from my car's exhaust. my neighbours just come up with these bullshit excuses like "you could turn off your car when you park it", when they only suggested closing the garage door, which i OBVIOUSLY cant do because of the car.

dynast wrote:some people have different pacing so you need a window that everybody will narrowly fit through otherwise its trivial or punishing, and i have no idea how you gonna do that.

alternatively, you could let the players who are bad at the game either get better, or lose

There's also the fact that crawl has exactly one difficulty setting, and making a clock system that is challenging for new players without killing them but still existing as a motivation push for advanced players is not possible. Throw in the race variation, and it becomes silly.

@duvessa: I'm willing to believe this 5-scumming stuff was a thing before .6, but there is little to suggest that hunger prevents it in current/recent crawl. This says to me that if it's a worthwhile thing to do, people would be doing it and I'd be seeing it and/or hearing about it.

greedo wrote:There's also the fact that crawl has exactly one difficulty setting, and making a clock system that is challenging for new players without killing them but still existing as a motivation push for advanced players is not possible.

so people shouldn't have to get good at the game in order to win on its one difficulty setting?

greedo wrote:Throw in the race variation, and it becomes silly.

ok since the analogy approach isnt working for you let me spell it out: pretty sure everyone except you thinks it's obvious that the suggestions to remove renewable food etc. also include removing racial food consumption variation

mps wrote:@duvessa: I'm willing to believe this 5-scumming stuff was a thing before .6, but there is little to suggest that hunger prevents it in current/recent crawl. This says to me that if it's a worthwhile thing to do, people would be doing it and I'd be seeing it and/or hearing about it.

people are doing it and you're hearing about it right now, and i never said that the current hunger system prevents it (because it doesn't)

duvessa wrote:
dynast wrote:some people have different pacing so you need a window that everybody will narrowly fit through otherwise its trivial or punishing, and i have no idea how you gonna do that.
alternatively, you could let the players who are bad at the game either get better, or lose

And that makes the game better how again?

dynast wrote:
duvessa wrote:
dynast wrote:some people have different pacing so you need a window that everybody will narrowly fit through otherwise its trivial or punishing, and i have no idea how you gonna do that.
alternatively, you could let the players who are bad at the game either get better, or lose

And that makes the game better how again?

games where player skill doesn't affect performance are often considered boring

No, I'm hearing about the theoretical possibility of 5-scumming in this thread. I asked for a morgue file.

duvessa wrote:games where player skill doesn't affect performance are often considered boring

True, buts thats not the only and not the most relevant factor about performance in this game.

As for people getting better, no I'm talking about food being a limiting factor for extremely good players as well as okay or bad players. You cannot make a system that puts pressure on an experienced player but also make it possible for someone getting just good enough to win to actually win. Because you need a metric crapton of pressure to make a clock/food system make an experienced player budge.

Also, missed your silly car post, sorry, but there are lots of variation is my point. Player experience, race, blaster casters. Removing chunks will basically force people into playing some stupid "optimal" playstyle built around food if it matters, and if doesn't matter, than why have food in the first place.

greedo wrote:Removing chunks will basically force people into playing some stupid "optimal" playstyle built around food if it matters, and if doesn't matter, than why have food in the first place.

This is absolutely not true. There is a spectrum here -- the point of a clock is to make you play above a certain speed or die, but the speed in question can be adjusted. On the one end, you need to move so fast that only a highly-skilled speedrunner diving as fast as possible could make it. On the other, you can sit around for tens of thousands of turns doing literally nothing and be in no danger whatsoever (as is currently the case in Crawl). Both of those extremes suck... but they are extremes! A setting somewhere in the middle, where you have a reasonable amount of time to do stuff, but can't just sit around for ages and ages, is both possible and good for the game.

ontoclasm wrote:
greedo wrote:Removing chunks will basically force people into playing some stupid "optimal" playstyle built around food if it matters, and if doesn't matter, than why have food in the first place.

This is absolutely not true. There is a spectrum here -- the point of a clock is to make you play above a certain speed or die, but the speed in question can be adjusted. On the one end, you need to move so fast that only a highly-skilled speedrunner diving as fast as possible could make it. On the other, you can sit around for tens of thousands of turns doing literally nothing and be in no danger whatsoever (as is currently the case in Crawl). Both of those extremes suck... but they are extremes! A setting somewhere in the middle, where you have a reasonable amount of time to do stuff, but can't just sit around for ages and ages, is both possible and good for the game.

Yes, but this isn't some simple game with only a few variables, this is the insanity that crawl is

A very poor player playing a slower combination might take 250k turns to win, and a highly skilled speed runner might win in 20k turns. Crawl IS extreme is my point. You're not going to make experienced players, the type complaining here in the first place, pressured in the slightest, while also making newbies seriously distressed on something as simple as food.

dynast wrote:
yesno wrote:
dynast wrote:You dont know? You want the game to have a clock but not gonna take into considerantion the infinite branches and their infinite source of food? what about necromutation, or gozag?

perhaps if you considered compromise a worthwhile concept you might offer some suggestions for these difficulties rather than demand i immediately draw up a full plan for you

Here is the problem of not putting any thought on your ideas, now other people have to think for you.

you are plainly more interested in venting your hostility and frustration (with a COMPUTER GAME) than having a reasonable discussion with me. i think i've talked to you enough. hope this thread comes to a viable resolution that pleases at least most players.

ontoclasm wrote:A setting somewhere in the middle, where you have a reasonable amount of time to do stuff, but can't just sit around for ages and ages, is both possible and good for the game.

So, what number are we going for here? 30k? 100k? do you get more time if you declare you are doing 4-15 runes? Split it into checkpoints? Is there a way to borrow extra time? Will there be some strategy involved or is it a "hey, play the game right" kind of thing?

yesno wrote:you are plainly more interested in venting your hostility and frustration (with a COMPUTER GAME) than having a reasonable discussion with me. i think i've talked to you enough. hope this thread comes to a viable resolution that pleases at least most players.

Sorry bro.

don't worry about it little sister. time heals all wounds

Make hunger cause attribute drain instead of starvation?

Still holding out for hunger doing nothing, tbh.

To be honest I've heard about the one DoomRL cheap trick they hate on this forum for the first time, and I've been playing DoomRL for years. So yeah, maybe worrying about this happening in crawl is a fool's errand.

acvar wrote:
Hurkyl wrote:Ignorance is bliss. A nontrivial percentage of the people who aren't idiots and actually recognize that torturing yourself is better play will have their experience ruined simply by that knowledge, even if they don't torture themselves at all.

Triply so in any venue where people compare their performance with others'. (or sometimes even comparing against their prior performance)

Sorry, but I play games to have fun. The most optimal way to play is the way that gives me the most enjoyment.

I play to have fun too. Why do you insist on trying to make things so that I have to choose between unfun alternatives?

It's one thing to make a bad choice in a game because the choice something I want to do. Also, making good choices is fun in of itself. It's very dissatisfying to knowingly and deliberately make bad choices for no better reason than not being able to put up with whatever tedium and irritation is needed to do things well.

I'm aware that some people just want an excuse to indulge in mindless, consequence-free violence or other similar thing, even if I can't really understand it, and these people don't get that sense of dissatisfaction. It's fine to design games for those people.

But crawl is at least trying to target people like myself who derive enjoyment out of playing well. In fact, it's mildly inconceivable that a roguelike wouldn't try to target this group.

Also, even if we were to adopt for the sake of argument your uncharitable strawman that this whole line of thought is just about people who ruin their own experience... if that demographic is part of your target audience and you're designing the game to your audience has fun, then it's your job to protect these people from themselves, no matter how badly you think of them.

As far as comparing yourself to others and yourself since turncount is part of score this is just not a problem.

Winrate. (also, not all tedious things are turncount-increasing)

Hurkyl wrote:But crawl is at least trying to target people like myself who derive enjoyment out of playing well. In fact, it's mildly inconceivable that a roguelike wouldn't try to target this group.

There are basically two tendencies in the roguelike audience: There's the people who believe in computer roleplaying and favor simulation-y "realism" with baroque mechanics and there's people who think of games as rules simulators and prize purity of gameplay. It's like Uma Thurman's line about Elvis people and Beatles people -- you can like both, but somewhere along the line you have to make a choice.

I put myself in the latter camp. The way hunger is in crawl, there's only one position to take for me: Remove food. There's no gameplay rationale that holds up to basic scrutiny, attempts to obfuscate that in this thread notwithstanding.

Now when you talk about "mindless, consequence-free violence" in relation to crawl, I get worried, because when I look at crawl, I see a game where you enter a place, murder its inhabitants, and steal their TV. In the context of a discussion about hunger, it makes me think you're too wedded a superficially relevant-looking minigame that looks like something other than typical roguelike murderhobodom, but in fact has no real bearing on the game given minimally competent play. Looks like simulationism to me.

kuniqs wrote:To be honest I've heard about the one DoomRL cheap trick they hate on this forum for the first time, and I've been playing DoomRL for years. So yeah, maybe worrying about this happening in crawl is a fool's errand.

The problems with DooMRL (which are admittedly actually problems that I really enjoy, I find it a very peaceful game to play) have far more to do with non-reciprocal LoS and attacking out of LoS than they do with DooMRL not having any hunger.

mps wrote:
Hurkyl wrote:But crawl is at least trying to target people like myself who derive enjoyment out of playing well. In fact, it's mildly inconceivable that a roguelike wouldn't try to target this group.

There are basically two tendencies in the roguelike audience: There's the people who believe in computer roleplaying and favor simulation-y "realism" with baroque mechanics and there's people who think of games as rules simulators and prize purity of gameplay. It's like Uma Thurman's line about Elvis people and Beatles people -- you can like both, but somewhere along the line you have to make a choice.

I put myself in the latter camp.

I really thought there was going to be several paragraphs about the Beatles here. 0/10 disappointed.

See, this is why I said 150+ posts ago that we've probably had all the reasonable discussion there is to be had re: hunger. Because now we're talking about "what makes roguelikes fun" instead.

archaeo wrote:See, this is why I said 150+ posts ago that we've probably had all the reasonable discussion there is to be had re: hunger. Because now we're talking about "what makes roguelikes fun" instead.

Well, that's part of the problem, no-one agrees, really what we should be talking about is "what makes crawl fun" Since everyone's free to go make their own roguelike that has a different context for "fun" than crawl's (I mean honestly no-one is forcing you to play a freely-made game that you don't enjoy...)

Crawl is my favorite game of all time, bar none, and I still greatly dislike hitting c over corpses and wish I did not have to do it.

Yeah, that's my deal. I like Crawl enough that I spend a considerable amount of time just watching other people play Crawl. I'm not interested in radically transforming the game or anything; I just think food is a waste of time, and I don't really see how you make it worthwhile without making the game less fun.

A good start would be imo to 1) goldify chunks (no inventory slot) and 2) make occasionally some chunks automatically appear in your inventory when you kill a corpse-leaving monster (no picking up chunks).

This would solve the butchering and inventory management aspects of chunks. These are the tedious aspects of hunger and food in Crawl to me, personally, and I assume that this would be a quite easily implementable solution. And I don't think it would affect game balance a whole lot.

Sprucery wrote:A good start would be imo to 1) goldify chunks (no inventory slot) and 2) make occasionally some chunks automatically appear in your inventory when you kill a corpse-leaving monster (no picking up chunks).

This would solve the butchering and inventory management aspects of chunks. These are the tedious aspects of hunger and food in Crawl to me, personally, and I assume that this would be a quite easily implementable solution. And I don't think it would affect game balance a whole lot.

If you wanted to go that route, I would just skip the chunks completely, I would just make it so if you are below satiated you have a chance of being set to satiated on every kill that could generate chunks currently (engorged with gourmond)

That would be the 3rd step, yes :)

The problem with halfway measures like goldifying chunks or statiation-on-kills is that they do nothing to address the structural problems with hunger. Sure, if you automate it to the point that even berserkers and casters don't have to waste time feeding themselves a dozen times per floor, it would reduce player annoyance. But you'd still be left with a system that doesn't really limit anything it claims to limit.

Of course, the response to this is "well make the limit matter," which is why the only reasonable compromise solution is some kind of permafood-only-no-hunger-costs Crawl, imo. If we can't actually remove hunger, we might as well limit it to the one thing that it sort of accomplishes, instead of spreading it all over the game pointlessly.

i don't really care about the scummers, i just want food to become scarcer and apply pressure to even normal players who may have gotten used to resting to full hp/mp after every fight. some other system could do this instead, but it's just that crawl already has food, and this is what food was supposed to do (i think). of course if food is removed players can still just set speedrun targets for themselves.

Stupid and unfunny jokes that apparently aren't getting moderated aside,

yesno wrote:i don't really care about the scummers, i just want food to become scarcer and apply pressure to even normal players who may have gotten used to resting to full hp/mp after every fight.

Which "normal players"? The ones who are playing characters that cast spells to kill dudes? The ones who kill everything with weapons and never stash anything? Does it matter if they're playing mummies? Does it matter if they learn necromutation or find a staff of energy? Do we give them 100,000 turns to win the 3 rune game? Or should it be more granular, should they have to kill a satiation-giving enemy every 200 turns?

Exactly what counts as "normal play" in low-food Crawl? And how much food really gets removed from the game if everything we currently accept as "normal" is expected to be playable?

what's with the aggressive barrage of questions? do you actually want me to answer them? two posts back you were agreeing with me...

which is why the only reasonable compromise solution is some kind of permafood-only-no-hunger-costs Crawl, imo

the only difference is you specify "no hunger costs" while i acknowledged that to be a separate question that could go either way as part of the implementation of chunkless hunger.

But hunger costs aren't a separate question; they're the reason I'm asking that "aggressive barrage of questions." If someone wants to remove some portion of food from the game, they have to account for how they'd address the myriad ways in which Crawl's hunger costs assume that food is abundant.

@yesno do you want auto-exploring to be harmful to the player?

1. normal players meaning non-scummers. 2. if chunks were removed, food were reduced, and spell hunger retained, relying on spells to kill lots of things would be less viable. i don't think that would be a bad thing but whatever, it's fine either way. 3. i don't think stashing is important to consider, and has been deprecated in recent versions anyway (item destruction gone; monsters no longer pick up dropped items). 4. mummies and players who cast necromutation can ignore food. why not? 4. of course staff of energy matters if spell hunger is retained; presumably it would be a lot more valuable than before. 5. food can be calibrated to give players a certain amount of turns to get from one point to another. obviously this can impose an overall turn limit on a 3 rune game, since there are only so many dungeon levels to find food in. i'm not sure how many turns worth of satiation should be spread through the dungeon. (let's arbitrarily say, i don't know, 60k-90k turns worth, then if it were implemented we could see how it plays). if we insist on such a large amount of food that the mechanic is trivialized, then it might as well be removed (is that the goal of compromise here?)

@yesno do you want auto-exploring to be harmful to the player?

duh

i wonder if this is what the iranian nuclear program negotiations were like

I'm not sure if you're familiar with GDD, but "compromise" and "negotiation" don't really enter into it.

that devs to stop the perfectionism will solve most of the stupid remove and terrible game balance and bad gameplay issues.

Mod Note: This thread has reached the end of its life in terms of productive conversation, I think. Thanks to archaeo for getting an important topic started and putting together a spreadsheet that can be referenced later. There's certainly interest among several dev team members in addressing the food system in DCSS in the relatively near term, quite possibly 0.18. I doubt any major changes will make the 0.17 release at this point, since that's probably not a long ways away, but this isn't set in stone, of course.

Locking this thread doesn't mean this is the last food discussion we'll see in GDD. It just needs to happen with less insult hurtling and people trying to come up with the best comeback; there is CYC, if you need that. Keep in mind that proposals of "remove all hunger" are exceeding unlikely to be accepted if you also propose "don't even try to have a forward-progress clock," since the latter is something the dev team considers important.

The Tavern

But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger

Re: But seriously, remove hunger