DCSS is too long.

[lethediver]

Hi ya'll. I've been playing DCSS for about 2 years, and have a few 15 rune wins under my belt. It's definitely one of the best designed, challenging games I've ever played, and I believe, the best roguelike currently in existence.

Well, now that positive crap's out of the way... on to the negative!

* The dungeon's way too vast. Halve the number of floors per branch please. I know the devs are working on this but it's not enough. Shorten depths, vaults, lair, the lair branches, hells, and abyss to max 3 floors, pls.

* The popcorn to unique/dangerous vault/strong enemy for this area ratio is way too high. Cut down on the amount we need to spam tab and hotkeys pls. I know the devs are working on this but it's not enough. Get rid of the stupid green rats in lair, no one ever dies to those. Dont make orcs and rats and bats keep spawning after d10. Etc. Almost every branch has some ridic easy enemies that only serve to make the player sigh, zone out and mash hotkeys to wade through them.

* Every game is too similar to every other game. Vaults make things pretty, artifacts mix things up, but it's not enough. The same branches shouldn't be in every game. The same RUNES shouldn't be in every game. Make it seven runes max and give Hells and Pan the lair treatment where only some of the branches spawn in a given game. Or if you are going to keep it at 15, design 30 branches, and put half of them in every game. Going late game in DCSS is way too much like following a script.

* You guys say you are anti grind, but it only seems to apply to the early-mid stage of the game. I was stunned when I figured out that you can get infinite items through Abyss, Pan and Zigs. Why is this permitted? Giving the player a reliable way to defeat scarcity is Un Rogue Like and for good reason. There is no excuse for this! Have Abyss be itemless and make Pan have only rune floors. Put one Zig in the game max. Do SOMETHING to make scumming not possible in your game pls.

* You guys say you are anti grind, but you let PCs (functionally if not in name) level up past 27 by continuing to improve their skills. Why is this permitted? If you HAVE to allow this, at least make it come at the expense of forgetting some old skills. God tier, good-at-everything PCs should not be allowed, make specialization a thing pls.

Fix all that, and you will increase DCSS's replayability by a lot.

PS. I hope I don't sound overly negative because overall, the devs do a great job with this game, particularly with difficulty and balance.

[Tiktacy]

While some of what you are saying is very legitimate, I think you are failing to take a lot of important aspects of game design into account. More importantly, I think maybe you are trying to address too many things in a single post and should try to refine the OP in a way that specifically tackles a single issue. If I had to make a suggestion, I would think most people will be interesting in discussing shortening the length of branches.

I'm going to treat my response as thought we are discussing branch/dungeon shortening since I think that is probably the most relevant discussion topic based on the name of the thread.

I definitely agree on shortening the length of lair/branches, but hell branches need to stay as they are. Hell branches aren't like other branches, they aren't meant to be cleared(in fact doing so is completely pointless) and therefore are significantly shorter in length than most floors. As a result, increasing the number of floors evens this out. In my experience, 7 floors of hell tends to be shorter time-wise than 3 floors of elven halls(except tartarus, those doom hounds are nuts).

I think 3 floor lair branches would definitely be an improvement, I like this idea. 4 floors isn't that bad though, at least not compared to when vaults was 8 floors and the dungeon was 27 floors. I also object to pandemonium and abyss changes, they are good as they are. While you can grind them infinitely, their random nature makes them very risky and generally do not give items worth trekking for. In addition to this, scumming requires a means of dealing with hunger.

Lastly, I like the length of vaults at 4-5. The buildup to the final vault is exciting for me, and the first time I still remember how much fun I had the first time I went through it(despite it being 8 floors at the time). This could have more to do with the well designed monster set though, I might be in a minority on that though.

[dpeg]

The OP is a rant, there are absolutely no proposals. I don't think it belongs to GDD.

There are a myriad threads where I mention that we've been cutting levels since 0.4. There is a current thread about "incremental changes" where I explain why this is better than big, sweeping cuts (or at least, why we do it this way).

If you're burned out from Crawl, take a break. The game is under long time development, so you can come back in a year, or four, and check what's happened, and how short Lair is by then.

It might be an age or native/non-native speaker thing, but having every other sentence end in "do this pls" sounds very rude to me. You are a disgruntled customer? I don't care! On the homepage you can find a form where you can get your money back.
You want some changes? Too bad I couldn't find anything in your half page posting to actually work on. If we'd design the game like you give feedback, there'd be 20 participants in each tournament, not 1000.

[Quazifuji]

Nearly everything you propose has discussed before, but as dpeg said, there's a lot of "do this pls" (maybe it's just me, but using "pls" instead of "please" makes you come up as way more annoying and whiny) without considering the logistics

* The popcorn to unique/dangerous vault/strong enemy for this area ratio is way too high. Cut down on the amount we need to spam tab and hotkeys pls. I know the devs are working on this but it's not enough. Get rid of the stupid green rats in lair, no one ever dies to those. Dont make orcs and rats and bats keep spawning after d10. Etc. Almost every branch has some ridic easy enemies that only serve to make the player sigh, zone out and mash hotkeys to wade through them.

How about this: go create an experimental branch with this change. Let's see how it is. I mean it. I think this would be a fantastic exercise. There's been discussions here about the amount of popcorn in the game, and I think it would be a good idea to see what purpose it serves. Is popcorn essential to the game, or would the game just be faster and better if most encounters were difficult? Note that you'd have to make other changes to make up for all the resources you acquire (items, XP, piety) from popcorn to make this work. Piety is especially important unless you want to make the game vastly more challenging, as right now a lot of god abilities can be easily used every dangerous fight because you get the piety back from popcorn in between, which wouldn't be the case with no popcorn.

Make it seven runes max and give Hells and Pan the lair treatment where only some of the branches spawn in a given game.

This gets discussed too, and it's been considered. Although one thing to note: nothing is stopping you from playing like this. Always grab the first two Pan runes you find, then leave at the next exist. Use a random number generator to pick to Hell Branches at random and only enter those branches. Congratulations, you are now playing a version of DCSS where Hell and Pan got the Lair treatment.

Or if you are going to keep it at 15, design 30 branches, and put half of them in every game.

Sounds great. I think tons of people would be on-board with doubling the number of possible branches that could appear in any given game to add variety. So what are you waiting for? Go design 15 good, interesting branches that add something meaningful to the game and distinguish themselves from existing branches! Of course, they'll need new enemies, and themes, and tilesets to be visually distinct in tiles, and tons of new vaults, especially rune vaults, probably a bunch of new uniques. Does that sound easy? Awesome, go do it. Hard? Well, then now you know why it's not a thing yet.

Designing new branches is very difficult and time consuming. There's a reason it never happens. Last time someone tried to add a new branch to the game (the enchanted forest, which would sometimes replace Crypt), they put a huge amount of effort into it, designed a ton of new enemies, and in the end the whole thing got scrapped because the branch turned out incredibly unfun to play. A lot of the enemies from the branch ended up elsewhere in the game (mostly Shoals, Swamp, and Depths), but the branch didn't. And that's just one branch. Adding 15 new branches isn't some "go do this pls"-level request, it is a massive, massive undertaking.[/quote]

* You guys say you are anti grind, but it only seems to apply to the early-mid stage of the game. I was stunned when I figured out that you can get infinite items through Abyss, Pan and Zigs. Why is this permitted?

Grinding Abyss or Pan never really helps your character much, so most people just figure it's your own problem if you want to waste time doing that instead of just winning the game. As for Zigs, if you're just hunting for Zigs so you can do the first 10 floors over and over again in Pan, the same thing applies. If you're clearing Zigs and using the new Zig portals, then you're already strong enough to win the game anyway.[/quote]

* You guys say you are anti grind, but you let PCs (functionally if not in name) level up past 27 by continuing to improve their skills. Why is this permitted? If you HAVE to allow this, at least make it come at the expense of forgetting some old skills. God tier, good-at-everything PCs should not be allowed, make specialization a thing pls.

God-tier, good at everything characters don't occur and aren't necessary in a three rune game. I think for a lot of people they're part of the appeal of a 15-rune game or doing Ziggurats. If someone wants to grind Zigs until they've maxed every skill, why not let them? No one's forcing you to do that if you don't like it.

PS. I hope I don't sound overly negative.

I wouldn't say overly negative, necessarily. More overly demanding. As I've pointed out, a lot of these things are very non-trivial to do, and many of them have discussed before but haven't been done not because no one liked the idea, but because either no one got around to implementing that or because the logistics of some of these ideas are actually extremely complicated. Using terms like "pls" and "fix all that" makes it sound like you think you're just asking for a quick favor or something, but you'd actually asking for (borderline demanding) massive changes to the game that would require an incredible amount of work to do remotely well. The game's open source, if you really want to make these things happen, you're free to get in there and try to help out yourself, or just make your own version of the game that you play if the devs don't want the official version to go in the direction you've requested. From what I've seen, the best way to get major traction on an idea is to implement it yourself and post the branch so people can try it.

[Rast]

How about this: go create an experimental branch with this change.

But this is very hard.

I don't mean the coding, though that is hard enough for most people, but setting up a crawl server.

[dpeg]

Rast: I'd think that setting up servers is hard (I have no idea how to go about it), but from what I discern on ##crawl-dev it seems to be a reasonably straightforward by now ... for sufficiently technically-minded people, I guess. The recent proliferation of Crawl servers has been helped by some kind of packaging, I believe.

[Jarlyk]

If you actually create a good experimental branch, there are probably folks around here who'd be willing to try it out, if you make the source available. If it gets enough traction, one of the popular servers might even be willing to host it for broader playtesting. I've seen this happen a few times for people who want to play with new god and species concepts.

It is actually possible to create patches and have them be accepted, though large overhauls are obviously a much tougher sell than small features.

One very interesting idea for a project, if you have the coding skill and would like to attempt it, would be to expose a bunch of knobs to tweak length and progression in a config file so that people can easily experiment with different settings. Things like XP scaling, piety scaling, floor lengths, rune locks on/off, etc. It would be a fair challenge to even identify what the knobs should be, but if this experimental branch existed, you could probably attract a willing audience to play with the knobs to try out different styles of progression.

[archaeo]

Rather than move this to CYC, I'm going to lock this thread.

lethediver, all the aspects of the game you've criticized are frequently discussed here and in CYC. You're more than welcome to participate in those more specific conversations or create your own, but it's difficult to discuss game design from a foundation of a relatively unfocused and broad list of criticisms.

Everybody else, I'm sure that lethediver didn't intend to be demeaning or rude.