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
lethediver wrote:* 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.