The Tavern

Since ghosts appear as the result of the actions of another player and not the actual game, we should be able to turn them off so that they don't appear at all.

The equivalent can be achieved by playing offline on a fresh install, so it's clearly possible, but I play trunk and don't like deleting bones files or redownloading the game every five seconds, so having this option would be incredibly convenient.

Can this please be a thing?

It has been proposed several times in the past and personally I would love it but the devs don't want ghosts to be optional.

PowerOfKaishin wrote:Since ghosts appear as the result of the actions of another player and not the actual game, we should be able to turn them off so that they don't appear at all.

The equivalent can be achieved by playing offline on a fresh install, so it's clearly possible, but I play trunk and don't like deleting bones files or redownloading the game every five seconds, so having this option would be incredibly convenient.

Can this please be a thing?

A simple out of game option is to write a trivial shell script that deletes your bones files, then launches crawl, then use that to start up the program.

Siegurt wrote:
PowerOfKaishin wrote:Since ghosts appear as the result of the actions of another player and not the actual game, we should be able to turn them off so that they don't appear at all.

The equivalent can be achieved by playing offline on a fresh install, so it's clearly possible, but I play trunk and don't like deleting bones files or redownloading the game every five seconds, so having this option would be incredibly convenient.

Can this please be a thing?

A simple out of game option is to write a trivial shell script that deletes your bones files, then launches crawl, then use that to start up the program.

dude i can barely check my email some days and you're saying writing a "shell" "script" is trivial? throw a man a bone here.

Arrhythmia wrote:
Siegurt wrote:
PowerOfKaishin wrote:Since ghosts appear as the result of the actions of another player and not the actual game, we should be able to turn them off so that they don't appear at all.

The equivalent can be achieved by playing offline on a fresh install, so it's clearly possible, but I play trunk and don't like deleting bones files or redownloading the game every five seconds, so having this option would be incredibly convenient.

Can this please be a thing?

A simple out of game option is to write a trivial shell script that deletes your bones files, then launches crawl, then use that to start up the program.

dude i can barely check my email some days and you're saying writing a "shell" "script" is trivial? throw a man a bone here.

For windows:

Code:: Del <path to bones file>\*.* Start <path to crawl.exe>

Saved with notepad to a .bat file will do the trick.

But I'm on OSX!

For Windows it is enough to delete bones directory which is inside saves directory (tested in 0.18).

This does nothing to help the online player who is sick of seeing DickSchlonger69's stupid OP draconian ghosts making life miserable on whatever floor they show up on. Not to mention the various names based on racial slurs... but hey, at least iljyb is female now...

Ghosts are... wildly outside the parameters of normal monsters, and based on some other player's actions. Sometimes they're free bags of XP, sometimes they're a chance for some jackass on the internet to grief you. Sometimes they're both!

Very true, ghosts make some players prefer playing stable versions offline instead of trunk/stable online. For example, I will return to offline play after finishing current game. Dr ghost with Venom bolt/Bolt of Draining on D10, AC 40 ghost on Orc:1 or AC 26 HP 174 ghost (that's harder than Jory!) on Snake:2 are not fun for some players. 11 ghosts in Dungeon/Lair/Snake/Vault1-2... Is it a balanced roguelike or random number generator?

At least nethack ghosts...

No, nevermind, nethack ghosts were even worse...

Is a win on a ghostless offline game considered less respectable than an online win with ghosts?

If the answer is No, then there's no reason whatsoever to not give a ghostless option online. therefore, wins vs. the possibility of ghosts must be considered, "better" somehow.

I used to have problems with the huge number of offensively named ghosts constantly flooding my games. The names were appalling: poorly-spelled, racist, sexist, disgusting names that made you question the basic decency of human beings.Then I switched from local to online and the problem went away.

Serious answer: ghosts will never be optional in online play because they have an impact on balance. Removing ghosts is an option and keeping ghosts is an option, but ghosts for some and not others is not an option. I personally find ghosts kinda fun, so I would vote to keep them, even though I understand the problems with them. I like the idea of making them not worth XP tho.

i don't mind ghosts in terms of gameplay but i really would like to stop seeing offensive ghost names. i don't care whose ghost i am fighting, and the effect of player-named ghosts in online games is just to allow players to look up the logfile for the ghost in question anyway, which doesn't seem ideal... so player ghosts would be better if names were just randomized crawl names.

Well then people would just look up who died recently on this level playing that combo.

fine but at least i wouldn't have to read their terrible names!

I definitely think ghosts should be removed, not because they are dangerous (it is very rare that they are) but because they 1. make you check morgues in order to fight them, 2. make crawl games unequal based on the computer you're playing on, 3. have repeatedly served as a gateway to add terrible monster spells.

Race and class selection at the beginning also affects balance, yet the devs allow people to choose that. Let's extend it to ghosts.

Taking 30 damage going up the stairs because every single ghost and its mom is some tanky Gr/Mi/Tr Fi/Gl/Be or something else equally threatening that regardless of its actual stats has amazing AC and EV compared to other monsters is NOT fun. It's also not fun to have to dance around them either and all it serves is to make the game much more tedious. You either fight (and die) or you run every time it spots you (which is very often if you haven't finished exploring the level).

Then there's the fact that they randomly appear on special levels and force you to have to leave. Ghosts do nothing but ruin my fun.

Grinder can only generate so many times in a game (once) and even then, outside of his confusion he is still way less threatening than a ghost. It's possible have a ghost every level past D:2, and I have run into upwards of 3 or 4 of the suckers before.

Lasty wrote:I like the idea of making them not worth XP tho.

How about differentiating XP for different ghosts? I mean if OgSk ghost has AC 26, 174 HP and +3 giant spiked club, it should not give the same XP as HaBe ghost with sling even if their XL is identical. Can we change XP to be dynamic depending on AC/EV/HP/spells?

Sar wrote:Well then people would just look up who died recently on this level playing that combo.

I think the ideal solution would be to display exact AC/EV/weapon etc. of the ghost in their description (along with standard bars of course) to remove any reason to look into morgue file. One more reason why I dislike ghosts is that they make you suspend normal play to check their morgues.

PowerOfKaishin wrote:Race and class selection at the beginning also affects balance, yet the devs allow people to choose that. Let's extend it to ghosts.

Also if a player is lucky to run into weak ghosts (anything with ranged weapon equipped, for example), they get almost free XP while other players can be not so lucky and run into SpAK/SpEn etc. ghosts and die. I don't see why we should keep this "balance".

Draconian ghosts aren't an argument for removing ghosts, because obviously draconian ghost breath needs to be nerfed/removed.

Rast wrote:Draconian ghosts aren't an argument for removing ghosts, because obviously draconian ghost breath needs to be nerfed/removed.

Huh, my post got deleted. Uh, okay...

Anyway, frost is not draconian breath. Draconian ghosts only get negative energy rays. It was a DrIE and it hurled frost at me. Why do I take so much more damage than it does from spells? ._.

Also this was D:3. Pretty sure it wasn't quite level 7 yet.

Rast wrote:Draconian ghosts aren't an argument for removing ghosts, because obviously draconian ghost breath needs to be nerfed/removed.

I don't understand how it hasn't been removed, I've seen people complaining about it for probably as long as I've been playing the game and it makes draconian ghosts so much more dangerous than normal ghosts, which already are in kind of a wonky place wrt player risk/reward. there's even precedent from a flavor perspective with how undead dragons(+draconians) lose their breath attacks-if anything, it'd be more confusing to an unspoiled player that undead dragons(and draconians) lose breath attacks, but player ghost draconians keep breath attacks... but of a different damage type for some reason, when no player ghost spells or melee attacks have damage type changed to draining, and considerably more damaging than that breath usually was for the player at time of death.

tl;dr: if player ghost draconians are even going to keep breath ability after death(when ghosts lose most abilities, like evocable berserk/invis and god powers), why does it do so much damage, and why does it change to draining when no other brands/spells change to draining damage for ghosts?

Because everything about ghosts was implemented because someone thought "this would be cool" without thinking about the gameplay implications at all.

duvessa wrote:Because everything about ghosts Crawl was implemented because someone thought "this would be cool" without thinking about the gameplay implications at all.

(TBH, that's not a bad thing)

Rast wrote:
duvessa wrote:Because everything about ghosts Crawl was implemented because someone thought "this would be cool" without thinking about the gameplay implications at all.

(TBH, that's not a bad thing)

Beogh and Pak aren't bad things?

duvessa wrote:Because everything about ghosts was implemented because someone thought "this would be cool" without thinking about the gameplay implications at all.

back when Crawl was actually good

Some of the bigger problems with ghosts are actually fixable fairly easily.

1) randomise the names
2) put a cap on the defences a ghost can have on a given level

On top of all the issues mentioned in this post, I'll bring up another thing I dislike about ghosts that I've brought up before: they encourage tedious stairdancing. If I encounter a player ghost that's dangerous, but that I can potentially beat in a fight if I get lucky (even if the odds are less than 50%), my typical strategy is to lure it to a staircase, then fight it until I either kill it, or am low on health. If the latter happens, I retreat up the stairs, rest, and then repeat the process. This is really boring, but I do it because it eliminates the risk of running into the ghost in a less safe situation, as well as giving a sizable amount of experience.

There are two main ways to solve this that don't involve removing ghosts, but I dislike both solutions. One option is to make ghosts give no XP, but then dangerous ghosts would be even more frustrating because there isn't even a reward if you manage to kill them, and it would still often be optimal to kill them through stairdancing because if you don't you risk running into them when there are other enemies around and you're not near a staircase. The other way to fix it is to let ghosts take stairs, but that makes powerful ghosts feel more unfair. Right now, ghosts being unable to use stairs seems important to limit the danger of overpowered ghosts.

Rast wrote:
duvessa wrote:Because everything about ghosts Crawl was implemented because someone thought "this would be cool" without thinking about the gameplay implications at all.

(TBH, that's not a bad thing)

Wanting to implement something because it's cool isn't a bad thing. Implementing it without thinking about the gameplay implications is a very bad thing.

I like the sense of joining in and interacting with the community of crawl-players, all on the server together striving for the same goal, to retrieve the orb. It's one reason that I play online, and recognizing the ghosts in my games is part of that. It's part of the point that the ghost is not just another random enemy, but visibly the remnant of another player's attempt. Is it a good enough reason to keep character names even though some of the members of that community are obnoxious enough to name their characters dicksuck69 or whatever? Beats the hell out of me. But I did want to point out, that for people like me anyway, something is lost by randomizing all ghost names.

I can't believe ghosts are still in the game to be honest. Gameplay wise they are pretty bad. If they didn't exist and they were suggested I don't think the suggestion would even be considered. I don't understand how a development process that cut popular and largely gameplay neutral things like MD for fairly abstract reasons has left ghosts for so long.

Hands wrote:If they didn't exist and they were suggested I don't think the suggestion would even be considered.

I'm not saying I disagree with you on this, but I get the feeling the devs roll their eyes whenever they see this argument.

Tiktacy wrote:
Hands wrote:If they didn't exist and they were suggested I don't think the suggestion would even be considered.

I'm not saying I disagree with you on this, but I get the feeling the devs roll their eyes whenever they see this argument.

I don't think it's a good argument in every situation, but I think it's pretty strong in situations like this where the feature in question is not a central game mechanic and is also quite impactful on gameplay.

I do agree that its a reasonable thing to bring up in this situation.

But in all honesty, player ghosts aren't that bad in concept. Make it so they can move up and down staircases , give them randomized names, and make it so online ghosts appear with the same frequency in all games to avoid the "easier to win the game at different times of the day" or "splat PC's to get rid of player ghosts" cheese.

The thing about ghosts though is that if you remove the traceable connection to other players and let them behave like monsters then they're effectively just random uniques with no attempt to balance their powers and with extra grief potential.

Hands wrote:The thing about ghosts though is that if you remove the traceable connection to other players and let them behave like monsters then they're effectively just random uniques with no attempt to balance their powers and with extra grief potential.

Maybe its just me, but I actually like that about them.

But I see what you are trying to get it.

It's not wrong as such but it does seem to be inconsistent with the general design philosophy.

Lasty wrote:I used to have problems with the huge number of offensively named ghosts constantly flooding my games. The names were appalling: poorly-spelled, racist, sexist, disgusting names that made you question the basic decency of human beings.Then I switched from local to online and the problem went away.

Serious answer: ghosts will never be optional in online play because they have an impact on balance. Removing ghosts is an option and keeping ghosts is an option, but ghosts for some and not others is not an option. I personally find ghosts kinda fun, so I would vote to keep them, even though I understand the problems with them. I like the idea of making them not worth XP tho.

For real fun you have to add randomized fake ghosts to games that don't have enough real ghosts. So even if someone deletes their morgue every death they still have a random chance to run into an invincible treeform cheigarg in CPA (rip ghost trees). Also it's good for balance i guess.

This might sound a bit cheesy, but might a swear filter help with the ghost name issue?

I think the main problem is that ghosts are tied to the place of their death, rather than placed in any sort of sensible fashion. Design a handful of easily identifiable vaults, and limit the appearance of ghosts to such places... imagine, for example, a branch end with a rune guarded by a half dozen of the poor sods who died trying to get it before you. Perhaps lower level ghosts might be used as popcorn minions by necromancers later in the game.

Not every fallen player needs to be represented as a vanilla ghost either. Perhaps fallen worshipers of the good gods could become angels instead, appear in the rare places where holy monsters show up. Let Murray summon the damned souls who died in the hells. Bug kill your casting character? Gastronok might bring your spell list and hat to somebody else's game. Why not let Saint Roka's posse include a few resurrected and recruited false Messiahs that he killed.

I like being reminded of my past attempts, or the fact that other people try and fail at Crawl just as I do, depending on if I am on or offline. But the ghost system as it stands is a bit screwy.

Might as well take a cue from NetHack's Valley of the Dead, and just slap names from recent games* on generic monsters. Flavorful, but it can be made clear in the manual and other documentation that these are just normal monsters with special names.

Still, I think that the immediate solution is to just remove ghosts. Perhaps someone will come up with a better persistence-after-death mechanic, but the one we have now can produce wild swings in balance, encourages out-of-game action, and doesn't seem to be very well-liked. Halfway solutions like randomizing names just seem like they're more trouble than they're worth, especially since a lot of them would have little effect besides making it harder, but not impossible, to look up morgues.

As for the issue of ghosts with offensive names, maybe a filter could be implemented, but it seems like a better idea is to just ban accounts with offensive names from servers. Names show up in a lot of other places (current games to watch, milestones in IRC channels, recent games, etc), so just filtering them out of ghost names doesn't solve the problem completely. If possible, established accounts could be given the opportunity to be renamed (I have no idea how technically feasible this is).

* Yes I know the VotD pulls from the high score list, but it's the same concept

Maybe some cemetery vaults could be added, with a variable number of depth appropriate levelled ghosts. Other ghosts could be limited to Hell, Tomb, and Pandemonium, where you already need good survivability. I also like a massive number of player ghosts spawning while running with the Orb.

For what it's worth, I don't think ghosts' names are really a good thing to consider when we're talking about ghost design. If offensive player names are a problem, we should address that directly, especially since those names pop up in many other places all over Crawl. Likewise, @duvessa, if bad monster spells are a problem, we should remove them, not remove ghosts to eliminate some vector by which they could be added.

IMO, many of the problems with ghosts could be solved by making them optional in the offline game. I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who really defended offline ghosts with much passion, and I don't know that I've ever read a conversation about crawl ghosts that didn't include a sidebar on deleting ghosts or setting up a script or whatever. Short of offering things like NetHack's bones sharing systems, it seems like the best option.

Ghosts are a good idea online, because they are cool and potentially interesting. The fact that they're often not right now is a harder problem to solve than offline ghosts.

Muhahaha wrote:I think the main problem is that ghosts are tied to the place of their death, rather than placed in any sort of sensible fashion

I agree with this part. The game should evaluate the strength of a ghost, and if it's too much for where it died, place it deeper.

Muhahaha wrote:might a swear filter help with the ghost name issue?

So is Dick a swear word then? And a ghost named HaistaVittu would be pretty offensive to me but not to most people. Filtering would be a lousy band-aid.

The trouble with ghosts is that literally every single aspect of their design is bad. They have no redeeming mechanical features at all. Any level of removal is preferable to the status quo, but the only viable path towards rehabilitation involve re-writing everything about them from scratch.

If we want to have randuniques, we should just have randuniques rather than tying them to player accounts. An intentionally designed random unique generation block of code could actually be tested, modified, and balanced to make it do what it's supposed to be doing, in contrast to the current system when is non-random, open to abuse by both involved parties, and completely disconnected from intended gameplay.

What if ghosts just vanished when you left the level, like friendly summons do? So if you encounter a ghost, you can either try and kill it if you think it's weak enough, or you can flee and the problem is gone, but you can't keep going up the stairs and resting to reset the fight until you get lucky and win. Perhaps would work better if ghosts would appear at a random time during a floor, instead of spawned in at generation.

Honestly a whole lot of problems in crawl(ghosts, stairdancing, etc) seem like they would be solved or at least improved a lot better if you just couldn't take upstairs normally, so if you wanted to escape a level your only option was diving deeper. But because the game has multiple branching paths which the player might need to return to, it's not so simple, because what if they go past a branch entrance and need to go back to it... maybe when the player reaches, for example, the dungeon level the lair entrance would normally be on, they would be given an item which they can use to transport them into lair, for use whenever(but once they use it, they cannot leave lair until they reach the end). Ideally these 'branch portal' items would not take up inventory space, and would instead be on a menu on a different unimportant key. Like { or something.

archaeo wrote:For what it's worth, I don't think ghosts' names are really a good thing to consider when we're talking about ghost design.

People want randomized names because of the theoretical hyper optimal behavior of diving through morgue files to figure out everything you can about the ghost.

Admittedly even I do that if its in zot or some other late-extended branch.

I don't ever feel the need to do this when I can look at a ghost to see weapon brand, resists, general AC/EV, and spells. Not really sure what else I would need to know. The only thing that doesn't tell me is weapon type+enchant, but I can find out how strong it is in melee by letting it hit me and if it's too strong, I leave.

Randomized names would not stop me from looking at morgues. It would just make it more of a pain in the ass to construct the Sequell query - instead of name+combo+place, I'd use combo+place+god+AC bounds+EV bounds+etc.

Looking at the morgue still gives you the exact HP, EV, AC, HD, MR, and melee damage.

Weapon enchantment doesn't affect ghost damage.

duvessa wrote:Weapon enchantment doesn't affect ghost damage.

Wow! Slaying doesn't count either?

The Tavern

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