Why phase out races at all?

[graemelion]

I think you are reading far too much into this and reading far too personally into this.

It's not about you.

[dynast]

I mean, if all this information is so easy to look for it should be somewhat as easy to post it here, in our faces. I thought you guys enjoyed some "danking".

[prozacelf]

Fo:Bad

I'm curious as to why you think this. I haven't got a ton of experience with hunter, but are bows that much worse than crossbows for formicids?

Short answer: yes.

I guess you could justify using bows w/r/t the fact that arrows are much more common early than bolts are. But Fo are just better at xbows.

[ker]

Communication being what it is means that the speaker can always be clearer and the listener can always try harder to understand. That doesn't mean that either of the parties can just assume the other has to do all the work. Because that's not how that works.

I don't really see a plausible argument that this information is difficult to locate.

I read the stickied thread when I joined the forum and wanted to post something in GDD. I didn't pick up on this information. Take from that what you will.

Also, the thread is called "Game Design Discussion Guidelines" - it's not the place you'd look for more information on "Game Design Discussion". At least I didn't.

Also, also, the dev wiki link in that thread doesn't really lead you to somewhere that's actually easy to find the information you might want in much the same way the webpage doesn't highlight the wiki as per Shard1697's account.

All of this isn't an attack on you or the devs. Rather, I hope it is useful and actionable feedback.

[graemelion]

Let's just move this to CYC

[duvessa]

Holy Jesus just don't randomly lash out at people and twist the words in their mouth saying that they gave the devs flak when they really didn't and quit trying to undermine peoples right to express their opinion just because it doesn't flow with your inner monologue @a certain individual

have you considered a job at a movie theatre because you're an excellent projector

[syringe]

The public emails are like threads, except the grouping/nesting/ordering/formatting is worse, and makes it much harder to follow. Researching archived correspondence - who's this for, Nancy Drew? And how is it reasonable to expect anyone, even devs, to scroll through old chat logs? Not even old threads, but a single stream of chatter, which is only good for quick back-and-forth. More insight can be gleaned from HE threads than from searching "high el" +regex in the logs, try it. And most is just idle talk.

Like, the thread for amulet reform prominently has "XP-gated Slow" as a take-off penalty, which is nuts. Suggestions are not equal and not everything can get criticized. If XP-gated slow wasn't taken seriously, how could we know suggestions like Dismissal were taken seriously, other than seeing them in trunk?

The situation and discussion would be very different if devs were to post their plans, not "maybe someday we might consider" like the dev wiki, but "this is going in the game" with the specificity of a commit's commentary.

If you want to inconvenience outsiders to keep casuals at arm's length from the process, fine, but knowing the history of decisions is not necessary to judge design, even as it may be helpful. You don't need to know how a book was written or how a movie was made to review it.

[graemelion]

The public emails are like threads, except the grouping/nesting/ordering/formatting is worse, and makes it much harder to follow. Researching archived correspondence - who's this for, Nancy Drew? And how is it reasonable to expect anyone, even devs, to scroll through old chat logs? Not even old threads, but a single stream of chatter, which is only good for quick back-and-forth. More insight can be gleaned from HE threads than from searching "high el" +regex in the logs, try it. And most is just idle talk.

Like, the thread for amulet reform prominently has "XP-gated Slow" as a take-off penalty, which is nuts. Suggestions are not equal and not everything can get criticized. If XP-gated slow wasn't taken seriously, how could we know suggestions like Dismissal were taken seriously, other than seeing them in trunk?

The situation and discussion would be very different if devs were to post their plans, not "maybe someday we might consider" like the dev wiki, but "this is going in the game" with the specificity of a commit's commentary.

If you want to inconvenience outsiders to keep casuals at arm's length from the process, fine, but knowing the history of decisions is not necessary to judge design, even as it may be helpful. You don't need to know how a book was written or how a movie was made to review it.

The devs plans are posted here:

https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... :0.20_plan

The current commits are published here:

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commits/master

Trunk updates are posted mostly every two weeks on the blog here.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk ... nuary-2017

I found this within five minutes of deciding I wanted to follow DCSS development closer.

Five minutes.

FIVE.

[milski]

I do agree that reworks seem like a better way of doing things than removing and (possibly) adding a new race.

For instance, with HE/Barachian, you could have just reflavored HE's as naturally translocative elves that advance and move slowly. Buff their TLoc aptitude, shave some other aptitudes, give them hop flavored as a semi-semi controlled blink.

[dynast]

Maybe you should have spent more than five minutes.

The devs plans are posted here:

https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... :0.20_plan

Where is the 0.19 release plan? Or do you want to discuss the charms rework that is going on since 0.16 release plan? Because we have been discussing charms(in gdd and cyc) for quite some time.

The current commits are published here:

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commits/master

And here is all i could find(which is in gammafunk' meme thread anyways):
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/a ... c6dfb43c30

  Code:

High elves were a relatively uninteresting species in terms of gameplay,
feeling somewhat like tengu but with weapon specialization like merfolk.
Their theme originates from Tolkien, a source of lore that crawl is
trying to borrow less from these days. Their gorgeous blonde hair not
withstanding, this particular Tolkien reference wasn't particularly
interesting.

[Especially with Ogres now also having newly-improved casting apts, there's a
very wide range of hybrid/magic-oriented species, with High Elves being
increasingly redundant. -MarvinPA]

I had forgot the last line there, which is glorious. It basically says "go play Og instead of HE".

Trunk updates are posted mostly every two weeks on the blog here.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk ... nuary-2017

Well, lets read it:

  Code:

Whisper ‘Farewell’ when you leave, Legolas: High Elves are no more. (This is, of course, part of the crawl dev team’s newly “straight edge” lifestyle.)

Who is insulting who here, again?

[gammafunk]

Alright, this thread has ceased to be a productive discussion, and I'm locking the thread.

The dev team is a group of volunteers that have agreed to share commit access to the project. The terms under which we collaborate are not open for democratic vote, nor is the method we use for communication, which is primarily Freenode IRC. The commit logs are an important source of documentation for current and future developers, and the CRD mailing list and the dev wiki are other tools we use for some kinds of collaboration. But none of this documentation contain all relevant discussion, because participating in the discussion and working on the game itself take considerable amounts of free time. Trying to summarize all forms of dev discussion for purposes of informing players that want to know more about developer decisions is not at all feasible for us.

That said, anyone can read the commit logs to get more informed about developers' reasoning. They can also participate in IRC discussion if they want to talk about their ideas politely and show clear reasoning. Various people on the dev team hang out in places like Tavern, reddit, SA, etc to get player feedback. So there's not too much of a barrier for someone wanting to make a design suggestion in one of these places so that a dev or two can at least see it.

As for removals, we've been clear for a long time now that if we don't feel that specific content adds significantly to the game, it can be removed. Cognitive load for player and developer alike are easier, and we like the game we're making more when content like this is gone. Even when most of us feel there's not enough of value in some piece of content to salvage, its removal is usually considered over some time, often many releases. This is a process that works for us, and lets us keep evolving the game in a direction we like. It's open source, so if anyone profoundly disagrees with all of this or just wants to make a game going in a different direction, they can create a nice new fork and host it (cf. Hellcrawl). We're happy to answer technical questions from anyone who's serious about getting started.