Hurkyl wrote:and into wrote:To put it another way: If the formula does actually need to be seen, the formula is broken, not the display.
And I assert exactly the opposite -- if people find it useful to go through great lengths to research formulas and run up numbers to discover some fact, that's a pretty strong indicator that the display really should be presenting that fact directly.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but whatever you or I assert, Crawl design philosophy, which is completely transparent by the way (it talks about it in depth both in the information files in game, and on the website) tends to NOT give extremely specific numeric info.
People can and will do whatever they want. Some people find all that information useful and want it at hand. The information is not particularly hidden, it is even available on the Crawl website, it is just that much of it is not displayed in game. I didn't say that the formula is broken if people *want* to see it, rather, if it is absolutely required that one does see it or know something recondite in order to play. (Cf. Nethack—not saying that as a dig or anything, it is just that the game intentionally has all sorts of extremely specific spoilery stuff in it, that's part of its aesthetic.)
I'm sure each developer has a slightly different take on exactly where to draw what lines, but as I understand it they are all more or less on the same page about these things. Exactly how much "hard" information (i.e., the numbers, the statistical data) is displayed, and in what cases, is up for discussion to an extent, but it is explicitly said in the design philosophy to keep it to a minimum. Maybe fighting warrants an exception, but trying to argue against the whole philosophy and aesthetic of Crawl, which is minimalist when it comes to this particular thing, is probably not going to achieve much.
There is a rationale behind this, it is not simply arbitrary. The Crawl Wiki, for instance, loves all these long lists and comparison tables, formulas, etc. That's all well and good. But then you actually read the descriptions available on the wiki about various things (different gods, weapons, etc.) and you often see a real lack of perspective. I'm not saying all of the contributors do this (I'm not part of that community so I don't have any sense of that), but amongst some of the contributors, there's a very narrow focus on numbers, in a way that is probably misleading, like comparing two extremely similar weapons in terms of average damage and saying one is better against "high AC foes" because its base damage is 1 higher while the other weapon is slightly faster and so (but of course!) the faster weapon is better against "high EV" foes.
Talking about those small differences out of curiosity is one thing, but this is presented on the wiki as information that new players should know about weapons. Even when the observations are technically true, some of them are just such small differences it is completely trivial. It is not like one weapon was DESIGNED to be better against one type of foe, and so there is this awesome noticeable special effect that really affects game play and strategy, it is just a minor quirk of the numbers that you can only "discover" when you over-analyze said numbers to death. In other words, this lack of perspective I'm talking about did not emerge because people LACKED information, on the contrary, it emerged because people sought out all the gory details and over-analyzed it. They are free to do that, of course, but Crawl's design should not *encourage* it by making that information seem more important than it actually is.
Speaking personally, aside from min delay—which many developers feel is a somewhat broken formula that needs tweaking, by the way—I do not know off the top of my head any of the formulas from which Crawl game play mechanics derive. If I'm *really* in a pickle about whether, for instance, raising dodging is worthwhile on a particular character in heavy armor, given a certain set of stats, I start a new character and I wiz mode it to see, then quit the wiz mode character. I've done this maybe four or five times. I've won many games since I started playing in 0.4.5, and I'm by no means a *great* Crawler, just a decent one.
Digging into Crawl's formulas can be interesting, definitely. It is not necessary for good play, any more than knowing about the industrial process by which chess pieces are created makes you a good chess player.