Abyss Redecorating

[brendan]

I'd like to float some ideas for redecorating the Abyss:

1. Provide an exit/stairs based on how much the player has explored. As the player sees new tiles, the counter decrements. When it hits zero, stairs appear when an unseen square enters LOS. My goal here is to reduce the variance in the time to exit the abyss. Currently Abyssal exits make up 1 in 7500 tiles on Abyss:1. This is basically sampling from a Poisson distribution, which has a high variance and should lead to some excruciatingly long trips to the abyss.

2. Convert the lower branches into dedicated rune vault levels. There's currently no reason to go to Abyss:5. I would strongly prefer to create a single instance of a rune vault and have it appear repeatedly as the player wander. The frequency with which the vault appeared would increase with level. As the player goes deeper, the vault would appear with greater frequency. Abyss:3 might have 200-tiles between vaults (these are just off the top of my head), while Abyss:5 could have an average spacing of 80-tiles.

3. Expel the players from the Abyss once the rune is taken. This will requiring revisiting vault design.

[Wahaha]

For 3, I think the increased gates after picking up the rune do the job perfectly.

[brendan]

For 3, I think the increased gates after picking up the rune do the job perfectly.

They work pretty well, but they trivialize all subsequent departures from the Abyss. Whether this is a pro or con is debatable -- getting the rune signifies in some sense that you've won the branch.

[Siegurt]

Actually the increased abyss exits once you have the pan rune are one of the things that make pan bearable, since literal exits are so much less common than exits-through-the-abyss, just something to keep in the back of your head.

If we do go this route, I would personally like it if when someone enters the abyss by way of banishment, for the timer to be set according to the spell power of the banisher (so wimpy banishers will banish you for less time than strong ones) and for the banishment timer even at high spell power to be much smaller than it is when you enter voluntarily. Actually a fuzzed timer of some sort gives a lot of design space around abyss trips.

[MDvedh]

To be honest, I hate Abyss. It's boring. Especially when you are XL27 guy who cleared pans and is going to get that rune. Last time i took like 45 minutes of real-time.
I see two ways of getting it more interesting.
The first one is to reduce rune search time. Exactly that thing you are telling us about, sounds great, I'm in.
The second one is to make Abyss more challenging. I love new monsters, but i think there must be more of them and new ones deeper in the Abyss. Also, why Hell Sentinels wandering in the abyss? They are Hell Sentinels, not Abyss Sentinels. Yeah, I think demons should be banished from Abyss. Maybe add some malmutating monsters in Cosmic-Lovecraft style to compensate nequoxecs.

EDIT: If you aren't strong enough, i find Abyss quite fun. It's all like "run-run-run-OH-FUCK-run-run-run-run-OH-FUCK-run-run"

[galehar]

3. Expel the players from the Abyss once the rune is taken. This will requiring revisiting vault design.

It depends on vault design, but I fear this will create a huge bias toward stealing the rune instead of fighting the vault. Stealing is a perfectly valid and interesting tactic, but if you don't even have to plan your escape, I find it a bit cheap.
As Siegurt said, the increased exit spawn rate is enough and works well.

[1010011010]

make exit portal occur more often on your first unwanted visit to the Abyss.
So the first time you get banished because an ogre mage popped into LOS or a naga first strike with a distortion weapon, or a zombie walks on a zot trap you have a better chance of surviving the result of uncontrollable circumstance.
It also lets new players get a taste of the abyss to realise it's a dangerous place without keeping them there too long and potentially killing off a character .

[galehar]

potentially killing off a character .

What's wrong with killing characters? It's the point of the game!

[Lasty]

I love that having the Abyssal rune makes it easier to leave the Abyss. I've had characters where I went to get the rune after getting banished just so that any future banishments would be shorter and more trivial. It's also nice to have at least one rune that has a meaningful(ish) power. I would love it if all the runes had an effect that's similar in design, though I'm not sure offhand how that could work.

[1010011010]

What's wrong with killing characters? It's the point of the game!

Crawl is transparent, it's one of the best things about it. You can call up information about almost everything with ?/ and examining monsters gives loads of information, including threat level.
Branches have very little in the way of conveying it's difficulty which is fine in most cases since you exit the way you came. Any threat of being sent to the abyss has an ambiguous level of danger, it also happens in one turn with no warning. With the spell, it's unintuitive to how much MR you need or how well you resist.

Being banished is dangerous but it's not obvious.

[dpeg]

bitcode: Yes, banishment is one-way but for this we have Abyssal Knights. If you keep being banished and want to train the Abyss a bit (and go unspoiled), you can fire up AK's to have some abyss trips at various stages.

The true spoiler information around this is how MR works. Should really do something about it.

[galehar]

Being banished is dangerous but it's not obvious.

It quickly does after a couple of death. Anyway, the information is there. You can read the branch description and now, you can even see the monster spell list and spell descriptions. The game don't warn you about plenty of other threats, you learn by dying.
This is offtopic anyway.

[MDvedh]

Being banished is dangerous but it's not obvious.

Once upon a time, it took like 200 (500? 1000?) games to understand the fact I'm seeing thing doesn't mean I'm able to kill it. It took one banish to understand Abyss is no joke, though.

[Tiktacy]

I fear that making the abyss easier to escape from would make rings of magic resistance much less useful(although, it is quite powerful to begin with). It would also make the mid game way less scary, and way more boring. Lets avoid doing things that make the abyss less scary. It's the fucking ABYSS for gods sake, it's SUPPOSE to be shit-your-pants scary.

Quite honestly, escaping the abyss can often be the most terrifying and intense experience in the game, and I think it should stay that way. Making the abyss door spawn less randomly completely detracts from the flavor. On top of that, if you can survive 500 turns in the abyss, you can probably survive 2000, and if you can't then you are likely going to die anyway from exhausting your consumables.

I'm not going to lie, dying in the abyss is incredibly frustrating, but its one of the few times in crawl I actually feel like my death was warranted. If you make the decision to fight Louis, its your fault for dying, if you make the decision to not pull out all the stops or ogre mages, that's your fault for dying, if you choose to skip out on MR because you don't think you need it, it's your fault for dying. Surviving the abyss is an exercise of pure skill, despite its randomized flavor. It demonstrates the unpredictability of the game, and shows how you NEED to be ready for ANYTHING. It is NEVER the games fault you were banished, it's always the players. If LOS edge banishment is that much of an issue, make it so the range of banishment is shorter.

As for the part about vaults spawning in Abyss;3 and on, that sounds really cool. Keep abyss 1 and 2 the same, those are perfect the way they are(although less/no demons and more chaotic monsters would be cool).

[galehar]

To come back to the OP's proposal.

1. I don't see the point in reducing variance. It's good that sometimes you get lucky with an early exit and sometimes they seem impossible to find. The abyss is supposed to be random and unpredictable.

2. Same, no need to try to guarantee anything. There are already rune vaults. Maybe we need more of them, or make them more dramatic or tweak the frequency. But the basic mechanism sounds good to me.

[Mankeli]

I fear that making the abyss easier to escape from would make rings of magic resistance nearly useless.

This doesn't make any sense.

As for the OP's proposal, I agree that Abyss trips can be excruciating but I don't think it has a lot to do with the variance in gettin out of there. Also, how would the change in 2) make people want to go to Abyss:5 any more than they do now?

[MoogleDan]

I agree on the point that there's currently no reason to go to Abyss:5. It simply ramps up the monster spawn rate high enough to make exploration that much more dangerous; I'd much rather spend a little more time on Abyss:3 than dive to someplace much more eager to kill me, especially since you sometimes find the rune on 3 or 4 anyway before finding a stairway deeper.

I've been banished while already in the Abyss once by an acolyte of Lugonu, and that seems like a pretty good system for making the deeper depths more consequential, but right now they seem to be the only thing capable of sending you down further. Should there be more threats in the Abyss capable of forcing the player to dive? Frankly I'd be happy with an increase in the number of doors down spawning; I've had runs where I was fleeing a lich or hell sentinel (seriously, nix the hell sentinels) and would've happily jumped through a door into the deeper chaos to escape. Setting them to be more common at high tension would make for some extremely unpleasant (in a fun way) decision making.

As for Abyss:5, could we make the level stand out from 3 and 4 a little more? I'd love it if the rune at that depth were to distort the level in some way to show the player its location... Maybe have the rune vault be huge, with a large circular area around it signifying its presence? Replace rock walls with "warped rock walls," "twisted rock walls," and eventually "amorphous walls" near the very center, and the actual center vault could be fairly forgiving. Abyss:5 is already the most dangerous floor of the place, so allowing players to rush right into the heart of things for a fairly straightforward challenge seems reasonable, especially since there's already immense variance in Abyss rune vault difficulty (are there still "vaults" that just place the rune right out in the open?).

[WalkerBoh]

1. Provide an exit/stairs based on how much the player has explored. As the player sees new tiles, the counter decrements. When it hits zero, stairs appear when an unseen square enters LOS.

I agree with galehar that variance is fine. I have no issue with the appearance rate of gates out. I would however like to put a cap on number of turns spent before stairs are found. So around, e.g. 2k turns per level, the stair rate increases significantly. Nothing is more frustrating than being stuck on abyss:1 for an hour when you're trying to dive.

I also dislike goal #2. IMO the way to encourage abyss:5 visits is to drastically increase rune vault spawn rates in relation to 3 and 4. The spawn rate has to be proportionally greater than abyss:4 so that it overcompensates the added danger on abyss:5. Abyss:5 is pretty nuts right now, danger-wise.

For #3, I agree that the increased gate spawn rate works very well currently. I don't see a need for a change.

[Kate]

Split off a bunch of off-topic stuff, feel free to start a new thread about magic resistance in the advice forum.

[Tiktacy]

1. Provide an exit/stairs based on how much the player has explored. As the player sees new tiles, the counter decrements. When it hits zero, stairs appear when an unseen square enters LOS.

I agree with galehar that variance is fine. I have no issue with the appearance rate of gates out. I would however like to put a cap on number of turns spent before stairs are found. So around, e.g. 2k turns per level, the stair rate increases significantly. Nothing is more frustrating than being stuck on abyss:1 for an hour when you're trying to dive.

I also dislike goal #2. IMO the way to encourage abyss:5 visits is to drastically increase rune vault spawn rates in relation to 3 and 4. The spawn rate has to be proportionally greater than abyss:4 so that it overcompensates the added danger on abyss:5. Abyss:5 is pretty nuts right now, danger-wise.

For #3, I agree that the increased gate spawn rate works very well currently. I don't see a need for a change.

I've actually never made it to abyss:5. Considering how horrifying abyss:4 was on a character that I considered to be indestructible(abyss was the last rune I went for in a 15 rune run, mostly because I forgot it existed...), I can't even begin to imagine how awful abyss:5 is. Could someone help describe it to me?

(just to put my experience into perspective, I entered the abyss having used BR only once in the tomb, I left having used it 5 times)

[Hurkyl]

To come back to the OP's proposal.

1. I don't see the point in reducing variance. It's good that sometimes you get lucky with an early exit and sometimes they seem impossible to find. The abyss is supposed to be random and unpredictable.

Exponential distributions -- the distribution on the "time you have to wait for an event with x% chance of happening every turn" -- have really long tails. There is a lot of room to curtail that behavior while still retaining "random and unpredictable".

[Siegurt]

Indeed it's theoretically possible to have the crawl-world end before an abyss exit generates, although I think we'd need a billion crawl players playing nonstop for the next 10,000 years to actually see an instance of it.

  Code:

 if (you.elapsed_time >= 2*1000*1000*1000)
    {
        mpr("Outside, the world ends.");
        mpr("Sorry, but your quest for the Orb is now rather pointless. "
            "You quit...");
        ouch(INSTANT_DEATH, NON_MONSTER, KILLED_BY_QUITTING);
    }


[brendan]

To come back to the OP's proposal.

1. I don't see the point in reducing variance. It's good that sometimes you get lucky with an early exit and sometimes they seem impossible to find. The abyss is supposed to be random and unpredictable.

Exponential distributions -- the distribution on the "time you have to wait for an event with x% chance of happening every turn" -- have really long tails. There is a lot of room to curtail that behavior while still retaining "random and unpredictable".

Exactly. Changing the generation strategy gives us explicit control over the distribution, rather than settling for some weird Poisson mess.

[Bloax]

The biggest thing that I think is missing from Abyss at the moment (besides all those PESKY SMOKEHELLHOQEXEC DEMONS being there) is that even if you want to go down to Abyss:3 and below, actually having one of those pesky stairways spawning can take forever.t

[rjrrt]

This is my from my current game... I spent what seemed like forever with a lvl 27 DEFE in the abyss, half on level 5 without finding the rune.

96095 | D:22 | Voluntarily entered the Abyss.
96376 | Abyss:2 | Reached skill level 27 in Conjurations
97402 | Abyss:2 | Reached skill level 5 in Stealth
98341 | Abyss:5 | Entered Level 5 of the Abyss
99333 | Abyss:5 | Found a corrupted altar of Lugonu.
99667 | Abyss:5 | Reached skill level 10 in Stealth
100055 | D:22 | Escaped the Abyss

Level 5 is pretty hectic. There seemed to be intermittent waves of dangerous mobs.
Annoying thrashing horrors and starcursed masses are too common, in my opinion (28 thrashing horrors, 32 starcursed masses).
I finally left due mostly to frustration at danger level with no reward.

I am in favor of some type of rune vault appearing more quickly on Abyss:5, otherwise what's the point of going that far down.

[Galefury]

The one time I was in Abyss:5 I couldnt even move much because the monsters spawned so fast. I almost immediately identified a rune vault, but had to move around a bunch due to huge amounts of spawning monsters before I could finally go get the rune. All the time expecting to be shifted away. It was a fun thing to experience once, but I would not go there again.

[MrPlanck]

My primary objective, every game, is to keep contact with the forest to an absolute minimum. Now the forest denizens haunt me in the abyss, and I am sad.

[damiac]

I have lost a few promising characters to the abyss, and I have to say, the variance is a bit too much considering that you can be banished by any random monster with a distortion weapon, and a few uniques have the spell, while you're still within the rune lock area of the game.

That means, if you don't find some decent MR early in the dungeon, or in the lair branches, you might just get screwed.

And even more annoying is to have a character survive insane encounter after insane encounter in the abyss, finally make my way out, only to get instantly abyssed again! But this time, even after exploring for like 40 frikking minutes, no exit is found, and eventually I run out teleport scrolls and speed potions.

What's wrong with normalizing the abyss time a bit? Why should some early game monsters have what has the potential to be a death spell? Getting abyssed is so far out of line with the power level of a monster who found a disto weapon, or erolcha's other spells. Why should there be a random, unavoidable chance of stepping on a zot trap and getting abyssed?(remember, I'm now forced to go places with zot traps before i can go to D15)

I really like the idea of a turn counter that will generate a guaranteed exit after X turns, especially if that count is influenced by the power level of the spell or whatever that sent you there. Also, that means having some MR, but not enough to actually resist the abyss, could still reduce that count.

That argument that the odds are really low that you'll get stuck there for a long time is a rather meaningless argument when it actually happens.

Also, on a somewhat related note, is it just me, or is abyss 2 way easier than abyss 1? It seems like there's a lot more generic popcorn in abyss 2, and you can actually get chunks from some of it.

[WalkerBoh]

Just an FYI, but if you get abyssed early and don't want to die, you can always convert to Lugonu and depart right away.

Also, there is a small period when you escape the abyss when you are immune to banishment. So you can't get "instantly" abyssed again.

[galehar]

Exactly. Changing the generation strategy gives us explicit control over the distribution, rather than settling for some weird Poisson mess.

I'm not opposed to changing the generation strategy. As you said, it currently depends on explored cells and is a simple poisson distribution. Are you only suggesting to cap it?

[Siegurt]

Assuming you find an altar before you find an exit (which is the case for about half my games, certainly not all of them)

Hm, that brings something up, maybe you should be able to convert *anywhere* in the abyss, after all, it's pretty much Lucy's bag, that'd mean you could pretty much escape when you decided to escape, but with a pretty substantial commitment (and potentially wrath).

Perhaps you could only convert "anywhere in the abyss" if you hadn't previously abandoned lucy. If you've left her service, then you have to find an altar like any old schmo.

That would certainly reduce the super-extra-grindyness of the abyss and make it not a one-shot death sentence for a low level characters.

[dpeg]

Siegurt: I think the choice is a lot more pronouned if you can only convert at Lugonu altars. After all, it is completely different thing to recap that desastrous abyss run and wonder about the five altars you let pass by, and switching allegiance when surrounded at 10 HP -- you can always do the latter, so I wouldn't want that behaviour.

[Siegurt]

That's true, it does make for a less-interesting choice.

Hm, what if converting without an altar required half of your life to do so (so take half of your max hp as irresistible damage, sorta like torment, but will kill you if you are below half hit points)

That'd make it a pretty rough choice (particularly if you were banished to get here) as an escape and one you'd really only want to make if you were at-or-near-full hp, and definitely not an emergency escape button, but a viable option if you just wanted to get the heck out of here.

[damiac]

Can you actually escape the abyss with 0 piety? I thought the escape the abyss ability took a significant amount of piety.

I've had dangerous trips to the abyss that didn't go on forever, and I think those accomplished what the abyss is supposed to be. I was running from horrible monsters, and trying to heal up in little corners. Those are exciting and it's great when you actually escape.

Then I've had the trips that don't seem to have any big scary moments, more like you just get worn down over time, and after exploring and escaping a ton of dangerous monsters, you finally just get beaten down by the infinite swarm, probably insanely mutated in the process.

[MoogleDan]

Well if she's trying to tempt the desperate, just crank up altar generation as tension rises, or even have her blatantly dump them near the edge of LOS for characters fleeing dangerous opponents : D It's a compromise solution, but I think it maintains flavour nicely.

[bisonbisonbison]

Has anyone calculated the median time for exit portals appearing on A:1-5?

[reaver]

Can you actually escape the abyss with 0 piety? I thought the escape the abyss ability took a significant amount of piety.

When you start worshiping Lugonu for the first time you get extra piety so you can use the "escape the abyss" ability immediately. Normally you start off with 15 piety (so that you don't get excommunicated for waiting around a bit) but Lugonu worshippers start with 35. (Piety max is 200)

[brendan]

Has anyone calculated the median time for exit portals appearing on A:1-5?

It's a function of the number of tiles you see. You could calculate it empirically, but I think it's a waste of time.

[MDvedh]

Has anyone calculated the median time for exit portals appearing on A:1-5?

Given the chance 1/7500 for each new tile, we could mathematically expect one exit per 7500 new tiles seen.
Given every turn you can see 16 new tiles and lets say you explore new tiles every second turn, we have an expectation of one portal per 1000 turns.

[bisonbisonbison]

I calculated the numbers for abyss exit appearances:

  Code:

Leve1   Odds         Median 1st exit      90th percentile     95th       99th
1       1/7500       after ~5200 tiles    ~17000 tiles        ~22k       ~35k
2       1/6250       ~4300                ~14000              ~19k       ~29k
3       1/5000       ~3500                ~11500              ~15k       ~23k
4       1/3750       ~2600                ~8700               ~11k       ~17k
5       1/2500       ~1700                ~5700               ~7.5k      ~11.5k


I don't know how fast people actually uncover new tiles in the Abyss, but I'd suggest a goal of ensuring exit stairs appear somewhere between 3-5x the median at each level. God forbid you are on a 1/10 duration banishment and you get shifted away from an exit.

[siprus]

What about using pseudo random generation? You'd increase your chance of finding portal for every tile you don't find portal from. I'd suggest the game with should start with 1/8000 and increase it to something like 1/10 or 1/100 once you have explored 10000 tiles (it' would cap at this point)? Anyway if you find protal the chance decreases back to 1/8000.

[galehar]

Slowly increasing the exit spawn chance based on explored tiles would help without introducing any ugly cap or breakpoint.

[siprus]

To come back to the OP's proposal.

1. I don't see the point in reducing variance. It's good that sometimes you get lucky with an early exit and sometimes they seem impossible to find. The abyss is supposed to be random and unpredictable.

Assumed from this post You'd want portal to never have 100% chance of appearing.

I guess theoretical cap which can never be reached and the spawn value will never exceed wouldn't be that hard to code either.

[MrPlanck]

Is it just me, or is the new abyss too hard? Even abyss 1 is a nightmare.

[damiac]

Abyss 1 seems to be WAY harder than abyss 2.... so I think something's wrong.

In abyss 1 I was running into a lot of ultra fast demons, mutating monsters, etc.
In abyss 2 i'm seeing merfolk, some abominations, and various dungeon popcorn.

I really don't understand the thought process of the abyss being able to randomly generate the hardest monsters in the entire game on level 1, when a character can get sent there around the time they find the lair!

The abyss is just a total crapshoot. Maybe you'll find an exit after 10 turns. Maybe you'll immediately get surrounded by executioners. Maybe you won't find an exit after 5000 turns. Maybe your teleport just won't work.

How on earth do you balance that? Why not just make banishment send you to a different level of the abyss based on spellpower, and scale the monster difficulty by the level of the abyss you're in?

Random != Challenge.

[Sandman25]

I think the intent is to punish player for being banished, now the player must prove he can survive. Early Abyss exit is fun, I would not want to remove it. If Abyss was easy, it would not be Abyss.

[tompliss]

How on earth do you balance that? Why not just make banishment send you to a different level of the abyss based on spellpower, and scale the monster difficulty by the level of the abyss you're in?
Random != Challenge.

Because then players would be grinding the abyss.
It is random, and even being a noob, I feel it's OK that way, being dangerous without being stupidly dangerous. And always scary, until you've got enough MR not to care about banishment usually.

[brendan]

Slowly increasing the exit spawn chance based on explored tiles would help without introducing any ugly cap or breakpoint.

Do you have a formula in mind? This sounds like a great idea.

Stuff in the abyss capriciously murders me.

The abyss picks a random sub-branch and uses it for a fraction of the spawns. Currently it's random-random. This makes for a bad experience. I think kilobyte is working on fixing this. If a change is much longer in the making, I'm going to disable this until it's ready. My feeling is that Executioners and Hellions are also candidates for removal from Abyss:1. A single one can easily grind through many level 15 characters.

[galehar]

Slowly increasing the exit spawn chance based on explored tiles would help without introducing any ugly cap or breakpoint.

Do you have a formula in mind? This sounds like a great idea.

I was thinking of applying some sort of stepdown to ABYSSAL_RUNE_MAX_ROLL. But I calculated the chance of generating a rune and it already scales pretty well (depth 6 is because worshiping Lugonu gives a +1 to depth). Well, it does if you dive to Abyss:5. Also, note that "cells" means "floor cells", and I don't know what's the average floor density is in the Abyss.
If the spawning chance increase with time, wouldn't it encourage people to grind Abyss:3 instead of diving? And if Abyss:5 is so crazy that people prefer to stay above, maybe that should be addressed instead of changing the rune spawn change.

[bisonbisonbison]

Slowly increasing the exit spawn chance based on explored tiles would help without introducing any ugly cap or breakpoint.

Do you have a formula in mind? This sounds like a great idea.

I was thinking of applying some sort of stepdown to ABYSSAL_RUNE_MAX_ROLL. But I calculated the chance of generating a rune and it already scales pretty well (depth 6 is because worshiping Lugonu gives a +1 to depth). Well, it does if you dive to Abyss:5. Also, note that "cells" means "floor cells", and I don't know what's the average floor density is in the Abyss.
If the spawning chance increase with time, wouldn't it encourage people to grind Abyss:3 instead of diving? And if Abyss:5 is so crazy that people prefer to stay above, maybe that should be addressed instead of changing the rune spawn change.

I think we've been discussing exit spawn, not rune spawn (or even downstairs spawn).