Monday, 16th May 2016, 17:51 by crate
From a design standpoint crawl's identification right now is really bad because it's almost entirely at the point of "everything is identified", so mostly the player is just forced to press extra buttons for no real reason. You get few of the potential benefits of having identification exist, with most of the drawbacks.
If making the player use unidentified things is good, then crawl should reduce the amount of identification available pretty significantly, since then it would actually happen. Instead it sort of matters for like 3 floors sometimes, and the main function of making things unidentified seems to be to reduce by 1 the number of e.g. scroll of teleportation the player might find (since you are somewhat likely to read-ID teleportation even if you then use your ID scrolls on scrolls). If you actually want to reduce the number of scrolls of teleportation a player finds by 1, it's better to just, you know, generate one less scroll in the first place. It's also better since players don't feel like they wasted an item when it just never got generated in the first place (see item destruction).
If, on the other hand, having the player know which resources she has available is desirable, which is the case for like 90% of a win, crawl should just do that. If you like, you can keep "identification" around as it currently works on wands, which is not identification at all but rather as a "scroll of enhancement" (but perhaps that should be merged with ?ew and ?ea and ?recharging, which helps also since crawl keeps increasing the number of inventory items the player wants to carry, which is its own problem).
---
From a player standpoint I much prefer the everything-is-identified approach, so perhaps I shouldn't even be making this post (I'd prefer the status quo to crawl moving in the direction of less ID, even if that is better from a design standpoint, and really crawl is so close to everything-is-identified already that as a player it's not much of a change if crawl goes all the way).
Also as I said above, note that wand "identification" is not actually identification in my opinion: you already know what that wand does, and you have a good idea of how many charges it has (especially for the higher-charge wands). In fact an un"identified" wand works a lot like a sack of spiders or the like, which you cannot "identify" anyway.
- For this message the author crate has received thanks: 4
- all before, duvessa, Floodkiller, osklington