0.20 is so hard that crawl is no fun any longer

[VeryAngryFelid]

You see, crawl is losing players, just core players stay and win more due to becoming more experienced personally

What's your source for this assertion?

From post above in this thread:

Stats after 16 days (t): 2997 players, 1062 runers, 543 winners, 1685 wins, 73356 games, winrate 2.30%, total player time 4y+187d+2:02:23.

Stats after 16 days (0.19): 3033 players, 963 runers, 472 winners, 1155 wins, 69013 games, winrate 1.67%, total player time 3y+274d+1:40:38.

[bel]

I don't think a difference of 1% is meaningfully different from noise.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I don't think a difference of 1% is meaningfully different from noise.

We need data from previous tournaments IMHO.
Chart from this thread shows number of players increased from about 2750 (0.18) to about 3000 (0.20)
0.19 had about 3000 players too.
Did 0.17 have about 2500 players?
Then we lost an "expected" increase of 250 players in 0.20, that's about 10% loss:
0.17 - 2500
0.18 - 2750
0.19 - 3000
0.20 - 3000 again instead of 3250

[VeryAngryFelid]

I have just checked http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.xx/all-players.html

http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.17/all-players.html - 2495+ player
http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.18/all-players.html - 2461+
http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.19/all-players.html - 2750+
http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.20/all-players.html - 2610+

Ok, crawl is NOT losing players.

Edit. http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.12/all-players.html - 1447+

[Shtopit]

There is a big difference between online players in a tournament and players in general. Information about download of the game would also be needed. I wouldn't be surprised if most games were played offline.

[Siegurt]

There is a big difference between online players in a tournament and players in general. Information about download of the game would also be needed. I wouldn't be surprised if most games were played offline.

According to the survey done aome number of years ago the significant majority of players did play offline.

However, If we assume the proportion of offline to online players hasn't changed drastically, one can extrapolate from the sample. I am not sure if that is true (actually it would be intersting to know if that number has changed, on an unrelated note)

I am also not sure how "tournament players" as a sample relates to "all players" or even to "online players" however we could probably extract data like "has the percentage of all active online players, who play in tournaments (or "who play in the most current version"), dropped from earlier releases" which might be an indicator of popularity (for example if crawl had doubled the number of active players in total, but we went from 10% to 50% on the older versions, the number of players playing the newest version might in absolute terms be increasing, but that could still be interpreted as a drop in popularity)

[Sphara]

Is it possible to get 0.18 tourney vs. 0.20 tourney splatratio?

That would at least shut my mouth about this issue if the game has become universally harder. I'm pretty sure that is also what OP had in mind since Turgon does not play for 3-5 rune wins.

johnstein's graph that duvessa published is pretty good evidence that players are getting better and better. But the increasing problems with >5 rune games I have noticed myself and that graph does tell absolutely nothing about it.

PS: the game is still fun

[Tedronai]

  Code:

!lg * t0.18 xl>=17 / !won
<Sequell> 2396/3756 games for * (t0.18 xl>=17): N=2396/3756 (63.79%)
!lg * t0.20 xl>=17 / !won
<Sequell> 2883/4592 games for * (t.20 xl>=17): N=2883/4592 (62.78%)

Splatratio decreased!

I agree with what Lasty said in an earlier post: Taking away those 'essential' wands makes the game appear harder without actually increasing the difficulty by much. The increase in difficulty is kind of negligible since it was not like you needed to use those wands excessively to win a game (and now you have more potions/scrolls to compensate).

[Sphara]

Thanks. Now I am proved wrong.

Every player that has 3 runes, has the same perfect chance of doing 15 runes with the same character.

This is what I asked for and this is what I got. I WAS WRONG!!

PS: now you try it!

[stoneychips]

Later in the tourney I had a game or two where I did find myself holding more than a dozen tele scrolls again by around Vaults/Depths. I think these were some of the more generally successful ones, probably with some rare artifact boosts. Still... For the record, it can still happen.

I don't feel like I've really played enough games to be sure personally, even with 60 mostly martial-heavy backgrounds in the tourney. I suspect the difficulty has become somewhat more flat and perhaps slightly harder toward the deep of the 3-rune game. I'm not entirely sure that concept thrills me. If true, it would seem to mean that winning even a basic game is harder in a game where so much of the forum chatter already revolved around making no mistakes and following "great player" tracks.

I'd prefer that the great people were given more challenges in an enlivened extended game, where there is plenty of real estate, lots of uniques and random lords to be developed or tweaked, and those players can generally manage to get to with more ease if they are so inclined. A bit more randomness in the experience of the 3-4 rune game doesn't bother me as much, if it allows more situations where players can experiment with wicked combos as well as some awfully borked ones. Seeing as how the difficulty bar is such that we can still and a D:1 gnoll or kobold with branded dagger of elec/distort right out of the gate or a D:3 hippogriff, or be paralyzed by a hornet quite regardless of so many other resistances which are often evading us in some part throughout most of the dungeon before Depths/Zot in at least some games... I don't imagine flattening the overall curve all that much is really going to be that attractive for most players. It may be more technically fair, but after a point it can also end up making things ironically more tedious.

I am no expert and I have little appetite for number-crunching. But for what it's worth, my apparent mediocre-ness with only a single 3-rune win and some 15 iterations of mostly Lair branch runes, still landed me in the top 10% of the absolute number of players in the tournament. I didn't play all day every day, but I played a few hours on most days and several on some. So I feel like I have at least a tentative purview to be guessing about where "many" players might be if the tournament is representative of the wider population in any significant way. (Statisticians of speed players will be along shortly to laugh at all this.) [Edit: I rechecked and was somewhere just short of the top 10% actually -- but I think the point is still valid enough.]

[VeryAngryFelid]

Thanks. Now I am proved wrong.

Every player that has 3 runes, has the same perfect chance of doing 15 runes with the same character.

This is what I asked for and this is what I got. I WAS WRONG!!

PS: now you try it!

Sorry, I don't see where it is proven. IMHO we need to see failures of characters with 5+ runes, not just after XL 17.

[Shtopit]

Something I find more difficult are double ogres on D:5.

[Tedronai]

Sorry, I don't see where it is proven. IMHO we need to see failures of characters with 5+ runes, not just after XL 17.

"splatratio" is commonly defined as percentage of character deaths after XL 17. If this is not what you're looking for, you should use a different term.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I am not using any terms. Sphara was interested in deaths in extended, I don't see how that splatratio as you call it can help here

[duvessa]

Sphara literally asked for splatratio

Is it possible to get 0.18 tourney vs. 0.20 tourney splatratio?

That would at least shut my mouth about this issue if the game has become universally harder.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I was talking about his "Every player that has 3 runes, has the same perfect chance of doing 15 runes with the same character.". This has nothing to do with splatratio

[VeryAngryFelid]

Also I bet ratio 3rune games/15 rune games dropped in 0.20, at least for non-tso, non-mak and without stat/lichform because of lack of haste and new tomb

[Turukano]

I started this topic two weeks ago, and I'm *very* surprised that there were so many answers.

It was interesting to read gammafunks post when he reported tournament results:

Statistics and Final Thoughts
[...]
One statistic was significantly higher this tournament than we expected: the win rate. Win rate does tend to increase with each new tournament, since we don’t increase the game’s difficulty drastically with each new version, yet our player base keeps growing in experience.
[...]
This year win rate increased by 29%, which is a bit surprising to us here on the dev team, because on paper this doesn’t look like a version that would make winning significantly easier. New high-level wands, new scarf items, and slightly increased potions of hasting/heal wounds are offset by removal of rods, removal of the Repel Missiles spell, and removal of wands of hasting/heal wounds/teleport.
[...]

[ZipZipskins]

"Doesn't make winning significantly easier" is, of course, very different from "significantly harder".

[stoneychips]

Yeah, I saw the post about winrates and I was curious too.

One thought: If indeed the difficulty curve across games has flattened a bit and early game has become somewhat easier but later game has become somewhat harder (?)... Then it would make sense that more players are spending more time working farther through early/mid-game (they're not getting killed there quite as often), so overall they would be playing fewer games and perhaps winning a higher percentage of their games.

That is, also assuming they don't save a massive amount of time in that early portion just by things being marginally easier.

I don't see a count of total games entered in each tournament, so I can't check that. Maybe if someone has that info?

[stoneychips]

Oh... Actually if the individual player rankings square with the way winrates are being calculated above, then I guess there were 3,679 games in 0.20 --- versus 3,872 in the tourney for 0.19

So in absolute terms, that's about 1/19th fewer games finished in 0.20.

I don't want to discount other possible explanations off the bat. Maybe some of us are just getting a little more skilled, or maybe we're playing more combos that tend to result in wins a little more often? Or an argument might be made some of the deity changes outweigh some of the changes in mobs? I don't know really.

[Siegurt]

Another plausible explanation: the loss of the easier, obvious get out of jail crutches forces people to play more thoughtfully and carefully, which has a larger impact on win rate.

[Shtopit]

What are the statistics for mummies? Number of mummy games vs total games and % of mummy victories to mummy games? They have been hit during the last releases (clarity, haste, wand of HW), but have gotten an increase in Spellcasting, I think.

[Lasty]

Keep in mind that 0.18 is the better comparison point, since those two are both summer tournaments, and summer tournaments tend to have bigger crowds that winter ones.

[duvessa]

Isn't it the winter tournaments that get more turnout? But other than that, yes, 0.18 is a better tournament to compare.

[Lasty]

Maybe I got that backwards. But in any case, it's seasonal.

[tasonir]

Imho the main difference between a good experiment and a bad experiment is isolating as many variables as possible, so you can test what effect the change to X had on crawl (usually winrate). If you can isolate everything except for change X, you then know what effect X had. If you have two or three variables which changed at once, it gets much harder to tell which had the biggest impact. And more than that, and you probably can't really do more than guess as to what's having the biggest impact.

In short, crawl tournaments and changesets between versions have a lot of differences, which can't really be controlled for. And some are terribly hard to measure such as player interest/focus vs blindly tabbing because they're getting tired. It makes it rather difficult to run scientific tests on the data.

By all means, continue to try, I'm not saying it's useless, just that it's unusually hard to make a statement like "The removal of haste wands lowered the win rate by .05%". We can't really get to that kind of result.

[TonberryJam]

There's an idea. Advertise in Canada.

[Turukano]

That's from CXC chat today with some interesting thoughts about 0.20:

*******

Turgon: Nevertheless 0.20 is a step to make extended harder
Turgon: Consider your berserkitis which caused you some trouble
4thArraOfDagon: yea
4thArraOfDagon: the truth is
4thArraOfDagon: nothing is unapproachable
4thArraOfDagon: tomb is easy with kiku
4thArraOfDagon: no haste? go formicid
4thArraOfDagon: no healing? go venom stalker
4thArraOfDagon: berserkitis? go ash
4thArraOfDagon: etc
[...]
4thArraOfDagon: at first I thought the same as you Turgon that everything is harder
4thArraOfDagon: but in fact its not, it just makes you slower
4thArraOfDagon: you have to do everything slower
4thArraOfDagon: I have noticed Im basically playing the same way as I was in prev versions
[...]
4thArraOfDagon: but +10k,+20k turns
Turgon: well,
Turgon: similar experience for me
Turgon: But I also play slower in 0.19 now
Turgon: Because your char is stronger when you play more slowly and pick up items and XP
4thArraOfDagon: yea

*******

Harder time for speedrunners in 0.20 - this has been mentioned by other players above in this topic.

Am I right that one of the ideas of 0.20 is to make early game easier and extended harder?

[VeryAngryFelid]

Slower is harder IMHO, especially for speedruns.
I see the following reasons of being slow:
1) being low on current HP/MP
2) being low on max HP/MP
3) it takes more in-game turns to kill monsters
I would call all these reasons a harder game.

[Shtopit]

At least I am not the only one who reads the V in VS as Venom (I read VS as VenomSpawn).

[tabstorm]

That's from CXC chat today with some interesting thoughts about 0.20:

*******

Turgon: Nevertheless 0.20 is a step to make extended harder
Turgon: Consider your berserkitis which caused you some trouble
4thArraOfDagon: yea
4thArraOfDagon: the truth is
4thArraOfDagon: nothing is unapproachable
4thArraOfDagon: tomb is easy with kiku
4thArraOfDagon: no haste? go formicid
4thArraOfDagon: no healing? go venom stalker
4thArraOfDagon: berserkitis? go ash
4thArraOfDagon: etc
[...]
4thArraOfDagon: at first I thought the same as you Turgon that everything is harder
4thArraOfDagon: but in fact its not, it just makes you slower
4thArraOfDagon: you have to do everything slower
4thArraOfDagon: I have noticed Im basically playing the same way as I was in prev versions
[...]
4thArraOfDagon: but +10k,+20k turns
Turgon: well,
Turgon: similar experience for me
Turgon: But I also play slower in 0.19 now
Turgon: Because your char is stronger when you play more slowly and pick up items and XP
4thArraOfDagon: yea

*******

Harder time for speedrunners in 0.20 - this has been mentioned by other players above in this topic.

Am I right that one of the ideas of 0.20 is to make early game easier and extended harder?

I don't think so beyond fiddling with tomb, which I wish would be removed instead... but most of the things that made extended harder were done for reasons unrelated to extended, for instance
"now you get Orb status in zot at all times"
"why"
"because"

or
"spell haste and wands of hasting are now removed"
"why"
"because it should only be a consumable"
"why"
"because"

and so on

[duvessa]

tbf yellow wands and buff spells were and are stupid and bad and deserving of removal

[Lasty]

It seems a bit odd to characterize the reasons given as "because", when there were reasons given. Is that a way of attempting to delegitimize reasons you dislike?

[watertreatmentRL]

The obvious implication is that the reasoning is unconvincing. This "Sir, you forget yourself!" stuff doesn't really help with that perception.

[Lasty]

Bullshit. There's a world of difference between "I didn't agree with the stated reasons" and "because I didn't like the reasons I'll pretend there were no reasons." Similarly, what I said isn't reasonably interpretable as "sir, you forget yourself!" -- unless I suppose the premise is that there's no legitimate way to comment on the behavior of others. I don't like it when tabstorm wildly mischaracterizes people's positions above, and I don't like you doing it either. That's plainly bad behavior, and calling it out is more than fair.

I have no idea how to even respond to your assertion that my comments somehow reinforce people's negative impressions about the reasoning in commits I didn't execute.

[gammafunk]

"spell haste and wands of hasting should exist"
"why"
"because they should be spammable"
"why"
"because"

and so on

[watertreatmentRL]

@Lasty: Someone expresses their frank opinion about the reasoning of some change made by your team and you come at them with "Is that a way of attempting to delegitimize reasons you dislike?" I would say my characterization was actually charitable.

Do these arguments at some point boil down to arbitrary questions of taste and preference? Sure, I've said so myself plenty of times. So someone has a wry comment about particular instances of that.

[tasonir]

Can't we all just agree that removing the wand of haste was an excellent move towards encouraging all players to kneel at the altar of our one true god Cheibriados and be happy? Take it easy, everyone.

[Shard1697]

@Lasty: Someone expresses their frank opinion about the reasoning of some change made by your team and you come at them with "Is that a way of attempting to delegitimize reasons you dislike?" I would say my characterization was actually charitable.

The "frank opinion" was to pretend/imply that there was no reason given for the changes, when there was. It would seem much more like they were arguing in good faith if they didn't replace the actual reasons given with just "because".

[Lasty]

@watertreatmentRL, if I replied to your post by saying that you just said "blah blah blah lecturing blah", would you consider that a frank opinion or a total misrepresentation meant to delegitimize your post? I would consider it the latter.

[watertreatmentRL]

So you're real mad at the suggestion that there was no reason given for the changes? Because, buddy, what's being said is that the reasoning sucked.

@Lasty: I would not care if you said that, frankly. And you did!

[Shard1697]

So you're real mad at the suggestion that there was no reason given for the changes? Because, buddy, what's being said is that the reasoning sucked.

That's definitely not what the original post we are talking about implied!

[4Hooves2Appendages]

A couple of links to the relevant commits might have saved this discussion.

[ThreeInvisibleDucks]

Can't we all just agree that removing the wand of haste was an excellent move towards encouraging all players to kneel at the altar of our one true god Cheibriados and be happy? Take it easy, everyone.

I thought it was to nudge melee people to try this really obscure god, Okawaru, and finally try whether Finesse would help in combat.

[tabstorm]

But seriously, the Orb status in all of Zot actually does kind of irritate me.

"Should you be able to use controlled blink arbitrarily many times?"
"Sure."
-enters Zot-
"Wait! I changed my mind."
"But I just got this spell castable..."
"Too bad."

It would be preferable to just remove Passage of Golubria instead of this, imo. I can at least see the argument for removing spell-haste for being overpowered (even though that's not the official reason, and the spell was removed before the wand because ?), but it's frustrating to have a spell be effectively neutered right after you learn it. It's like having a double spellpower malus to Fire magic upon entering Zot right after you get Fire Storm. If the spell is that egregious it'd be better to just remove it for being overpowered.

[Rast]

"spell haste and wands of hasting should exist"

This... is actually a pretty compelling argument. If the main yellow wands had never existed, and some guy came along with a suggestion to add them to trunk, complete with recharging them repeatedly, we'd all laugh at him, and rightfully so.

However, the recent change is still an unfun nerf:
* Mummies got F'ed by removal of haste spell and wand. The increase in potions helps everyone else.
* Tele wand was great under silence, now silence is a lot more deadly.
* HW is less common. Sure, it's a little more common before you find the wand, but not enough to compensate.
* Overall, in long games where you get multiple runes, and especially in extended, you have less of the big three effects. And those are the most memorable games.

The only suggestion I have is to increase HW frequency and buff it a little lategame. For example, make the heal formula 20+d(XL)

[Floodkiller]

Removing wand of heal wounds was actually a secret attempt to get people to play Elyvilon again.

[duvessa]

Silence is still harmless, and the only problem with mummies losing yellow wands is that potion petition exists. Just remove potion petition or don't let mummies use it.

[laularukyrumo]

Silence is still harmless.

Ereshkigal says hi.