Tomb Titivator
Posts: 838
Joined: Friday, 2nd October 2015, 04:47
Re: Player ghost aggravation
mibe420 wrote: Maybe I can explain my thought process...
I don't play formicids, and I'm not quite sure what "shaftrobin" is. Other than that, while I'm not sure I quite agree with quite all of it, I do appreciate the relatively clear post.
But ghosts as implented right now can not be balanced. Hellmonk said it better than I could so here you goHellmonk wrote:Player ghosts are essentially impossible to balance. They have a massive range of possible attributes based on the character that died (including HP, AC, EV, spell selection, melee damage, melee weapon brand, movement speed, resistances) and zero checks to ensure that they are a reasonable spawn for their dungeon level. Hence you can get a D:6 ghost with glaciate or you can get a spriggan ghost with no spells and 1 melee damage. A lot of player attributes don't translate well to monsters, which exacerbates this problem. I am thinking specifically of AC, where 20 is endgame material for monsters and achievable in lair for players. Then there's stuff like monster dazzling spray, which works different from the player spell for no apparent reason other than to make conjurer and wizard ghosts abnormally dangerous. Other monsters can get pushed around or have stats tweaked to make them an appropriate threat; ghosts cannot because of the way they're generated.
It might be talking past each other. But I thought adjusting the code would generally mean changing the way things are implemented, to some extent. Or does "essentially impossible" just mean 'more work than most people would ever wish to consider'? It seems to me checks being added would be one obvious response, but I don't know how many pieces of code would need to be changed to get that done. I don't code as well as not knowing the material, so I don't know what the time involved or limits are.
It wasn't that long ago that draconian ghosts started with the neative energy bolts... I know that is just one factor, but it's one that has generated a pretty heavy (maybe disproportionate?) amount of talk about ghosts, too. So it's a little odd to me that this was changed and it did have a pretty dramatic impact on the discussion about ghosts -- and yet now I'm hearing that ghosts cannot be fundamentally changed in a way that will matter to many people. I don't know, perhaps limiting AC or EV by dungeon level requires a hundred more entries in the code to be toggled somehow? Slightly confused.
On the other hand, I also feel like it's been an exceedingly rare issue for me. I tend to place ghosts in the occasional challenge/annoyance/random death box rather than a "systemic unfairness" box -- perhaps just because I don't have enough people trolling me with them or because I'm not concerned about the scoreboard, I don't know. I just don't feel like all this stuff that "can" happen bothers me that often courtesy of ghost, as compared to courtesy of other monsters and layouts which are even more "normal" and frequent. Dead is dead, regardless of whether it was by Glaciate or speedy spriggan versus my clunky one-wrong-move ogre (natural or ghostly on the spriggan doesn't really matter) or "Oops, that gnoll did have a blue weapon dammit and damn D:1 randomness, it was venom too before I got any curing totally unfair"...
And I'm not pushing very hard for most of the "normal" randomness to go away anyway, frustrating though it sometimes can be. I don't feel like the range of awful situations in the regular game is maybe entirely fair (or I haven't decided what "reasonably fair" is consistently enough perhaps?), but I don't equate non-random or non-player-influenced even with fair necessarily. I would probably go for a bit more player-influenced, actually, if only there were some level limits and randomness (not super predictable player control) in the mix then there could be more of it and the world would feel that much more interactive and on-theme to me.
I totally wouldn't object to others being able to turn ghosts off, though. If it were up to me and fully assuming, scoring might be sorted out (not that I care about score very much -- but it would probably come up next).
More runes! GnWn (11, 0.21), GhMo^Makh (15, 0.17)
And a Yiuf: (1.4.6, 0.20): ImpGl^Oka (3)