Slime Squisher
Posts: 386
Joined: Thursday, 26th March 2015, 01:22
Remove Piety Decay
1) Not all gods have piety decay, and for the gods that do piety matters to varying degrees. So: piety decay is an insufficient anti-scumming mechanic. It can easily be side stepped. If an anti-scumming mechanic is needed (in a game like dcss with enormous persistent levels it is needed) it should be consistent across characters and not side-steppable.
If piety decay doesn't make sense as an anti-scumming mechanic, why do gods have varying degrees of it? As far as I can tell, the answer is 'differentiation.' It allows Uskayaw (who is a mess) to function, and causes some gods to encourage more aggressive play than others by penalizing slow play with a (minimal) cost to consumable/passive abilities. However, the *main reason* piety decay should go away is that:
2) In practice, its main effect is to punish auto explore.
So, in sum: if the game decides that some play is scummy and should be penalized or prevented entirely, it should be consistent about it. Although piety decay also serves to differentiate gods by varying the amount of 'scummy play' you are allotted, it does a bad job of that and ultimately discourages people from using the game's best convenience feature.
Why is piety decay different from food or a doom clock in this regard? Because piety decay is a gradient penalty for slow play, whereas other anti-scumming measures are binary. It is better to kill the player outright for breaking the rules than it is to penalize their resources in a minimal way over time, which results in a stupid CBA in which you have to weigh the cost of playing excruciatingly safely (or autoexploring) vs ~1 piety many many times throughout the game. The food clock doesn't punish autoexplore because it gives you more than ample time to autoexplore every level. If you are not actually scumming, you should not die of starvation and will face no negative effects due to having less food.