Sorcerous wrote:I've read through old threads, and completely agree that degenerate gameplay is punishment unto itself.
I strongly disagree with this position. Crawl is a roguelike, and the gameplay draw of roguelikes is, traditionally, to survive a hostile environment using limited tools.
The problem with this kind of thing is that it undercuts that primary gameplay draw that got people to sit down and engage with your ascii o+tab simulator in the first place.
If the ruleset of your survival game has unintended interactions that allow for (degenerate, tedious) playstyles which disproportionately impact character survival, it surely sounds to me like the ruleset of that survival game needs to be changed to remove those unintended interactions, else you're effectively stating to your playerbase that not only is your game a hackjob of whatever you threw together that sounded okay at the time without thought to how your mechanics would interact, but you also don't really give a shit whether your players have a fun time playing your game.
[Such a position is only marginally better than writing your game to intentionally waste your player's time with a mobile microtransaction model. Okay, great, you're only doing this unintentionally, that's ethically better but still demonstrable evidence that your app isn't worth engaging with.]
I've made a habit of killing Pikel's humans since many many major versions ago, because they used to pickup floor items and walk off with them.
Admittedly, I don't do this much nowadays, but that's because I don't play Crawl much nowadays, rather than any shift in my practical application of tolerably-optimal Crawlplay.
If you make a game that says "Okay, your goal is to survive, good luck.", and then you go on to say "BTW, if you press Q 50000 times in a row, your HP will reset to full.", would that really be a good game? Would anyone want to play it? Would the community around the game just be like "Oh, hey, you used Q, your score doesn't count!", or would there be some portion of the playerbase defending the position of "Well, Q was written into the game intentionally, of course it's fair to use it!", thus turning an irritating little feature into a pointless player squabble? Some players would make macros, some would put a rubber band on their keyboard, some would be like "Woah dude, I'm legit, NO Q." Maybe someone would be like "Maybe pressing Q is its own punishment?" And then you'd have streakplayers, who would create complex scripts to press Q and then go post youtube videos about winning your game using One Weird Trick. Meanwhile the entire thing just sounds like kind of a shitty feature to add from the beginning, and maybe it would have been better for the developer to not leave it in their release build if the goal was to actually create a fun game?
I don't know dude, I don't even play theoretical broken games like that anymore. There are a lot of better things out there to occupy one's time.