svendre wrote:Piety decay doesn't seem like that big of a force to me. If the gains were slowed down and the decay removed, it'd probably be fine. I don't feel like it would be a big issue either way. Leave it, fine, change it fine.. whatever, it's low on my list.
But, this topic does lead into what bothers me more: that is - turn count determining score by far more than anything else. If you want a high score, you must not use auto explore at all... and rush in and out as fast as possible avoiding as many encounters as possible. How is that not always going to be a stealth/ninja game? I realize it would be difficult to come up with a different metric. I can't think of much off the top of my head, but, it feels unfair that a game where every challenge is faced, every danger taken on, scores lower than one that uses "avoidance" as the main principal. I feel like the # monsters killed should amount to a larger %, but realize any serious alternative would be really tough to figure out. I just sort-of hate the current score system, for a lot of the reasons previously discussed here concerning piety.
I think that "getting runes with low XP" should dominate the score. Killing more monsters should reduce your score instead of increasing it, with the exception of perhaps the unique Pan & Hell lords.
I'm not good enough at the game to get a high score either way, but I find not killing monsters just as hard and much less tedious than turn-count optimising. If I kill everything and go for Elf+Slime+Vaults, reaching XL27 before I even enter Zot or extended, the game is usually pretty easy. With every floor emptied before I descend to the next level, I always have a safe place to retreat to, and I'm almost always strong enough to take advantage of timed portals. (I still die, but that's just due to carelessness/stupidity, almost never due to a lack of very-good-gameplay.)
An argument could be made that killing a unique whilst it still counts as 'very dangerous' could also give bonus points, as could things like skipping Temple/Orc/Lair.
If most of the score-gain (ie rune-collection, dangerous-unique-killing, ******-piety-reaching) would scale inversely with the amount of XP a character has earned (plus a background-dependent amount of 'phantom xp' to avoid silly score spikes on D:1), and winning after skipping a rune branch would give a # of bonus points that's comparable to the amount of points that a good player could get collecting that rune (slightly less for skipping only an S-branch, slightly more for skipping all of Lair) I can't see any annoying exploits and I might actually become interested in score.
Anyway, we both agree the current scoring system is a little odd. I'll hope they do something to make the score more interesting for you