Sunday, 14th October 2012, 15:28 by Tiber
I'd rather avoid the whole AAA game vs. indie game debate, because it'd really just end up some off-topic rant about how BS it is that people need to segregate the two and hate on things that other people enjoy. All I'll say is that developers do and should try to make their games more enjoyable for their audiences, and remove or mitigate features that their audience enjoy less. I also never said it was only commercial games that did this, so I'd appreciate if people didn't make up arguments for me. I'm not asking for infinite lives or an easier difficulty here. I'm just asking for closer access for mid/late-game players to a known safe place for items (or if you want to switch gods).
I already explained why I dislike travel_delay -1. I find the teleporting around less enjoyable and more disorientating for the >99% of the time that I'm not traveling to or from a stash. I also don't get how the statements, "I personally consider stashing to be a bad habit" and, "I'm not saying ... that it's a bad thing" are not contradictory.
You already implicitly encourage players to leave items behind through item destruction; the only difference is some players like to leave items around haphazardly and others like to be more organized. I'm just the type of person where if you give me a game like Resident Evil 4 that has the "tetris inventory", I'll waste time organizing everything just the way I like it. But I think you worry too much about "sending the wrong ideas". If you took a poll to see how many people would change their decision on whether or not to stash if you made it slightly easier or harder, I doubt very many people would change their minds. People play how they want to play, and it takes more than a subtle nudge to really change their behavior. You may think that if you change this you'd be sending out subliminal messages or something that it's okay to stash, but really, I think all players are going to think is, "Hey, now it's easier to store this stuff I was going to drop here!" I think you're imagining that you have a far greater ability to manipulate peoples' behaviors than you actually have.
Lastly, stashing isn't just pointless behavior. Besides books, which you seem willing to implement a shopping-list-like solution to just to avoid conceding that stashing might be good for something, there's also late-game food and Tomb preparation. For Tomb, I consider it best practice to have plenty of curing and restore ability potions and remove curse scrolls near the entrance (but not all on me, since summoned demons can still destroy them), and I just prefer being able to grab them all from one place rather than hunting them down. I also go back to my stash for heal wounds potions, which are valuable and used often enough to have to go back for more of. I also think another temple entrance or two would be an easier solution to the spell memorization problem than the shopping list solution, and to be honest I still have absolutely no idea how the shopping list actually works, even after looking through the in-game help for it.