The overall difficulty of the game is fine.


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Post Wednesday, 13th April 2016, 21:19

The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

No major changes needed.

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Post Wednesday, 13th April 2016, 21:31

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

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Post Wednesday, 13th April 2016, 21:33

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Depending on the point of view, it's always either insanely hard (caustic shrikes!!!) or boringly easy (elliptic's streak!!!).
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Post Wednesday, 13th April 2016, 21:43

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Sprucery wrote:Depending on the point of view, it's always either insanely hard (caustic shrikes!!!) or boringly easy (elliptic's streak!!!).


It seems to me that the # of people arguing the former just about = the # of people arguing the latter.

Therefore it is totally fine. :D That just about = logic.

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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 00:58

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

I think we can achieve perfect balance by transforming elliptic into a caustic shrike and setting him loose on whoever disagrees with the direction taken with the game.

I don't think anyone will voice any complaints once they see all the acid-eaten, rotting bodies impaled on elliptic's favorite tree.

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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 01:16

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

A good compromise is when everyone is unhappy.

Honestly though the difficulty of the game seems pretty good. My last death was a 20 minute struggle burning up all my resources before I couldn't teleport or heal anymore.

The only deaths I feel that are unwarranted at this time are paralysis from almost full health to death with no interaction from the character or when you enter a level, excluding vaults 5, and never make it away from the entrance before dying.

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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 01:42

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

i agree difficulty overall is fine, except that sometimes early game is too frustrating if you get unlucky. auto-ID of items would probably fix this and make early game as enjoyable as the later parts but i don't anticipate such a drastic change to a fundamental mechanic happening soon/ever

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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 01:49

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

yesno wrote:i agree difficulty overall is fine, except that sometimes early game is too frustrating if you get unlucky. auto-ID of items would probably fix this and make early game as enjoyable as the later parts but i don't anticipate such a drastic change to a fundamental mechanic happening soon/ever
I don't think so either, but you make it sound as if there hadn't been any drastic changes to fundamental mechanics whatsoever.

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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 01:56

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

i don't mean to make it sound like that... tbh though at the moment at least i'm not sure i can remember any changes as drastic as removal of something as fundamental and roguelike-classic as ID, or food for that matter. although i can remember a lot of smaller changes with major consequences.

edit: there was removal of inventory weight, now that i think of it, that was a pretty huge one, and a very excellent change

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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 07:30

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

dpeg wrote:
yesno wrote:i agree difficulty overall is fine, except that sometimes early game is too frustrating if you get unlucky. auto-ID of items would probably fix this and make early game as enjoyable as the later parts but i don't anticipate such a drastic change to a fundamental mechanic happening soon/ever
I don't think so either, but you make it sound as if there hadn't been any drastic changes to fundamental mechanics whatsoever.
There haven't been any drastic changes to fundamental mechanics whatsoever.
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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 09:40

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

define 'drastic' and 'fundamental mechanics'
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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 11:04

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

The problem is that whether the game is easy or hard depends entirely on your definition of the terms rather than what changes are made.

Crawl is designed so that players die because they made mistakes, not because the game was in an unwinnable state. For that reason, it is always going to be 'easy' from the perspective that, if you play the game perfectly, safely, and never make mistakes, you are very unlikely to ever die. And changing that so playing the game perfectly can still kill you would be a collosally terrible decision.

Complaints that the game is too easy are usually made in comparison to the most powerful races, backgrounds, and gods, who are by design stronger than other options. Minotaurs are supposed to be an easier race than Mummies, so of course a game where you should still be able to win as a Mummy is going to be easy as a Minotaur.

Alternatively, the game is always going to be difficult in that player mistakes can be devastating and that even routine encounters can end up killing a careless character. And that is also fine.

If this game is easy or hard is a question of your metric, and I feel comfortable saying that it is both relatively easy and very hard, just depending on how you look at it.

duvessa wrote:There haven't been any drastic changes to fundamental mechanics whatsoever.


Powerful tools like throwing and blowguns have received multiple nerfs, player MP has been completely changed, amulets of rMut and Clarity among others have been removed entirely, corrosion was completely revamped to add a new tactical threat to the game, powerful spells like Phase Shift and Enslavement among others have been removed entirely while spells like Animate Skeleton and Ozocubu's Armour were nerfed, ranged reform still wasn't that long ago, strength weighting is gone, dozens of minor abuses like evocables rings of teleport / invisibility removed, stat loss and degeneration has been tied to experience rather than time, etc...

I honestly don't know how you can claim that this game has had no major changes to any fundamental mechanics, nothing could be further from the truth.

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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 12:58

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Those are just content removal and nerfs, the game still plays the exact same way, so i have to agree with duvessa there.
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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 13:11

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Item destruction removal?
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/playe ... speon.html. I started playing in 0.16.1
I achieved greatplayer in less than a year.
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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 16:00

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

dynast wrote:Those are just content removal and nerfs, the game still plays the exact same way, so i have to agree with duvessa there.


Last I checked, 'exactly the same' meant 'no differences whatsoever', so no, it isn't exactly the same. Just because the game hasn't been updated to include all modifications you would prefer to include does not make it that nothing meaningful has ever changed in it.

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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 16:14

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

none of what you mentioned can be classified as a drastic change to a fundamental mechanic

something like, I dunno, adding a stamina bar for movement/melee would count

actually I kind of wonder if squarelos does? It is a change to a fundamental mechanic, just not a drastic one

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Post Thursday, 14th April 2016, 17:38

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

squarelos is a pretty drastic change to a fundamental mechanic, imo
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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 00:42

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Aethrus wrote:Complaints that the game is too easy are usually made in comparison to the most powerful races, backgrounds, and gods, who are by design stronger than other options. Minotaurs are supposed to be an easier race than Mummies, so of course a game where you should still be able to win as a Mummy is going to be easy as a Minotaur.


In my view it has more to do with the fact that the "harder" races aren't really "hard" in the following sense:
As a good race, like a Minotaur, you can get away with a lot of mistakes. You can just run around the dungeon mashing o/tab without too much regard for what enemies are onscreen. Mummies are a lot weaker, and you have to engage in more degenerate gameplay to keep them alive. Strictly speaking, it's a mistake not to use the same tactics on a Minotaur, but they're really boring, so people don't do it. But, as a Mummy, you can't get away with it very much.

The issue is that correct play is largely "known", but is too unfun for most players. Most people do not want to spend most of their game luring enemies to the staircase, stone-throwing, and so on. Lots of the "interesting tactical positioning" problems can be dissolved by degenerate play. Fortunately, you can get away with not doing this sort of thing on almost all characters.

In a sense, Crawl is a game that kills by boredom!

This is why people like turncount or realtime speedruns, except the game isn't very well set up for that...
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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 01:27

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

tabstorm wrote:In my view it has more to do with the fact that the "harder" races aren't really "hard" in the following sense:
As a good race, like a Minotaur, you can get away with a lot of mistakes. You can just run around the dungeon mashing o/tab without too much regard for what enemies are onscreen. Mummies are a lot weaker, and you have to engage in more degenerate gameplay to keep them alive. Strictly speaking, it's a mistake not to use the same tactics on a Minotaur, but they're really boring, so people don't do it. But, as a Mummy, you can't get away with it very much.

The issue is that correct play is largely "known", but is too unfun for most players. Most people do not want to spend most of their game luring enemies to the staircase, stone-throwing, and so on. Lots of the "interesting tactical positioning" problems can be dissolved by degenerate play. Fortunately, you can get away with not doing this sort of thing on almost all characters.

In a sense, Crawl is a game that kills by boredom!

This is why people like turncount or realtime speedruns, except the game isn't very well set up for that...


What exactly is 'degenerate play'? Minotaurs can more safely o/tab through most of the mundane encounters, but because a Mummy doesn't, the Mummy is the one playing in a degenerate way by... being careful and not recklessly getting into encounters more dangerous than necessary?

You're gonna have to break this one down for me, because I must be missing something here, or misunderstanding your point completely. How is a OgWz or a MuAs or a DgWn or whatever playing carefully the degenerate play, and MiBe facesmashing through the dungeon the quality gameplay?

I suppose the Hypothetical Optimal Player tactics and patented scummy mummy plays might be considered degenerate, but there is a significant gap between 'relentlessly mashing o and tab until the floor is finished, repeat' and 'kiting every single individual orc back to the staircase and fighting them one by one and waiting thousands of turns for enemies to wander away, etc.' And I think good gameplay lies in that space. Not that strong races that can run through the game are bad either though. The game has a lot of room for different styles, which I like about it!
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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 03:16

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Degenerate play includes things like kiting every monster back to stairs to prevent noise from carrying, throwing stones to pull monsters as quietly as possible, and so on, careful use of (manual) exploration for maximal safety, and so on.

It's degenerate in the sense that it's not actually fun to do. How does it make sense for a game ostensibly designed around tactical combat to have an optimal strategy that's more or less equivalent to avoiding tactical combat as much as possible? The most interesting things that happen in combats tend to involve enemies' abilities interacting with one another, but in principle you're supposed to avoid this as much as possible to maximize your chances to win.

Aethrus wrote:I suppose the Hypothetical Optimal Player tactics and patented scummy mummy plays might be considered degenerate, but there is a significant gap between 'relentlessly mashing o and tab until the floor is finished, repeat' and 'kiting every single individual orc back to the staircase and fighting them one by one and waiting thousands of turns for enemies to wander away, etc.' And I think good gameplay lies in that space. Not that strong races that can run through the game are bad either though. The game has a lot of room for different styles, which I like about it!


Aren't you agreeing with me here? My whole point was that the middle way between Hypothetical Optimal Play and button-mashing arises from the conflict between essentially-known "correct" play and the player's boredom tolerance. This is what I mean when I write that in a sense, Crawl kills you by boredom - you weren't willing to engage in "correct" play because it's just too frustrating to keep doing it. This even extends to things like speedruns - you don't find the regular game particularly interesting any more, so you're willing to splat tons of times early on just for an interesting game.

Keep in mind that most characters lean more towards the "button-mash" end of the spectrum than the "Hypothetical Optimal Play" end, and in general tend towards the former as the game goes on (and gets easier). Button-mashing characters aren't particularly fun either. They're the other end of the extreme I mentioned above - no combat is tactical in an interesting way because they're too powerful. It's not especially fun to alternate holding down o and tab without thinking.

I think the game would have to be totally restructured in order to fix these kinds of issues, though.
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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 05:31

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

This sounds quite a lot like saying it eventually becomes boring once you've won a dozen or so times, which is true of (A) Crawl, (B) every other single player game I can think of and (C) every other game unless you're Bobby Fischer.

It's a game, not a lifetime commitment.

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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 13:25

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

One way you could make the game have more replay value would be to
1. Get rid of permanent floors
2. Have a per-floor timer that will hit you with some kind of penalty if you linger too long. See Infra Arcana for a game that does this, although I do not like it because it has floor traps.

This would force you into more complex situations rather than just letting you kite to win.
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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 15:01

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Dooooooooom clooooooock.

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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 15:05

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Getting rid of permafloors would be pretty difficult so long as branches exist. Also, you could keep replaying easy floors to scum for items, though that could be fixed with a mindepth timer like in Sil.

I think some kind of stair reform + smaller levels would be the way to prevent the easily known but really boring form of kiting/luring optimal play you mention.
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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 15:23

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Just do it like doomrl...
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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 17:52

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

I'm just curious about the people that complain the game isn't difficult enough.

Are they complaining because it is easy to win with GrBe or MiBe?

Its fairly easy to make Crawl more difficult... play more difficult species and gods.

I agree with Tabstorm on a turn count timer or something to that degree.

There are always some that will complain that have the extreme patience that are willing to take a 100k turns to win a three rune by lurking every single monster out. This is particularly the case with streakers... it is difficult but it's more of an endurance-of-concentration difficulty.

That is crawl is often difficult post lair sadly because it is a long game to play if you are afraid of loosing a character.

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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 18:25

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Lasty wrote:Dooooooooom clooooooock.


i would really appreciate some implementation of this, since neither food nor piety decay nor OOD spawns do it currently. anything to add pressure to the player to move. sometimes, after a streak of losses, i find myself willing to start 5ing more, and i would def like it for the game to remind me not to. it could be flavorful too, maybe contam buildup and corruption of levels with hazards and demonic spawns near the player, something like that, calibrated to a 50-70k 3-rune turncount, that genuinely forces the player to dive.

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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 18:27

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

what does doomrl do?

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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 19:26

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

agentgt wrote:I'm just curious about the people that complain the game isn't difficult enough.

Are they complaining because it is easy to win with GrBe or MiBe?

Its fairly easy to make Crawl more difficult... play more difficult species and gods.

I agree with Tabstorm on a turn count timer or something to that degree.

There are always some that will complain that have the extreme patience that are willing to take a 100k turns to win a three rune by lurking every single monster out. This is particularly the case with streakers... it is difficult but it's more of an endurance-of-concentration difficulty.

That is crawl is often difficult post lair sadly because it is a long game to play if you are afraid of loosing a character.

The game is easy to the point of most of its deaths being just plain hubris.
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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 19:44

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

all before wrote:what does doomrl do?

21 generic floors with (mostly) optional special floors, downstairs only. This could translate to DCSS by having ~20 generic Dungeon floors, with special floors for runes that contribute only to score. There's no real reason to keep the "3 runes to win!" condition in such a big game overhaul, it exists only because of tradition. It would even be fine in current Crawl but could never be implemented for similar reasons.

By Crawl's philosophy, no longer requiring runes would probably be viewed as a mistake, because it would encourage players to do branches and skip the endvaults to obtain as much experience as possible before Zot:5 while minimizing risk exposure. It's clear from the runelock arguments that exposing players to these vaults at the "correct" XL range so that they are sufficiently "special" is considered impotrant. I think the end vaults in the game are quite interesting and good, so why even have the filler floors?
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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 21:52

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

dynast wrote:
agentgt wrote:I'm just curious about the people that complain the game isn't difficult enough.

Are they complaining because it is easy to win with GrBe or MiBe?

Its fairly easy to make Crawl more difficult... play more difficult species and gods.

I agree with Tabstorm on a turn count timer or something to that degree.

There are always some that will complain that have the extreme patience that are willing to take a 100k turns to win a three rune by lurking every single monster out. This is particularly the case with streakers... it is difficult but it's more of an endurance-of-concentration difficulty.

That is crawl is often difficult post lair sadly because it is a long game to play if you are afraid of loosing a character.

The game is easy to the point of most of its deaths being just plain hubris.


Compared to what? I'm not trying to troll or be snide. Curious what turn based games would you consider challenging that have an ending (ie simulation games don't count)?

I guess Brogue could be considered but even Brogue can be made easy by picking a certain seed (akin to picking certain gods and species).

Also I agree with TabStorm.. it's generally not hubris... it's boredom. For me if I'm not in hell or pand by 70k I'm gonna kill the characters because I'm bored. I'll try to take on Elf or something suboptimal. Basically every game I play I try to low turn count aka highscore (except during tourny) because it is fairly fun challenge.

The only way I can really see making the game more challenging is either:

  Code:
1. have way more randomness
2. more intelligent AI
3. severely buffing monster / nerfing players.
4. increasing length of game
5. making mechanics complicated or knowledge of game more difficult
6. or as mentioned earlier an impending doom timer of sorts


Really the only thing I can see is probably making monsters follow people up stairs from several tiles away (ie brogue style). Someone should just make that change and see how difficult. I bet for certain species it is a joke but for others I bet it would be fairly awful.

So what is more difficult? And what do you have in mind to make it more difficult?
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Post Friday, 15th April 2016, 22:49

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

tabstorm wrote: I think the end vaults in the game are quite interesting and good, so why even have the filler floors?


because a series of climaxes is tiresome without filler. Filler is a good remedy for that.

Yeah well DooMRL is also oldschool and doesn't have Halo/Crawl-style regenerating health, which would be as out of place there as deep dwarves are in Crawl. It also gives you more ways to avoid exposing yourself, has more predictable damage, etc.

DooMRL is a finite game. Crawl is also a finite game if you exclude pan/abyss/hell. Downstairs-only exists to eliminate backtracking, and this has the sole function of limiting your inventory. Whatever issue it may solve in Crawl, it would be completely different from the issues it solves in doomrl.

Stairs are good - I don't think resting should be super-annoying all game long.

The guaranteed presense of hatches would permit keeping stairs relatively safe, rather than surrounded. This is a point in favor of stairs and against hatches.

Runes work as well as stairs BTW; Vaults could be connected to the lair through its sub-branches, with up-stairs on V:1 to the rune-places and it would not make much difference IMO.

Disagree about doomclock.

Aethrus wrote:Complaints that the game is too easy are usually made in comparison to the most powerful

agentgt wrote:Its fairly easy to make Crawl more difficult... play more difficult species and gods.

Reptisaurus wrote:This sounds quite a lot like saying it eventually becomes boring once you've won a dozen or so times


If only. There are tactics that render your character's power level largely irrelevant. These are the tactics that are expounded in guides for newbies. They're rather simple to follow, too. You can do it underslept and tired, contrary to common wisdom. It's okay for the game to be always winnable but it should make you jump through hoops, however powerful your character. An analogous shooting game should keep you somewhere between "fast on your feet" and "sweating bullets", with perhaps some acceptable deviations, but instead has buggy boxes that you can shoot from and not be shot at, and exploiting that property is considered valid/necessary tactics by the community.

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Post Saturday, 16th April 2016, 12:22

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

@agentgt, i believe every game have a learning curve, the game difficulty is based on how high you have to be on that curve to be able to win the game and, for me, you dont have to be high on that curve for winning crawl.
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Post Saturday, 16th April 2016, 19:03

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

the game is too easy because of teleport/blink
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Post Sunday, 17th April 2016, 17:47

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

dynast wrote:The game is easy to the point of most of its deaths being just plain hubris.


But what would you have instead? A game where players die not because they overestimated their ability to handle the situation, but die because even with a proper appraisal of the situation there was no way to survive it?

One of Crawl's design principles is that the player should die because of their own mistakes, that you can look at a situation where you died and see what you did wrong. Of course deaths are going to be attributed mostly to player overconfidence.

If you want to play a game where you can play everything wisely and sometimes die anyways, well, you can always play Nethack and have a random mob wave a wand of death at you. Woo-hoo, this is way more interesting, isn't it?

How exactly do you propose making Crawl 'hard' without making it so that dying is primarily due to the player's mistakes? If players don't usually die without making mistakes, the game is always going to be 'too easy' for a skilled player. If players often lose even if they never made any decisions that were clearly 'bad' then how is it that remotely fair, especially for new players?

Edit: I do want to qualify that I'm not arguing here that the game's difficulty couldn't be increased, that individual changes to raise the difficulty curve would be innately good or bad. My point is though that if your stance is "If I can win reliably by playing well, it is too easy," then you're never going to be happy with the difficulty unless the game is modified to the point that that perfect play still loses due to RNG.
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Post Sunday, 17th April 2016, 18:53

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

People here seem to forget how other games exist and don't face difficulty paradigms like this.

A game that always kills you for sloppy play and always lets you win with good play sounds pretty good, and nobody would say things like "Of course deaths are going to be attributed mostly to player overconfidence". But that's not Crawl; Crawl often lets you get away with sloppy play to no detriment for 90%+ of the time.

There's also that the best play often happens to be mechanically uninteresting and more a test of hubris than skill or performance, unlike other games.

Now, I think a game can be based largely around keeping your guard up and not letting it slip, like Papers Please I suppose, and for a long time I thought Crawl was doing exactly that, and was good at it. I even imagined that the meat of Crawl was in "sifting" through popcorn.

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Post Sunday, 17th April 2016, 19:18

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:People here seem to forget how other games exist and don't face difficulty paradigms like this.

A game that always kills you for sloppy play and always lets you win with good play sounds pretty good, and nobody would say things like "Of course deaths are going to be attributed mostly to player overconfidence". But that's not Crawl; Crawl often lets you get away with sloppy play to no detriment for 90%+ of the time.

There's also that the best play often happens to be mechanically uninteresting and more a test of hubris than skill or performance, unlike other games.

Now, I think a game can be based largely around keeping your guard up and not letting it slip, like Papers Please I suppose, and for a long time I thought Crawl was doing exactly that, and was good at it. I even imagined that the meat of Crawl was in "sifting" through popcorn.


Interesting, I feel like most strategy games actually do have this pattern, particularly turn based ones, see XCOM or Civilization, where higher difficulties are defined by how much you need to stick to best practices or certain strategies. The XCOM Long War mod is a good example of this, where the raised difficulty ceiling means that players have to play as carefully and slowly as possible, and the game is a massive test of attrition.

For single-player games where player performance is a matter of decision making with no element of reaction time or physical execution, every game is 'easy' once totally understood and played optimally

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Post Sunday, 17th April 2016, 19:24

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

I guess it depends on whether you expect an adventure to be like a Robert Louis Stevenson novel or like a chicken that darts the wrong way across the road because it thinks it can beat that oncoming hrududoo.
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Post Sunday, 17th April 2016, 19:45

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Aethrus wrote:
dynast wrote:The game is easy to the point of most of its deaths being just plain hubris.


But what would you have instead? A game where players die not because they overestimated their ability to handle the situation, but die because even with a proper appraisal of the situation there was no way to survive it?

One of Crawl's design principles is that the player should die because of their own mistakes, that you can look at a situation where you died and see what you did wrong. Of course deaths are going to be attributed mostly to player overconfidence.

If you want to play a game where you can play everything wisely and sometimes die anyways, well, you can always play Nethack and have a random mob wave a wand of death at you. Woo-hoo, this is way more interesting, isn't it?

How exactly do you propose making Crawl 'hard' without making it so that dying is primarily due to the player's mistakes? If players don't usually die without making mistakes, the game is always going to be 'too easy' for a skilled player. If players often lose even if they never made any decisions that were clearly 'bad' then how is it that remotely fair, especially for new players?

Edit: I do want to qualify that I'm not arguing here that the game's difficulty couldn't be increased, that individual changes to raise the difficulty curve would be innately good or bad. My point is though that if your stance is "If I can win reliably by playing well, it is too easy," then you're never going to be happy with the difficulty unless the game is modified to the point that that perfect play still loses due to RNG.


It's more about dying to interesting mistakes vs. not-so-interesting mistakes. When you die because you take risks out of laziness even though you know the "correct" play, there is a problem.
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Post Sunday, 17th April 2016, 19:57

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

it would be better if those best practices/strategies were enforced most of the time, but Crawl lets you mess around an awful lot, maybe like 99% of the time. Simply buffing monsters to do this would probably make Crawl unbearably repetitive.

Attrition doesn't have to be tedious if the game requires you to maintain a high level of performance. A game can be ("feel"?) hard even if you know, correctly, that you have a 0% chance of failure. Imagine climbing a rock wall that you feel comfortable with. Crawl falls short of that.

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Post Sunday, 17th April 2016, 20:50

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

tabstorm wrote:It's more about dying to interesting mistakes vs. not-so-interesting mistakes. When you die because you take risks out of laziness even though you know the "correct" play, there is a problem.


I can accept that, but I'm not sure what the right solution is.

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Post Monday, 18th April 2016, 12:43

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Aethrus wrote:But what would you have instead? A game where players die not because they overestimated their ability to handle the situation, but die because even with a proper appraisal of the situation there was no way to survive it?

Instead of what? i am not making proposals here.
Aethrus wrote:For single-player games where player performance is a matter of decision making with no element of reaction time or physical execution, every game is 'easy' once totally understood and played optimally

And thats why crawl is easy, you dont have to understand jack shit to win a game of crawl.
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Post Monday, 18th April 2016, 13:21

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

I guess some people have different ideas about what difficulty means. I've played this game for 3 years or so, done a lot of reading so I know what to expect and how things work, and I have put in hundreds of hours. I probably manage a 2% win rate, at best.

I know I am nowhere near the best player, but I also know I'm far, far from the worst. If I only win 2% of the time, I'd say crawl is a very difficult game, from my point of view.

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Post Monday, 18th April 2016, 13:32

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

I use "difficulty" when talking about winning the game, Anything above that i call "mastery".
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Post Monday, 18th April 2016, 13:40

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

As in, winning once ever? As in, if a person wins the game one time after 1000 tries, the game is easy?

That's an interesting point of view, if that is what you are saying. What game meets that definition of difficulty?

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Post Monday, 18th April 2016, 14:23

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

You talk about tries, as if trial and error classifies as difficulty, and maybe it does, but, if im trying to play the game like a total hipster(which is usually what i do when i find a new game) does it even classify as "trying"? You can consider a game hard for trying over a thousand times with reason, but also because you dont have the self awareness that you are playing it the wrong way.
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Post Monday, 18th April 2016, 14:47

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

I guess I just don't know what you're saying at all.

By the standards of modern turn-based games which can be won, crawl is extremely difficult. Most games can be beaten on the first attempt, especially if one plays on the default difficulty level.

Is winning crawl harder than winning Ikaruga with the default number of lives? No, probably not for most people, but the bullet hell genre is difficult to compare with the turn based roguelike genre.
Is winning a game of crawl easier than beating mario 1? For some people, probably so, but then with enough muscle memory you can beat it without even looking at the screen.
Is winning a game of crawl harder than beating dark souls? Yes, I would say so, but then, I'm pretty good at that genre of game.

What even defines the difficulty of winning a game? Time spent on attempts? I guess you're defining it as... attempts taken when making proper attempts with self awareness? I mean, sure, I wouldn't call a game hard because it's unwinnable if I hold the controller upside-down and mash buttons randomly, but then, I don't think anyone is doing that with crawl either.

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Post Monday, 18th April 2016, 15:34

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

And im back to talking about learning curves. What do you have to learn in order to win a game of crawl? I didnt even know what was a roguelike when i won my first game of crawl, i thought i knew, turns out the game i played before crawl was ToME, which is just a turn based hack n slash. I beat crawl while i was playing it as a hack n slash, though i must admit, i did have to learn a few things, like avoiding gettting my scrolls burned, haul ammo because of weight and not play draconian because of unindentified dragon slaying spears being tossed at me, ironically, those were all removed.
There is a shit ton of things to be learned about crawl that will increase your mastery over the game, but what do you actually have to know to win it? To win a game of crawl you have to know to not get cocky, some basic level of risk management. And thats what i like about crawl, you can win it, and then you can learn and become better at it, instead of having to obtain some obscure knowledge about the game or memorize patterns just to be able to win once.
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Post Monday, 18th April 2016, 15:41

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

dynast wrote:you dont have to understand jack shit to win a game of crawl

can confirm

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Post Monday, 18th April 2016, 15:46

Re: The overall difficulty of the game is fine.

Sar wrote:
dynast wrote:you dont have to understand jack shit to win a game of crawl

can confirm

This also has to do with that other thing we dicussed about, doesnt it? You got me good now.
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