1. When a few players would use the staff of earth (back in 0.4) for its obscene melee damage potential, it was obviously unbalanced but not urgent. We wanted to wait with a change until we overhaul staves (which will come eventually, including randart staves and ego properties for them). When many players announced (in ##crawl) that they’re “just starting another GnEE, hoping for an early SoE”, it became urgent, and we invented an ad-hoc nerf for the enhance staves.

2. I have seen the brokeness of the Tomb of Dorokhloe spell (you can still read the discussions in old posts to the r.g.r.misc newsgroup). DCSS has tried to balance the spell, for example by raising the level. Finally, I pushed for removing the spell altogether: the effect is a great idea, it should just not be a _spell_. We delegated it to a card effect, which seems better. (Nemelex is overpowered, too, but that’s a different topic.)

3. Selfbanishment (up to 0.4 IIRC via spell, after that via distortion weapons) was overpowered: you’d get an _instant_ late-game (when Abyss would pose no serious threat anymore) life saver. On top of that, proper usage is incredibly tedious: approach target destination (e.g. a hell end), self-banish if something goes wrong, repeat. One approach would be to make selfbanishment costly but I pushed for removing the self-version of the spell altogether. (It is good for Lugonu, of course.) This nerf came before the abuse potential was fully realised by the player base, I think. But it was obvious to me, so we could nerf anyway.

4. Up to 0.5, melee with heavy AC was too strong. There was a reason why players would call MDFi broken. This was a long-standing issue and we promised to do something about it. We did not manage to deliver the nerf for 0.5, but we had one for 0.6. It is _not_ a problem that melee in heavy armour is now harder than before. If you wouldn’t feel the change, we would have undernerfed. The question is if heavy armours play about correctly now. This is very hard to judge (also for us).

On measuring “success” or “balance” as a whole: I don’t think it is a good idea to use “average number of wins” or something similar. Crawl is supposed to be hard — this is also part of the appeal for players who have never win (and perhaps never will). The Nethack threads are full of this, and last year’s poll also underlined this point.
The (harsh) difficulty has some rather enjoyable corollaries: a), players of very high skill can still be differentiated; b), replay value increases (especially with the many approaches available); c), even the progress to your second rune (say) is meaningful.

I am certain a difficulty section would mess with these without really improving matters. We try to nerf certain features because (vastly) overpowered mechanics are just no-brainers. And we boost others, because not-using something that is plain too weak is just a no-brainer itself. That’s all we are doing.

I’m curious how the devs measure balance. You mention nerfs arriving later to reset balance but the vast majority of players can’t win. What metrics, if any, are being run to determine how a particular nerf is applied to reset balance? From my perspective, I understand the big picture vision of the game and the need to coherently balance different facets of the experience, but going from 0.5 to 0.6 meant a quantitatively significant reduction of performance in my games.

Perhaps an idea is to apply a difficult setting or some such, rather than trying to make the game balanced for everyone. There’s a clear difference between players who can win and those who can’t – why not let players adjust settings to find a pleasing balance? Presumably a major portion of the game works in such a way that particular variables could be set by players at the outset of a game.

I usually don’t think of myself as a statistic, but hot damn am I one right now! Oh well, glad I stumbled upon Stone Soup. Very user-friendly and feature-rich for a Rogue game, which is probably why you guys get lots of newbs and non ASCII-level hardcore players.

Our goal is not, and never has been, to make the game unwinnable apart from the select few. We stand by the goals of “anyone can win, unspoiled”, yet “no-one can win reliably”.

It was a plain fact that heavy AC was overpowered. The nerf was long ordered, we took some time to finally get there. It turned out we overnerfed a little, so we’ll keep adjusting things in the future. 0.6 also showed that high EV is quite overpowered (something insightful people warned us about in advance), but you can use Ha or Sp instead of MD in 0.6.

Finally, the game getting harder with each version. This is objectively wrong: Crawl became generally easier with all releases up to 0.5 (generally, because each version contains many changes, both nerfs and buffs). It was always understood that certain nerfs would arrive later to reset balance.

Additionally and on a completely different note, could Jivya be a starting god choice for Chaos Knights?

For the record, we stopped supporting DOS because none of the team uses it natively and there were some serious bugs consequently none of us was capable of reproducing, let alone fixing. In previous discussions, I got the impressions that most players of the DOS version actually have Windows as a OS, but used the DOS version because it was faster or something, so it’s no wonder these numbers differ wildly.

@Anonymous: Yes, we’ll be running another survey at some point, though probably with different questions and more pre-planning. :)

I completed the game once but I want to share my exp / rank with online profiles

Are there any plans to do another survey at some point?