- remove high elves,
- remove wands of healing, teleportation and hasting,
- Ogres flavor fail,
- remove hill giants, :c
- made The Shining One even more useful, despite the fact that it’s already one of the most used Gods.

I do appreciate the voluntary work behind DCSS, but this is no the kind of design process that it’s going to make the game more fun. I’ve started to notice more and more questionable updates.

Depth, content and variety is what makes players hooked on a game. Crawl has lost a huge bulk of these since these last few years of *updates* due to that stupid over-dumbified game design concept being pushed by the devs.

You’ve lost me as a player as well, sad to say.

Oh, and I finally got your joke in the post, too!

One last thing I do want to make clear: I am GRATEFUL to the devs, including you (PleasingFungus). I am sure some of you opt more for cutting stuff and focusing on core mechanics, and others are more for fixing and enhancing what exists. That DCSS is still going shows that it has had devs who have made mostly sound decisions… I and others just don’t think cutting stuff is one of them. There have definitely been things throughout the years that should have been removed (and were), but what purpose do things like removing High Elves serve? Oh, and that’s not rhetorical: really, why are you all cutting stuff?

Now, I don’t want to criticize the devs too much. I have been modding and programming for 20 years, and sometimes you really can’t fix something. Or maybe for a better feature to be implemented, something else has to go. But removal should serve a good, defensible purpose. What did removing High Elves accomplish, other than annoying people? What is this “straight edge” lifestyle? As I wrote, I usually play as a Mummy, so removing High Elf as a playable race doesn’t really affect me. But it seems endemic to this mindset on the devs that they are in charge, so they can do whatever the heck they want to. The devs ARE in charge, to an extent (though people can make their own changes to the source code and make their own DCSS); what the devs forget is that they are *custodians* of DCSS. When I make a new gun for a game, it is for me and me alone. The DCSS devs are making a game, but it is NOT for themselves only: it is for all of us, their players! And our opinions matter for the following reason:

At it’s core, gameplay is about the players’ preference. A good game give the player what they want. It doesn’t have to have EVERYTHING, just what attracts the player. People play some game genres and not others, but role-playing games are about playing roles and making choices. You can’t make choices if you don’t have choices, and you can’t play a role if it doesn’t exist. The irritating thing is that a lot of choices (items, spells, characters), options (playstyles), roles (overall preferred character builds), and flavor (maybe I just want to look like an elf today?) exist[ed] in DCSS that is simply being removed.

Cutting stuff left and right shows the devs really don’t seem to care much about the game, since they don’t put the effort into fixing it. Ignoring the feelings that I and others have about the [seemingly] capricious cutting of content is just that: the devs ignoring us. The core, however, is this: you keep cutting pieces off a game, then you will eventually have no game anyone wants to play. I like new stuff, and balancing can be very beneficial, but I have seen very little ADDED content that would necessitate so much REMOVAL.

It is possible that eventually DCSS will hit a slump, nothing will happen for a while, then we will start getting all sorts of forks like what happened to Angband. Who knows? But I would rather play DCSS, *if* I can enjoy what is there for me to play.

I was, until reading how you people are removing a bunch of stuff AGAIN… DCSS had so much going for it, but I started playing less and less after the first “let’s remove stuff because BALANCING REASONS” years ago. I lost some of my favorite spells, like tossing potions for cloud-filled explosions and Projecting Noises. Yeah, it’s been so long I can’t even remember the names for some of them. I do remember the dev’s answer to the removal of Project Noise, though: it was “unbalanced” and could be used to sneak through difficult levels like the Tomb. Well maybe I don’t feel like throwing away a character I spent weeks on by charging into enemy ranks? Maybe I like more to stealth than moving and hoping the RNG doesn’t decide everyone should see (and kill) me right now?

THAT was a long time ago, but the problem of cutting stuff at a whim “because balance” or “because it’s old” or “because we have new features we want to force people to use” persists. Remove a monster because there are 3 identical other types I can understand, BUT… why not make it better or more interesting instead of just amputating it? Like the Manticore, for example. And why can’t we leave stuff in because it’s fun? The devs *do* realize that “balance” is not the ultimate goal of playing a game, right? Balance should help CONTRIBUTE to a game’s fun by regulating playability, but nerfing stuff left and right, removing options that (apparently) a lot of people enjoy (like High Elves for people to like ROLE PLAYING), etc., doesn’t really make sense.

I guess I am getting old. I didn’t starting playing games like DCSS because it is “simple” and “easy to get into”. I like having a zillion different options, and removing stuff gets under my skin. I get tired of having new stuff that looks cool, stuff that I want to try out, only to have it die forever on an apparent whim. The changes listed in this dev post don’t affect me much, I usually play a Mummy and don’t use wands much. But too many other times I get to read about decisions that DO impact me and the way I play the game. Some decisions were correct, but others I still miss, years later.

Something is off when “improving” the game makes it harder to love.

Oh well, break is over. Back to work.

HE removal sounds like “another meh patch thingy I don’t care and quite probably will forget about soon”. I kinda feel sorry for dudes who like playing them so much, tho.

Mummies are my favorite masochistic pass-time, but without any source of haste they might be too much so.

High elves I guess I didn’t really play. I just rarely understand the reasoning behind subtracting race choices.

Shining one summoning gold dragons? (pearl is more appropriate?)

Removing high elves to step away from tolkien, and because you consider them boring sounds dumb to me. High elves aren’t a tolkien thing are they? I suppose maybe Noldor were seen as high elves or something? And they weren’t boring. One of my most played.

Only good thing out of this patch is the removal of the crutch-wands, and QoL change to sandblast. What a shit show.

Admin Note: comment removed.

(not really… xD)