Death!

[Berendol]

I'd have to disagree with the idea of making the game more difficult for the 30-40 range of levels... I died shortly after recall to 3600, then my ghost landed on ethereal hounds, then I floated up into chaos hounds for the final few blows. It's plenty hard enough as is... please don't make it any tougher in the mid-game. The bottom and end-game are still too easy by all accounts.

[Fink]

Y'know, I kinda agree with Berendols comments. I consider myself to currently be just leaving the newbie stage, on my Great Journey of Mangband and all that.

Over the year or so I've played as a noob, I don't think I really ever felt that the game was a breeze or easy - quite the opposite often.

This topic brings to mind a common problem in longer-term MMORPGS, whether MUDs or otherwise. The problem that is often experienced is that of long time players becoming very adept at the game, and an understandable response to this of making things more difficult.

To a "t" , in most cases this has one serious unintended consquence: newer users get the shaft, as the game is now tuned for the expert, and the new user is assumed by implication to be able to play at a skilled level and to know all the tricks.

An example of this is the long-running commercial MUD Gemstone (currently in version 4). This mud has got to be one of the greatest test beds for all things MMORPG, due to the insanely long lifespan it has had, and continues to have.

These guys had a problem with their long time players getting really really good at the game, and finding the most brutally efficient long term character growth strategies. So, understandably, the company who makes the game started a long process of tweaking the tuning and characters. After a number of years of this, they had a new problem: if you the new user *didn't* follow an incredibly regimented and extremely specific optimal character growth plan, you were completely hosed later in the game. Level by level, you would find yourself increasingly unable to do what you needed to level.

Now, I don't mean to apply this specific issue directly to Mangband. Instead, I just want to bring up the topic in general: when we change tuning to respond to players getting good at the game, we are increasing, often to the point of unrealism, what a new player is expected to understand and deal with.

For every Ashiki, Jube, or Juan, there is an army of newer players who find death to be frequent and unforgiving. I don't mean to say that occasional re-tunes of the game are bad - far from it. But, I think we should try to be clear on what exactly is providing the impetus to retune.

When I think back over the last year of playing, I see a distinct line, depth-wise, in the game: 2000 feet or so. Past this point, the number of players who keep going down suddenly gets pretty thin. If we assume that there has been a steady trickle of players starting Mangband, then we would perhaps expect to see some semi-even distribution of players at most depths, or at least at most effective depths (that is, the relative homoginaity of the mid 3k's down to the bottom makes that whole depth range a sort of single depth in and of itself). Far from this, we generally see a few people at the bottom, and a huddled cluster not daring to go much further beyond the 2k's. Until recently, I was smack in the middle of this group: the late 2k's and beyond scared me.


I guess, in the end, I'm kind of curious who exactly is the target of a retune with an eye towards increasing the difficulty. I'll admit that I worry that it's focus is the handfull of excellent longtime players who play the game, with resulting collateral damage to the less skilled newer players who, far from finding the game easy, instead seem to suddenly hit a wall beyond which they fear to creep.

[Rali]

I'd like to voice my total agreement with this thread so far. It takes me so long to get to level 30 and find decent gear that I'm a complete coward past 2k. Instadeath is just too common, whether it's from getting pushed off of stairs from hounds, getting surrounded by a quick summon or two, or breathed on from offscreen (or onscreen, 800-damage breaths aren't unheard of).

Okay, maybe there are macros to get out of some of these situations. Could we put some advanced macros in the game's help? But it still seems that players get hosed to an unreasonable degree even when they are well prepared.

edit: the following is probably off topic, but I'll leave it. Sorry.

Maybe make scrolls of teleport available for lower level characters to buy in the alchemist's shop?

Anybody want to help me write a "softcore" patch that drops gold and inventory on death, takes xp, statics the level and teleports you to town with gear intact? Books, potions, scrolls, loot may be lost, but the gear enabling the player to make a living wouldn't be gone like it is now. That seems to be what cripples players the most.

On one server I played long ago, the temple gave alms to players who went there to resurrect. This allowed them to buy a basic book or weapon or recall to help get on their feet again.

Maybe players under level 25 could keep all gear, with a chance per level above 25 for more and more gear to be taken away, since players should be building up reserves in a house by then.

[Anyar]

I agree with berendol, the gam is hard enough in the lowe 2k-high3k area where most L30 players train and begin their growth economically and plaayerwise, and they really start to connect to their character. Making it harder here would ruin a major part of the MAng expirience

[Berendol]

Yes - the in-game help document (hotkey: "?") is in need of updating for MAngband's features. I'd like some help but this is not the thread for that. Anyone care to add, please start a new thread - I'll find it!

I'll give a pointer on the "offscreen" issue. Whenever you're diving you should always use the L command to look ahead of where you're going, occasionally looking around to see if anything is closing in on you from another direction, and use some kind of mapping spell to see potential blunders before you make them. Paladins have Sense Surroundings, Detect Doors and Stairs, and Detect Traps. Not detecting stuff around you can be deadly. My 2nd-most-recent death is due to not casting Detect Traps in a vault, then stepping on a summoning rune which summoned a GWoB, a drolem, and some miscellaneous non-troublesome monsters - which was really stupid, a human error.

My most recent death, the one that was followed by the ghost death that inspired the thread in the first place, is due to a GWoB breathing twice while I was fighting it - I was unaware that anything could breathe on you while you were slaughtering it in hand-to-hand combat. But - if it hadn't breathed, I would have utterly destroyed it at level 38 without taking a lot of damage. But that's due to my vault-scumming for good gear, and the vault-sharing I did with some higher level people who gave me some gear from the vaults. I think that sort of thing may be Crimson's inspiration to make the game harder someday. However! Most people don't have the knowledge at that point to do such things, and thus will not be prepared for a more difficult challenge.

Avoidable death is annoying but it should be as possible as it is now. Instadeath on recall, ghost pop, or stairing is far worse and the possibility of such should be lessened. I like to think I've got a fighting chance to escape from something that's giving me a major bruising or is coming from another room to do that. I mean, who would keep going down stairs if they saw a rabid wolverine (or a pack of time hounds) waiting at the bottom?

To make the game more evil is not the goal - extending the possible play length of the game for players (which pretty much means extending the endgame) is the goal. This means that the game should not cease to become more difficult at 5050'. Since the game currently has 27 levels from 5000' to 6350' which actually decrease in difficulty due to the dungeon speed adjustments and lack of new anything, a lot of players just wind up scumming vaults at the bottom with the Genocide spells, collecting gear and wealth in their myriad houses, and not actually fighting Morgoth. Morgoth-fighting gear should be more easily attainable, and the bottom should be more difficult. Perhaps making 5000 the bottom, or the speed not decrease after 5000, or making new monsters appear below 5000 would be the answer. However! Powerful items and greater vaults will need to be more easily found near 5000 or that doesn't work out so well.

Are there figures on deaths per-level, instead of per 10-level range?

If you really want to make such a patch, my suggestion would be to grep for "player death" in src/server/*.c -- I think it's in xtra1.c or something, but I haven't looked at it in a week. There you could #ifdef 0 / #endif out some of the code that offends you.

[Anyar]

an idea that woul give high level players something to do, or as an incentive to actually kill morgy that i though of would be to along with the crown and hammer the player that beats morgy owuld get a special scroll that acts like a create stair spell or recall scroll. or make an inscribable thing on recall scroll that only kinged players are able to use, and when they use the scroll it would bring them to a superhighlevel dangerfilled zone that is filled with awesome vaults and unuiqes, it would either have to be incredibly large or multiple levels, even though they would all be about the same danger level, though given teh relativly few  number of kings this might not be a problem.
another idea is to expand the level limit to 100 or something like i am almost sure some variants have. If any of this would be possible without an incredibly large amount of time and effort i would be surprised so i dont expect anything to happen soon or ever

[Fink]

I was just musing on this topic more, and had a couple of thoughts:


Stratify late-game monsters more

In the absence of new monsters, redistribute the late game toughies to fill up the last couple thousand feet or so with new monsters consistently. That is, Take monster X who normally appears at, let's say 4k', and push him down to 5.1k', etc. The goal would be to have more "milestones" in the currently homogenous last chunk of dungeon depth.


Update Geno/Mass Geno

Make geno work on warmblooded monsters only, and perhaps reclassify some currently warmblooded monsters as coldblooded monsters. Are Chaos Beetles warm or cold blooded? Either way, these could be an example of a newly coldblooded monster that could be impervious to genocide. Personally, if, let's say, druj's and undead beholders couldn't be geno'd, I would find things much spicier to deal with.


Add unique monster maximum depth

Clamp the depth that a unique monster can appear at, so people playing at shallower depths will more likely encounter them (as opposed to people at the bottom one-shotting level 15 uniques that provide no challenge).


Add normal monster maximum depth

Clamp the depth that a normal monster can appear at. The result here would be more difficult dungeon levels as you go deeper, due to not being able to rely on a level having, let's say, 40% very weak monsters. This would have the unintended effect of speeding up leveling, perhaps, by throwing more "good" monsters at a player, but a dungeon level with only tougher monsters would definitely make the level more interesting. I have to admit that I always find it odd to see a clump of orcs next door to a pack of aether hounds.


Get more use out of Aggrivate

"Aggrivates monsters" seems like an underused feature which perhaps we could use in new ways. For example, imagine if GoI flipped the Aggrivates Monster flag on a player for the duration of the spell. Yikes!


Set GoI to not protect against geno HP cost

Currently, GoI protects the player against the HP cost of casting geno/mass geno. While I'm fighting some nasty summoning unique, I often hit mass geno to clear the area of summons (if I'm taking a unique on in an open area to give it room to drop more loot). If I couldn't protect myself against the health penalty via GoI, fights could get much more interesting.

Personally, I don't know if this particular idea is so hot; geno is as much a utility spell as a combat spell, and being unable to protect against the HP penalty could just end up being an annoyance given the softened gamespeed and regen time at the bottom (9 out of every 10 geno/mass geno casts of mine are not done in combat).

[Fink]

On this whole general topic, I'd be really interested to hear what our power players have to say on the topic of game difficulty, particularly late-ish game.

Jube? Juan? Ashi? Weigh in!

-Fink

[Ashi]

You know what would be great? Adding tougher monsters for EVERYONE!

Also, getting rid of the whole process of turning into a ghost. If we could just make a dying character respawn back in town with all his items intact, there'd be a lot less frustration over lost gear and more serious playing. Instead, we should make them drop some amount of gold depending on their level, and to prevent people from diving with no money on them, make them drop items and gear as necessary to pay for this death fee. bwa.ha.ha.ha

It would help our situation of not enough active players because newbies would stop quitting when they lose their gear. It also makes the game harder to win because there will be more deaths more often, and that exp setback winds up extending the amount of time it takes to level up etc..
Also it allows us to kill people for money. he.he

So more deaths and less gear loss would be nice.

[Fink]

Hm, that reminds me: I only play with one artifact, so I can't really judge too well. The topic has come up before, and bumped up against Crimsons desire to keep MAangband recognizably Angbang - but, how about once and for all doing away with artifacts?

This could be an accross-the-board evening of the playing field difficulty wise, regardless of level. Also, it would make the end game a tad bit more interesting (it seems clear that art isn't necessary to finish the game, so this doesn't seem unreasonable).

I should be clear on this: I don't mean "get rid of art and introduce a HUGE NEW COMPLEX ITEM CREATION THING!!" , but instead quite simply mean "get rid of art."

Again, I know this is kind of narrow, as most people don't really have much if any art (particularly compared to Angband), but it's another idea.

[Ashi]

An idea was once brought up which suggested that when you bump someone's house, it brings up a store and you could buy anything they had inscribed with a price.

That makes it easier to get the rare items you need to win the game without arts and also gives high level people a reason to hold onto money.

[Fink]

Ah, just thought of this as well:

Disallow experience after level 50

We could cap the exp counter at a players level 50, and not allow exp to be stacked on top of this. This way, death keeps it's sting despite having played for moons at the bottom (losing loads of loot notwithstanding).

[Ashi]

pfft, then how do you compare big players on the high score list? :p

[Berendol]

I dunno, maybe... Make a new scoring system?! Yeah, make it figure out and use the player's Power rating or something similar on death. That way your level still factors into it but your accumulated wealth, your equipment, winner status/wins, deaths, etc. have an influence as well. It would have to be weighted away from money, since anyone can make a load of cash if they want it badly enough.

[Fink]

Scoring?! Easy! Whoever finishes in the least moves with the least value caried wins.

Of course, this would have the odd effect of putting Jube at the bottom of the list if/when he squishes morgy