by TigerKnee on Tue Jan 17, 2012 7:04 am
Adding in on the whole "randomness" debate going on.
I used to play Magic:The Gathering. One of the basic rules in deck construction for high-level play is "4 of each card you want to use (4 is the maximum of an individual card, you see), unless you have an extremely good reason not to (such as deck searching cards)"
In a game with random factors, good players will attempt to keep Luck to the minimum. One way of doing so is to get rid of junk. That means sub-optimal and super niche items like blue beads get junked.
In Alpha, you HAVE to get through the junk items in order to reach the high end awesome ones like Orb of Zot due to the simple unlocking system.
In Beta, you can control your "deck", or in this case, your item pool, by simply not doing quests that junk up the shops.
Even if, in theory, you managed to make all items equally useful, the optimal play would still be to minimize your luck as much as possible.
Now, having a huge pool of items and seeing what you get as a luck of the draw CAN be FUN. That's the basis behind the alternative mode "Elder Dragon Highlander", where you have a 100 card deck with a card maximum of 1 per individual card, but that's not the base gameplay of Magic, and I would like to think that the "fun" and the "optimal" way of playing a game should intersect, rather than clash with each other.
This is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup's reasoning for removing grindy behaviour. It's true that players can choose not to do X scummy and boring action, but if it gives you an advantage, players will happily whip themselves if they must.