QCF Design Community

Not to mention that altar preps made me scum 100% less, and it didn't break the game in any circumstance (edit) except where the challenge was percieved as being too difficult to warrant scuming for half an hour to get the desired altar in the first place (Binlor most often). They solved this very same problem with gods for good, and the game is better off for it.

Took them a million years too.

EDIT: And on the tedium side, relockering a vicious reward is like having an hour-long loading screen in the game, only worse because you have to be sitting there. If you have a hard time acquiring it once, you'll never let it out of your locker - which means nothing else gets lockered and experimented with in that slot, if you're a vet you might as well have a button that starts a blank black screen that sticks on your monitor for an hour. But that would be better, because you could go do something else as long as it isn't a DD run. For short runs, you only get a pre-enchanced edition witcher scene-change loading screen with variable lenght (depending on whether you find the item on the 1st or 5th run, and whether you're scumming with a tinker or a transmuter). And that game didn't sell do all that well before the enchanced edition which pretty much only dispensed with the loading screens.

Could we at least get that? A button which gets us an item lockered and freezes the loading screen for up to an hour? I'd pay rl money for that, I'm not kidding. It would improve the expirience immensly, and I'm not kidding about that, either - it's a fact. I can do a whole lot of stuff with an hour, or even half an hour.

I wonder now; what *IS* exactly the purpose of the locker?
I can think of a few, and maybe get a few from the thread, but I'd rather hear some explanation, since I keep wondering about that.

Edit : Nevermind, my reading comprehensen seemed to have failed, seeing a sthe answer lies roughly below it. *facepalms*

Okay, so after reading the rambling design article and dislekcia's latest fearful post, it's pretty clear that the dev's decision to ignore this complaint is an emotional one rather than a logical one. The slippery slope argument being wielded is fallacious and a little silly - you are the devs, nobody is going to force you at gunpoint to implement random terrible ideas to replace the one existing scummy behaviour you're being asked to fix. All that we're hearing from you right now is moaning that players are never happy, or broad and tenuously related design theory, or arguments about other changes that are not being asked for. It is a little frustrating for me to spend an hour carefully explaining why these complaints and solutions are unrelated to your 'slippery slope' ... only to be met with a blanket statement that every suggestion has been a slippery slope and no further or specific reasoning being given.

Let me try this a different way.

Desktop Dungeons, right now, has effectively infinite locker space. The player can at any time easily prep any item that they've unlocked in stores. The cost for this prep is (let's say) fifteen minutes of scumming. This is boring for the player to do, but absolutely possible and sometimes they may reluctantly pay it to try something out.

Now imagine that one of the solutions proposed in this topic is implemented. The player will at any time be able to easily prep any item they've unlocked in stores. The cost for this prep will be an in-game resource. This will be fun for the player to obtain, and already possible but now they'll sometimes cheerfully pay to try something out.

The only difference is that you'd be explicitly asking the player for a in-game resource (gold) instead of implicitly asking for an external one (time). Nothing more or less is being allowed than in your current implementation. If anything, that's going UP your alleged slope. Heck, if you really don't want players to be able to start with their choice of items then feel free to go further and randomise the contents of locker slots after each run. That could be thematically fun and encourage experimentation. But the setup you've chosen so far demonstratively encourages mindless scumming and this is a flaw that one way or another you need to fix.