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QCF Design Community • View topic - Rate the Vicious Dungeons!


Rate the Vicious Dungeons!

All things Desktop Dungeons

What's Your Favorite Vicious Dungeon?

Demonic Library
5
26%
Namtar's Lair
5
26%
Dragon Isles
1
5%
Naga City
6
32%
Vicious Halls of Steel
1
5%
Vicious Gaan-Telet
1
5%
 
Total votes : 19

Re: Rate the Vicious Dungeons!

Postby gjaustin on Fri Mar 30, 2012 1:59 pm

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Re: Rate the Vicious Dungeons!

Postby Lujo on Fri Mar 30, 2012 2:02 pm

I'll do a thread on this, might do some good, might not, and will be easier to avoid than spamming this thread.

And what I gathered from Dislekcias response was not wether he liked it or not. Just the surprise. And it's enough.
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Re: Rate the Vicious Dungeons!

Postby Lujo on Fri Mar 30, 2012 3:36 pm

Crap. I wrote a damned essay and for some reason the forums decided I wasn't logged in and I lost the whole damned thing. And it was a polite one. :(

And since I lost it, for anyone intersted it boils down to this: What Avatar did there, while awsome, sayes less about Avatar then about the game. He finds such strats legit, and exectues them perfectly, often in impressive ways, high five for Avatar right there. Find my reaction to that, it was "O.O WOW". But the fact that the game allows for such strats supports most of my arguments perfectly.

Most of the "difficulty" and "learning curve" in the game ATM comes from things you can do being so preposterous that most people wouldn't even try, and the fact that it is so can also be seen in the previous posts of that thread where people discuss how to do such a thing, being simply aware of everything in the game deciding NOT to use / waste time on most of the content, Avatar deciding on what to do, and right as rain doing something that amazes a dev with possible room for improvement.

And if what he did there worked there, it would certanly work in other places, with even less effort required.

It doesn't revlove around using stuff, it revolves around ignoring stuff, which leads to the question - why was stuff there in the first place and why has the game led anyone to believe that it should be interacted with? What A did right there was probably the most epic dodging of content I have seen in this beta test :_D
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Re: Rate the Vicious Dungeons!

Postby Darvin on Fri Mar 30, 2012 4:07 pm

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Re: Rate the Vicious Dungeons!

Postby Lujo on Fri Mar 30, 2012 6:24 pm

I almost got pwned by Shifty Brickwork!
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Re: Rate the Vicious Dungeons!

Postby q 3 on Fri Mar 30, 2012 7:30 pm

Every successful strategy involves ignoring some elements of the game - if for no other reason than that it's impossible to have every item, glyph, or god* in a single run. I agree that it would be ideal if any given randomly generated dungeon had the same potential for victory, but the solution to a successful strategy is not to shut down everything.

*The two obvious exceptions aside.
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Re: Rate the Vicious Dungeons!

Postby Lujo on Fri Mar 30, 2012 7:55 pm

Yes, but making players eschew monsters as such (which most VICIOUS dungeons mandate) or enabling players to get so much power out of deliberately avoiding so much content (minimum unlocks, skipping entire monster level brackets) is going way overboard in the opposite direction.

Don't get me wrong, huge popcorn bowls are deffintely a fun thing for me, but lately we've been seeing higher and higher lvl monsters reffered to as popcorn, which is a concequence of the highest tier of play, VICIOUS, revolving around simply not having any truck with monsters at all if possible. I can't remember the last time I thought about "how do I get through" this or that monster lvl tier, rather than "how much various benefits (money, piety, XP) can be squeezed out of all of theese, and do I really need it at all" in non-VICIOUS dungeons.

I still blame the monster choices for the major end game dungeon offenders for all of this. I guess mindlessly pushing the path of least resistance is part of being a gamer or a geek (or even human), so it's no wonder we find ways to showcase the effects rather easily. You can almost get to thinking about it as being a strategy, rather than following a design flaw to its natural conclusion, as if it was allowed in moderation (with, erm, balance) it WOULD be one. It's been shooting fish in a barrel thorughout most of the game for a while now, or just plain frustrating in some places, and my skill hasn't improved or degraded a bit.
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Re: Rate the Vicious Dungeons!

Postby gjaustin on Fri Mar 30, 2012 9:04 pm

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Re: Rate the Vicious Dungeons!

Postby The Avatar on Sat Mar 31, 2012 2:16 am

Wow. I feel like a celebrity...

I think the answer is not to make things harder, but to make things appeal to a broader variety of characters.
We made an expansion and it is awesome. Really, you should check it out, especially if you're looking for some extra challenge.

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Re: Rate the Vicious Dungeons!

Postby Lujo on Sat Mar 31, 2012 3:37 am

What Avatar said.

I KNOW newbies are finding the game difficult, but what I'm complaining about is the following - what you need to learn for the game to stop being difficult is NOT what the game is trying to teach you or giving you reasons to beilieve is important. You can get better at what you're expected to do, develop your strategies, learn about monster abilities, glyphs, gods, items and all that, and really get somewhere, but then hit a difficulty spike that can't be accounted for or forseen by simply playing the game.

Because it requires a perspective that's the opposite of what you've learned so far, or rather, which requires you to gauge the worth of various elements in the game in a way different than before. Making this perspective shift makes you a number of times more powerfull as a player, but at the same time requires you to "forget what you learned" and start ignoring so much stuff that it easily leads you to the qestion of why the game made you learn it al in the first place?

As it is now, if there was a tutorial that showed how to kill bosses at lvl 4 the learning curve would be a lot less steep. Or at least one which pointed out that it's the proper way to look at things. You could give it to players after a tutorial that thought them what each button does, and then just give them a run by of all the gods, and everyone would be a vet in no time.

As it is, the game IS more difficult when you start out and play intuitively. It was made steadily more difficult by collecting rewards from quests back when I took that problem to it's logical conclusion and simply stopped rewarding my efforts with item unlocks - that made the game a lot easier. As long as you don't avoid fighting monsters, unlocking the Goos makes the game a lot more difficult than it was before - had Avatar not unlocked the Goos, his other boss would've had a better chance at being an easier one (speculating). And the answer to "Why should I even bother with stuff that unlocks monsters?" shouldn't really be - lol, noob, you're supposed to fight bosses at lvl 4, monsters aren't that important.

Basicaly, because of not having acess to info about features and their effects on gameplay and their level of necessity, people spend their time unlocking, learning ot use and rely upon stuff which is not at all needed to do the really impressive stuff - it's actually detrimental to that. And if the end game challenges sort of REQUIRE you to acknowlegde that so many features CAN and SHOULD be avoided or not interacted with, then you end up feeling like you wasted a whole lot of your time.

It's like with the "low hanging plantation of conversion points cheeze". A powergaming vet probably never stopped to think "wait, why have I been given everything I need to completely demolish the game right from the get go? Why unlock anything then?", or that Monk had a godlike ability - more cheeze = more fun, right? But a casual/regular guy, once he learned the basics, felt really pissed off, confused and insulted because either the devs were morons to not spot this, or the community were being... well, morons, for not spotting it. And it turned out that the devs were trying to goad us for god knows how long to "take advantage" of stuff they've overbuffed a long time ago (purely for testing urposes), but we never noticed. What's worse the general response was - buff EVERYTHING else! And thank god that devs didn't go that way...

Don't you, gjaustin, feel just a little bit stupid for assuming you were supposed to have a rocket launcher at an archery contest? Or think, YAY I DON'T EVEN HAVE TO AIM THIS THING! Because the guy who prepared for the archery contest by actually learning to shoot a bow would. And quite a bit dissapionted and insulted, at that. And could probably get better results with said rocket launcher if you could convince him to degrade himself as a human being, adimit that his assumption about an archery contest requiring him to be good with the bow and arrow was wrong, and pick up a rocket launcher.

So I don't feel like I'm seeing it wrong, or seeing it right either, but that the game had for various reasons taken a turn for catering to the powergaming bunch as opposed to the general public. Which I wrote about a long time ago, when I called this mentality elitist. It turned out not to be on purpose, or rather, it turned out not to be desired, and I've been mostly content since.

And also, could someone please nerf the damned AA's? Has anyone allready?
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