I splat a lot and thats mostly because I carelessly otab/op into disaster or forget I have lots of consumables or god abilities, but there are a couple of cases where I just feel that there’s no way I could escape from death. But given that there are people (accounts) who have unbelievably high win rates and long streaks with different combo each run (that is, not spamming “strong” combos like MiFi^Oka, TrBe^Trog, etc.), it seems to suggest that an especially skilled and cautious player can avoid death 90%+ of the times with their wit. Is this the case? What do you think?
…it seems to suggest that an especially skilled and cautious player can avoid death 90%+ of the times with their wit. Is this the case?
What would be the alternative?
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The alternative is that strategy matters a lot.
And I don’t know whether I’d die less if my strategy was better either.
But it is possible to win even as a unarmed mummy, so I do think that excelent tactics can save you even if you have poor strategy.
I think good strategy is part of being a “skilled player”. I don’t think you can be called “skilled”, if you don’t have a good idea about which things are strong in what circumstances, how quick you can get them online on a given combo, and whether or not you should go for them on the specific run in question.
To get very high winrate you need the whole package: tactics + strategy + discipline. To get only somewhat high winrate (like 50% or so) just tactics and some game knowledege are enough, IMO.
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The alternative explanation I can think of for the longest streaks is that people play so many games that it is reasonably likely that some players will get exceptionally lucky.
Someone more expert at statistics could probably assess how probable that is given the number of games played, etc.
It doesn’t fit the existing pattern of how streaks are distributed. Extremely long streaks happen only for very few players, they often happen for the same players repeatedly, and don’t happen at all for some random players, who can barely string several wins together. Considering that the amount of runs by low-winrate players is orders of magnitude higher than by high-winrate players, it’s extremely unlikely that long streaks are luck based.
There’s also the fact that each individual run in DCSS contains a mind-boggling amount of random rolls, which essentially prevents “lucking” into a streak longer than low single digits. Cause if the player doesn’t understand how to control the randomness, they will be subjected to having to get lucky to win a huge amount of times in each individual run.
If I wanted to play devil’s advocate on this, then I would say that foul play is much more likely than luck as an explanation. Except even foul play is extremely unlikely, cause high winrates and long streaks have been happening over decades for different people all over the world, who don’t share one common playstyle, personality, language, server, the runs have been spectated, there are morgues and ttyrecs etc. etc.
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Years ago I had a 21-streak of assorted characters: MuEE, HuFi, KoAE, GnGl, DrSk, DDCj, CeEE, SpSu, HuAE, TeWr, DgEn, OpAM, FoWz, SpIE, DDWz, SpNe, TeGl, OpWn, MiAE, OpAs, DgSk.
Many characters in the 21-streak weren’t particularly strong, so it’s not just that I was picking easy options. Of course I was making decent strategic decisions. For some characters in that streak, I would play the character on my local machine until lair or so, until I was confident I understood strengths and weaknesses and knew how to get a good start with it. Only then would I play the character online to continue the streak.
I can tell you that my win rate is not 90%+ normally. I have an alt that played only random characters, established after I was an experienced player, and only managed a 70% win rate with that. Recently I started playing after an absence with a recent win rate more like 30%, although I did just manage a 6 streak of SpEn, OpWn, OpWn, OpWn, OpWn, OpWn (and then died today :( ).
As a basic prerequisite you need all the skills - know which skills and items you need strategically to be able to kill the enemies you will encounter, know how to lure and position yourself in combat, know when a fight is starting to get dangerous, know when it’s possible you could actually die in a few turns, know how to get yourself out of a bad situation. But I’m using those skills all the time whether I’m streaking or not, and again, I don’t normally manage a streaking winrate unless I’m actually streaking.
The big difference, for me, in whether I am playing normally or “on a streak” is in how much I’m willing to sacrifice to reduce a low chance of death to a near-zero chance of death. Am I willing to review my consumables before every hard fight so I understand what my escapes are? Am I willing to spend that consumable just because I dropped below 50% health, even though I hardly have any consumables left and it will make me have to play even more carefully when it’s gone? Am I willing to use consumables preventively when I’m okay for the moment but don’t want to have to use a more scarce consumable later? Am I willing to abandon this ice cave or gauntlet or dungeon level because it’s too dangerous, even though I really want that artifact ring I can see? Am I willing to skip fighting that sleeping unique, even though I think I could probably win? Am I willing to explore manually, sticking to safe areas first, instead of autoexploring? Am I willing to walk around near the stairs, shouting and waiting, to lure enemies to me? When I’m not on a streak, often the answer is no - it’s more fun to take the risk and play the easy way. But if I’m in the middle of a long streak then I really do care, since it would hurt a lot more to die and break it, so I make those sacrifices. As a result the character is harder to play and weaker (because of lost consumables and loot) but does manage to hang on.
Look at it this way: if you died, was there anything you could reasonably have done in the 10 turns preceding your death, so that you would have survived? Almost all of the time the answer is yes.
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I think a big problem with this game is that it forces you to play in a conservative way if you want to win, and unfortunately, conservative is the least fun way to play this type of game. As I get better at the game (About 10 wins), I unfortunately have less fun playing it. I don’t feel that I am mastering the game, I feel that the game is forcing me to play in an unfun way to beat it, like the way COD 4 forced you to play in an unfun way to beat veteran mode with all those damned grenades.
I’m not saying O-tab is fun, I’m saying that the swingyness of damage leads you to need to play in a way that avoids actual decision making and reduces randomness, when randomness SHOULD BE the fun part of a randomly generated game. You should be surprised and excited by random generation, not afraid of it and beaten down by it.
So it leads to you just shout, kite, and isolate. (That should be the motto of this game). Over and over and over. There is no reason to play any other way unless you get a great armor and weapon drop and can afford to fight crowds, or if you get an overpowered spell online like freezing cloud or plasma beam or magma cannon or any of the other midgame stuff right now. Then, when you get level 9 spells, you become so overpowered that the game becomes a cake walk and literally nothing threatens you. Stealth is laughable, a secondary ability at best, not a true gameplay style.
RPGs (and roguelikes) should make you feel powerful, and yes, you do feel powerful when you get an OP spell online or have a +15 artifact weapon, but I wish this feeling was less dependant on relying on the game to gift you that, and would allow skilled players to play more fast and loose rather than being FORCED to play conservative. Imagine if the ghost vaults were actually worth it to attempt instead of literal death traps for 99% of players. Imagine if you were incentivised to dive to lower levels for equipment and stuff rather than that being an instant death sentence due to malevolence. Sentinel mark and shafting absolutely ruin any ability to dive whatsoever. Imagine the variety runs would have.
I wish there was a way to play that was less conservative, but honestly, since .26 and the AOO changes, there is literally no hope for that type of gameplay. Being up in the face of an enemy or group of enemies is just objectively the wrong way to play this game at this point, and that ruins a lot of the fun and unique feeling of each run. Even melee guys are scared to run up and hit mages at this point unless they are trogg, even though that should be a mage’s kryptonite.
TLDR The better I get at this game, the less fun I have with it. This is why people tend to fall off the game and come back later. Everyone burns out because the second to second gamplay of playing this game “the right way” is just mind numbing. I’m sorry.
In other types of games, pro players are able to play more fast and loose with the game due to their mastery. In this game, even the best streakers are forced to play conservatively and use consumables constantly, because it is objectively the best way to play.
It would be more fun if there was a way to leverage your mastery of the game into playing the game more aggressively to demonstrate your mastery.
There should be more rewards for diving to lower levels. There should be more reward for melee guys getting up in dangerous enemies faces instead of JUST downsides (AOO). The absolute swingyness of the damage in this game and the .26 changes to AOO will always result in a conservative playstyle being dominant, and I really think that hurts the variety of gameplay if you want to win. I really miss the old minotaur of Trogg days before .26, that type of gameplay is literally gone now, and you have to play MORE conservatively than a mage to win as a melee character.
There are real-time speedruns and low turncount runs, which are basically challenges for experienced players to play the game “fast and loose” to get impressive results. So yeah, there is skill expression like that in DCSS.
I don’t know that you “should” be rewarded for playing turn-based game fast though. By definition of “turn based” you always will be at an advantage (within reason), if you think about your moves more. One would argue that thinking about the game effectively and having good fundamentals (so you don’t have to think about them) is a big part of being skilled at DCSS.
AoO is a convenient scapegoat to blame your losses on, but they are not super impactful past the very early D and they are very much compensated by increased consumable generation. With these changes DCSS moved away from one button gameplay, and that’s IMO is a good thing. I don’t see the value in mindless o-tab, personally.
Funnily enough MiBe is probably the start that’s the least bothered by AoO. Cause it’s so hilariously overstatted compared to the rest, that it doesn’t need to run away almost at all. Minotaur wins in general are still very-very easy comparatively.
.26 is widely considered the easiest version of the game, it is an outlier, and the AoO version (.29) was the hardest (before consumable buff), it is also an outlier. Otherwise tourney winrates are more or less the same before and after AoO.
After AoO people in general adapted to play more proactively (not conservatively) with their consumables, god abilities etc. Which, incidentally, was a good way to play even before AoO, but the existence of pillar-dancing actively discouraged using your resources and encouraged being greedy by mindlessly kiting, hundreds of key presses at a time.
Finally, your ideal .26 is not gone. It’s still there, ready to be played, as perfect as ever.
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RPGs (and roguelikes) should make you feel powerful
Hard disagree. While I won’t deny that some people look for that in their RPGs, game, some people (such as myself) very much dislike that in a game and prefer success to be due to mastery of the system rather than because the game is puffing you up.
And this frame of mind seems completely antithetical to the roguelike genre, which AFAIK has always been about careful gameplay, identifing what things are threatening, and spending effort to acquire tools or build your character to mitigate those threats.
Incidentally, even the rogue lites I’ve been exposed to tend to scale up the difficulty to retain challenge as you acquire the permanent progression that makes you OP relative to early challenges.
Tournament win rates
.22 Win rate 2.86%
.23 Win rate 2.46%
.24 Win rate: 3.06%
.25 Win rate: 3.01%
.26 Win rate: 3.23%
.27 Win rate 2.34
.28 Win rate: 1.68%
.29 Win rate: 1.58%
.30 Win rate 2.06%
.31 Win rate: 1.90%
.32 Win rate: 1.73%
.33 Win Rate1.59%
Average from .22 to .26 is 2.924% Winrate
Average from .27 to .33 is 1.84% Winrate
We nearly halved the winrate for even the best players, and if trends continue to be closer to 1.5, we will have successfully halved the winrate since 2.6. When people ask if the game is harder now, this is all you have to point to. Yes, it unquestionably has gotten about twice as hard to win a game since .26, for the best players of the game.
I’d say the game has gotten at least 3x as hard for a new player with the increased difficulty of melee not allowing them an easy learning curve. Asking a new player to get into MiBe melee with everyone is just asking for them to rage quit from frequent deaths. I know most of you don’t care about new players, but me and many other prominent community members wouldn’t be here if the changes in up to .26 didn’t made the game more accessible to new players. It used to be that DCSS had the least BS and had a lot of gameplay and build variety compared to older roguelikes, but I feel we have strayed away from that. I really don’t see anyone recommending this game to new players like they did in that era, and every thread that DCSS is brought up in just devolves into “Half the players hate the controversial changes.”
I believe the main cause of this was that the devs believed they needed to make the game harder due to the lack of the food mechanic, which no one experienced ever died to anyway. I think when players pre .26 come back, they are put off by the following changes. They made Snake and Swamp FAR more dangerous in .27, they reduced consumable drops significantly, (You used to be able to find STACKS of consumables) which directly made melee characters much harder, as they tend to get into situations where they need consumables more than mages, who can run away easier because they aren’t in melee. Monster weapon penalties were removed in .27, which tends to get grouped in with AOO changes when AOO didn’t come until .29, both of which also hurt melee far more than mages. Wand charges and throwing ammo nerfed in .27 and .28, also hurting melee more than mages, who have spells they can use instead. Basically all these changes make the early and mid game much harder, especially for melee characters, and we all get to this point where we ask “Why do I keep dying in early-mid game, I’m playing the right way.” Because they just aren’t prepared to deal with the BS that is the new monsters in S branches, and the only way to deal with them is shout kite isolate, which has debatable effectiveness when Monsters like Guardian Serpent can instantly surround you in one turn.
All of this led to straight up deleting a full playstyle from the game. The game I played as a noob in .24 does not exist anymore. You can no longer be an overpowered melee character unless you have an insane artifact, the right shapeshifting talisman, or God shenanigans (All things that don’t spawn in every game, and you wont have until midgame, making melee far more RNG reliant without even mentioning armor drops). Those are the only ways to get strong enough to handle the threats this game throws out at you. If you don’t have those, You either don’t use enough consumables and die or use all your consumables and die, unless you get insane resistance and AC drops. Or you just die to a gnoll band around a corner in D2 or a random high roll on poison attacks because early you have no escape tools and even might potion wont save you from 4 attacks per turn with halberds at 1.0 auts.
I say this as someone who had ZERO wins before .29. I learned the game during its most difficult period, and I just got 6 wins in .33 with my first 8 rune win where I dipped into Hell and Pan and killed my first couple pan lords. Fought Asmodeus and drained my mana bar and he was still alive lol. I feel like I have a decent expertise in this game at this point and win about 1 in every 10-20 games.
I am, however, learning that the way the game wants me to play is not that fun. Now that I have won the game quite a few times with a different backgrounds, I am kind of getting sick of the forced gameplay loop of shout kite isolate over and over and over, dying to things that have no right to kill me just because of bad RNG, like dream sheep sleeping me the first turn I see them as a spriggan and a merfolk javelinier two shotting me while I’m asleep.
I would like to be able to play as a melee brute without having to play the same build every time MiBe, or play like Magnus Carlson in chess. My melee wins are around 3 hours. My mage wins around 5. When I get into an interesting situation with red enemies or large groups, I do stop and think, but I don’t want to be forced to play D1-4 like the championship of chess.
I’m getting sick of the artificially inflated difficulty that doesn’t check skill, it just checks how conservative you play, and delights in killing me in unavoidable, unpredictable ways, even when playing optimally.
There should be other ways to play the game that rely on other skills. For example, the necromancy armies of the past. That playstyle is completely gone. It IS possible to balance having permanent allies, but the devs just didn’t want to do it. The devs have changed yred like 7 times, he still isn’t fun or interesting or good and basically wastes your time by getting you through mid game then dying at end game. Plus the shennanigans in place with black torch not letting you leave the level. I am sick of them cutting content and just shoving it into a god instead of balancing it. Random decks of Power, instead of being balanced, its just Nemlex now, along with any other RANDOMIZED ability allowed to players (Besides chaos brand). And yes, more content has been added to this game, but have new GAMPLAY STYLES been added? I really don’t think so. They have only been removed. I get that the original roguelike playstyle needs to be preserved, but the best part about DCSS was that you didn’t NEED to play them like other roguelikes and could branch out with fun stuff like necromancy armies or full evocations builds or the haste spell which really change your gameplay style. Displacement from Nethack could be an interesting avenue to explore in the future.
Honestly, the new spells (Freezing cloud, magma cannon, plasma beam, animate armor) are good because they are overpowered, not because their positioning requirements fill some niche gameplay that was not in the game before. I think we have removed quite a bit of variety
Just sucks I wont have anyone to talk to about .26 with because everyone is playing trunk with the most heavy handed way to reduce player conservative play of all time, the boundless tesseract, which expect you to play completely differently than the game has trained you to play for your entire run. Good luck! If this enters the game, I fully expect the win rate to crater to around 1%. It just further punishes you for having any build that isn’t exactly what the designers have in mind.
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So, some more stats first, for the sake of completeness:
.21 Win rate 2.4%
.20 Win rate 2.3%
.19 Win rate 1.7%
.18 Win rate 2%
.17 Win rate 1.9%
.16 Win rate 3% (melee double damage bug)
.15 Win rate 1.8%
.14 (and all earlier versions) Win rate below 1.5%
You get my point, yeah?
I feel like I have a decent expertise in this game at this point and win about 1 in every 10-20 games.
No, in my opinion you do not “have decent expertise”. I have about 90% winrate over the last three years playing (it’s about 160 games in total), and I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to assume I know the “objectively optimal” way to play this game. I have decent fundamentals, and a bit of game knowledge, but I also know that a lot of my decisions in this game are nothing more than somewhat informed guess work, basically heuristics.
That’s how I also know from experience, that you don’t need shout luring things, or some specific super optimal strategy, or some tedious bullshit like full manual exploration to win consistently. In fact, I’m quite certain that focusing on that stuff makes you a worse player, cause you spend your attention on mostly irrelevant things.
Here’s my score page for reference: PaperRat
Your early game needs to be quite sharp to get a high-ish winrate, and you need to be resistant to tilt and train your focus and discipline to get long streaks, but most importantly to win with anything you need to be flexible. Not “conservative”, flexible. You need to learn to adapt to what the dungeon gives you, you need to have good threat assessment, you need to learn to use your consumables, you need to know which tools do what and when to use them, you need to know when fighting is better than running and vice versa. This approach leads to very varied gameplay.
As I see it, your opinion of yourself as good player (or whatever you want to call it) actively prevents you from actually getting better. Cause “if it’s not you, then it’s the game”. There’s no way to improve, if you don’t analyse your mistakes and fix them, and that can be hard work, and I can understand that maybe you don’t wanna do it, but it’s not the game’s fault. Of course I also understand, that it’s not my place to tell you how to enjoy your free time.
The current version of the game is very accommodating as far as different playstyles go, though you can’t always force it (unless you pick a strong starting combo). For my past hundred or so wins I’ve gotten a new title every time (this involves things like training 20+ Invocations with Vehumet), so the system is quite permissive about making suboptimal decisions.
I could address your other points (regarding gods, branches, balance etc.), but I feel we would be getting quite a bit offtopic then. I don’t agree with majority of your takes, so lets agree to disagree, it’s cool. (new Yred is absurdly strong btw and Freezing Cloud have been in the game since forever)
As for variety, the game never had as much varied and meaningfully different stuff as today (monsters, spells, vaults, items etc.). Considering a couple of last releases, it’s not particularly close either. I’ve seen some old hands complain that the game gets a bit too varied even.
I also don’t quite know why you keep referring to yourself as “we”. You don’t speak for anyone but yourself, you’re also not a dev, as far as I’m aware. Same goes for your “new player” plight, you don’t speak for them, they don’t need your defence. I see new people posting about their wins all the time, if anything I feel there’s been more of them lately for some reason. Player numbers are also quite stable across the tournaments.
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In other types of games, pro players are able to play more fast and loose with the game due to their mastery. In this game, even the best streakers are forced to play conservatively and use consumables constantly, because it is objectively the best way to play.
In Crawl you can show off how good you are at the game by doing conduct runs. Realtime speedruns, turncount runs are just a few of them. Over time there were different runs. For example winning a Deep Dwarf without any source of healing except for potions and their innate ability. Or winning a Mummy where you turn on every skill before making any moves and never turn them off. Or winnning with one of low skill titles, preventing you from training any skill over 7.9. Or winning a game without using any items. These have all been done. No heal DD took me 3 attempts, mostly because of my mistake, all skills on mummy I won first try, 7.9 titles aren’t even that hard and have been done by several people, Sergey beat the game without any items on his 5th attempt.
I don’t know where you are getting your info from, but I suggest asking around places like r/dcss on reddit or on r/roguelikes discord server. Lots of experience people hang out there and you can find out what people who are experienced at the game think/how they play.
3 Thanks
Hi! There were multiple reports here, so I’ve nuked the lower half of this thread and given the responsible party a time-out. If the behavior continues later it will become permanent. Personal attacks are never okay.
Be excellent to each other.
1 Thank