Imagine DCSS is Benjamin Button. He was born at .33 and will age down to Linley’s dungeon crawl.
What do you imagine would be the most celebrated changes?
I think that once we get to .28 the game explodes in popularity and new players, because the addition of AOO in .29 made the game far less fun and far more stressful and unenjoyable, forcing you to play slow and conservative and ruining the fast and loose style of aggressive melee characters. I’ve seen far less new players in that time, and seen many players leave for good.
I think the game starts getting worse once it adds food back in.
Are there any forks that keep the good changes but remove the obvious problematic things like AOO, shafts and stuff?
curious that we can agree so much, yet disagree so much
I’m quite fond of bcrawl, but it actually keeps food and shafts, which you say you dislike. And the development stalled out a while ago. Presumably bhauth got busy with real life.
Every version has been better than the last. This experiment sounds terrible but at least I can continue playing the new versions and you can continue playing the old ones you prefer!
As for forks: you might like DCST! It’s made by one of the DCSS devs and it removes AOO and shafts and even stairs!
This is secondary to your point but it seems to me that you’re just relying on vibes here? If you have some data about new players joining or players no longer playing please share!
Here’s online playtime data I collected recently via sequell and it seems the game is still going strong.
Here’s online account data I collected recently via sequell and it seems 2024 hit an all-time peak for new accounts. (the dip for 2025 is because 2025 isn’t over yet so we don’t have have full data)
Playtime stats obviously don’t strictly correlate to “how good is the game”. But if the game became terrible and kept getting worse, you would expect more people to abandon it yeah? It seems there’s a large quantity of players that enjoys the game enough to keep playing it! (and players overwhelmingly play either trunk or the most recent stable version. Hardly any playtime is old versions. I can show you that data upon request)
The playerbase absolutely dips in 2019-2020 which is strange for a game that would be excellent for covid. It hasn’t really recovered its upward momentum since them.
Look at the upward momentum from the games release to about the end of 2019 where it completely stops. (Coincidentally when the game started received negative word of mouth regarding removal of content) From updates .25-.29 there is a literal decline in the player base of about 35%, which recovers about 5% and has stayed relatively stable there.
That 5% exists because the last 3 updates have been great. I give it up, they are awesome and have some fun stuff. But I really think that the changes made in .26 and .29 have harmed the game popularity wise and in terms of how much fun I have playing it.
We had our height of playtime in 2018 with 6.3 years played average, way before any of us had experienced the pain of monster weapon changes and attacks of opportunity. We are now hovering at about 4.5 years played average. That is about 30% of the playerbase who has left or significantly reduced their playtime, which is enough to offset new players by a significant margin.
Online accounts are cumulative because accounts are not deleted when someone stops playing. Unreliable data set on the second graph.
The data shows the opposite of what you are arguing. The dip can’t be due to the changes in 0.26-0.29 because most of it occurs before that! By the time 0.26 releases in early 2021, the line has already fallen and stays mostly level!
Again, I don’t think we should assign every dip and rise in player playtime as a result of design decisions because there’s a lot of factors. If I was going to investigate the rise and fall of playtime further, I might look at the distance between major updates.
I do believe that if the game were terrible and unfun we would see a dramatic decrease and that’s just not the case.
The blue line is cumulative and, yes, can only go up. The red line is new accounts created (technically, new player names that have never been seen before. If you created an account with the same name on a different server, it wouldn’t show up here). (the left axis is for the blue line, the right for the red line, as labeled!)
Again, I don’t think we should assign every dip and rise in player playtime as a result of design decisions because there’s a lot of factors. If I was going to investigate the rise and fall of playtime further, I might look at the distance between major updates.
There is also the fact that there are more good roguelikes these days (and roguelike adjecent games) so people who are into DCSS have more options! I know of a few people who switched to other games and now play DCSS only once the new version hits or every few years.
I totally agree with you, but I think you should also concede and agree with me that a majority of the upward momentum experienced before .25ish has been halted and the game has mostly ceased growing and hasn’t reached the peak from 5 years ago. This data certainly showed that the updates in that era were not generating significant player interest, I think we can agree on that.
