YAFAP wizard

"John H." <JohnWH.RemoveThis@gmail.com> wrote:

> Abuses are things like pudding farming.

Sigh.

Once again.

No!

"Abuse" is a highly specific term-of-art in NetHack
(or other computer games).

"Abuses" are playing strategies deliberately taking
advantage of [NetHack] computer code _bugs_,
features _unintended by the game code authors_.

Full stop.

Puddings splitting due to heat/"blows insufficient
to kill"/whatever is an _intended_ feature in the
game, put in there by explicit code, with the
exact design purpose of being intensely annoying to
naive NetHackers first encountering puddings.

Pudding farming is a clever [but boring] use of this
_intended_ feature and _game_ (not _code_) behavior
in a _new way_ NOT originally intended by the code
authors [and incidentally requiring great patience],
but in no way "abusive".

Please stop using the label "abuse" on anything of
which _you_ happen to disapprove because you would
not enjoy doing it yourself, and so therefore _you_
may suffer a game play disadvantage as a result of
that _personal preference_ of yours.

That's very insulting to NetHack's "patience
gamers", to no good purpose. All the steady litany
of accusations here that pudding farming (and a few
other unanticipated uses of intended features) are
"abuses" accomplish, is to foment strife.

If I were to follow your logic, about another
_intended_ NetHack game feature, I could equally as
easily call alchemy an "abuse" because 1) I find it
boring, 2) I don't care to do it and thus 3) not
doing so puts me at a (fairly large) score table
disadvantage in "competitive" NetHack playing (which
I don't do anyway, so the issue is moot to others).

[Alchemy violates _my personal_ concept of NetHack
"potion science" as derived from AD&D roleplaying,
In my opinion, NetHack potions are _already_, in
the main, highly magicked and intricately
compounded concoctions. All mixing them together
_should_ accomplish is to create worthless,
possibly dangerous, sludge,]

Grrrr.

xanthian.
 >> Stay informed about: YAFAP wizard 

[Sorry for the double posting; something about
this article crashed Mailgate repeatedly, and
when I shifted to Google Groups, I forgot to
again re-title it.

The re-titling is severely needed.

I'll "cancel" the first copy, but that doesn't
have any effect any more any on well run
news provider sites, who turned cancels
off years ago because forged cancels were
becoming a huge Usenet-wide vandalism
problem.]

"John H." <Joh... RemoveThis @gmail.com> wrote:
> Abuses are things like pudding farming.

Sigh.

Once again.

No!

"Abuse" is a highly specific term-of-art in NetHack
(or other computer games).

"Abuses" are playing strategies deliberately taking
advantage of [NetHack] computer code _bugs_,
features _unintended by the game code authors_.

Full stop.

Puddings splitting due to heat/"blows insufficient
to kill"/whatever is an _intended_ feature in the
game, put in there by explicit code, with the
exact design purpose of being intensely annoying to
naive NetHackers first encountering puddings.

Pudding farming is a clever [but boring] use of this
_intended_ feature and _game_ (not _code_) behavior
in a _new way_ NOT originally intended by the code
authors [and incidentally requiring great patience],
but in no way "abusive".

Please stop using the label "abuse" on anything of
which _you_ happen to disapprove because you would
not enjoy doing it yourself, and so therefore _you_
may suffer a game play disadvantage as a result of
that _personal preference_ of yours.

That's very insulting to NetHack's "patience
gamers", to no good purpose. All the steady litany
of accusations here that pudding farming (and a few
other unanticipated uses of intended features) are
"abuses" accomplish, is to foment strife.

If I were to follow your logic, about another
_intended_ NetHack game feature, I could equally as
easily call alchemy an "abuse" because 1) I find it
boring, 2) I don't care to do it and thus 3) not
doing so puts me at a (fairly large) score table
disadvantage in "competitive" NetHack playing (which
I don't do anyway, so the issue is moot to others).

[Alchemy violates _my personal_ concept of NetHack
"potion science" as derived from AD&D roleplaying,
In my opinion, NetHack potions are _already_, in
the main, highly magicked and intricately
compounded concoctions. All mixing them together
_should_ accomplish is to create worthless,
possibly dangerous, sludge,]

Grrrr.

xanthian.
 >> Stay informed about: YAFAP wizard 

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
> "John H." <JohnWH.RemoveThis@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Abuses are things like pudding farming.
>
> Sigh.
>
> Once again.
>
> No!
>
> "Abuse" is a highly specific term-of-art in NetHack
> (or other computer games).

Nyaah nyaah nyaah.

I am not the only one to consider it abusive. I didn't say nurse
dancing was, or *cubus dancing, or polypiling, or any of the dozens of
other little ways Nethack has of rewarding observant (or sufficently
spoiled) players. I said it was abusive because it upsets fundamental
assumptions about the game.

It is abusive not because puddings split, but because every time they
do they create a chance of a major treasure drop and in so doing spoil
item rarity. Plenty of Nethack features have been removed over time as
being abusive, and I suspect this one won't make it into 3.5, as well
as effectively infinite points from Pestilence.


> Please stop using the label "abuse" on anything of
> which _you_ happen to disapprove because you would
> not enjoy doing it yourself, and so therefore _you_
> may suffer a game play disadvantage as a result of
> that _personal preference_ of yours.

I wasn't trying to deride the guy (when you ascend the first time, you
do it however you can short of backing up saves -- which is beyond
abusive).


> That's very insulting to NetHack's "patience
> gamers", to no good purpose. All the steady litany
> of accusations here that pudding farming (and a few
> other unanticipated uses of intended features) are
> "abuses" accomplish, is to foment strife.

I'm sorry, I still think that pudding farming destroys the game. It is
not an insult to anyone to think, or state, that.

Sure, maybe I phrased it wrong in this case. I wouldn't be averse to
admitting making an error in how I phrased that... but then, I think
it's just as likely that you're overreacting.

- John H.
 >> Stay informed about: YAFAP wizard 

[Threading now totally pied, due to my repost.
Cope.]

John H. wrote:

> I said it was abusive because it upsets
> fundamental assumptions about the game.

> It is abusive not because puddings split, but
> because every time they do they create a chance of
> a major treasure drop and in so doing spoil item
> rarity.

Nope.

You are working from false premises.

Item rarity is NOT a feature of NetHack, even
without pudding farming, so long as the player
is sufficiently patient.

Ask any extinctionist.

Or look at my current game, where altar camping
fills my kit with a profuse flow of goodies.

Thus, item rarity was never a design goal of the Dev
team, who of course are by definition inerrant about
game features, at least until they change their
minds. Only item rarity per level descended OR turn
consumed is an obvious design goal.

All pudding farming adds is the chance to be patient
enough to crash the game due to buffer size limits
in various C compiler implementations, a natural
limit on just how greedy pudding farmers can get.

That even Isaac Asimov, famous author of over 300
novels, textbooks, and other non-fiction books, had
_some_ "sitzfleish" limitations, implies that
pudding farmers will give out from butt-aches, long
before crashing the game mechanics, in the usual
case.

All that said, why on earth deny pudding farmers
their fun except out of meanness of spirit that they
are willing to do what you cannot stomach?

HTH

xanthian.
 >> Stay informed about: YAFAP wizard 

Jeremiah DeWitt Weiner wrote:

> Congratulations! I think it's pretty rare to have a W as one's
> first ascension, actually. (Mine was an Elf, which dates me.)

Thanx! The thing is that I started playing a "male elf wizard" back
when I wasn't in the "you play what you get dealt with" mentality, and
I realy _realy_ missed the cloack of MR when I played other characters.
In fact it felt like a totally different game and I couldn't handle
that. Oh, and it took me 2 years .

After I ascend once more with a wizard, I' ll try other classes.
 >> Stay informed about: YAFAP wizard 

Ohle Claussen wrote:
> On 2006-06-13, John H. wrote:
>> nhack.TakeThisOut@xhac.net wrote:
>>> Hi.
>>>
>>> I've been playing nethack on and off for 2 years and today was my first
>>> ascension!
>> Congratulations!
>
> Seconded!
>
>>> The bigest scare was kind of stupid: I'm standing on the right altar on
>>> astral and I #offer the amulet only to get the response "You have
>>> nothing to sacrifice". My first thought was that somehow rodney
>>> switched amulets on me and I started a pretty detailed post on getting
>>> answers about what happened. Only later, as a last resort, I tried to
>>> #offer while having the amulet in my inventory and not on the altar.
>> Heh. Just so you know, it's impossible to trigger the magic portal out
>> of an elemental plane without the Amulet, so the worst that could have
>> happened would be that it was somewhere on the Astral Plane.
>
> ... which is pretty damned bad if you ask me. Anyway, why is it that the
> amulet can only be offered from inventory? I've asked myself that before.
> Many players are completely unfamiliar with offering from inventory (like I
> was on my YAFAP), always dropping the corpse to be offered on the altar
> before issuing the command.
>
> regards,
> Ohle
To make the riders impossible to sacrifice on a high altar. If you try
to pick up a rider corpse, it auto-revives. Hence, the only way to
permanently remove them from the game is to 'feel less hassled' by
crowding them out of the level.

Justin Hiltscher

P.S. reminds me of a funny post I read here years ago, about live
sacrifices. Wait until the victim steps on the altar, then
'OH-HOLY-CROM-PLEASE-ACCEPT-THIS-OFFERING!' *FOOOM!*
--
The Source For Premium Newsgroup Access
Great Speed, Great Retention
1 GB/Day for only $8.95
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nhack.RemoveThis@xhac.net <apetrop.RemoveThis@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been playing nethack on and off for 2 years and today was my first
> ascension!

Congratulations! I think it's pretty rare to have a W as one's
first ascension, actually. (Mine was an Elf, which dates me.)

--
Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness. Where rumors of oppression
and deceit, of unsuccessful and successful wars may never reach me
anymore.
-- William Cowper
 >> Stay informed about: YAFAP wizard 

Jack Bolsen wrote:

> To some degree I agree. However, it is impossible
> to determine what the writers of nethack had in
> mind with pudding farming. It has gone back and
> forth on rgrn whether or not pudding farming was
> intended.

I certainly didn't/don't intend to convey that
_pudding farming_ was _intended_ when puddings that
split an unlimited number of times were made part of
the source code,

I'd be astonished if some member of the Dev Team
came forward and said "we _wanted_ pudding splitting
to be used to farm puddings, so we put in a set of
features _deliberately intended_ to cater for
pudding farming".

That, I'm quite convinced, is _not_ what happened.

What makes pudding farming "not an abuse" is that it
is _not_ based on a bug or misdesign.

The pudding splitting feature was deliberately put
into the code to work exactly as it does, was
_intended_, as, my surmise, yet another way to
harass early game playing newbies, this time with
creatures that rot/rust, multiply "without limit",
to surround the player with foes if attacked with
with the low damage weapons typical of a player in
the early game,

All those _intended_ features just got used by some
original NetHack player-genius linked together in an
_unanticipated_ way, setting up a production line to
farm puddings.

Doing something _unanticipated_ isn't abusing the
game, it's being a smart player, or, in the case of
pudding farming, probably better described as a
sufficiently patient player, since any smart player
[who isn't cursed with an obsessive-compulsive
personality], will find less boring ways to play the
game. After all, pudding farming certainly isn't an
_easy_ way to ascend.

xanthian.
 >> Stay informed about: YAFAP wizard 

I was hanging out with the cool kids in rec.games.roguelike.nethack when
Justin Hiltscher got out a spraycan and scrawled the following:
> P.S. reminds me of a funny post I read here years ago, about live
> sacrifices. Wait until the victim steps on the altar, then
> 'OH-HOLY-CROM-PLEASE-ACCEPT-THIS-OFFERING!' *FOOOM!*

`Your sacrifice seems to be insufficiently prepared.'

Or possibly

`The voice of <deity> booms out: "This one says he's not dead yet."'

--
Glyn Kennington - remove caps from email address to reply
 >> Stay informed about: YAFAP wizard 

To some degree I agree. However, it is impossible to determine what the
writers of nethack had in mind with pudding farming. It has gone back
and forth on rgrn whether or not pudding farming was intended. I
personally suspect that the ability to pudding farm will be dealt with
in the next release. Hopefully other exploits (the one in which a
character can go down to lvl1 and then poly himself into the same race
to get a boost) will be dealt with to make the game properly challenging
even to the people who sourcedive.
 >> Stay informed about: YAFAP wizard 

Blah Blah Blah... Snip snip snip..

> Item rarity is NOT a feature of NetHack, even
> without pudding farming, so long as the player
> is sufficiently patient.
>
> Ask any extinctionist.

As someone who has played a several extinctionist games now, let me
assure you that pudding farming is in *NO* way any more abusive the
someone willing to sit and perform the 3 S's of nethack (summon,
slaughter, sacrifice) as long as it takes. And if you try to tell me
that the dev team didn't mean for the 3 S's to be in nethack, I'm going
to have to hurt you.

I've had games where I would polypile hundreds of scrolls at a time,
because I didn't need anything, and it wasn't worth the work to get
anything less than a stack of 10 or so. Once, I stuffed a bag of
holding with wands of wishing, there must have been at least 20 of
them, and carted it up to the astral plane with the label "Santa's bag
of wishes"... Why? because I freaking well could.
 >> Stay informed about: YAFAP wizard 

bvowk.RemoveThis@math.ualberta.ca wrote:
> Blah Blah Blah... Snip snip snip..

> xanthian wrote:

>> Item rarity is NOT a feature of NetHack, even
>> without pudding farming, so long as the player is
>> sufficiently patient.

>> Ask any extinctionist.

> As someone who has played several extinctionist
> games now, let me assure you that pudding farming
> is in *NO* way any more abusive than someone
> willing to sit and perform the 3 S's of nethack
> (summon, slaughter, sacrifice) as long as it
> takes. And if you try to tell me that the dev team
> didn't mean for the 3 S's to be in nethack, I'm
> going to have to hurt you.

Okay, okay, mercy please. I'll agree quietly, offisa
bvowk!

> I've had games where I would polypile hundreds of
> scrolls at a time, because I didn't need anything,
> and it wasn't worth the work to get anything less
> than a stack of 10 or so. Once, I stuffed a bag of
> holding with wands of wishing, there must have
> been at least 20 of them, and carted it up to the
> astral plane with the label "Santa's bag of
> wishes"... Why? because I freaking well could.

Thank you for that splendid testimonial that pudding
farming is just one of several ways to accumulate
more garbage than any sane person could ever use or
want. "Drowning in affluence" is how I feel merely
by altar camping, I cannot imaging the trudging
needed to get rid of the death drops of
extinctionism without crashing the game due to some
compiler writer's oversight.

Overall, I'm happy to agree.

xanthian.

By the way, since I'm currently playing a less long
term patience game [see the thread "(not) being
cannon fodder"] of altar camping, I'm planning that
game as if wishes are going to be in plentiful
supply, and don't much care how many I use since
I've already broken wish-free conduct.

I'm glad your experience confirms that expectation.
 >> Stay informed about: YAFAP wizard