MAngband

I'm curious to know what's everyone's take on adding a lot of new features. I have a ton of great ideas about how to rebalance the game appropriately to its post-Moria size, improve the economic situation, reduce the cheezing that's been promoted by various imbalances, enhance the sense of adventure, and add various realistic features. Most of this is nicely worked out on paper. (Man, economics class is great for that.)

So. What should I do? Should I try to get them into "vanilla" Mangband, or should I create a variant? I don't plan to work on ToME. At this juncture I don't really want to promote further division in an already small following by spawning yet another sect. Plus I really enjoy playing with you guys and working with Crimson is great. Got any ideas?

As mangband is already a variant, I think we may as well make variant features. Importantly, we can no longer get the same number of standard artifacts, so we desperately need some random ones.

Having said that, I think we are better off not making any variations that take us too far away from vanilla code, so that we can benefit from vanilla upgrades without technical problems.

Also, I think the flavour should be 'vanillary'. This means that the variations that are made can be as numerous as we like, but should be:

1) in addition to vanillar code not replacing it
2) always the result of an unusual dice throw rather than becoming commonplace.

ie. if some unusual dice throw then...
   instead of ...

an example is random artifacts. The game should be exactly the same but when you get an unusual dice throw, a new artifact appears. This could be the same artifact as vanillar would give you but with a random name. (Not much damage done) or could just be a product of a good artifact generator.

I see no point in making randarts. Since there would be an unlimited number of them available to find, why not just make more ego types and avoid a lot of messy code?

I'll agree with that.. But, maybe make some more variances on interesting egos?

The point in making randarts as opposed to just egos is simple.  Player whining...  Eventually someone or several someones will end up with the majority of the realy *GREAT* artifacts and players will get nasty about it if these players don't die or retire and release them in short order...

It is important to remember here than the main mangband varient will stay as close to vanilla Angband as it can, while still supporting Multiplayer.  Herein lies lots of room for varients.  I'd love to concentrate only on improving the mechanics of multiplayer play (a *MASSIVE* undertaking), and leave others to "flavoring" the base with their own pets of choice.  

Attempting to take on both tasks is futile, to say the lease.

I agree with Crimson. I would really like to see
the multi-player aspect enhanced (fixed

Some new ego items or artifacts would be okay.

Perhaps an enterprising level 50 would hire out
bladeturner for 20mins (but unlikely).

Perhaps one of the first additions would be an in-game
bug report mechanism. (Similar to lp-mud gripe or bug.)
This could be just a way of entering text into a forum topic (auto-generate the subject, name, etc).

[quote author=Domino link=board=wishlist;num=1042485630;start=0#4 date=05/05/03 at 16:30:50]The point in making randarts as opposed to just egos is simple.  Player whining...  Eventually someone or several someones will end up with the majority of the realy *GREAT* artifacts and players will get nasty about it if these players don't die or retire and release them in short order...[/quote]

No, the point in making randarts is that we have already gone away from vanilla here, because as a consequence of multiplaying, you cant easily get any artifacts anymore.

What would happen if artifacts always stayed in memory. ie. never got destroyed when you logged out?