Ticket #220... who the hell is Seth?

General discussion about the game. Pull up a stool and tell us your tale!
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PowerWyrm
Balrog
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Ticket #220... who the hell is Seth?

Post by PowerWyrm » Mon 24.12.2007, 16:33

Should have been a famous player to have his name hardcoded in the source code!
Tell the story please...

Crimson
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Post by Crimson » Wed 26.12.2007, 18:49

Which version of code?
Are you not entertained?
Is this not what you came here for?

-- Maximus Decimus Meridias, The Gladiator

Jug
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Post by Jug » Thu 27.12.2007, 22:45

Warrior's on his xmas holiday at the moment, but I'm certain he can enlighten us with a comic tale when he gets back in a few days...

Billsey
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Post by Billsey » Fri 28.12.2007, 04:03

It turns out that back in the day (vintage 0.7.0) someone decided that mages should get an extra HP each level, to make up for their abysmal performance everywhere else. When this was revealed, there was one mage who refused the bonus! Hence the bit of code excepting him from that nasty extra HP...

Gorth
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Seths Legacy

Post by Gorth » Sun 03.02.2008, 18:50

On one of the early servers hosted by a former MIT student and friend of Hao's, Seth participated in the a dive to a GCV at 4k. The level was being held static by one of Warriors ghosts and the three of us, using Mords that we had stolen from the server admins house, an entirely different story, dove to 4k to begin fighting the GCV. The end result was that the server was shut down mid dive and there was a lot of talk of kicking all three of us off the servers, eventually Hao understood why we had stolen the stuff, but wasnt too happy with that.
Gorth

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Post by Warrior » Mon 04.02.2008, 01:26

Damned, I didn't see this thread until now.

I think Gorth mixed up two separate stories, unless I'm mistaken this (click this link for the full story!) is what really happened:

In the early days of MAngband (when pretty much no one played deeper than 2000ft) it was possible to "ghost dive" meaning that if your character was a ghost, you could hit > and go down the dungeon very quickly.
Most of the time it'd be something you'd do after you died, kinda like a suicide mission, try to get your max depth as deep as possible to score a few extra points on the highscore. We also did it just for fun, seeing who could get deepest down and then back up to town again. It was really exiting sometimes.

Anyway, one of these days my main character (around level 35-40 I think) found the iron crown of beruthiel (a cursed artifact that grants telepathy) so I decided to take one of my (resurrected) ghost divers, put the crown on his head and send him down to his max recall, which happened to be at 4000 feet.

I still remember the room I landed in, it was a really large (completely dark as all rooms are down that deep) room close to the western edge of the map. There was a flashing K (chaos beetle) down the hallway not far away but it was still asleep. I read a scroll of light and saw that the room was empty so I moved into a corner of the room, as far as possible from the sleeping chaos beetle. I was only very low level, maybe level 5 or so at most so basically anything could've killed me. So I started to look around the level until I spotted TONS of monsters all aligned in perfect order in what is known as a Greater Checkerboard Vault (GCV!).

This was before we added all the vaults we have now and a GCV was the top of the top, you couldn't get better (or harder) vault than that. It still is an awesome find, all items inside (something like 100 items) are guaranteed excellent or better and the monsters inside can come from 2000 feet deeper in the dungeon than the current level. So this vault could have monsters from 6000ft! (not that there are any new monsters that deep, but basically the vault could have (and had!) all the hard monsters and uniques in the game in it). It was an incredible sight, lots and lots of flashing monsters and stuff I had only read about in the spoilers... I shouted out some enthusiastic lines and logged out my character to keep the level static so the vault would not go away.

It's getting late and I can't finish the tale right now...

But as Gorth said, it ended with me, Gorth, Conn, Seth, Crimson and at least one more guy called Legolas (Who could've been Seth, I don't recall) walking the entire way down to 4000 feet from something like 11-1200 feet which was the max recall of the guy who was the lowest level of us.
The Mordenkainen didn't come from the house of an admin, that was another incident, that I'll write more about later, but anyway one of us was a mage and could use the create stairs spell in Mordenkainen Escapes and we moved down.

Hm. I said I couldn't finish the tale now. Damn. But anyway, it was really exciting, I think none of us at the time had played any deeper than 2300-2400 at most, so I remember after the mage created the stairs I had to go first down to the next level and it was so incredibly scary. Remember this was a totally different time, very few characters got to level 30, far far fewer as high as level 40.

I know I have this tale written up somewhere from when it happened and I will post it tomorrow, but we did get to level 80 and Seth (like most of us) DID die, not because he had 1 hitpoint pr level less than anyone else but that's all for tonight. Seth was hardcore and got killed by traps all the time. And as Billsey said, he simply refused to get the extra mage bonus so Alex Dingle added that line of code only for Seth.

:lol:

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