[bkcooper]

...the developers have "eliminate tedium" as a specific design goal.

I think lots of good has come from that. At some point, though, it started to feel like a lot of what the dev team considered tedium I considered fun, and vice versa. (I could of course download the old versions and play locally, but playing online was a lot of the fun.)

I need to see if I can get a spellcaster through the full game

"Pure" spellcasting can be done, but it's unpleasant to play (just from a UI perspective) and usually a suboptimal use of XP (DCSS usually rewards moderate investment in several areas rather than extreme specialization in one.) If you're not imposing that on yourself, then book backgrounds are overrepresented among the better starts in the game.

[JoshTriplett]

> At some point, though, it started to feel like a lot of what the dev team considered tedium I considered fun, and vice versa.

What kinds of things got dropped that you liked?

[bkcooper]

There's been a big push to shorten the game, constantly trimming out levels. I think some aspects of that turned out pretty well (I was skeptical of the D to D + Depths transition but ultimately I came around on it) but I actually liked the slightly longer game. The stretches of the game where I can get in a flow state and smash are usually among the more enjoyable.

My impression is that the devs who have been most influential for the last two to three years find that element of the game boring and instead want to put you in more "interesting" situations (e.g. forcing a rune before entering Vaults, increasingly strong new monsters in Depths.) I find that a lot of those things don't meaningfully decrease my chances of winning or force creative new strategies. Instead, they encourage me to do more tedious things like isolating single monsters, stair dancing, etc.

In fairness, I think my opinion on this was probably in the minority among heavy players at the time.

[thaumasiotes]

I don't like the hunger clock.

[wtbob]

Seconded. It's nothing more than a nuisance, but one has to constantly carve up carcasses just in case, and constantly drop rotten meat. Not fun.

[thaumasiotes]

Just to be clear, there are two things going on:

1. Your character gets hungry periodically and needs to be fed. I'll refer to this as the "hunger system"; I don't really have so much of a problem with it, although I wouldn't be sad to see it go either.

2. The amount of food in the game is finite. This is the hunger clock. If you take too much time in any one area, you will starve because there is no more food available; the only way to get more food is to move into a dangerous, uncleared area, and you'll need to spend that food exploring the new area. I'd like to be able to play slowly and carefully if I want to.