Tahnan
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2460
Registered: 11-14-2005
IP: Logged

And, to Silver: L3:2N was, as wallu says, solvable. But it had...

* a small horde of brained wubbas and rock golems, making it easy to get trapped;
* a black door plus tar in an irregularly shaped area, bounded by a diagonal wall and evil eyes, so that it was really hard to be positive when it was safe to kill the tar mother;
* and, for a long time, no checkpoints, so that you could get hundreds of very tricky moves into solving the room and find yourself stuck behind wubbas, or trapped by goblins, or cornered behind unbreakable tar, or unable to clear the tar, or many other things, and all your good work up to that point was in vain.

And yet: solveable. When I finished I felt more lucky than smart, but, solveable. Indeed, solved. Which is why deleting the whole damned thing and replacing it with a nearly-empty five-move room is unconscionable.

michthro
Level: Smitemaestro
Rank Points: 679
Registered: 05-01-2005
IP: Logged

My, my. I've been wondering when something like this was going to happen. tokyokid went and marked seven non-trivial rooms for which I had the #1 score as uninteresting:
L3:5W
L6:4N
L12:5N
L12:3N
L12:1N
L14:1N
L15:1N1W
I'm sure it was an accident. But seriously, don't annoy me further by claiming that it was.

As for L3:2N. I agree that it didn't fit with the rest and that tokyokid didn't test it. BUT, it was solvable, and once people have spent a lot of time finding a solution (at least five people did) it's TOO LATE to change it. Anyway, it's only because there were no checkpoints that it was ridiculously difficult. Otherwise it wouldn't be that bad.

But that has become a minor issue. There has always been the possibility of authors spitefully marking or changing rooms. I'm waiting anxiously to see what Caravel does now that it's happened.

It's time for Caravel to face the fact that they have to exercise some control over what goes on on the Holds board.

Anyone can upload a garbage hold, *and* then play games with the scores. You can't allow that, Caravel.

silver
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 915
Registered: 01-18-2005
IP: Logged

The only time I suggested he change the room was after he had invalidated the high scores anyway (I dunno how adding checkpoints did that). I'm sorry that I said it now because of his over-reaction :/

edit: I significantly edited this post because of a PM I received.

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[Last edited by silver at 09-07-2006 12:24 PM]

eytanz
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2708
Registered: 02-05-2003
IP: Logged

michthro wrote:
It's time for Caravel to face the fact that they have to exercise some control over what goes on on the Holds board.

What can they do? I mean, the mods can remove the hold entirely and that would be better for new players but for those of us who slogged through this hold it'd be even worse. Honestly, I'd be willing to sacrifice my scores if this hold is removed as part of a new editorial policy, but only if everyone else with good scores for this hold agrees beforehand.

But remember, Caravel is two guys (Erik and Mike) working part-time, plus a bunch of volunteers (Oneiromancer, Trick, Schik, myself) working for free. There just aren't the resources to have a proper pre-upload hold review, since that would mean that someone would need to solve every hold before it's uploaded and seriously, no-one can afford that time.

If you have a constructive suggestion of what *can* be done, please post it in the site forum and open a discussion. But just making statement like that because you are upset isn't helping anything.

As for Tokyokid - well, lets just say that I've got nothing nice to say at the moment and leave it at that.

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I got my avatar back! Yay!

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[Last edited by Schik at 09-07-2006 01:26 PM : moved myself to that volunteer group.]

michthro
Level: Smitemaestro
Rank Points: 679
Registered: 05-01-2005
IP: Logged

eytanz wrote:
If you have a constructive suggestion of what *can* be done, please post it in the site forum and open a discussion. But just making statement like that because you are upset isn't helping anything.

A lot of constructive ideas have been suggested before, and time and again, nothing has come of it. There is a lot they can do. I don't think it's even worth starting a new thread. For starters:
-Make the ability to upload holds part of the CaravelNet deal. I don't see what's wrong with the idea of allowing only subscribers to mess with what other subscribers pay for.
-Require that authors provide demos with their holds.
-Without going into it, they could appoint someone to moderate the Holds board. Someone whose job it is to flag buggy holds. Buggy as in unconquerable holds/impossible rooms/getting stuck problems, nothing more. They wouldn't have to solve every hold, they'd only have to verify bug reports - whenever a new hold appears in Architecture, there's no shortage of testers.
In other words, someone who does less than what wallu and silver have been doing anyway. Except that half the time they're doing it in Holds instead of Architecture.

silver
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 915
Registered: 01-18-2005
IP: Logged

michthro wrote:
-Require that authors provide demos with their holds.

I may go a little 19th century in my turn of phrase here:

"hear him"

that would go a long way.


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eytanz
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2708
Registered: 02-05-2003
IP: Logged

michthro wrote:

eytanz wrote:
If you have a constructive suggestion of what *can* be done, please post it in the site forum and open a discussion. But just making statement like that because you are upset isn't helping anything.

A lot of constructive ideas have been suggested before, and time and again, nothing has come of it. There is a lot they can do. I don't think it's even worth starting a new thread. For starters:
-Make the ability to upload holds part of the CaravelNet deal. I don't see what's wrong with the idea of allowing only subscribers to mess with what other subscribers pay for.
-Require that authors provide demos with their holds.
-Without going into it, they could appoint someone to moderate the Holds board. Someone whose job it is to flag buggy holds. Buggy as in unconquerable holds/impossible rooms/getting stuck problems, nothing more. They wouldn't have to solve every hold, they'd only have to verify bug reports - whenever a new hold appears in Architecture, there's no shortage of testers.
In other words, someone who does less than what wallu and silver have been doing anyway. Except that half the time they're doing it in Holds instead of Architecture.

This is *not* the place to discuss this - I opened a topic on this matter in the Site board, and you can open one of your own. Having debates in this thread seriously undermines the chances that they get taken seriously. Doing so as a way to prove a point about how bad a job Caravel is doing, is just shooting yourself in the foot.

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I got my avatar back! Yay!

silver
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 915
Registered: 01-18-2005
IP: Logged

discussion of the topic of fixing hold-uploading in general has moved here: http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=11885


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michthro
Level: Smitemaestro
Rank Points: 679
Registered: 05-01-2005
IP: Logged

I was literally just answering your question. I am not really interested in debating this any more. You asked, I didn't *want* to start a whole new thread about this, so I answered you here. I am not making a point about Caravel doing a bad job, either. Where do you get that from? What I said was meant as a warning to Caravel that there is a problem with the way things go on the Holds board.

Tahnan
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2460
Registered: 11-14-2005
IP: Logged

Lord knows I hate to bring any more attention to this hold--I'd come here to rate it a 1, only to discover I already had--but I do want to ask this.

It's easy to see how to get a two-move high score in L4:2E. What's not so easy to see is how to get to the right entrance, i.e. how to get to 1E without having conquered 2E. Which makes me wonder: did something change in there after one of the many, many updates, so that 1E used to be accessible but no longer is?

(It's kind of infuriating to think that, even though 2E itself may not have changed so that high scores recorded there are still "valid", the rest of the hold changed in a way to make them unmatchable. I'm guessing the spider can't catch those things. Or else, hey, maybe I'm missing something obvious here.)

michthro
Level: Smitemaestro
Rank Points: 679
Registered: 05-01-2005
IP: Logged

Tahnan wrote:
It's easy to see how to get a two-move high score in L4:2E. What's not so easy to see is how to get to the right entrance, i.e. how to get to 1E without having conquered 2E. Which makes me wonder: did something change in there after one of the many, many updates, so that 1E used to be accessible but no longer is?

I definitely remember at least two cases like this being mentioned somewhere, and I'm pretty sure this was one of them. (The other one involved a beta tester having - and *using*, presumably unwittingly - a room entrance save game from testing that was no longer possible.) It's clearly unfair that some players should have scores that can no longer be matched. If an update caused such a situation the scores for the room should be reset. Hopefully such updates will simply not be allowed in future.

I'll see if I can find the post I'm thinking of.

EDIT: This thread.

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[Last edited by michthro at 11-12-2006 10:46 AM]

michthro
Level: Smitemaestro
Rank Points: 679
Registered: 05-01-2005
IP: Logged

wallu wrote:
High score reset won't help because a still could restore to 1W with unconquered 2W. And I agree that this is a problem.

How about you don't restore to 1W? I don't see that it is a problem, since there are only a handful of such cases, only a couple of players with these invalid save games, and such updates can be disallowed in future.

A simple solution for the exisiting cases would be to mark these rooms as non-scorable, since they all happen to be uninteresting.

Otherwise, how about the scores are reset, and only if it turns out there really is a problem do we do something about it? If it does actually come to it, the spider could reject scores lower than the known optimum - these rooms are all trivial, with easily calculated optimal scores. Which is why it would be a waste of time anyway - just mark them non-scorable.

neveragain
Level: Goblin
Rank Points: 23
Registered: 07-08-2009
IP: Logged

This hold needs to be minimized. Some good rooms here and there (Roach Temple: Thrice East and Quince East), but plenty of bad ones.

Roach Temple: Twice North, Once East: EXTREMELY TEDIOUS, BORING, TIRESOME!
Roach HQ: Once South, Once West: Guess the path sucks. So does click on 17x13 crumbly walls to see if they really are crumbly walls.
Roach HQ: Once North, Twice East: Tedium
Roach HQ: Once North, Thrice East: More Tedium
Roach HQ: Once North, Quarce East: Three rooms of complete tedium in a row!
Roach Caves: Quarce North, Twice West : I skipped the rest of Roach HQ, hoping that I'd find something better. I was wrong.

And don't get me to go through all the pointless rooms that either contain no monsters or contain so little monsters that the room is so trivial.

Considering there's at least 15 levels, and that I only went through 2 1/2 real levels of rooms (Level One doesn't count), I am horrified at the rest of it.

8 Brains
3 Overall

Certainly better than some holds, but only a persistent optimiszer or a diehard monsterkiller can enjoy this hold without getting frustrated, annoyed or bored four dozen times.

It really is that horrific.

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[Last edited by neveragain at 07-29-2009 04:59 AM]

Chaco
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3689
Registered: 10-06-2005
IP: Logged

I'm just poking my head in here to leave a note - as of the latest version of the hold available on the Holds board, the level 9 2N1E and 2N2E backtracking bug is still in effect, where if I went and solved 2N2E and all the rooms below it first, then tried to return to the Entrance via 2N1E, you get completely stuck since 2N1E isn't solvable from the east entrance.

The worst part is that you can't return to the entrance of the level from 3N2E either, since there's no fuse on the south side of the room, so I'm going to have to replay a bunch of rooms.

So, just a warning for any optimizers who might be playing this hold for scoring purposes.

____________________________
Quick links to my stuff (in case you forgot where it was):

bomber50
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 872
Registered: 09-18-2006
IP: Logged

I don't know why it's been over 3 years and the backtracking issue on Level 9 is yet to be fixed. This is the biggest backtracking issue I've ever seen. Even with UU, this puts me behind at least 10 minutes. Heaven forbid if I was playing in JTRH - that might have been over an hour lost from the added difficulty.

There are multiple incredible easy solutions. Place a decoy potion behind the green door in 3N2E. Place a decoy potion on a green door on one of the outside walls of 3N2E if you really want to ensure zero demos get broken. A random set of stairs inside 3S2E, 4S2E or 5S2E (unscorable rooms) which takes you back to the entrance room, would ensure zero invalid scorable demos. It's a simple fix with huge benefits for everyone.

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[Last edited by bomber50 at 02-13-2015 03:37 AM]