Just as a reminder, with the currently released version, it is possible to have a room with just Pit, Pit Platforms and Pit Trapdoors, without a hint of water at all, and cause a bridge in that room to fall into water. That's the logical ramifications of this trick taken to its extreme, and it's not a behavior that can really be explained away as anything but "
that's what happens"
.
On top of that, there are also possible graphical artifacts that can occur when a bridge (which is drawn as hovering over pit, even if you can't see that pit because it's surrounded by non-pit tiles) turns into water. So it was not only highly unintuitive in some cases, but it could *look* bad too.
Changing it so that Pit Platforms are considered Pit for the purposes of bridges dropping is not just the most intuitive change to fix both of these issues, it's the *easiest*, and least likely to need further maintenance.
And please don't use the "
there are other unintuitive things in DROD"
argument. We already know there are. I hate how Stalwarts/Halph/Slayer Wisps pathfind, since it's impossible to predict which of two equally valid tiles will actually be chosen. And yes, some of the ways monsters work are arcane (like all the differences there are with brained goblins vs other brained monsters). But we can't touch most of these things, because they've been around for so long and affect *so* many rooms.
You'll also note that we *have* changed how the game works in the past. We just finished the 3.3 Hold Update, and we'll be starting the leadup to the 4.0 Hold Update fairly shortly. I've mentioned that we have a good deal of criteria we need to think through before we change something, and yes, some of that is based on how a feature 'feels' to us, which is by no means something that we always agree on (remember the Mimic/Mirror stuff?) But just because other more unintuitive stuff are entrenched in the game and won't ever change doesn't mean we should leave in every other lesser (but still) unintuitive thing.
===
Incidentally, touching on the tar oddity... as Schik half notes, there's no easy way to change that. Sure, we could make it that all new stable Tarstuff has to be connected to existing Tar... that would solve the problem, right? Except... Gel already does that, and guess what happens with this configuration of gel when it grows:
gggggggg
gggGGggg
ggg##ggg g = Gel
gg#..#gg G = Gel Mother
gg#...gg # = Wall
ggg#.ggg . = Floor
gggggggg
gggggggg
So we've got a trick that is complicated to fix in the code, is used prominently in a number of published rooms, and strictly speaking, is based off a rule that doesn't inherently have any unintuitive exceptions. All things that make it difficult and not worthwhile to change.
