martz
Level: Smiter
Rank Points: 414
Registered: 08-19-2005
IP: Logged

I've just started playing DROD again and thought I'd open up a topic which might prove interesting:

How do you decide which holds to play?

I guess the true order would be chronologically by release date but would be interested to see how other people choose.

For myself, I have two text files (holds completed, holds outstanding) which I semi-maintain and use to determine which holds to play. My criteria is as follows:

Engine: old to new
Difficulty: easy to hard
Number of rooms: low to high
Number of levels: high to low
Alphabetic

Maintaining these lists is difficult due to the fact the difficulty rating for holds changes and also the sheer number of published holds now compared to when I started these lists.

One side-effect of this is I tend to finish one hold before starting the next one, and therefore if I get stuck on a hold I'll tend to put the game down for a length of time rather than moving onto another hold.

So over to everyone - how do you choose?

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Without struggle, there is no progress, so get up, get out, and go make the rest of your life the best of your life; you deserve to live the life that YOU want to live...

Progress - Gavin G

Dragon Fogel
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 2434
Registered: 06-21-2014
IP: Logged

At the point I'm at, this is pretty easy because I've played through all published holds, so I play through new ones as they get published. If a long one gets released or two or more get released close together, I tend to just work on one and poke at it until I either finish it or get stuck, then move to the other. Generally if there's a long one and a short one both in progress, I'll poke at the long one for a level or two, then switch to the short one.

When I was first going through them, I played pretty much whatever grabbed my attention for whatever reason. I did a little planning, but only in broad terms - I noticed I had a chance to hit 10000 rooms after 200 holds, and then 15000 after 300 holds, so I did that. (I didn't count Deja Vu or RPG 3.0 in there - at the time, completion for those wasn't properly tracked.)

After that, since the whole "Fogel and disoriented are going to finish all the holds" thing had taken off in earnest, I aimed to finish holds disoriented hadn't, and then I focused on holds that had rooms disoriented hadn't finished. Then I just finished up whatever was left - though I specifically aimed to have two AE holds, two JtRH holds, two TCB holds, two GaTEB holds and two TSS holds left for the very end. Why two of each as opposed to some other number? I'm not sure there was a particular reason.

mauvebutterfly
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 720
Registered: 05-03-2015
IP: Logged

I tend to do chronological by release date, although since I've been involved with HA work I occasionally look at stuff in development or play through new releases.

I'm also inclined to play specific holds if they are being mentioned in CaravelNet chat a lot since I like being able to follow the discussions there.

Finally, back when I did LPs of DROD holds, I'd often reserve interesting looking holds for that and would skip them when playing through the rest of the holds chronologically. I also had a tendency to do playthroughs of architecture contest entries on my LP channel, since I thought people would appreciate the immediate feedback and it made for timely and often interesting content. Also, committing to playing through the contests insured that I'd actually test them out before the voting period ended.

I wish I was spending more time on architecture (both building my own holds and testing other holds that have been posted to architecture) but for whatever reason I haven't been finding enough time for DROD lately.

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106th Skywatcher

Rabscuttle
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2460
Registered: 09-10-2004
IP: Logged

Cons:
* It'll be really annoying if my computer crashes or something when every hold is 99% done, because then I'll have to redo everything to get to that last room. I'm backing up my DROD dat files every so often.

welp, my laptop won't start.

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[Last edited by Rabscuttle at 12-02-2020 04:05 AM]