End of vanilla Angband: “Jump from the cliff, fools”

It was interesting to read the feedback Oo

I donno why some other folk with whom I discussed this matters in Discord are silent.. I suppose there could be two reasons:

1) people who do not like what’s going on – do not participate in Angband forum discussions anymore.. Why?

Because they do not see any way to stop this butchering. The only man who could stop Angband’s lore destruction is Nick or next maintainer who (hopefully) may consider to revert this monsters/races changes. At the same time I really do not want to see anyone else as maintainer, Nick is really genious in terms of gameplay mechanics (traps, ID, curses etc). Nick please don’t go away! (my poor Russian soul: you love and hate him at the same time).

And now I understand this ‘out-of-forum’ people. I myself after reading this thread feel that it’s really pointless for me to participate in V-discussions anymore; it’s pointless to try and save certain monsters from destruction, it won’t save V. I do not want to dramatize, but just look at this new execution list and say goodbye to Angband which you know and to your memories:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nick 
Dark elf replaced by eastern dwarf
Dark elven mage replaced by blacklock mage
Dark elven warrior replaced by stonefoot warrior
Gnome mage replaced by drúadan mage
Dark elven priest replaced by ironfist priest
Dark elven lord replaced by dark dwarven lord
Dark elven druid buffed, moved deeper and renamed drúadan druid
New monster green elf archer
Dark elven sorcerer replaced by stiffbeard sorcerer (this one’s for HallucinationMushroom)

I wanna note again – this is just another tiny drop of Vanilla blood.. There already were a lot of changes like this. Nick is doing a very smart thing (as I said before – he is a great leader and knows the stuff) – he makes ‘butchering’ in tiny portions so community won’t notice the whole picture and won’t react to it. Everything is going according The Dark Lords plan 8)…

2) there are people who participate the discussions on this forums, but silent in this particular one. Why? Because they are too.. gentle. This is very good virtue of human, but not in all conditions. 

Some people do not speak what they think because it’s ‘western’ politcorrect bahaviour. This is a very interesting issue and I wanna share some thoughts about it because it’s not the first time when I note this: if some ‘western’ people do not agree with something – they are just keep silence (I mean highly cultured people; for example, ones who play intellectual roguelike games like Angband).

On contrary Russian people (even roguelike players) are very straight-forward and sometimes you could think that they are even offencive. We do not have political correctness in our culture and we tell what we think. It’s truth that in some cases it produces bad bahaviour (like someone could start harassment and swearing). But sometimes such properties gives an advantage – you could get real, fair feedback from such people – without politically correct behaviour which is harmful in certain conditions… Everyone are kind and loyal to Nick (and me too, I love this man), but there should be a difference between being kind to person and to give a real and clear feedback on his actions.

This ‘gentleness’ makes people who do not agree – just to be silent so they won’t offend beloved person / won’t go agains it’s supporters.

So the picture is: people who like what’s Nick doing are supporting him on this forum (obviously). But people who do not agree – are silent (again, I know such people as I’ve spoken to them via Discord). 

Does it matter really? No. Just an interesting observation. I suppose most of the V-players would support anything what Nick’s doing, like lemmings.. and if he would say “Jump from the cliff, fools!”.. they would jump 😉 And minority of the community are looking at this picture from the distance, being sad and silent.

Now I wanna write a note considering comments like “you are free to have your own variant with old monsters” or “you could use monster.txt from past version”.

The problem is: vanilla is the Core. It’s the exemplar. A lot of non-Lore, good gameplay changes upcoming there. A lot of new monsters are going to appear. How to be up-to-date with new versions now? After this revamp, ‘new Angband’ monsters would not be compatible to real ‘vanilla Angband’ (sorry, but I’m going to call Angband with new Lore as ‘new Angband‘, not ‘Vanilla’). It would be _very hard_ to be up-to-date and look into ‘new Angband’ config files while there are so much monsters deleted/renamed/changed compare to ‘Vanilla’. I know what I’m speaking about as I’m currently working with Angband gamedata customization a lot.

That’s why this isn’t a ‘vanilla Angband’ anymore. ‘New Angband’ monster list won’t be compatible to previous versions and variants. I want to emphasize: this is not about physical compatibility (gamedata configs are the same), but about monsters compatibility – you can not compare two monster.txt files properly (old and new one) to make your version of the game up-to-date – if they got so much differences between monsters and their names.

If before that changes, Vanilla was a place from where you take stuff for old game versions or another variant – ‘new Angband’ would be itself variant-like game. This is very bad for Angbands’ evolution.

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