The same dungeon those people abuse can also give a non-stairhopper some decent starting gear before venturing to the "real" dungeons.

Perhaps monsters shouldn't spawn either, because you can get many intrinsics that way? (I know it's not a good comparison since most items won't try to kill you, but just saying :p)

There's a big difference between spending hours just looking for random floor drops items without ever fighting anything and what you're describing. If you aren't stairhopping, you can still get decent starting gear by killing monsters.

I'm thinking this in term of how I usually use the Infinite Dungeon, so it will not apply to everyone. But say I'm a wizard starting the game in the ID precisely because of its low DL, yet the only drops I can get are from monsters I kill, which don't have a 100% drop rate. If I don't get anything decent and run out of my starting bolt spell, I can't really melee anything at this point.

Sure you can. Farmers, thieves, mindcrafters, monks, non-7lbs bards, non-bolt necromancers, healers, merchants, etc. all start the game with similar (or worse) starting gear to a wizard and can survive just fine with careful play. By the time you run out of bolts, you'll probably be at least level 6 or 8 anyway and should be able to kill things in melee fairly safely. If you're clearing entire levels, floor drops aren't contributing that significantly to your overall item production as well.

There is another, more important diffence. Meeting many different monsters is easy in any case, because they respawn. If you need a specific monster, you can simply hang around in a dungeon with a high monster generation like the big room or a cavernous level. Intrinsics from corpses have been designed to take this into account. Granted, stairhopping makes finding a blink dog a little easier, but that's about it.

Items on the ground do not respawn in normal dungeons. This is the key reason why stairhopping makes a real difference for them and not so much for monsters.

Hmm... What if floor items only spawn once per level of the ID? So on I:1, you get one set of floor items, but on future generations of I:1, you don't get any, but if you go to I:2, then you can get floor items from there... basically the same as how a regular dungeon works. (This might be needlessly more programming work though because each level would need a separate counter or something... I dunno, I'm no expert on this aspect of it).

If the problem is people pressing < > < > and not moving from the stairs until they see an item, what about not spawning items only in rooms that contain an staircase?

I don't stairhop, but I don't have anything against it, and honestly think this is one of those things that should just be left as is. But if TB wishes to change it, I believe this would be the simplest and less intrusive solution.

anon123's solution works to a degree, but I have a further suggestion...

Make it so that the item generation rate on generation of the level is proportional to the number of turns spent on the level prior to it. Meaning, if you go down a level, and then up a level immediately, having spent no turns on the previous level, no items would be generated. On the other hand, if one spends a good, say, 20-30 turns at minimum, regular item generation would occur. Obviously, an upper limit would be applied.

Items from monsters would still occur as usual, of course, but that makes sense, since you have to actually fight them. And since each level is generated randomly on visit, the PC isn't going to be doing a lot of teleporting to the next stairs - it'll take exploration except when using magic mapping or random teleporting.

One last solution could be to have all of the staircases, except for the ID:1 up staircase (to the wilderness), move to a random room other than the one that the PC is in. This would force exploration of levels, and should also address the issue of using quirks in the map-generation algorithm to tell when the down staircase is in an adjacent room in order to speed up the descent through the ID. In this case, on your first visit to ID:2, it could say something like "You sense the futility of infinity as the staircase behind you fades from existence". It would also explain why, on going up or down stairs to a level you've already been on takes you to a different map - it's not just that the levels rearrange, it's that you're moving to a different level.

Simple solutions are often better than complicated ones. The ID has no shops, no vaults, no altars, etc. Having no random items on the ground would be consistent with that.

Moving the staircases would make retrieving the scepter even harder than it already is.

I like the solution in the OP. Some of the solutions proposed afterwards (generation rate proportional to number of turns, etc.) also make sense, but they sound more complex to code. Random staircases sounds too radical to me, it would make ID a more dangerous place for noobs (imagine descending into a room with a powerful mob and not being able to find a way back up) and I think it's good that weak chars can go there to honourably make a few levels by killing monsters if they want.

How about randomised staircases that only start to happen once you get below a certain depth? Weak characters really shouldn't be going below, say, ID:4, anyway.

But then, I'm happy with just the "item generation depends on how long you've spent on the previous level" solution alone, because it ruins stairhopping without at all impacting regular diving through the ID.

One must keep in mind that making the ID have no gound items generated would ruin the Iron Man challenge.

Even if you implemented the 'item generation depends on how long you've spent on the previous level' idea, it would still make the Iron Man challenge much more harder than it already is because if you need to invoke the River Rule, you would get no items.

So basically, the real choice here is: Killing Iron Man or keeping Stair-Hopping.

Why are you all trying to fix it? Ones who doesn't like it, can just not use it. Or you are thinking it's unfair that someone can play easier than you?

This is a good point. It would ruin the iron man challenge in its current form. Then again, the rules of the iron man challenge could be changed. For example, the rule that states you can't go back could be eliminated or at least relaxed, if stairhopping was no longer effective. If this change was made, I think it would already be a big challenge to retrieve the scepter without visiting other places at all, even without further rules.

In general, I think there are going to be many changes and additions to the game and we can expect many sorts of new challenges and changes to old ones.

The problem with this argument is that it can be applied to any sort of balance measure. Following this logic, there was no reason to remove dragon gold doubling either, or overflow piety, or anything else. We could also let each character start with a wand of wishing with 100 charges. You don´t have to use it if you don´t like it.

Don´t get me wrong, I´m very open to arguments why this particular proposed change is a bad idea. I´m just saying that this general statement doesn´t really convince me.

I actually think ruining the Iron Man challenge is enough of a disincentive not to make a change... Just removing items from the stairwell room wouldn't particularly affect it, though.

The thing is - it seems to me that the very purpose of the ID is to be a place for weaker characters just to grind for a while to get stronger. There's always fresh monsters and levels and items (even if they are not as good), forever, so that you should never get completely stuck (for instance, if all the available in-game dungeons end up being too hard). Stairhopping is just one extreme application of it.

Since the main attraction seems to be accumulating spellbooks, making spellbooks not all DL 1 could help. Just setting the danger level at four would make a spell available some ways into the VD or DD, but not in the ID until I:12 (which is quite a risk to get to and back from with a level 1 wizard).

Effectively disabling the non-stairhopping wizard's chance to "get stronger" by learning new spells...

Nah, he just has to reach danger level four to get them. That's D:4 down, VD:5 down and so forth, isn't it?

Giving books proper danger levels is actually an interesting idea. They don´t need to be equal danger level, either. Some of them could be level 1, while acid ball could be a much higher danger level.

Yeah, that's about what I had in mind. You could still stairhop on I:1 and I:2 to get books - if you're fine with Light, Know Alignment and Knock :P

It's not so much that it's easier. It's that it's basically a free source of items for doing something that wasn't really intended (and while I'm sure the ID was intended as a way to provide lower level characters a way to train without having to visit unique locations, I don't think stairhopping was an intended effect).

As for the idea of adjusting danger levels to move some of the sought-after items deeper into the ID, I don't mind it (especially for some spellbooks), but I don't think it really solves the problem of stairhopping, only of doing so on the first few levels. If I were going to adjust the DL of spellbooks, I'd organise them like this:

DL1: Light, Darkness, Slow Monster, Knock, and Burning Hands.
DL2: Magic Missile, Cure Light Wounds, Web, Stun Ray, and Calm Monster.
DL3: Frost Bolt, Fire Bolt, Know Alignment, Slow Poison, and Magic Lock.
DL4: Lightning Bolt, Strength of Atlas, Farsight, Cure Disease, and Invisibility.
DL5: Acid Bolt, Bless, Magic Lock, Cure Serious Wounds, and Teleportation.
DL6: Fireball, Disarm Trap, Scare Monster, Magic Map, and Mystic Shovel.
DL8: Ice Ball, Summon Monsters, Revelation, Destroy Undead, and Greater Identify.
DL10: Improved Fireball, Cure Critical Wounds, Neutralize Poison, and Remove Curse.
DL12: Lightning Ball, Heal, and Create Item.
DL15: Acid Ball and Petrification.
DL20: Earthquake.
DL25: Death Ray.
DL30: Wish.

Yes, Wish right down at DL30, which I believe is the danger level of the Library - seemed appropriate. Up to DL6, every DL has five new books. DL8 also introduces five new books, and then the remaining DLs introduce fewer.

But it still doesn't solve the issue, like I said. At the very least, the "no items in the entry stair-room of the ID level" is a sensible modification that should prevent most stairhopping without overly impacting anything else... but I also think that having item generation dependent on the time spent on the previous level should be implemented.

To compensate for the issue regarding the Iron Man challenge, this generation-based-on-turns approach could be modified to only affect return movements. If you go down a level, move to the next stairs that happen to be in the next room, and go down again, you shouldn't be punished by reduced item generation... but if you go down to the next level, then immediately climb back to the previous one again, item generation at creation of that level should be dropped to basically zero.

That way, it still addresses the issue of stairhopping, yet permits regular descent through the ID (and ascent through it) without affecting the item generation along the way. This should prevent an impact on either Iron Man or the quest to kill Filk (should he be located deep in the ID due to a common kill).