I definitely agree.
When I launched the exploration mode for the first time, I used the 4 wishes up and started looking for the shortcut or command to add more.
I asked around and searched and checked and then realized that's all there is to it. 4 wishes. Come on.

It depends on what Thomas' vision was for this but I think a huge amount of wishes would be cool. I think a lot of interesting player stories will come out of it and maybe some more adventures down the ID. I think there could be potential for the steam community to really exercise the sandbox nature of exploration mode if there were lots of wishes.

Giving a wand of wishing to players and zeroing the score is a clear indication of intent - players are to do whatever they please.
But instead of fully exploring that feature, we are restricted to 4 wishes.
No matter what TB's vision is in this regard, once the exploration mode has been added, everything that happens there is according to players' actions and visions.
Wand with only 4 charges is a needless limitation where no limits are strongly implied.
I can work around this using cheat engine, editing the memory and increasing the available wishes to 65535 or more, but I shouldn't have to do that because of the nature of this game mode.

So what's the point? Why the votes against?

I vote for increasing it way past 4.
One advantage of having a specific count (rather than "limitless") is that you can see how many you spent, to get some idea. That's true even if the count is 100000.

In addition to this RFE, I think the wand of wishing should probably be immune to the effects of the mana battery corruption, and flagged to be completely indestructible (if it's not already) - it is made of eternium, sure, but that can still be destroyed by divine retribution, scrolls of item destruction and maybe a few other ways.

Maybe there could be a wish counter that shows up in the FLG, only for exploration mode games?

Kind of offtopic at this point, but a wish counter in the FLG for all games would be pretty cool IMO.

I like the idea that the main measure of achievement would be the number of wishes you spend with that wand. So maybe the wand should have, say, 20 or 30 wishes, and the end-game summary would state prominently just how many of those were spent.

I understand the opinion that the wand should have infinite wishes. But, as someone who used to regularly cheat the game quite heavily using CheatEngine or ArtMoney (infinite money, torches, heavily boosted stats across the board), the game can become quite boring when there's no challenge at all. And if you can't sort things so you're darned near invulnerable with 10 or 20 well placed wishes, you're doing something wrong .. or suicidal. :) (IMHO of course.)

edit: and I like wheals idea that the number of wishes spent would be a useful stat in all .flg's. That's interesting information I think.

Well, I think part of what would be nice here is to use it as a sort of testing mode, instead of adombot or something. In that case, a 30-wish limit might mean having to restart the testing game, instead of just being able to use one game, which could get annoying.

And if you just want to try playing with some ridiculous item set, nothing's forcing you to use anything past the first 4 you have now. Especially if it's in the FLG, then you have to face the fact that you died after 15 wishes ;)

It would be interesting to hear from the people down-voting this

Haven't downvoted it (yet), but don't like the idea.
For a new player, completing the game for the first time needs to feel like an acheivement. The difference between infinite wishes and <10 wishes is extremely significant. It's the difference between (for a newcomer) a very-difficult game, and an incredibly easy, almost impossible to lose game.

It's called exploration mode, not indestructible mode.

I guess I don't understand the need for it to be a total power hack? Why is that what it should be at all?

My personal feeling about this is -- to save people from themselves somewhat -- the number of wishes should be finite. 10, 20, 30 .. something like that.

As I said, I have tried ADOM quite a bit with cheat-engines, and the game honestly becomes a little boring with absolutely no limits. Half the fun of ADOM is trying to prevent the many ways the game will try to kill you with a massive (but limited) variety of items or skills you have. 10 or 20 wishes would make the game quite easy (-ish) for any reasonable ADOM player, but they'll still have to consider their actions -- the game won't be a boring cake-walk. And new players won't be able to instantly win, without learning anything about the game mechanics.

And, honestly, for anyone who feels the wishes given aren't enough -- or who genuinely wants to do some ADOMBot testing -- the wand-charge can easily be targeted with CheatEngine or ArtMoney and set to a huge value and/or prevented from decreasing. I'm not sure The Creator is sympathetic to the bot-testing argument, as he does want some aspects of the game to be mysterious. (At least, that's how I understand it, from years of lurking in the ADOM discussion boards and newsgroups.)

I believe everything stems from different understanding of the word "exploration".

In my head "exploration mode" is associated with playing a game and using something like a console to be able to do literally everything - create items, monsters out of thin air, change your stats etc. From what I am seeing in the comments, people feel like "exploration mode" is "play ADOM normally with a little bit of help" which seems to me quite strange. 4 wishes won't let me explore specific areas in the game, they will just decrease the chance of dying. Can you explore the dungeon level of the Bug Temple in the exploration mode straight off the bat with level 1 char? No, because 4 wishes are not enough for that. Then this shouldn't be called exploration mode.

There is already a setting for disabling permadeath which allows any player to win the game with any char without any extra wishes.

Okay, I'll bite. I'm one of the fun haters who voted against. Sorry, I just don't like the idea of such a power tool. My feeling is that once a new player has seen the game with a wand of infinite wishing, the game can easily get boring. So I dislike the idea of having such a game mode, no matter what it is called. A game mode with three wishes sounds much more fun and interesting to me.

If that is at odds with the word "exploration mode", we could also change the name? Easy mode, free cookie mode?

But there is NOT standard mode. Zeroing score, WoWi(nning) in starting equipment... Ok, I belive you, exploration mode can be boring. But if you want to play not-boring-game, you should play in ORDINARY, STANDARD mode, without ANY source of wish in starting equipment. Do you think that the 'wizard mode' (zeroing score, marked flag, player can do anything - handle stats, xp, summon monsters, create items...) present in other roguelikes (DCSS, NH) should be removed? The idea of the wizard mode is very similar to the idea of exploration mode.

This is a pointless discussion. Blasphemous and StViers wanted to know why anyone voted against, so I explained why I voted against. No one will change their opinion, as usual on the internet.

I'm pretty much in agreement with you there grobble. Just to add, I think an infinite wish feature would get any new steam players just completing the game once on 'free win' mode, then not want to go back to it because they'd 'finished the story', missing out on all the depth that ADOM contains.

Personally I don't think having easy/wizard mode has hurt other roguelikes so why Adom should be exception? [In particular I'd rather have steam players completing it in story mode, rather than not completing at all].

If that is problem, maybe starting with unlimited wishing wand could be unlockable?
I mean sort of like bug temple, one would need meet certain conditions to have it instead of 3 charges one.

You could give it as many charges as your highest level character in the hiscore? :)

Grobble, I fully agree about the game mode - there shouldn't be such a thing as exploration mode at all.
But there is. So let's call it "game with 4 initial wishes and no score" instead of misleading "exploration mode".

Or, increase the amount of wishes to something the player won't run out of in 1 minute.
IMHO starting with that wand should divide the final score by a factor of 10 but not eliminate scoring completely, unless the amount of wishes is much greater.

PS. If people want to really explore and do some power gaming, they don't need the exploration mode at all, just cheat engine and 1 hour of figuring it out.
Some people will be satisfied with that and move on, some will be intrigued by the game and stick around. Having the wand with 4 or 4000 charges won't really affect that.

So, more wishes make the game less fun? I guess this is why ADOM is so low ranked on steam now and fewer people are playing it since exploration mode was put in. Get real.