Originally Posted by
Harkila
Well obviously, if you want to never miss a single good item in-game, you'll need to dig through every single pile of everything. But that's your choice. That's nothing that would be required to win the game.
Hey, maybe some artifacts are indeed looking identical to their mundane equivalents, and only by using them (or magically identifying), you can notice the difference. It's nowhere said that all artifacts should stand out.
It's true that digging through everything is "a choice." The problem is in a game with significant difficulty and permadeath, it's the optimal choice. Finding a good artifact radically improves your character's chances of living. So the "choice" here is a tedious, low risk action (hoarding and ID'ing everything) for the chance of high reward. That's not really a choice if you care about optimal play. No well designed game should inflict such a tedious choice on the player. It is universally accepted that low risk tedious behavior with the chance of a high reward is the hallmark of a bad game mechanic.
Yes, it's not written in stone that all artifacts should be instantly recognizable. My point is, good game design weighs in favor of such a change.
Originally Posted by
ixi
I usually stay catious to unknown items if I don't have means of uncursing. Even though I know they might be artifacts. I'd keep the choice on the player - whether to risk and check what's that hoping for surprise, take all this garbage in your backpack to find out later or leave. That's basically it.
The problem with this argument is that artifacts almost never randomly drop in the early game (puppy cave, VD, CoC 1-9, etc). Most random drops come from greater vaults and the lower CoC. By this point, you're swimming in ID and uncursing scrolls. So there's no real cost to ID'ing everything you come across. And that's the problem. Negligible cost + real life tedium = a mechanic that needs rethinking.
One final point. You don't even need to burn a scroll to ID an artifact! Let's say I have a pile of loot after killing a room full of dragons. There's a 15s whip in the loot pile. Might be an artifact, might be garbage. I can just pick it up from the pile and drop it on a square by itself. If I see a normal whip tile, I know I have junk. If I see this unique tile: (
http://ancardia.wikia.com/wiki/Whip_..._vampire_snake) I know I have an artifact. So the game isn't even requiring me to use an ID scroll or risk cursing! It's just requiring me to inspect every 15s whip, 30s rapier, 400s chainmail, by dropping it onto its own space and looking at the tile.
Why make optimal play so tedious? Avoiding these grindy optimal choices is why we got rid of gremlin bombing, ring of weakness scumming, infinite rings of wishing from potion dipping, etc It's why this change should be made too.