YAVP: Even less scummy merchant

[vogonpoet]

By definition scummy is: no or low risk, repetitive actions, big gains.

Fact: Hitting individual keys on a standard computer keyboard entails little or no risk to the player.
Fact: Winning the game is certainly a big gain, within the framework of the game.
Fact: JellySlayer clearly hit many keys on his keyboard repeatedly - 80000 turns, even assuming impossibly even distribution, is about 800 strokes / key.

Conclusion: JellySlayer is a dirty scummer and none of his incredibly skilful wins, be they fragile merchants or doomed farmers, should be eligible for inclusion in the HoF.

/but the piety overflow mindcrafter, thats totally ok.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Very nice victory. Thanks for proving that merchants can win without scummy techniques. Well, using monster creation in D:50 is a bit scummy. A pity. But I'm sure you could have made without it.

[Orbic]

Well done, Sir.

Nitpickers will always nitpick... by the foregoing "non scummy squad" restriction list, I do believe that an utterly non scummy victory could only happen if someone wins upon his first game of ADOM, completely unspoiled by this (or any other) forum or guidebook.

Wake me up when that happens...

[JellySlayer]

Thanks guys.

Well, congratulations, I was sure from your mid-point report it was a losing game. Killing multiple shopkeepers with THOSE stats...

Well, in my experience surviving the early game is the area where I'm most likely to result in death. By the time I had posted that report, I was pretty sure it was a winner.

P.S. My calculation says that this list has 4431 monsters, and that is more than 4356. Is that some kind of bug?

I'm not sure, never checked that before. Maybe the two counters record it differently? Kills by PC vs kills by other things (eg. traps)? Final score is often bugged I know (shows up differently on hall of fame than .vlg); could be a similar sort of deal.

Any one of those individual things would have gotten one
crucified back in the days of the brinkster forums. This
is a welcome sight indeed though, that we now live in an
environment where one can use all these tactics and claim
a minimal scum victory. Cheers for freedom, and cheers
for JellySlayer!

In the brinkster days, was the typical strategy to hold down the arrow key until all of the monsters were dead? Well, I guess that's how I used to play a few years back, so maybe it was

Very nice victory. Thanks for proving that merchants can win without scummy techniques. Well, using monster creation in D:50 is a bit scummy. A pity. But I'm sure you could have made without it.

Well, I could kill a balor, and I had SoCR, so there's no reason that I couldn't have just done lever-lever-teleport repetitions and killed all of the balors one by one. I had planned on it, but it was getting late and I would have been forced to raise herbalism and pick pockets at a level up, which I didn't really want to do.

Fact: JellySlayer clearly hit many keys on his keyboard repeatedly - 80000 turns, even assuming impossibly even distribution, is about 800 strokes / key.

It's worse than that, because a lot of actions (open inventory, etc.) can be done without taking any turns.

[gut]

> disagree that even in the past some of those would be considered scummy.

What do you mean by 'past'. I know when I joined brinkster and started
advocating these things, I got (still sometimes get) blasted.

> I used Stun Ray and thrown potions of confusion and blindness in my
> unspoiled days on difficult monsters (though I never got the opportunity
> while unspoiled to use it against the ACW).

Disabling bosses is a relatively new strategy in ADOM. I think most
(all?) players just assumed bosses couldn't be so easily castrated, as that
is the way things are in 99.9% of all games. I think that is why so much
time passed before it was discovered in ADOM (or at the very least openly
advocated). When 99% of games have been played one way (the hard way) for so
long, many players tend to get resentful when someone comes along and advocates
a newer, easier way. The old way is presented as manly, heroic and correct, the
smart way is presented as womanly/cowardly and cheating/exploiting/scumming.

Most of these tactics Jelly used, though wholeheartedly supported by myself,
would have been blasted in the old days. Yet, as vogon points out, things like
piety scumming were old news then, and therefore perfectly accepted. If you
want a laugh, you should dig the old brinkster archives to see how drastically
attitudes have changed.


>> 3 greater daemons \\1 Sac

>Since when has saccing monsters been considered scummy?

I was just remembering some of the things I have heard others bash as being
cowardly/scummy, again, mainly on the old brinkster forums. That was one of the
milder ones though, usually just being looked down on as non-heroic.

> In the brinkster days, was the typical strategy to hold down the arrow key
> until all of the monsters were dead?

Absolutely. And if you get drained down to single digit stats, you go and build
them back up via garth training. That's heroic, darkness is cowardly...

[fazisi]

I want to be a hero again...

[Silfir]

What, you sacrificed the Dwarftown greater daemon?

I am terribly sorry but this just invalidated the entire endeavour in my eyes as well as the eyes of every pure-hearted ADOM player in this world. You dirty, dirty scumming piece of cutlery.

[zasvid]

I'm not sure, never checked that before. Maybe the two counters record it differently? Kills by PC vs kills by other things (eg. traps)? Final score is often bugged I know (shows up differently on hall of fame than .vlg); could be a similar sort of deal.

This is in fact a bug that I've noticed some time ago - the game doesn't increase kill count in some special places, most notably D:50 - I've noticed that on the in-game counter, because I wanted to have a palindrome or something like that at the end of the game Later noticed that VDDL (I think) doesn't work either, while I was trying to buff the kill count for the barbarian quest. I've ran a program to count kills in the list vs kill count for some of my stored .flgs and the kill count was lower in every case (so it is in fact the same kill counter as in-game). Though, maybe my assumption that it is placed-related is wrong, because I didn't run any tests and never remembered about that while playing.

[vogonpoet]

Well certainly some kills from D50 show up - all the WMoPC and Balors for a start. Maybe ADOM is just terrible at Maths

[zasvid]

Well certainly some kills from D50 show up - all the WMoPC and Balors for a start. Maybe ADOM is just terrible at Maths

I meant that the general kill counter doesn't count them, the [insert monster type] counters all work properly