Improvements

I humbly suggest the following for the betterment of the game:

1) Increase damage type encounters and stoning encounters and decrease the number of destroyers. (this will help balance the races vis a vis Ogre dominance)
2) Give mages and wizards a better attack spell that will Break Peace, and be effective against vampires. (this will help negate the Sorc required to run 14 and below)  I suggest modifying Soul Entrapment to take 4 charmees and kill a certain number of other mobs.  IE X number of hit points from the slot you are aimed at, 75% of that number against the second slot, 50% against the third, and 25% against the forth.  You only charm from the slot you are aimed at.  For Wizards-- perhaps a vampiric type spell that breaks peace, and does moderate damage, restoring 10% of the damage done to the wizard's hits.  The same metric from above could be used.  Ie diminishing in effect for subsequent groups.
3) Remove the ability of control dragon to charm DK/DQ.  
4) I've always thought a follow on to gloves of doom would be nice.  Use level low 400's, gives better DEF, and maybe casts burning air.  This would help to break the Sorc required below 13 mantra.  'Gloves of Perdition" has a nice ring to it.
5) Find some way to increase gold flow on 13 and below.  Once your chars reach the low 400's the amount of gold required to make levels far exceeds the amount you find in the dungeon.  This leads to running pinned for gold, which is no fun and frustrating for players.
6) Add in a couple doors on 12 to give the area accessible from the rickety ladder more rooms.  Right now you have to break the rotator and clear almost every encounter to trigger a repop.  Then break the rotator on the way back again! Over and over for each loop. Not much fun for the players.  Give that area access to the dragon room and the giant rooms by adding doors and remove a square of rock.  I shouldn't have to have to pass wall to run a level.
7) Decrease the occurrence of onerous quests.  Perhaps make certain that there is a room where the nightmare Q's appear more often on the target levels.  Bane can be found in the graveyard type area-- which is good.  Gloom Mages don't seem to appear anywhere specific and can take 30-50 hours to find.  Again, not much fun.  Perhaps a room on the big loop on 13 where they show up rarely but consistently -- sort of like the "Master of X" rooms on 11.  Or even just add them into the "master of x" rooms on 11.
8 ) I haven't run a healer yet.  #2 above might apply to them, or not.  Don't know.  But my mage is almost useless on 15.
9) Dagger of swiftness does not give dex here.  Other versions it give 1 dex.
10) Bard class-- why does it exist if I can't join it?  Do the operators need their own guild????
11) Having all the extra monsters adds fun to the game, but makes finding them for quests a PITA.  Anyway to mitigate this? I was quested for a "regular" level 9 monster and literally ran 6 hours looking for it.  After finding it, they were everywhere for the next few days.  This was always part of the "charm" of the game, but increasing the numbers of monsters exacerbates this problem many fold.  Leads to player burn out.

All told, you have created a wonderful game.  The fact that it is AD free and to free to play is incredible.  Thank you for hosting it.  It seems to me that players tend to burn out, and after spending time on 14 and 15, I begin to see why.  It is the uphill slog of building where it seems your chars don't get much better and it just seems to drag on and on.  Also, players want to feel like they are making choices and have freedom to run whatever party they choose.  Some of the design of this game seems to take those away, and players don't like to be forced into things.  I have tried to address those concerns above.  GOD Sorc's and GOD Ogres are not good for the game in anyway.

I hope you can see this in the spirit to which it was intended.  It isn't just player bitching.  It is a player trying to make the game better for players.

Respectfully,

Billy

Billy,

Thank you for taking the time to make these observations/suggestions. Player feedback, like yours is critical to making a game like this better.

Ogre and sorcerer dominance was an unintended and undesirable outcome of both the game mechanics and the game data. The same is true with stoning. The way the code that handles saving throws is set up, stoning attacks just don't function like the original game did. I made a great many decisions with data and code input, that were well intentioned, but ultimately not wise. Unfortunately, I think it is too late to go back and fix most of these mistakes. The data here is massive and interlinked and redundant. It is a function of how the game was written and how the data was developed. I learned when I modified level 12 a couple years ago, that going back in and changing a level and its encounters several years later is a pretty bad idea. I just couldn't remember all the linkages, and so I left a great many of them broken. Luckily, I had Jake F (shout out to one of the world's great players/testers!) to help me identify and then clean up the shit storm I had created. You have to keep in mind, the data structure for this game was put down in 2016 and was set up in a pretty cumbersome way, to work with the code that Jude had developed during the previous 10 years. It was far from ideal, but asking Jude to go comb thru 200,000 lines of code written over a decade, and change it was reserved for the most important changes only. So here we are, 4 1/2 years later, sitting in pretty much the same boat. Real Life issues for both Jude and I mean we simply don't have time to tackle a major modification like this, especially since the past mods were less than fully successful.

I will deal with your points in order:

1) A great idea. I will see what I can do with the data if/when I get some time.
2) I like these concepts-- the PLATO game =melee had this effect for soul charm. You would charm 4, and kill 3 or 4 more. Jude and I have discussed vampiric spells in the past. Both would require code changes and are therefor not very likely to get acted upon at this late date.
3) I didn't know this was going on, I must have made a mistake someplace when twiddling all the knobs. It was NOT the case during play testing. I will get this fixed as soon as I can.
4) I like this idea. I will have to think on it some.
5) I think I can mitigate this issue, without the need for code changes. I will put it on the list.
6) Design choice. I certainly see the frustration from the player's side, tho. Let me think on this.
7) Tough quests are another design choice. Let me think on this as well. 50 hours of hunting for gloomies??? that is probably about 50% too much.
Healers generally don't get all the complaints that wizards do.
9) Design Choice.
10) Hold over from the previous version of this game. Pay no attention to it.
11) This was an unintended consequence of the design choices I made. In the original, I never really cared for the fact that you would see the same monsters over 3 - 5 levels, just more of them. So I added more, and controlled their "range." There is little I can do to fix this now. You have to run where quested and face the fact that "leniry" isn't going to be as easy to find as it was in the original.

Thank you for the kind words. Jude has devoted almost 20 years to this project and foots the bills for maintaining it. I hear the critic on the uphill slog. I will try and mitigate the gold issue, is there anything else specifically that adds to the "no fun" part that I can take a look at? Again, major changes and code changes are probably off the board.

Jude and I tend not to view input in a negative light, unless it is offensive in nature or just complaining with no proposed ideas to fix it. I at least have thick skin.

Again, thanks for the time you devoted to this input. I really appreciate it when you spell out what you think is wrong, and suggest some way to fix it.

JPA

I have asked Jude to make adjustments to gold starting on level 12. Hopefully he can get to it soon.

Effective immediately, I have reduced the numbers of Cash Items in the store. Potion of Death, Scroll Insanity,
Golden Platemail, etc. I will go in and reduce this stuff from time to time. I suggest you check when you game and see what you can sell when the volumes are low. This is not much of a fix-- but it is something quick and easy to do. When I have more time, I will step thru the encounters one at a time and do some boosting.

JPA