Little Annoyances | Patreon Poll #70

Hey Patrons, this time around I’ve got a poll about various little annoyance reports I often get, I’m curious about which ones you guys also feel are annoying or should be prioritized. Each poll option comes with a quick description of what I’ve gotten feedback about, and my current idea for changing it.

Note that this poll in particular isn’t really an either/or, and many options from it might end up being changed. Please vote for ALL of the things that you agree with.

Poll Options

Please vote for all the options that you like, not just for your one favourite! I allow multiple votes as it means that a higher proportion of people will end up voting for the winning choice. Note however that multiple choice polls have been finicky on Patreon for a while, so you may need to refresh the page/app to verify your choices or vote for multiple options.

All patrons are encouraged to share their opinion by commenting and voting, but only the votes from Golden+ Supporters are counted when determining a poll winner. Votes from Shattered Supporters are worth double!

DM-300 currently generates situations where attacks are unavoidable often enough to frustrate some players. I’ve tried adjusting this before but it’s not quite worked properly. I think all DM really needs is a slight tuning of how willing it is to drop rocks right after a pylon is destroyed, and a coding improvement to the gas shot (likely delaying gas generation via a hidden actor) to guarantee the player has a turn to react.

Caves Quest Secrets currently generate annoyance when there is only one secret room that’s well hidden and necessary for 40 gold. I don’t want to outright remove this, but could soften this by guaranteeing the level always generates with two secrets, meaning the player would only be forced to find one of them.

Hostile Champions currently generate some annoyance from high-challenge players because with difficulty turned up, certain champions (usually crabs) are basically guaranteed death. I’d rather not add too many guardrails to the challenge, as that defeats the point of it, but I could do a few specific things such as preventing champion crabs on floor 3. I might also consider changing champions to be less deadly early but become stronger later, which also helps with the challenge front-loading difficulty.

Artifact Transmutation eventually results in rings when there are no artifacts left to generate, which seems to generally be a disliked mechanic. I could possibly change transmutation to re-add artifacts to the generation pool when they’re destroyed, or change it to simply fail when no artifacts are left (you’d get the scroll back if it was IDed).

Chalice Upgrading is easily the most ‘just look it up on the wiki’ mechanic in the game. I originally intended it to be a tradeoff where the player’s greed could be their undoing, but this was back in 2014 when a wiki for Shattered didn’t exist. I’d like to change the mechanic to be more up-front with its numbers, but also a little more unpredictable so that the risk-reward aspect is maintained. It might deal a range of damage values (e.g. instead of ~200 at +8, it might deal 175-225), and show the player the % chance that the damage has of killing them before extra mitigations. To encourage risky play, the chalice might leave the player at 1 health and fail to upgrade instead of killing them if the player almost had enough HP.

Pscifist Ascent & Taking the Mick both get invalidated quite easily at the end for badges that require a whole run of buildup. I might like to change them to allow a little leeway. For taking the mick this might be the badge counting if Yog was damaged by the pickaxe within 1 or 2 turns of death. For Pascifist ascent this might mean friendly fire from evil eye death beams, or allowing one enemy death if it wasn’t directly tied to the hero.