My personal dislikes have nothing to do with fair moderation of this sub. People I despise are permitted free speech here as long as they adhere to Saidit's rules. There are no additional rules due to the fact that I am the moderator. I'll even grant them their preferred flair, within reason.
The rest of this post explains why I created s/DCSS. You don't have to read it. I intend to moderate the community neutrally, unlike the mods of r/DCSS.
I plan to make many posts on this sub, and want to clarify my motivations.
Unlike most, I did not start playing DCSS to have fun. Rather, in order to demonstrate Textmind, my text-based personal information management system, I decided to create a separate persona called Bibliodemos who would play video games and organize his notes about them using Textmind. So I started watching video game streamers, looking for something that would work for my demo.
I needed a game that presented a complicated puzzle to crack, a puzzle susceptible to solution via lots of text processing. I was searching for something devilishly difficult, competitively broken, and politically converged. This would allow me to pioneer the cracking of a complex game meta, become the best at the game, AND perform a hostile takeover against the SJWs ruining the game.
My search for an appropriate game moved inexorably towards turn-based roguelikes, and from there I settled on DCSS as the best of breed. Nethack, for example, is too competitive and insufficiently deep; it would take too much work to accomplish things of too little significance.
However, DCSS' data-driven and meritocratic community-collaborative development has expanded a single-developer opus into something resembling a market or ecosystem. Rules of parsimony once enforced ecological niches for each game element; features that failed to provide unique value were constantly modified or removed. Moreover, replay value is near infinite, or at least has the potential to be so, after some design tweaks.
Unfortunately, in recent years the gradual convergence of DCSS moderation and leadership, in lockstep with the US cultural revolution and particularly World-War Trans, led to the collapse of the DCSS collaborative meritocracy, freedom of debate and participation, and eventually development quality. Versions ceased to be net improvements after .23.
The current dev team is now dumbing down and radically altering the DCSS in order to maintain the appearance of an unchanged pace of development, without the necessary talent to do so. Another way to view it is that the distributed intelligence of the dev inputs has decreased and therefore the emergent complexity of the game must decrease to match. Community disgust with the changes is growing, and elite burnout is endemic.
Conservative views are not tolerated. Malcolm Rose, the longest streak-holder, has been completely deplatformed, as have I. Unlike Malcolm, I anticipated the SJWs would deplatform me. I chose them knowing their nature, hoping to add another dramatic dimension to my Textmind demo -- that of rescuing a great game from evil clutches.
Not that I intend to steal the DCSS name. DCSS has reached the limits of its development philosophy, and my fork intends to transcend them. However, my fork doesn't exist yet. I have quite a bit to say about DCSS version .23 first. It is necessary to understand both the flaws and magnificence of DCSS before it can be improved, and no such comprehensive perspective exists.
Part of that involves studying the essence of each DCSS player race, and writing a bit of lore background about it. Since I'm no longer welcome on r/DCSS, I'll post my fanfic build guides on s/DCSS instead. Saidit's rules and culture are better than Reddit's anyway.
There's no DCSS or even roguelike community on Saidit now, but I'm patient. I've been told my fanfic is book-worthy, and I hope it will inspire Saidit to try DCSS. In order to build a community, someone has to start somewhere.
Lastly, discussion of other DCSS forks is welcome in this sub for the time being, since it is so small that creating separate subs would be silly.
there doesn't seem to be anything here