Why do people hate randomizer wads?

[fiorello1]

Why all the zdoom community hates randomizer wads? Like Aeod

[Kinsie]

A number of mods that utilize heavy actor spawn randomization get caught up in chasing the idea of having "more stuff" as opposed to "better stuff" or "stuff that doesn't blow out difficulty balance". It's an easy trap to fall into, and I'm as guilty of doing this as anyone.

Also, this would probably be better off in the General forum.

[fiorello1]

So to do a good randomizer wad it must have not a ridiculous difficulty?

[Jimmy]

It should be balanced well. Difficulty is fine because a lot of folks enjoy that. But a decent randomizer mod won't replace a shotgunner with a lightning-fast teleporting flying floating skull monster with insta-kill laser breath just because it has 50 HP.

[fiorello1]

Some people say that put everything that you see is bad. Like weapons or monsters from Realm.

[Kinsie]

Throwing stuff in just for the sake of having more stuff rarely works well.

[fiorello1]

In my randomizer i put all the realm monsters but i dont think if its good...

[wildweasel]

Bad randomizer mods do this kind of stuff:

- Too many things are random. Now, this can still be workable (Doom Roguelike Arsenal does a great job of keeping its randomness constrained), but I have fairly vivid memories of a mod by Daniel where a single Zombieman dropped upwards of 10-12 different kinds of ammo and at least 2 inventory items.

- Randomization picks between things with a very high range of relative threat levels. Where there is a Chainsaw, there can just as easily be a BFG50K or a pop gun. Where there is a Zombieman, there can just as likely be a zombie with a rocket launcher as there can be a zombie that dances uselessly in circles.

- The more things wind up in the mod, the less the author tends to care about quality control. Very old randomizers such as - and I'm sorry to name names here - Alando Guns X had major problems with this.

- Lots of duplicates or near-duplicates. You can only cram so many shotguns into the game before they all start feeling the same.

- No real attention paid to which spawn slot something appears in. Back to the chainsaw/zombieman example above, is it really fair that the zombieman has a 1/256 chance of spawning an Armageddon nightmare arch-vile? That goes beyond "difficulty balance issues" and straight into "fuck the player, seriously" territory.

- Useless items. Gonna specifically call out Doomguy's Warzone on this; that mod loved to drop items that had absolutely zero use whatsoever and clutter the inventory with everything from issues of Playboy to Whoopie Cushions that the player could do absolutely nothing with.

[Jimmy]

Throwing in everything from Realm667 is bad if it's not done carefully, yes, because as you might be able to tell from experience, it's exceptionally hard just to manage everything if it's all in one package. Discounting the possible resource clashes, having hundreds of different monsters and weapons all together just doesn't work out of the box from a gameplay perspective - you'd either need to severely downscale, or fine-tune for days.

[Arctangent]

Plus someone's already done it, all while doing the best he could to avoid the pitfalls of randomizer mods with that much content.

[Enjay]

Why all the zdoom community hates randomizer wads? Like Aeod

Who says the ZDoom community hates randomiser WADs? I don't.

[fiorello1]

Most of the community hate them cuz they are too random and have a lot of things stealed from other wads, but that's the point right?

[Enjay]

Most of the community...

I'd like to see the numbers on that.

[Ichor]

Bad randomizer mods do this kind of stuff:

- Too many things are random. Now, this can still be workable (Doom Roguelike Arsenal does a great job of keeping its randomness constrained), but I have fairly vivid memories of a mod by Daniel where a single Zombieman dropped upwards of 10-12 different kinds of ammo and at least 2 inventory items.

- Randomization picks between things with a very high range of relative threat levels. Where there is a Chainsaw, there can just as easily be a BFG50K or a pop gun. Where there is a Zombieman, there can just as likely be a zombie with a rocket launcher as there can be a zombie that dances uselessly in circles.

- The more things wind up in the mod, the less the author tends to care about quality control. Very old randomizers such as - and I'm sorry to name names here - Alando Guns X had major problems with this.

- Lots of duplicates or near-duplicates. You can only cram so many shotguns into the game before they all start feeling the same.

- No real attention paid to which spawn slot something appears in. Back to the chainsaw/zombieman example above, is it really fair that the zombieman has a 1/256 chance of spawning an Armageddon nightmare arch-vile? That goes beyond "difficulty balance issues" and straight into "fuck the player, seriously" territory.

- Useless items. Gonna specifically call out Doomguy's Warzone on this; that mod loved to drop items that had absolutely zero use whatsoever and clutter the inventory with everything from issues of Playboy to Whoopie Cushions that the player could do absolutely nothing with.

Another problem is that after a while, the player will have so many weapons in each slot that it takes a long time to cycle through all of the weapons to pick the one you want to use. And some weapons took a long time to bring up because of the extra frames. You end up only using the first one or trying to avoid picking up too many weapon types in an effort to at least put off this problem until later on. It was a huge issue in AEoD until that slot limit thing was added.

[Major Cooke]

There's also the issue of organizing what weapons you want to select first -- an issue AEoD recently addresses -- if not, will be addressing, in the next patch. I always like to have my ducks in a row, in case if you want to lug every one of those heavy-ass weapons all around you since your spine and bones are motherfucking titanium, Wolverine style.