🚀 go-pugleaf

I rather doubt that all this excitement is about the "use up excess
food while gaining some experience at the current level" trick.
This technique is boring and only mildly effective: it takes a over
thousand kobolds to get to experience level 9 (how many hours of
cpu time?).  When you eventually run out of food, you must go down
to the lower levels where the monsters are your equal.

A better method is to try to polymorph a bat into a dragon when you
are holding a scroll of scare monster (how many of you ever thought
a scroll of monster creation could be useful?) or a drain life stick.
Even a dead worm would only get you to level 11.  This might impress
a jackal, but a xorn could still eat you for breakfast.  You risk
using up all of your polymorph charges without producing anything
more deadly than zombie (or worse, something just barely deadly
enough to force you to drop your scroll early).  In any case, these
methods of gaining experience are legitimate.

Winning requires experience and knowledge, but still depends mainly
on luck.  What glory is there in playing a thousand games because
you know that sooner or later you will find +3 plate mail and a
+1 double handed sword on level one?  This only demonstrates stolid
persistence and a capacity for infinite pain.  Cheating by ferreting
out holes in the game protection mechanisms or taking advantage of
obscure features of the UNIX programming environment demonstrates
skill and initiative.

I tend to sympathize with Mr. Hamachi.  Some of the mail he received
was in rather bad taste.  Disclosing the nature of bugs discovered by
others is not really his responsibility.  (Even if he is a nerd, he
has a right to secrets.  The problem arose when he couldn't keep
them that way.)

If we could not allow the distribution of the game because of a
possible scoring loophole, the fault is ours: we take scores too
seriously.  The decision to do this was Mr. Arnold's.  Clearly,
anyone who allows so many infinitely powerful floating eyes
to exist is a real sickie.

				Dan Strick
				University of Pittsburgh