On one hand, I probably will never satisfy the loud, old, obnoxious, reputable, and experienced voices of the kinds of players who would make custom settings to mute the Labyrinth announcement message and render the entrance invisible. Not-too-prominent, uniquely simple and quiet things like such mazes shouldn’t be thrown out just for being of a different era.
On the other hand, I will always have the quiet fear of flux, that in different ages and atmospheres of perpetually discordant and non-unified development another dev will okay a severe shift or outright cut to the maze portion of the maze. The enthusiasm (if not the capacity for development conversation) of this thread paired with my stressors made me pick up some almost certainly overdesigned minor balance work very recently, anyway, as I poured over spreadsheets thinking of randomized balance and feeling out numbers, and I can’t help but think my frenetic work won’t allowed such simple outliers to last.
At any rate, my Labyrinth plans aren’t that much of a drastic shift anyway: make the full level smaller, have the level builder work around fixed level chunks instead of needing a perfect border through them as which makes the maze much easier, and guarantee a decent number of those fixed level chunks and the minor encounters they foster with themed monsters and a few wanderers from the level before. Once the Lab is reliably a little dangerous all over then I’d let the miserable discourse decide whether the periodic maze shifting + minimap erasing + autoexplore-disabling should be kept or not (and it almost certainly will eventually be cut), while hopefully staving off the decent chance of the complete and utter removal of any maze elements or the Labyrinth itself.
This sort of eternal invisible panicked thinking around volunteer development is why I thoroughly advocate not playing Crawl for very long, as many get impatient and irritable about new changes and old cuts. Such a shift in attitude is admittedly dependent on person to person and probably mostly just over-represented in influential individuals and dedicated communities, but I still wonder if the base product and work model caused any of that, and I know it is changed in accordance to that.
