So, I can't kill anything? How on Earth am I going to level then?

I'll summarise my points:

• The thing with the uberjackal bug is, some monsters level WAY TOO FAST. (Other monsters behave as they should. Leveling itself is not a bug, but some level too much, which is the bug.)
• The purpose of monster leveling is to punish scumming.
• Killing a normal amount of a certain monster type should not be punished.
• It's not always possible to "be careful who you kill" - for example, if you get surrounded or they block a crucial pathway and you don't have a means of bypassing them.
• Some monsters leveling much faster than others makes no sense.
• Avoiding killing any monsters because of a punishment makes no sense.
• Low-level monsters becoming tougher than high-level monsters makes no sense.
• Having them killed by your pet instead of yourself to avoid this makes no sense.
• New players will not be aware of the bug because it's not documented in the manual and no other game has such a mechanic.
• Solving the leveling difference by making every monster level extremely fast makes the game unplayable.
• Melee characters become extremely difficult to play, as they don't have the means to handle breeders/sumoners as spellcasters do.
• It doesn't add to the gameplay, story, character developement or other features.
• The game never was "too easy" before the bug.

Thus there is no positive sides to this bug and it should be fixed.

Why have the uber-monster effect anyway? Jackals are jackals: there might be a few strong ones, but otherwise, the run of the mill jackal should be challenging for that stage of the game. A mighty champion that has bested all the monsters on the surface should not have worry about being up to task for slaying 1000's of barking yapping carrion beasts.

I just thought about this a bit more, and decided that an exponential increase would work. Monsters could gain additional levels according to a formula somewhat like this (x is the amount of monsters killed):

x^2 / 5000

This would add 2 levels after 100 kills, 8 after 200 kills, 32 after 400 kills, and 200 levels after a thousand kills. The numbers obviously could be tweaked, but this makes things increasingly difficult for scummers without doing that to those who kill a reasonable amount of monsters (less than a couple hundred).

Why this? To me the answer to the issue is simple: Why not go and instead make jackals and spiders level at a rate the same as other kinds of summoned monsters that don't suffer from this problem, like rats? I don't think it would utterly ruin the game to do that. If one really is worried about the "scumming" being a problem, why not something like [i]making jackalweres get less common over time[i], or make the rewards for killing them (XP, item quality) go down and down as more kills are made, thereby making scumming useless? E.g. every 100 summons killed, only half the XP is delivered (at least for summons -- randomly generated forms of the monster could still yield regular XP levels), down to the point where killing one only yields like 1-2XP per kill(!). That would shut down XP-scumming from jackals and so forth real dang quick and not harass regular play. Shouldn't be too tough to tweak the system so that jackals and spiders are brought in line with other monsters and to implement the XP-halving. E.g. if jackal kills started at like 50 XP a pop, then after 100 we're down to 25 XP, and after 200, to 12.5 XP, and 300 to 6.25 XP, 400 to 3.125 XP, 500 to 1.5625 XP, 600 to 1 XP and thus worthless for gaining levels?

Jackals and similar monsters barely give any xps anyway. In the wilderness, a jackal will net you maybe 15xps. You'd need to kill over a thousand to level from 10 to 11. The only reason that anybody would ever consider doing such I thing, I'd imagine, is for items or weapon marks (and even still, jackals are an inferior choice compared to, say, gremlins, for this purpose).

@mike3: I'm pretty sure that decreasing exp and weapon marks are already implemented (mentioned somewhere in the FAQ or manual). But yeah, decreasing rewards seems a better approach than increasing punishments. There could theoretically be some rare situation where a player is forced to kill 500 worms without the intention to scum. Making summons give the absolute minimum amount of rewards while normally spawned ones remain unchanged, sounds interesting, although things should still have to be modified for places which naturally spawn a really high amount of a single monster type, such as the blue dragon caves and the animated forest.

I agree with those quotes. Don't fix what isn't broken.. only a few monster types need fixing.

So then one could have items and marks fall off with more kills of summons. So after a few summonings, those jackals are giving you no marks... And just make item drops from summons really rare, so you could slaughter a whole pack of summons and you'd only get the loot of like 1-2 "normal" monsters out of it. Shouldn't be too hard to add something to adjust the loot probability to take the summoned nature of the monsters into account. And one could also make pickpocketing summons impossible, too, for good measure. :) Not all that hard, just a couple of "if"s in the relevant code and that's it.

I have adjusted the evolutionary danger level of these beings somewhat.

> I'm curious about the reactions once p7 is out.
(from Twitter)

If Chaos Servants have stopped getting so lethal .. quite happy

It seems that I forgot to mention that it is fixed.