To get permanent invisibility from wands you need 45/46 shots of it on hand. For permanent haste from wands, you'll need more like 67/68 shots of it on hand. In terms of how many wands this will take, you're looking at about 8 6-shot wands or 10 5-shot wands for invisibility, and 12 6-shot wands or 14 5-shot wands for haste.

So yeah.. unless you're willing to spend that wand of cloning on your wand collection and you actually have the wands to reach those numbers, you're not getting this from wands alone.

Well, winning at all is a bug, so I don't quite see your point.

It's considered theft if you take stuff without paying for it, though. And they will know it's you even if you don't lose your invisibility. And anyone with infravision available to them (which includes Decos, Petrus, and the elite guards) will head straight for you.

Summoner vs. warrior is stupid anyway given the way the game is designed. There's no mana, which means there can't be any player mages; the closest you can get is an evoker/priest and everybody gets the same power out of it no matter how much you use that wand of striking or pray to Legifer. There's only two ways to 'summon' monsters: you can pray to gods and if they like you enough maybe they'll send an angel down but there are no godly guarantees (except maybe Silva, and she's the only one whose main gifts are animals, and you only get that once every three hours), and there are scrolls of golem creation which IME are practically nonexistent. The only reason to even bother training your mind at all generally speaking are the scrolls of harden material and scrolls of change material; if it were possible to buy equivalent services I certainly wouldn't bother trying to train it.

I mean, I can understand thinking like this if you came from, say, Triangle Wizard, but that game is designed to be played multiple ways through and through, what with everybody having at least a little mana and the library of spells being huge and all. This game? You have no spells, you have no mana, you only have what the dungeon gives you and you have to work to get your stats to raise even if it's easily trained for your character. This game railroads characters into striving to be the exact same one 'cause otherwise you're dead, which means that if you could choose your stats at the beginning that there'd be just as little variation (generally speaking).

In short, I'm pretty sure the full-blown thing would be stupid and widely not used as imagined. An option to set straight 10s and average growth in every stat would be fair, though.

Examples Somagu gave in IRC: Al's guide, win posts.

It might not exactly make the forum livelier or cause the devs to come back and bring in the real .60, but it would be a nice feature.

Kudos system as explained and answered by Somagu sounds like what the CaravelNet forum uses, except it does not list who gave out kudos, which is good for larger forums as then users are less tempted to have kudos grudge matches. It may not matter for a small forum like ours, though.

I now recall better what CaravelNet does with their system: Users get rank and mod points through cool posts they make, and they can then spend their mod points on upping other cool posts. I can't recall if new users start with some karma or not, but if you don't get points from someone else for a post you make you can't spend any on other posts. You can up a post more than once, but it costs anyone who wants to up something past the first point more than just the + number (in other words, it costs only 1 point to give a +1/-1 boost but it costs 4 to give a +2/-2, for example). Total rank points gained is present in the profile and also determines the automated rank thingy (as opposed to just the post count).

Well, it is possible to find mirror chests lying on the ground, as well as mirror items within regular chests and mirror items lying on the ground.

It's possible there are still things to learn, but unlikely. If there were more people around poking at the code, we might have a better idea of whether or not everything had been found.

Really, what's more interesting to me is the question of how best to win IVAN (without cheating, of course). I guess I ought to give Al's guide a look and try some of it out sometime.

EDIT: granted, most interesting would be new versions of the game.

hint hint how's that coming along hint hint

If you keep yourself unburdened and eat all the safely edible corpses you eliminate 99% of all hunger problems. Seriously, satiation lasts quite a while if you're unburdened. Burdened and stressed states make your hunger clock move considerably/quite a lot faster respectively, which is great if you're bloated or overfed and don't want to be but bad if you're satiated or less.

(if you are in desperate need of exact time values, I have no life and can provide them)

Really. Where the hell is that line about how winning is supposed to be a bug?