I hate dwarves so much right now.
Toady, on the one hand I really like that you make it possible for dwarves to experience fates that are gruesome beyond just about anything else in gaming, as they deserve it more than any other entity in gaming. However, I worry that the reason they deserve it is that the function of their most basic tasks has been neglected in favor of new things like organ damage from their own bones. You make punishments befitting their stupidity, but they are most likely stupid because you went on to that stuff before finishing their basic reality comprehension.
Just started a new fortress and got my first migrant wave of two. I dumped embark points into one of my starting miners for stonecrafting, and now that his relief is here I had him stop mining. Took a lot of effort just to get him to drop his pick, but now the new guy simply. Will. Not. Get. It.
I've used garbage dumps, disabling/enabling labor, drafting him and assigning him the pick, undrafting him and...
Jesus, why the hell am I doing this?!
This is the kind of thing I do at work. I try to put a good quality product together but way too much of my time is spent making up for bugs put in by jerkoffs who can't construct a stable interface to save their lives but have no problem charging $2,000 for the privilege of having to outsmart their code while on a deadline. And somehow, I've now gotten into the habit of doing the same exact thing in my liesure time with this game. About the only difference is that you ask nicely for money rather than requiring it.
This game has an incredible awesomeness density to it, but there are also enough chunks of fail spread throughout that almost every play session ends feeling like a waste of several hours.
I've been here before and bounced back. I taught myself to mod out what annoying parts I could, and for a while it was good. But there is a giant wall of hard code guarding the most essential fixes.
I have to stop playing this game. It's driving me nuts. I loved it, and want so bad to continue loving it, but it HAS to stop feeling like work. Please, please get the basics fixed first. No more unmovable socks blocking construction sites, no more stranded wall builders, no more metagames designed around getting the dwarves to pick up this tool or that weapon or favor building materials a few feet away over ones that are nearly a mile away. None of that is fun, it sucks to no end, and it pollutes and defiles a uniquely spectacular game with its suckage.
I know this is not the way to request features, and it's not how I intended this post to turn out, but I wholeheartedly feel it needed to be said. Please don't mistake me here, I'm not trashing the game itself. I consider it a wonder of the world. It's just not ready yet. I hope that these issues will be corrected sooner rather than later. Until they are I can't spend any more time on it. Sanity is too precious. I'll make a donation and wait until a future release.