For anyone interested in object pricing issues

[Pete Mack]

Yup, passports (sans microwave) are a real problem. Not to mention modern ATM cards and driver's licenses...

[PowerDiver]

Tinfoil wallets OTOH, is a genuine issue.

That reminds me -- I have to buy some of those passport wallets with a built-in faraday cage.

[Pete Mack]

Some folks have a pretty weird notion of privacy concerns.... An anonymous ping with what your character crafted in a beta angband release will hardly affect privacy. It's a long way away from corporate snooping on browser clicks. A bigger issue in such case is making sure that any pings don't interfere much with process shutdown or gameplay.

Note: I am no fan of forging, but I am much less a fan an of tinfoil hats. Tinfoil wallets OTOH, is a genuine issue.

[Magnate]

Alternatively, if the crafting data is of special interest, it wouldn't be too hard to add a crafting history to character dumps. I'd still worry about how to interpret the data though.

I think you're right that it's easy to overestimate the usefulness of the data. Having crafting history in chardumps is a nice idea though - fits in with being optional and all that.

On a related note, has anybody considered mining the character dumps to get some idea of relative object power?

Yeah, it was discussed in the previous object pricing thread - again, quite a bit of work, and of doubtful value because you'd really want to compare chardumps *of the same version* - and dumps don't tell you what people found but didn't keep. You're right that forum feedback is probably the simplest way to go.

[Optimality]

Alternatively, if the crafting data is of special interest, it wouldn't be too hard to add a crafting history to character dumps. I'd still worry about how to interpret the data though.

On a related note, has anybody considered mining the character dumps to get some idea of relative object power?

[Optimality]

Do you mean because of privacy concerns, or technical challenge, or something else? If you did automatically collect data on what people crafted, that would be hugely useful for refining the power algorithm.

All of the above?

Out of privacy concerns, there's no way I'd even consider having it on by default. That would mean the user would have to turn it on manually (or when prompted). Users who are interested in providing feedback could do it (approximately) as easily in the forums (ie, "X is overpriced b/c Y"). It seems like a bad code/reward tradeoff (unless it were on by default).

The "something else" issue is the data quality. You might be overestimating how useful the data would be. It would be pretty hard to weed out the good choices from the bad ones; most Angband players (and presumably most Craftband players, eventually) probably don't play optimally (or even close to it). We'd have to collect a *lot* of information for it to be useful.

Basically, I don't see how it provides enough of an improvement over forum-based feedback to justify the code/possible privacy issues/data quality issues.

I'd be interested in talking about it further if anybody is interested; we should probably move that to a different thread though.

[Nick]

As much of a data fiend as I am (I'm a machine learning researcher), I don't think I'd be cool with automatically collecting data .

You could always ask people to volunteer to be part of your botnet^H^H^H^H^H^H project.

[Magnate]

That is basically what I'm writing, and I hope the balancing information uncovered by Craftband will be useful for the V developers. As much of a data fiend as I am (I'm a machine learning researcher), I don't think I'd be cool with automatically collecting data .

Do you mean because of privacy concerns, or technical challenge, or something else? If you did automatically collect data on what people crafted, that would be hugely useful for refining the power algorithm.

[Optimality]

Close, but there's no provision for automatic feedback. Asking "What did you use your ores for?" in a forum isn't likely to provoke a great deal of responses.

That is basically what I'm writing, and I hope the balancing information uncovered by Craftband will be useful for the V developers. As much of a data fiend as I am (I'm a machine learning researcher), I don't think I'd be cool with automatically collecting data .

[PaulBlay]

Isn't that exactly the variant Optimality is writing??

Close, but there's no provision for automatic feedback. Asking "What did you use your ores for?" in a forum isn't likely to provoke a great deal of responses.

[Magnate]

Here's an idea - have a special 'pricing evaluation' build available for download. In it allow people to 'cash in' abilities on items (artifacts, ego items, randarts) for 1/4 the 'power points' and spend those point to add abilities to items (artifacts, ego items and randarts).

Isn't that exactly the variant Optimality is writing??

[PaulBlay]

Here's an idea - have a special 'pricing evaluation' build available for download. In it allow people to 'cash in' abilities on items (artifacts, ego items, randarts) for 1/4 the 'power points' and spend those point to add abilities to items (artifacts, ego items and randarts).

Have the game send back by internet data on what they've cashed in and how they spent it to use for analysis in determining what abilities may be under or over priced.

OK, that would probably be more effort than it's worth, but it is one way of seeing where people would actually put their (figurative) money when the chips are down.

[Magnate]

From unix man section 2 open:

$ man 2 open
....
Flags:
O_CREAT create file if it does not exist
O_TRUNC truncate size to 0
O_APPEND append on each write

These are the flags you would use for open. For fopen, it's a little different.

Thanks for the explanation. I'm not sure if or how O_TRUNC is implemented in V. The function I use (file_putf) takes READ, WRITE or APPEND as its mode - presumably WRITE does O_CREAT or O_TRUNC as appropriate. In the object pricing function I use APPEND because I don't want it to keep overwriting the file with every object. So I need to find somewhere in init2.c to truncate the file (presumably a single text_out with mode WRITE will do the job). Will sort this out.

[Magnate]

It's only combat gear, not magical items.

But including rings and amulets (i.e. all wearables, plus ammo).

[takkaria]

while playing with dev r1359 i noticed that at the black market a rod of teleport other costs half the amount of a rod of acid bolts - which is pretty strange, considering that i would value the first around 4 times more than the second, as a rough estimate. Is the new object pricing algorithm only related to weapons and armour or does it affect also rings,wands,rods,etc ?

It's only combat gear, not magical items.