For anyone interested in object pricing issues

[Mondkalb]

Why don't you free yourself from this pricing mania? The ego items provided by shops are a lottery. IMO egos should not be offered in the shops, but once you go down that path there's no point in second guessing yourself. There is no reason the prices charged or offered should not be just as much a lottery as well. What is unbalancing is allowing ESP for sale in the shops in the first place. The difference between charging 50 AU versus 50K AU is tiny in comparison.
...

Not only the shops but the whole game is a lottery. Everything can be changed by random goodies or badies from the very start on. Every step you make in the dungeon, every lucky or unlucky fight, every good or lousy drop is a lousy lottery.

[PowerDiver]

@Eddie

I don't think there's an unbiased way to make a frequency vs depth model as you suggest. Thranduil is shallow and common. Does that mean ESP should be too? The signal vs depth is just very noisy. Price is supposed to be a proxy for this.

There you go fixating on 1-to-1. Any particular one such as Thranduil probably would not get ESP, but you could set it up so that one of the whole set of low-level randarts [including *thancs and the Paur* etc] would most likely get lucky. It doesn't matter about any particular item, only the distribution of the entire set of items.

And who is to say that Thranduil isn't too common in the first place? Why take that particular arbitrary number as gospel? I am not saying that it is or is not too common, just that the current likelihood is more arbitrary than planned.

[buzzkill]

It just occurred to me that, at least, part of the 'pricing problem' revolves around trying to keep the player from earning too much GP from his finds, therefore keeping that same player from buying his/her way to victory. Maybe you could factor in the 'number of items sold recently' into the '% of sale price' offered for items being sold. In short, the more crap you sell, and the more often you sell it, the less it's worth. Supply and demand all over again...

... or give shop keepers a static supply of GP that will only refresh itself over time. Constant loot runs to the surface will cause the keepers to run low on (or out of) gold, and, quite logically, these financially distressed shop keepers will offer less, and less for the items to be sold.

[Atarlost]

Cubragol and Ringil let you wear a second elven ring, but they prevent you from weilding a crossbow of harad/longbow of lothlorien and the glaive of pain respectively. At 4d5 with some decent brands/slays Ringil isn't a bad weapon, but Cubragol is a pretty dubious launcher.

Speed in the boot slot is great because there's basically nothing else to put there, but if you have a roS +10 handy to swap in many artifact and ego launchers are worth more than your second elven ring. Speed in the weapon slot is only good because the weapon it's on is already so good. A randart with +10 speed, 3d3 dice, and slay_orc would be garbage to anyone who expected to use melee just as Cubragol is garbage to anyone who intends to use archery.

[Pete Mack]

@buzzkill-
With a handful of exceptions like ESP*, I'm not particularly concerned about shopping or store scumming. The reason I think this is important is because the valuation reflects the quality of the randart code.

If eddie's model can be made to work, that's great. But in the mean time, getting the cost right should make an acceptable proxy for artifact power calculations.

* I'd include BoSpeed, but I've seen them maybe once in the stores.

[PowerDiver]

It just occurred to me that, at least, part of the 'pricing problem' revolves around trying to keep the player from earning too much GP from his finds,

There's a simple solution to that -- no selling. One solution to many problems.

[Atarlost]

No selling makes TMJ more noticable. There is, for instance, a point at which dungeon books or too-difficult-to-use devices are worth selling. Then there are the unblessed non-blunt ego weapons. Lots of stuff is good loot but utterly useless for some classes. Without selling it's just junk for those classes. That's without going into how much expensive but not quite good enough to use equipment gets generated.

There's also ID-by-selling. Without being able to sell unidentified flavour objects the early game gets a lot more painful. A painful early game is a good way to kill the growth of the player base.

[Nick]

Off the top of my head, here's a halfway house to no selling - drop all the selling price caps in the stores to, say 1000AU or less. Early game selling still works, ID-by-selling still works.

Shoot me down

[PowerDiver]

There's also ID-by-selling. Without being able to sell unidentified flavour objects the early game gets a lot more painful. A painful early game is a good way to kill the growth of the player base.

If it is too painful to id by use, then early flavors should simply come pre-identified. Perhaps the player should start with knowledge of all flavors that commonly appear in town, i.e. anything listed in the shop tables.

Why bother to have unknown flavors if the player is expected to identify them before use? Giving the player incentive to take a stack of items back to town simply to identify them really interferes with the flow of the game. It is likely that a bunch of things should be changed to improve id-by-use, but that won't ever get done while everyone is using id-by-selling.

Making the game play better won't kill the player base.

[takkaria]

Off the top of my head, here's a halfway house to no selling - drop all the selling price caps in the stores to, say 1000AU or less. Early game selling still works, ID-by-selling still works.

Shoot me down

I wish I'd thought of that.

[Magnate]

Interesting. I must go away more often.

We seem to have two separate issues here, which are conflated by the introduction of power-based pricing. One is the entire economic model in the game - hugely simplistic, very little relation to supply and demand, formerly using ancient arbitrary prices in text files which the various contributors deemed half-decent estimates reflecting value and rarity.

I wish I had said at the outset: I don't see power-based pricing as a fix for the underlying problems with the game's economic model. The real fix for that is to make some significant change to selling - either by limiting it to some gp figure as Nick suggests, or to zero as in Eddieband. (I also liked the suggestions of storekeepers having limited funds, and of prices dropping as you sell more and more stuff. Any permutation of these would improve the game's economics.)

Power-based pricing does nothing but attempt to add internal consistency to prices, which brings us to the second issue: the quality/usefulness of the power algorithm. It was invented by Greg Wooledge when he wrote the original randart generator, and reinvented by Chris Robertson (with not much help from me) a few years later. IMO it generates reasonably good randarts - at least as interesting (at both ends of the power spectrum) as those in artifact.txt - and it provides prices which are more consistent than previously (despite some eyebrow-raising differences).

Eddie thinks it's completely the wrong approach, which is fine - if anyone wants to send Takkaria a patch for a different approach, I'll be among the first to try it out. In the meantime, I'll start a separate thread about improving it. [EDIT: sorry, that was a half-post, as I got distracted by the prospect of a public inquiry into police lying about the Hillsborough disaster ... I'll do the improvements post later.]

[Atarlost]

Another thing that might help the money problem would be taxation. If you don't pay your income taxes you lose access to all shops except the BM until you pay up. I'm sure one can come up with a tax structure that will "soak the rich" without effecting the early game.

Then there's "insurance" where you pay the BM some amount of money proportional to your net worth and they guarantee that your home isn't ransacked when you return from the dungeon. If you don't pay there would be a chance of this happening every time shops refresh.

Then there's putting a cap on how much gold you can carry in the dungeon but allowing you to store gold in your home. This works in combination with the "insurance" mechanic.

Rather than preventing or limiting selling we can remove money from the game directly and force the player sell stuff for enought money to keep the mob out of his hair.

[Nick]

Another thing that might help the money problem would be taxation. If you don't pay your income taxes you lose access to all shops except the BM until you pay up. I'm sure one can come up with a tax structure that will "soak the rich" without effecting the early game.

Then there's "insurance" where you pay the BM some amount of money proportional to your net worth and they guarantee that your home isn't ransacked when you return from the dungeon. If you don't pay there would be a chance of this happening every time shops refresh.

Then there's putting a cap on how much gold you can carry in the dungeon but allowing you to store gold in your home. This works in combination with the "insurance" mechanic.

Rather than preventing or limiting selling we can remove money from the game directly and force the player sell stuff for enought money to keep the mob out of his hair.

I'm playing this game to get away from real life.

[Nick]

I wish I'd thought of that.

Well, it's an idea in a thread on Vanilla. Technically, you can take notice of such things.

[Magnate]

Speed in the boot slot is great because there's basically nothing else to put there,

I don't buy this at all. Thror (+3 CON), Dal-i-thalion (rnether), Stealth, Elvenkind, Stability and even Free Action are all useful for the vast majority of the game. We don't balance things (drops, prices, whatever) on the basis of the final fight.

but if you have a roS +10 handy to swap in many artifact and ego launchers are worth more than your second elven ring. Speed in the weapon slot is only good because the weapon it's on is already so good. A randart with +10 speed, 3d3 dice, and slay_orc would be garbage to anyone who expected to use melee just as Cubragol is garbage to anyone who intends to use archery.

Yes, this I agree with.

The interesting thing about speed is the nonlinearity of its value. +1-3 speed is really not worth very much at all - I'd much rather have +1-3 stealth or FA. +10 speed is more than twice as useful as +5 speed, yet +15 speed is not really 50% better still. I've found it really difficult to judge the usefulness of different speed boosts properly - there certainly doesn't seem to be a mathematical relationship, hence the lookup table in the power calc.

But I still don't think that speed boots should cost more than speed rings. I'm convinced that the rarity issue needs to address the rarity of the property *as a whole*, not relative to a particular slot. Leaving aside artifacts, there are only three sources of permanent speed: boots, rings and amulets of Trickery. (Interestingly, there are only two sources of ESP - hats and blessed weapons - so I think Pete was right to argue that it was undervalued.)

One thing I think needs to change is that speed is currently excluded from the "extra pval power" calculation. I think if you've got +5 STR as well as +5 speed on the same item, that's more valuable than just adding the two together. So I think I'll try including it and see what happens to randarts.