On the pricing of +speed

[bebo]

I've got to the point with my latest char that i have to sell excess =speed, and noticed that the new power based pricing system created by magnate has drastically reduced it's cost, maybe too much?

For example, i sold a =speed +7 to the alchemist for something around 10k , and then it was listed on sale for something like 13k , which seems both really low and really close to what i sold it for.

Granted, when you get this far in the game money is irrelevant, so it's not that much of a deal, but this might be a bug, so i thought it might be better to report it.

Looking forward to the repricing of magic objects, great work done so far! (i especially liked the increase in price of ranged weapons, it was long overdue)

[Magnate]

I've got to the point with my latest char that i have to sell excess =speed, and noticed that the new power based pricing system created by magnate has drastically reduced it's cost, maybe too much?

For example, i sold a =speed +7 to the alchemist for something around 10k , and then it was listed on sale for something like 13k , which seems both really low and really close to what i sold it for.

Granted, when you get this far in the game money is irrelevant, so it's not that much of a deal, but this might be a bug, so i thought it might be better to report it.

Thanks for the report, but it's not a bug. The price of speed items was vastly inflated in the previous pricing system - now they are correctly priced relative to items of equivalent worth, but it feels wrong to many people because it's so different to what went before. This feeling is exacerbated by a related change, which is that the racial cost adjustments have been removed. So every race buys and sells at the same cost now with all shopkeepers, which has the effect of making buying and selling prices closer together.

A +7 ring of speed has the same power rating as a +18 ring of damage, and now has the same cost. You might think one is worth more than the other, but I suspect the difference in value to you will be less than 50%. Under the old pricing system they would have differed by two orders of magnitude. (For comparison, a ring of ESP, were such a thing to exist, would now be the same price as a +15 damage ring or a +6 speed ring.)

If you feel strongly that there is a big difference in value between a +7 speed ring and a +18 damage ring (inherently, irrespective of any other equipment), pls do expand on it.

Looking forward to the repricing of magic objects, great work done so far! (i especially liked the increase in price of ranged weapons, it was long overdue)

Thank you. The increase in the costs of ranged weapons strikes many people as just as broken as the reduced costs of speed items. It all depends on your perspective. I have not yet persuaded Takkaria to let me rework the prices of consumables (I assume that's what you meant by "magic objects" - potions, scrolls, wands, staves etc.). I'll need to get a few more people backing the repriced wearables first.

[PowerDiver]

I have not yet persuaded Takkaria to let me rework the prices of consumables (I assume that's what you meant by "magic objects" - potions, scrolls, wands, staves etc.). I'll need to get a few more people backing the repriced wearables first.

What do you plan to do about useless but ridiculously expensive items like rods of curing? The only reason to have them in the game is that they sell for so much. If you priced them accurately, it would be better to remove them. In this context, accurate pricing seems counterproductive.

[bebo]

(I assume that's what you meant by "magic objects" - potions, scrolls, wands, staves etc.)

Yes.

And regarding items like rods of curing, just price them accordingly and drastically reduce their depth so they are actually useful.

As a side note i'd altogether remove rings of charisma and sustain charisma (but i'd remove charisma as a stat altogether, so i see why many people wouldn't want this ), and strongly suggest takkaria to rebalance (ie improve) rings of the dog/mouse and reckless attacks - i just squelch them automatically as of now. On the other hand rings of escaping are maybe a bit too good, mainly because you can still shoot with them.

[Magnate]

What do you plan to do about useless but ridiculously expensive items like rods of curing? The only reason to have them in the game is that they sell for so much. If you priced them accurately, it would be better to remove them. In this context, accurate pricing seems counterproductive.

And regarding items like rods of curing, just price them accordingly and drastically reduce their depth so they are actually useful.

Well, my view is that pricing should reflect an item's usefulness, so if they're useless, they should sell for very little. I don't think anything should be in the game purely to generate money. Think of your (Eddie's) previous comment about =rpois: if they get any cheaper I'll have to consider actually using them (I paraphrase). That's my point really - pricing is about making it more likely that stuff is in your inventory because it's useful, rather than for what it fetches. Obviously you can't always achieve this (think Kelek's for non-mages), but you can mend some of the obviously broken prices and get part of the way.

I think the Curing effect is just not useful enough, given that when you need it you usually have very high chance of failing to activate it. If Takkaria made it so that it had 100% chance of successful activation, then staves and rods of curing would suddenly be a little more worthwhile (though come to think of it you'd still carry a stack of !CCW instead - perhaps it should heal 100hp as well).

As a side note i'd altogether remove rings of charisma and sustain charisma (but i'd remove charisma as a stat altogether, so i see why many people wouldn't want this )

Eddie and I both agree with you here. Charisma is a D&D hangover that has no place in Angband as it currently exists (i.e. without lots of extra code to make use of it).

strongly suggest takkaria to rebalance (ie improve) rings of the dog/mouse and reckless attacks - i just squelch them automatically as of now. On the other hand rings of escaping are maybe a bit too good, mainly because you can still shoot with them.

I think the important thing here is that Takkaria has introduced the idea of mixed blessing items. Yes, they need tweaking, but fundamentally I'm really glad they're there. I also squelch them at the moment, but I'm sure they'll eventually get some use.

[PowerDiver]

I think the Curing effect is just not useful enough, given that when you need it you usually have very high chance of failing to activate it. If Takkaria made it so that it had 100% chance of successful activation, then staves and rods of curing would suddenly be a little more worthwhile (though come to think of it you'd still carry a stack of !CCW instead

And it uses an extra slot to boot. The *ONLY* reason for it to exist is to be the quivalent of a 10K diamond that takes an inventory slot. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that if you believe in selling to stores.

The curing effect is just added for flavour. If you take away the price, you ruin the item.

[Pete Mack]

@magnate -- there IS a reason for highly priced speed items:

If you don't have any speed, they are worth any price. So it's quite reasonable for the BM to charge 200K+ for a descent speed ring, or more for boots. They should simply be unaffordable. (Maybe speed rings & boots should be priced quadratically, since a +10 ring is worth far more than +3.)

[Magnate]

And it uses an extra slot to boot. The *ONLY* reason for it to exist is to be the quivalent of a 10K diamond that takes an inventory slot. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that if you believe in selling to stores.

The curing effect is just added for flavour. If you take away the price, you ruin the item.

Well, I don't believe items should exist purely for selling. I'm sure it's possible to design a curing effect that is worth an extra slot over !CCW, but only if it's reliable.

[Magnate]

@magnate -- there IS a reason for highly priced speed items:

If you don't have any speed, they are worth any price. So it's quite reasonable for the BM to charge 200K+ for a descent speed ring, or more for boots. They should simply be unaffordable.

... but if you already have +30 speed, they're really not worth much. It is impossible to base any pricing on what other equipment one might or might not have, hence the mean-field approach equating to +dam. A ring of +18 to_dam seems a reasonable equivalent for +7 speed: if you have no other +speed you probably want the speed, if you have lots then you probably want the +dam.

Besides, I think +speed has a somewhat undeserved mythical status - there are tons of dumps of people dying after finding speed items. I'm not saying it isn't valuable (it is), and I'm not saying it isn't underpriced on its own (it may be), but it's not the be-all and end-all.

(Maybe speed rings & boots should be priced quadratically, since a +10 ring is worth far more than +3.)

... but +11 is not 21% better than +10 - so quadratic pricing doesn't quite work. Neither does linear, hence the lookup table. I've almost doubled the values in it since Chris Robertson's original table, and it's not possible to do much more than tinker with the price outcome. There is no way I can make speed items cost 200k without a specific hack, and I'm not convinced of the need to do that. (I am still thinking about boosting their cost in some way, but not to 200k.)

[Storch]

Prices

Only few economists state that there exists something as inherent, fair, right price. Price in the real world is a function of both demand and supply. What you are trying to do is to define the right price which is an impossible task or perharps to simulate the demand - "how much would you pay for this or that". It is extremely difficult because it differs wildly with current situation of the player.

My idea is to try approximate the price using supply. Modelling of supply resulting from "town economy" (townsmen producing food, weapons etc.) is a ridiculous idea so the only source of goods supply is what can be found in the dungeon. That can be modelled quite easily because we know how the object generator works.

The merchants would then be approximated as a second-hand stores selling things the adventurers brought from the dungeon. The price of objects would been then naturaly based on their scarcity. Objects that are hard to come by should be expensive and common objects should be cheap. The distribution of goods available in stores should be shifted towards more scarce things and away from the common objects to make shopping interesting. This is also quite natural behavior for a second-hand store with limited space.

I think this would help to nicely balance the game. If you cannot find it, you can buy it, but at a price.

[Magnate]

Only few economists state that there exists something as inherent, fair, right price. Price in the real world is a function of both demand and supply. What you are trying to do is to define the right price which is an impossible task or perharps to simulate the demand - "how much would you pay for this or that". It is extremely difficult because it differs wildly with current situation of the player.

Let me just refresh the communal memory on how we got here. I didn't set out to overhaul Angband's economic model. I worked (with Chris Robertson) on an improved algorithm for generating randarts. When it was done, I suggested to Takkaria that it could be used to generate prices for non-artifact wearables as well as artifacts.

So, nobody is claiming that it's an accurate economic simulation. There have been numerous threads about incorporating supply and/or demand into the pricing model, but the best we can do in this particular system is to tweak the power ratings of various things to reflect supply or demand - e.g. low resists are rated much lower than their actual importance, because they are very common.

Despite not being an accurate economic simulation, it generates more consistent prices than the arbitrary values in text files (e.g. rings of rpois, foo of ESP). It can't really do any better than that without a complete rewrite. So the debate is not about "is power-based pricing an accurate economic model" but "is power-based pricing more consistent than the previous approach". Most of the debate centres around boots and rings of speed. Those two items were the most expensive in the entire game under the previous system. These two facts are related.

My idea is to try approximate the price using supply. Modelling of supply resulting from "town economy" (townsmen producing food, weapons etc.) is a ridiculous idea so the only source of goods supply is what can be found in the dungeon. That can be modelled quite easily because we know how the object generator works.

The merchants would then be approximated as a second-hand stores selling things the adventurers brought from the dungeon. The price of objects would been then naturaly based on their scarcity. Objects that are hard to come by should be expensive and common objects should be cheap. The distribution of goods available in stores should be shifted towards more scarce things and away from the common objects to make shopping interesting. This is also quite natural behavior for a second-hand store with limited space.

I think this would help to nicely balance the game. If you cannot find it, you can buy it, but at a price.

Yes, that would be interesting. There have been a couple of other complete rewrite suggestions too (least-squares iteration, trawling through chardumps). If anyone writes one, I'll be among the first to test it, and if it's better than the power-based approach, I'll be the first to champion its inclusion in V.

But I'm not sure that anyone ever will write one. Angband is a game about killing monsters and finding loot - buying and selling is tertiary to those, and should remain so. Anyone prepared to put that amount of time and effort into contributing code would gain more satisfaction from overhauling critical hits, or the blows table, or the spell realms, or whatever. I wouldn't have suggested any changes myself if I hadn't seen a quick win from re-using chunks of the randart code.

[PowerDiver]

Well, I don't believe items should exist purely for selling..

It's not that it exists purely for selling. But it is only ever used if its price is overly high.

I actually used a rod of curing once. But the only reason I used it is that I was carrying it home to sell it. Otherwise, I would have tossed it to pick up a scroll of mapping or whatever. There is a class of melee egos, slay animal/orc/troll/giant that are similar. Have you ever saved a weapon because it had one of those egos? I never would, and if they were appropriately priced [the power based pricing is still far too high] I would never carry them unless the item was useful without the ego. However, when they are expensive, then I carry them home and maybe even use them as a swap once or twice on that trip.

Think about monsters. There are some that are worth searching out, because their drop or exp is overly high in comparison to danger or resources required, and many you ignore. It's arbitrary, and playing well is about figuring out which monsters to fight. I see no reason for pricing to be different. Some things are overpriced, and those are the ones you search out to sell. I really do not see a substantive difference in these two situations.

It may seem strange that I am arguing so much when I think the better solution is to eliminate selling entirely. The reason is that if you are going to ruin the flow of the game, I'd like there to be at least something about it that leads to strategic choices by the player.

[PowerDiver]

(Maybe speed rings & boots should be priced quadratically, since a +10 ring is worth far more than +3.)

Well, maybe *everything* should be priced quadratically. Come up with a table that says what each flag [with pval 1 if relevant] is worth, but then price the object as the square of the sum of the flag values. So an armor with 3 elemental resists would evaluate to value 9 times as much as one with a single resist. A +16 ring of damage would be only 4 times as much as +8, but while bad that isn't as ludicrous as merely twice the price.

This still misses out on rarity issues. Gloves with a single resist are currently quite valuable. But that's still not adequately handled by the current pricing either.

[rdanhenry]

... but if you already have +30 speed, they're really not worth much.

If you already have +30 speed, you probably have so much money that you can "overpay" hundreds of thousands of gold to upgrade your +9 speed ring to +11. For that matter, if you can trade out +9 for +18, you can probably swap out some other item you were using for speed in order to swap in something with another useful property. Duplicating important abilities is still useful, because it makes your kit more flexible. And as I wrote above, once more speed becomes trivial-ish, so do large piles of gold. Price isn't very meaningful by that point, so I don't think that's a useful measure.

[PaulBlay]

Can you get things like "Ring of Strength (+0)" generated? They should have some value because they give Sustain Strength but I suppose that they are always generated with a bonus (or penalty), right?