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According to what source? Eddie uses !rExp, which is the source I was quoting (AFAIK Eddie invented the whole system of abbreviations in his Tales Of The Bold). So what higher authority calls it !rLife? I've never seen that abbreviation before. It doesn't seem like a good one, as it could easily be confused with !Life, and the two do not have the same relationship as !Stat and !rStat.
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"Been away so long I hardly knew the place, gee it's good to be back home" - The Beatles -
I think he's referring to the fact that the item's name is "Potion of Restore Life Levels." As for common abbreviation, I'm not sure. I probably like !rExp the best. QUICK SOMEONE MAKE A POLL!
Please don't make a poll.Comment
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Maybe we should make a poll to choose how to vote
A(3.2.0) C "Angdiira II" DP L:36 DL:44(2200') A+ R+ Sp w:Whip of Westernesse(+10,+10)(+2)
A Mx H- D c-- f- PV+ s- d P++ M+
C- S-- I So B++ ac GHB- SQ+ RQ++ V+Comment
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Actually, according to Eddie, it is called both![It's called !rLife] according to what source? Eddie uses !rExp, which is the source I was quoting
(There are 11 rLife and 10 rExp. AND: the first or second hit on each is in a Tales of The Bold...)Comment
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Damn. I need an editor!Actually, according to Eddie, it is called both!
(There are 11 rLife and 10 rExp. AND: the first or second hit on each is in a Tales of The Bold...)Comment
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tSelf only counts as an escape when you are confused or blind, or are sufficiently shallow that you are exceedingly unlikely to teleport into instadeath--that is, prior to dl 40.
It does make a reasonably good evasion technique, and if you have good stealth and are diving fast, it lets you bounce around the dungeon trying to detect easy targets.Comment
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@magnate -- I don't disagree on principle; I just think that you are over-thinking the store model.
IMO elegance and simplicity go hand in hand. For store pricing, buyout has a lot of the features that belong in real-life store restocking:
* High variance in price to simulate supply and demand.
* Unlimited basic supplies available at a high premium.
Right now it falls apart later in the game, but that's because pricing in general falls apart: you have so much money available from loot you can't possibly spend it all.
IMO Eddie got it essentially right: no selling, and store buyout made easy.
Store restocking already simulates inelastic supply and demand for the things that you really need. Eddie's modification of increased gold on the floor combined with no selling simulates elastic pricing for stuff that you don't really need.
1 It makes basic economic sense
2 It is extremely simple.
3 It is very easy to adjust:
- by changing the distribution of gold drops, you can increase average prices.
- by changing the average stack sizes in the stores, you can change the average cost and variance for inidividual items.
- by adding a the discount to the buyout button, you can change the variance of overall expenses. (This already exists in the tedious restocking model, as you can sell the more expensive stuff in another store where you don't care about restocking.)
While writing this post, I realized there's something that Eddie's model doesn't get right: sometimes, you should get very lucky, in the same way as the shopkeepers do when you need to buy them out repeatedly. In the reselling model, there's extremely high variance in the early game from good luck; gold on the floor loses this feature. (Later in the game, things average out as the average value of stuff on the floor approaches the maximum shop selling price.)
One fix that I would recommend to the no-sell model is to greatly increase the maximum size of gold drops, but make them extremely rare. Some characters should still win the lottery.Last edited by Pete Mack; June 10, 2009, 09:03.Comment
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Allowing players unlimited supplies by buying every item might penalise the player for excess demand, but beyond that it makes no economic sense whatever. Why should you buy unrelated goods in order to get at what you need? It confuses people. Disallowing the player from selling makes the situation worse. Randomness does not in any way "simulate supply and demand" when it's just randomness. If you want to simulate elastic supply, then simulate elastic supply: it is simple, makes sense, and allows for unlimited supplies available at a premium in the most natural way.Comment
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The buyout button doesn't simulate elastic supply; it simulates inelastic supply.
The variance on such things is much, much bigger than you might ordinarily expect--and it's why RL people buy gold.
Imagine there's a hurricane coming in, and there's only one Home Depot (and no Lowes) in a 2-hour radius that's selling plywood. Assuming the store manager doesn't care about repeat sales, what do you think the price of plywood will be? (An order of magnitude isn't unexpected. That's why you should buy plywood in the hurricane off-season. The same holds for canned food.)
In a specific example: say you desperately need some !rStr. While you are buying out the store, desperately trying to return your blows from 1 to 4, you also manage to score 20 scrolls of +damage. This unexpectedly gets your bow up to +9 and your arrows to +5, and suddenly you don't need four blows anymore. That's the kind of thing that happens in RL economics; there's no way to simulate such a 'market' with the cost based on a single type of item.Comment
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No. The buyout button allows the player infinite quantity with a price drawn from a fixed distribution. Inelastic supply occurs where supply is actually inelastic i.e. quantity is invariant under demand changes. So the buyout button does more or less the opposite, but certainly doesn't simulate anything economically meaningful.
Geometric pricing would make sense of the "plywood" scenario: continue to buy, and the supply price would eventually become intolerable. Buyouts do not: the cost to the player is distributed with a constant mean, since each buyout offers the same probability of getting what you want.
Geometric pricing can still incorporate volatility, to any desired degree. So I'm not sure what your point is.The variance on such things is much, much bigger than you might ordinarily expect--and it's why RL people buy gold.Comment
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I think Pete's basic point is that a buyout button achieves a vaguely similar effect with a tiny fraction of the code and gameplay changes associated with fixed inventories. He's right - but that doesn't mean that a buyout button is the right answer.
I started this thread because I am fairly certain that Takkaria has already said he doesn't want to make buying out stores easier or more attractive. If I'm wrong about that, then a buyout button is probably the easiest and most sensible way forward, at least in the short term. If I'm right, I think it is worth thinking through the additional complexity of fixed inventories to get a better solution than buyouts. I think buyouts are a very poor approximation to the supply-demand model that we want - so yes, in Pete's view, I am "over-thinking" it."Been away so long I hardly knew the place, gee it's good to be back home" - The BeatlesComment
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My bad.
I meant to say "inelastic demand". The buyout button assumes an effectively infinte supply with high variance in availability. If you are willing buy out the store multiple times (until you run out of cash or find some sub-optimal solution like enchanting your bow and ammo), then you have proven that the demand is inelastic.
There are very few cases of genuinely inelastic demand, at least in the short term. Once "peak oil" is definitively reached, we will see an example. The geometric model is a good model for that.Comment
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