Squelching for gold

[Nick]

No, this is not WoW spam.

I have been thinking about Eddie's "No selling to shops" idea, and have a suggestion on how to balance it (as an alternative to increasing gold drops). Simply this: do dungeon generation and monster drops exactly as now, but when a squelched object is generated, replace it at the last minute by equivalent gold.

This looks like a win to me - it basically solves the Too Much Junk problem by rewarding the player for doing without items. The only disadvantage I can see is that you can't play the "Squelch stuff (like !RestoreStat) until you need it, and then unsquelch" game, and I'm not convinced that's an actual disadvantage.

[Neuro]

Not sure I like this... the thing is, sometimes I squelch on accident or I want to unsquelch some particular item (like restore stat potions when I'm hit by a time hound and it gets past my sustain). I'd hate for squelch to be a permanent destroy.

[Sergio]

I noticed that, once I hit a certain amount of gold and depth, money is as useless as any squelched item. That might not be the case for all classes, but for my paladin, I could buy the black market again and again trying to find something nice in it. I had everything but artifacts on squelch, and I could still make about 500k gold in under 2 hours.

So... My question would be, why do we want gold when it's not useful for anything?

If there were end-game items that cost somewhere in the order of the millions (I'd pay at least 5 million for a scroll of *Restore Artifact that some disenchantment mob brought from +30 to +29*), having even more money would help.

Perhaps as an option besides the squelch quality ones we have, a tick that'd mean "squelch to gold"?

[PowerDiver]

So... My question would be, why do we want gold when it's not useful for anything?

The patch I sent to Takkaria included a "squelch money item" ability. If you step on it or run through it, you pick it up without a message or disturb, but otherwise it is unnoticed.

I think it might even help with those bugs about picking up money when blind and it gets stuck in the inventory.

Can you believe such a glorious idea wasn't incorporated into V?

[LCC]

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.angband/browse_thread/thread/50bbb53e654a3b2c?hl=en

has a discussion which I started regarding how to use up money by special ordering custom artifacts from the BM. Perhaps that idea can be resurrected ?

[Neuro]

Things I would save up for and spend gobs of gold on:

1) Larger backpack

2) Larger House

3) Potions of Experience


I could easily see any of these three being high price extras that help your game along. PoXp should be on the order of 100k, so a nice 1-1 gold-to-xp ratio is obtained. Backpack and house space could be exponentially more expensive, like 1 extra spot for 100k, second spot is 200k, third is 400k, etc.

[Nick]

So... My question would be, why do we want gold when it's not useful for anything?

Well, it's only not useful when you have plenty. IMHO the only use for money should be to even out item collection in the early game a bit so the player is not at the mercy of chance for things like ?Recall, !CCW, books, etc. The fact that in the mid/late game you build up massive quantities of money is kind of irrelevant - at some point you have enough money, and it stops being a consideration. And looking for uses for this money is backwards logic.

So the answer to your question is this: if selling to shops is outlawed, you want more gold to make up the shortfall. This is one mechanism for providing that gold.

[Pete Mack]

This idea has the benefit that early gold comes at high variance.

You never, ever sell all the stuff you find, so
you would need to discount things by a big chunk, so that things worth < 1K at dl 15 (say) don't get converted to gold, and things worth less than a scroll of Recall don't get converted at all. Also, you'd need to do something about ID and resale.

But the basic idea of ensuring a high variance for gold is good.

[Nick]

You never, ever sell all the stuff you find, so
you would need to discount things by a big chunk, so that things worth < 1K at dl 15 (say) don't get converted to gold, and things worth less than a scroll of Recall don't get converted at all.

Yes, good point - presumably items would be converted to gold at some fractional rate, the precise value of which would offer great scope for interminable discussion

Also, you'd need to do something about ID and resale.

If there's a sufficiently good ID-by-use scheme in place, this might not be too much of a problem.

[buzzkill]

Off the top of my head...

Have shops only pay black market prices for anything better than {good} items.

Double the prices of all items for sale in any (or all) given shop, each time it is bought out. It won't solve the problem, but it couldn't hurt anything. If you can afford to buy out a shop, you can afford to pay double (or x4, x8, x16).

Modify XP awards downward by 1% for each return trip to town (maybe allow 1 free round trip per 5 DL's).

Modify XP awards downward for players with huge amounts of gold. Should limit selling and hording since you can't simply drop gold.

Make GP in excess of ??? weigh something or have a slight (irresistible) chance at stat drain (corruption by greed).

Allow players to gamble (black market) any amount of gold for a chance of winning an acquirement or *acquirement*. Of course, it would take a huge gamble in order to produce a decent chance of winning.

[d_m]

So under this proposal, if I squelch excellent weapons, then the only weapons I will see are guaranteed to be artifacts?

If so, it has the effect of "loosening up" ID even more than ID-by-use does. I guess it would replace waving a rod of acid balls around to find artifacts.

I think that transmuting "known squelched" items into gold as a way of eliminating selling seems good. I'm not sure that allowing auto-ID of squelched items is good (which if I'm understanding correctly is something the proposal requires). But I'm not sure it's not either.

[takkaria]

Off the top of my head...

Have shops only pay black market prices for anything better than {good} items.

How about just capping stores much more harshly than at present?

[Nick]

So under this proposal, if I squelch excellent weapons, then the only weapons I will see are guaranteed to be artifacts?

If so, it has the effect of "loosening up" ID even more than ID-by-use does. I guess it would replace waving a rod of acid balls around to find artifacts.

I think that transmuting "known squelched" items into gold as a way of eliminating selling seems good. I'm not sure that allowing auto-ID of squelched items is good (which if I'm understanding correctly is something the proposal requires). But I'm not sure it's not either.

This sums up my current thinking perfectly. One approach would be to only apply this to things that don't get pseudo - wands, scrolls, etc - and continue to treat weapons, armor and possibly jewellery as at present. There are probably answers in between these two as well; I'm not sure what I think is best.

[Rizwan]

How about just capping stores much more harshly than at present?

This would make the start game even harder for people that don't dive. How about bringing the cap down from the max incrementally as the max dl reached increases. At the moment there are four shop owners of each category with different caps. At the start of the game have the guys with the most payout. For each 25 dl reached bring in the guys with the next lower payout and so on such that for dl 75-100 all the guys at the shops are the ones with the lowest payout.

[LCC]

If you are seriously considering changing the caps, I agree with Rizwan.