seller's delight

[nobody]

i don't understand this recent movement against selling things. how can that make the game any funner? i guess i can see where it could be a hassle to go sell things for some people, they probably don't enjoy selling things in real life either. How is it fun though to constantly get weapons and armor and such that you aren't going to use, and what do you do with it? squelch it? destroy it? just leave it sitting there? how is that fun? seems to me like the vast majority of at least weapons and armor found isn't going to be something you'd want to use. i get great pleasure out of selling stuff, in angband and real life. i spend a few hours every day i'm off work at the goodwill looking for books and CDs to sell (i keep some too, but not many) but anyway, it just seems like not selling is ignoring a big minigame within the game. free trade FTW

[LCC]

I agree with "nobody". Furthermore if selling is removed from vanilla Angband, I will start playing T.O.M.E. and ignore Vanilla completely!

[Sirridan]

From my understanding, no selling would be a birth option, much like Iron Man, and activating it would increase gold drops to compensate for the lack of selling items (in the long run it should even out, although you won't have the good early boosts of finding a good high value heavy weapon you can't use for a quick 30k...)

Theory has it that not having to drag around things you wouldn't normally use but keep to sell is more fun than having an inventory full of junk then having to decide which items to drop when you find something more valuable or useful.

This also encourages using things instead of just dropping them (IE you keep that staff of mapping you find instead of that holy avenger maul you would otherwise never use)

[Atarlost]

From my understanding, no selling would be a birth option, much like Iron Man, and activating it would increase gold drops to compensate for the lack of selling items (in the long run it should even out, although you won't have the good early boosts of finding a good high value heavy weapon you can't use for a quick 30k...)

Theory has it that not having to drag around things you wouldn't normally use but keep to sell is more fun than having an inventory full of junk then having to decide which items to drop when you find something more valuable or useful.

This also encourages using things instead of just dropping them (IE you keep that staff of mapping you find instead of that holy avenger maul you would otherwise never use)

The way to deal with that would be to dramatically increase the number of inventory slots while making most items take multiple slots. If your holy avenger maul is 5 slots and your staff is 1 you're more likely to be able to fit the staff.

[PowerDiver]

i don't understand this recent movement against selling things. how can that make the game any funner?

Among the people who have given "no selling" a try, so far there is 100% approval. Not a single person who has tried it has ever written, to anywhere that I read, that they think the game with selling is more fun. Well, one guy was on the fence for a while before coming down on the side of "no selling". It does take a little while to get acclimated. E.g. my wife grumped for 1 week, was agnostic for the next week, and then declared that she would never play with selling again. It could be made better than what people have tested, since my changes to money drops were done with minimal effort and presumably could be done better.

[Marble Dice]

The way to deal with that would be to dramatically increase the number of inventory slots while making most items take multiple slots. If your holy avenger maul is 5 slots and your staff is 1 you're more likely to be able to fit the staff.

Oh boy, so not only do you have to play Tetris like in Diablo 2, but you also have to start manually computing "estimated value per slot" on top of that? No thanks!

[Atarlost]

No Tetris. Just numbers. Just another limit like weight, but unlike weight it would be a hard limit. You only have to play tetris if you have your slots in a two dimensional array and your objects have two dimensions. Imagine if Diablo 2 had all the slots in a single column and no item was wider than one slot. It'd be like that but without the images.

[Magnate]

Among the people who have given "no selling" a try, so far there is 100% approval. Not a single person who has tried it has ever written, to anywhere that I read, that they think the game with selling is more fun. Well, one guy was on the fence for a while before coming down on the side of "no selling". It does take a little while to get acclimated. E.g. my wife grumped for 1 week, was agnostic for the next week, and then declared that she would never play with selling again. It could be made better than what people have tested, since my changes to money drops were done with minimal effort and presumably could be done better.

I have to add my personal experience to this. Before trying the no-selling patch I was an ardent packrat who loved filling his inv with stuff to sell (and doing the mental arith to work out what would fetch the most if Ithyl-Mak hadn't moved on). I hated no-selling for ... ooh, about five minutes.

Now I'm of the view that we only have a town at all because item generation in Moria got too imperfect and consumables needed to be bought.

No selling really does make the game more enjoyable. Try it for yourself and see.

[miyazaki]

Among the people who have given "no selling" a try, so far there is 100% approval. Not a single person who has tried it has ever written, to anywhere that I read, that they think the game with selling is more fun. Well, one guy was on the fence for a while before coming down on the side of "no selling". It does take a little while to get acclimated. E.g. my wife grumped for 1 week, was agnostic for the next week, and then declared that she would never play with selling again. It could be made better than what people have tested, since my changes to money drops were done with minimal effort and presumably could be done better.

Since killing Morgoth, I have recently started playing Ironman, and I have to say that far from resticting my play, it feels extremely liberating. I don't miss hauling ego weapons back to town to sell them and hope I find Boots of Speed at the BM. That said, I think we would be doing a huge disservice to new players if 'no selling' was standard. Selling is a valuable tool when first cutting your Angband chops. And it feels good when you realize that you have achieved financial independence! It is a progression of the game. Sometimes I think that experienced players can forget how difficult and daunting the game is when you first start playing...

I love the difficult options that make the game so re-playable: disconnected stairs, no selling, ironman. How about a no ?WoR option? It would be a semi-ironman: once you go past dlvl 5, it becomes impractical to return to town, but gives a little more set-up time at the beginning...

[Zappa]

I'd like to try this patch. Where can I obtain it?

[PowerDiver]

I'd like to try this patch. Where can I obtain it?

Your best option is probably to try out DaJ, if you can stand the fact that there are too many unnoticeable monsters.

You can send me mail and I'll send you my old highly modded 3.0.9, but I am not supporting bugfixes for that any more.

The only tricky part to the mod is dealing with 16-bit money items in old V and variants, which IIRC aren't fully suitable to multipliers. Or maybe that problem only applies to stolen gold. I'd be happy to write a patch for some current version of V. I haven't bothered yet because I thought Takkaria was going to add it officially.

[will_asher]

Your best option is probably to try out DaJ, if you can stand the fact that there are too many unnoticeable monsters.

There are actually significantly less hard-to-notice monsters in 1.0.98 than there was in 1.0.97 (the version used for the competition) and more sources of +alertness.
In my last wizmode game (the one with Donk the human barbarian), I didn't have any problems with not being able to notice monsters. And human barbarians don't have particularly high alertness.

..Getting a little more on topic: When I first made selling to stores a birth option in DaJAngband (defaults to no selling), I thought I'd sometimes play with selling and sometimes without, but in my many games since adding the option, I've only played one game with selling turned on and that wasn't recently. I haven't missed selling at all, and I was pretty doubtful about no selling before I tried it.