Additional Pseudo ID

[Lord Fell]

I haven't played much in the way of Mages lately, so I've been waiting until I get a pseudo ID on an item before I identify it.

I'm thinking that it would be good to differentiate between "low" ego items, and "high" ego items. For example, "feather falling," "resist cold," and "slay orc" are low ego items. "Elven Kind," "holy avenger" and "of westernesse" are high ego items.

Low Ego items could remain {excellent} and high ego would pseudo-ID as {fantastic}.

[PowerDiver]

For some reason jewelry does not pseudo, and when I included that in changes I submitted it was removed.

The objects you mention as "fantastic" all have properties that are obvious on wield. Wield them, before or after pseudo does not matter, and they will be marked as {splendid}.

IMO you should get wield info upon pseudo, but that too was overruled. In fact I don't believe you should get pseudo on items not wielded, but that is a different discussion.

In summary, these sorts of changes to pseudo have been coded and submitted, but were rejected.

[Magnate]

For some reason jewelry does not pseudo, and when I included that in changes I submitted it was removed.

The objects you mention as "fantastic" all have properties that are obvious on wield. Wield them, before or after pseudo does not matter, and they will be marked as {splendid}.

IMO you should get wield info upon pseudo, but that too was overruled. In fact I don't believe you should get pseudo on items not wielded, but that is a different discussion.

In summary, these sorts of changes to pseudo have been coded and submitted, but were rejected.

Er ... unless you got an explicit rejection from Takk, I suspect this was a mistake. He's always been keen on improving pseudo because it enourages ID-by-use. And unless I'm mistaken there was a time when they were in trunk, wasn't there?

Anyway, if you can point me to or resend your patch I'm pretty sure people would love to see this. But then again I may have misunderstood. I thought the whole point was to make pseudo of jewelry consistent with the pseudo of weapons, i.e. you automatically notice anything that you could see on the char screen etc.

[PowerDiver]

I don't have the separate stuff about pseudo. It was all part of the massive unified changes to object knowledge flags I sent to Tak. There was stuff for jewelry, but it was removed. There was a fair amount of work on doing things flagwise that was disallowed [e.g. I had tables defining how good each particular flag was], in favor of simply marking egos as {ego} rather than excellent vs splendid or whatever.

Jewelry has ID-by-use, but no pseudo. Historically, the main point of pseudo was to avoid wielding objects with sticky curses. Well, it seems that way to me anyway. I still do not understand why sticky curses remain in the game, but that they do is an explicit design decision, and the inability to wield-test jewelry without risk appears to be another explicit decision.

[Nick]

I still do not understand why sticky curses remain in the game

Patience, grasshopper.

[Lord Fell]

What about making "gain pseudo" an active thing? As a rule, I don't want to try something on until I know it's not (at least) cursed. Right now, I'm playing a Paladin, and I'm finding lack of Identify spells and slow pseudo to be a hassle, because I'll fill my pack up with weapons and armour that take hundreds of rounds to finally give me an pseudo for.

Basically, instead of gaining a feeling of how good an item is by osmosis (it's giving off nasty vibes that you can feel right through your back pack) you'd "evaluate item" (V key is free?) and spend however many rounds deciding if an item is worth your time. I kind of do something like this anyways -once I get too much stuff to move at a decent speed, or even just a pack full of unidentified stuff, I'll Rest until I get those pseudo feelings.

As now, the speed a pseudo ID is gained would be dependent on Class... Perhaps the amount of information could also be varied depending on who's evaluating what. For example, a Mage could get Pseudo on jewelry and wands, but only a "good" or "bad" on weapons and armour, while a straight warrior couldn't get any ID off of jewelry at all.

[Adley]

I think Un's pseudo id is probably the best i've seen. I didn't try people other than warriors yet, so i don't know if there's a slow one, but as for the high, you (most of the time) see the pseudo right away, before even picking the stuff. Which speeds everything tremendously. It's even balanced by the existence of an "unusual" feeling which can be anything.

[buzzkill]

I suggested a similar system before and it went nowhere. It was something like making pseudo a skill similar to searching, and then making it class/item combo dependent as you have suggested. Also faster pseudo when resting with full HP's. A lot of people seem to like V's new fangled ID-by-use. I'm not one of them.

It's not that the old pseudo system worked great, it didn't, but it could have been improved. Also ID-by-use isn't all bad, in fact it's not 'bad' at all. I just think that V's implementation to too all encompassing, and far too easy (while still being somewhat annoying to make use of). An intuitive blend of the two would get my vote. Who knows, it may already exist in a variant that I've never played.

[Lord Fell]

I'm not a fan of that.

I tend to play a lot of warriors, or classes that are item dependent. That means that (especially in the early games) I just don't ID anything that isn't {good} or {excellent} because I don't have the cashflow to ID anything and everything. If I have to wield something to ID it, it will cripple my early game because I just can't ID ... anything.

Probably what I'd end up doing, is hauling everything back to my house, saving, backing up my save game, and then selling it all. Anything that's good enough to use, I'd mark and save-scum to NOT sell. Which is to say... cheat like mad.

I wouldn't feel guilty about this in the slightest; I'd consider it a design flaw.