Nightlies embark on long journey towards 3.3

[Pete Mack]

You bought a pair of Leather Sandals of Speed [1,+6] (+5) for 15994 gold.

(I thought this was fixed? That is, no speed items in Armory, and speed items are seriously undervalued.)

[Timo Pietilä]

You bought a pair of Leather Sandals of Speed [1,+6] (+5) for 15994 gold.

(I thought this was fixed? That is, no speed items in Armory, and speed items are seriously undervalued.)

I'm not playing nightlies (because I want to get feeling of 3.2 first), but I think that has something to do with general undervaluing of armors. Rings of escaping and armor that gives same +4 cost about the same, and escaping has a bad drawback. In fact RoS +4 and Escaping cost exactly same and difference between teleportation and RoS +2 is negligible in 3.2.

[Timo Pietilä]

I'm not playing nightlies (because I want to get feeling of 3.2 first), but I think that has something to do with general undervaluing of armors. Rings of escaping and armor that gives same +4 cost about the same, and escaping has a bad drawback. In fact RoS +4 and Escaping cost exactly same and difference between teleportation and RoS +2 is negligible in 3.2.

I thought this a bit and if I have understood correctly item quality is the determining factor of item monetary value in the game now. This leaves out the rarity and depth, which both are _real_ values of the how high people value things. Rarity and depth should matter, deeper the better and more rare the better.

[Magnate]

I thought this a bit and if I have understood correctly item quality is the determining factor of item monetary value in the game now. This leaves out the rarity and depth, which both are _real_ values of the how high people value things. Rarity and depth should matter, deeper the better and more rare the better.

Um .... sort of. This is taking us back about two years, to the power-pricing debate. If you have a pair of boots of speed, its utility (usefulness, value, whatever) is identical, whether you found it on level 100 or level 1. It's identical whether you have one pair or ten, since you can only wear one. So it's power rating should be absolutely of depth and rarity.

That said, *before* you have a pair, the amount you will be willing to pay will depend on how likely you are to find one. So depth and rarity should affect price directly, but not power.

So the simplest thing to do is to say that the object power determines the price of a level 1 item with alloc_prob 100. You then multiply that price by 100/alloc_prob and by level, so that The One Ring is about 10,000x more expensive than its power rating would suggest.

This would probably go a long way towards sorting out the undervaluing of speed items.

N.B. Please don't anybody assume that we would multiply the *current* prices by 10k. The power-pricing formula would need adjusting to take this into account. I'll do some experimenting and put something into the nightlies for testing.

[Antoine]

This would probably go a long way towards sorting out the undervaluing of speed items.

I think a lot of players would be satisfied by simply multiplying the shop price of any item that gives +speed by 10. I would

A.

[Pete Mack]

@Magnate:
the only speed item (of any particular quality) whose store price matters is the first one that shows up, given that the item utility translates directly to power vs monsters.

Thus the valuation of a RoSpeed +2 vs a Ring of Teleportation are approximately the same. (Yes, it's a nuisance to swap in the Ring of Teleportation during melee, but it is feasible. And I have done it more than once in the past.)

A ring of escaping is a different matter: you can't melee, and you can barely use archery in combat with a RoESC. So it's power value is comparatively much, much lower than a RoSpeed (+4).

Further...
Just as melee bonus is most common in the weapon slot, speed bonus is most common in the ring slot. So a non-ring speed item is worth proportionally more ring speed item, in about the same degree that an off-weapon melee bonus out-values a weapon +to_dam bonus.

Edit:
If you really want to value speed correctly, you need to model the opportunity cost of wearing a particular speed item vs something else in that slot. So speed +2 is not proportionally valued to speed +5, while speed +6 and speed +10 are close to being proportionate in value: there just aren't a lot of objects that are more valuable than +6 speed. At the same time, +2 speed on an Amulet of Trickery is a lot more valuable than +2 on a Ring of Teleportation, because the opportunity cost of wearing the amulet of trickery is more than covered by rNexus, rPois, and +2 DEX.

[PowerDiver]

I've had a couple of crashes in place_object. The first time I thought it was my fault, as I have been doing some serious code mucking, but the second time makes me wonder if someone else has introduced a bug. This is based on a clone from 1/12. The second time, I am sure that I was digging rubble. I don't think I was digging the first time, just moving about, but possibly killed something by accident or tunneled with typeahead or typo.

[d_m]

I've had a couple of crashes in place_object. The first time I thought it was my fault, as I have been doing some serious code mucking, but the second time makes me wonder if someone else has introduced a bug. This is based on a clone from 1/12. The second time, I am sure that I was digging rubble. I don't think I was digging the first time, just moving about, but possibly killed something by accident or tunneled with typeahead or typo.

There were a bunch of memory management issues in staging/master around then. If you try the most recent nightly master I expect things will work better.

[PowerDiver]

There were a bunch of memory management issues in staging/master around then. If you try the most recent nightly master I expect things will work better.

I knew about those, but somehow did not make the connection. I would have understood a crash in object creation, but it didn't occur to me that object placement would be related to memory issues. I suppose once the stack gets trashed all bets are off.

[d_m]

I knew about those, but somehow did not make the connection. I would have understood a crash in object creation, but it didn't occur to me that object placement would be related to memory issues. I suppose once the stack gets trashed all bets are off.

The real issue is that some things were moved to being pointers (which will simplify a lot of code down the road). But yes, if you accidentally copy a pointer rather than copying the value pointed to, you can get all kinds of weird corruption.

Anyway, I think we have it under control now, and sorry for all the headaches it caused.

[Magnate]

@Magnate:
the only speed item (of any particular quality) whose store price matters is the first one that shows up, given that the item utility translates directly to power vs monsters.

Thus the valuation of a RoSpeed +2 vs a Ring of Teleportation are approximately the same. (Yes, it's a nuisance to swap in the Ring of Teleportation during melee, but it is feasible. And I have done it more than once in the past.)

A ring of escaping is a different matter: you can't melee, and you can barely use archery in combat with a RoESC. So it's power value is comparatively much, much lower than a RoSpeed (+4).

Further...
Just as melee bonus is most common in the weapon slot, speed bonus is most common in the ring slot. So a non-ring speed item is worth proportionally more ring speed item, in about the same degree that an off-weapon melee bonus out-values a weapon +to_dam bonus.

Edit:
If you really want to value speed correctly, you need to model the opportunity cost of wearing a particular speed item vs something else in that slot. So speed +2 is not proportionally valued to speed +5, while speed +6 and speed +10 are close to being proportionate in value: there just aren't a lot of objects that are more valuable than +6 speed. At the same time, +2 speed on an Amulet of Trickery is a lot more valuable than +2 on a Ring of Teleportation, because the opportunity cost of wearing the amulet of trickery is more than covered by rNexus, rPois, and +2 DEX.

Absolutely - Eddie has made this point many times and I opened a ticket for it a while ago (#1005). I completely agree about =Esc too - the power algorithm doesn't currently subtract anything for the induces-fear flag because it was added more recently.

For 3.3 (or 3.4 if I can't keep up with the punishing pace of 3.3) I intend to rewrite obj-power completely, and make sure pricing includes both slot-specific utility and depth/rarity. There are a bunch of things I need to refactor first to make that easier: the first is breath elements and resists (#803, which I'm halfway through and hope to merge into staging this weekend) and another is monster power (#869, which I will look at next). Once they're both done I will rewrite obj-power.c and bring about world peace.

[PowerDiver]

It's one thing to do this for you randart code, but I still think this is overkill for store pricing.

The old prices mostly OK, except that a random power of ESP wasn't priced right. It would have been simple enough to fix that. IMO it is better to set the prices according to gold drops and what you want the player to be able to buy when.

Some day you may get the pricing stuff working properly, but so far there is no question in my mind that it is significantly worse than what we had in 3.0.

[Magnate]

Some day you may get the pricing stuff working properly, but so far there is no question in my mind that it is significantly worse than what we had in 3.0.

Fortunately for my sense of self-worth, the majority don't seem to share that view.

[PowerDiver]

Fortunately for my sense of self-worth, the majority don't seem to share that view.

Every person who comments that speed items are mispriced might count on my side. I don't remember any other opinions being expressed pro or con. I think most people just accept the changes as a fait accompli.

[Derakon]

As a matter of practice, this has to be done for randarts to function properly, so there's little point in complaining about how it used to be better except to help guide how the new system can be improved. I'd say some things are better (e.g. Rings of Damage are far more expensive than they used to be) and some things are worse (armor is overvalued) but aside from a general overavailability of money (warning: haven't played Vanilla since before the 3.2 launch) things are fine.