Nightlies embark on long journey towards 3.3

[Timo Pietilä]

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.

In 3.2 armor prices are comical. Base AC is valued too high/low (it matter too much), so that even ego with weak AC cost practically nothing (which probably causes the low price of BoS), and non-ego with high AC costs thousands. Wicker shield of resist fire [2,+2] costs less than normal Large metal shield. Robe of Permanence {conf} costs a lot less than Full metal armour of Resistance. Chain mail of resist acid costs less than normal Metal brigandine armor.

(BTW, noticed that rolling {excellent} against full plate armor gives you only resistance, elvenkind or dwarven, no other choices. Is that intentional?)

[PowerDiver]

I'm not trying to give Magnate a free pass on this pricing stuff but I think the problem might be overstated.

What should have a higher price, a whip (1d3) (+0,+7) or a scythe (5d3) (+0,+0)? Is it close? I'll give you a hint as to my position. In all my playing, I have never used an average scythe once I knew what it was.

Should a starting char be able to buy a sling cheaply enough not to worry about it? That's a basic gameplay decision that should not be held hostage to Magnate's randart generation code.

[d_m]

I'm not trying to give Magnate a free pass on this pricing stuff but I think the problem might be overstated.

It might feel like there's a big difference between Boots of Speed +4 lying on the ground on level 21 and Boots of Speed +4 in the Black Market being sold too cheaply, but they are quite similar, except if you don't have 15k gp (or whatever). Certainly in the last few months I haven't seen any speed items for sale but have picked up several that I thought were unusually shallow.

I guess the complaints would make sense if people think they aren't being given enough gold when selling +speed items... but somehow I doubt that's what this crowd is angry about

[Magnate]

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.

Well, there have been a scattering of remarks over the past couple of years that the pricing system is now much more consistent and coherent than it used to be. Nobody else has said it's worse than 3.0

I reject your first point completely. It is well known that the pricing of +speed has been difficult to balance and anomalous in an otherwise consistent system. So I do not think that observing the underpricing of speed can be extrapolated to a view that the whole system is a retrograde step.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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]

@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.

[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.

[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'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]

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.

[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.

[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.