No Sell - I am convinced

[bulian]

Playing my first game of angband in a while - only 3.2, sorry devs. However, I just had a great pro-selling experience which falls outside of PDs 1-2-3 categories.

A =dam +9 was in the BM for 7.4k AU and my CL 16//DL 18 character had about 4k AU on hand. His entire inventory was sold, including his (self-enchanted) dagger(+5,+6), all armor, -dObj (a very precious object), and all !CXW, leaving the @ with enough AU fpr a dagger (+0,+0). Was it worth it? If I was playing no-selling I wouldn't be able to tell you.

[d_m]

I can actually imagine some crazy solutions to the problems people are talking about (seeing a great item they can't afford). I will present them, though they are (maybe) crazy:

1. Loans

Maybe the shopkeepers are willing to let you go into debt to some degree? Loans could be unlimited in size, or could be based on gold in hand (e.g. if you have X gold you can buy items up to 3X in value). At that point your gold display would go negative, and you wouldn't be able to buy anything else until you paid off the debt.

Due the weird money bug (which we need to fix for 3.3) we know that negative money currently "works" which is what made me think of it.

This would allow you to buy one nice thing beyond your means (e.g. Cap of Telepathy, Ring of Speed, PDSM) but then be SERIOUSLY in debt. It would also be interesting because until you did pay off the debt you wouldn't be able to buy consumables/anything else from town. You'd need to start finding serious money on your dives, or essentially begin an iron game from that point. To me this sounds cool.

2. Layaway

Maybe there is some way where you can put money down to hold an item in the Black Market for awhile. For instance, maybe putting 500gp down on something holds it for 500 turns (or 5k turns, or 50k turns). Every N turns the deposit "burns down" and when it is gone the item goes back to being a normal store item.

I think this is less interesting than loans, but still allows people to try to "stretch" for an item they can't afford. The nice thing here is that once someone sees a =speed +9 that they REALLY want they will totally change their playing style to go after money in the dungeon. This means they may use fewer consumables (to save money) as well as explore dungeons more fully (to find more money also). Hydras may actually be worth going after if what you need is gold.

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Anyway, many of the other developers aren't super excited about working on shopping/selling. I'd be willing to code this up and try it out if people are interested in either option. Or someone else could take this on as a new project. I can't promise Takkaria will go for either of these, but if the community is interested and the code is there I think it's somewhat likely.

[d_m]

Another similarly weird idea: sell your stats

In the same way that people sell plasma, organs, etc. maybe the player is allowed to sell off points of physical stats. Since all classes value those (unlike intelligence, wisdom, charisma) this seems fair to me. Maybe you get N gold for the equivalent of "losing" one stat potion worth of strength, dexterity and constitution? N should probably be somewhere between 20k - 40k.

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Creating new ways to sell because no-selling is so good is kind of perverse. But I think the key is that we don't want to obligate people to haul around junk. If the idea of making your character temporarily weaker in some way (e.g. selling some useful gear you were using to buy something new) is good, there should be a way to map that onto something else.

[Derakon]

...that is a weird idea...in any event, the value you get from selling a point in a stat should be less than the cost of a stat potion, or else you could make money whenever the BM stocks that potion.

[Jazerus]

Of those three ideas I think loans are the most interesting and directly intuitive - and a good way to use the negative money glitch in a beneficial way. In addition, it could provide a cool usage for CHR - perhaps CHR could affect how big of a loan you can obtain relative to your current gold on hand?

[d_m]

...that is a weird idea...in any event, the value you get from selling a point in a stat should be less than the cost of a stat potion, or else you could make money whenever the BM stocks that potion.

Agreed. I thougth getting 20-40k for "losing" 3 stat potions was fair.

[d_m]

Of those three ideas I think loans are the most interesting and directly intuitive - and a good way to use the negative money glitch in a beneficial way. In addition, it could provide a cool usage for CHR - perhaps CHR could affect how big of a loan you can obtain relative to your current gold on hand?

I could imagine using CHR in that way, although I doubt it will make anyone prioritize CHA any higher.

I think that "making CHA useful" will require some kind of large (possibly variant-esque) change to the game, e.g. summoning.

[Nomad]

1. Loans

Maybe the shopkeepers are willing to let you go into debt to some degree? Loans could be unlimited in size, or could be based on gold in hand (e.g. if you have X gold you can buy items up to 3X in value). At that point your gold display would go negative, and you wouldn't be able to buy anything else until you paid off the debt.

How about you raise money by selling your house? You can get a loan, but you have to give up all or some of the storage slots in your home until the money's been paid back.

[d_m]

How about you raise money by selling your house? You can get a loan, but you have to give up all or some of the storage slots in your home until the money's been paid back.

Ooooh... mortgaging the home? Interesting.

[Magnate]

Of those three ideas I think loans are the most interesting and directly intuitive - and a good way to use the negative money glitch in a beneficial way. In addition, it could provide a cool usage for CHR - perhaps CHR could affect how big of a loan you can obtain relative to your current gold on hand?

I also think the loans are the best of the three ideas - mainly because having negative gold will change the game so much (no more consumables) that it will be a really tough decision.

It means I'll have to get the price of speed items right though ;-)

[Jazerus]

I could imagine using CHR in that way, although I doubt it will make anyone prioritize CHA any higher.

I think that "making CHA useful" will require some kind of large (possibly variant-esque) change to the game, e.g. summoning.

Though I still wouldn't prioritize charisma over the other stats (other than INT/WIS as the classes that don't use them) it would at least be a reason to be mildly happy when finding a !Charisma. At this point giving charisma any value at all is a good thing; making the ambitious leap of trying to make it a priority stat in some cases doesn't have to be the first step in making it not worthless.

[bulian]

Just to be clear, my post was about the additional strategic component that selling adds, not about the general availability of gold. I'm confident the additional gold drops with no selling can be tuned to a point where the gold availability is even if its not already.

While loans sound interesting, layaway seems more attractive to the shopkeeprs. With loans, the player could buy all consumables they need, go deep into debt for the shopkeeper's best item, and then die in the dungeon. With layaway, the shopkeeper doesn't sell the item for a "week" and can sell it if the player doesn't come back in time. If I were a shopkeeper I know which one I would do.

Mortgaging the house is an interesting idea, but I think a powerful strategy would be to mortgage the entire house initially for a large chunk of gold to get a really good head start. At least, that's what I would do. The alternate, to let the character buy the home and/or barn, patio, front porch, attic, garage, and super secret hideout to enable additional late game storage space, is interesting as a late game gold sink (is 3 additional slots worth 100k AU?), though this seems variant territory.

[EpicMan]

I enjoy the decision of whether to sell some of my gear (esp. Artifacts) for a really good / important item. I wouldn't say I would refuse to play no-selling, though. And I think either the layaway option or the debt option would cover my one interesting sell scenario.

[Starhawk]

I'm in the middle of my first no-selling game, and I'm still on the fence.

I like that gold drops are now meaningful amounts. In selling games, I ignored most gold on the floor unless it was directly in my path. In no-selling, it's worth a detour to pick up. Coinage becomes flavorful and significant, which is good.

I don't like the frustration no-selling adds to finding a good item that I won't be able to use. For instance, yesterday: I'm attacking with an enchanted rapier for 70 points a round, and I find a nice ego maul. The maul will do less damage because I only get one attack a round. In a selling game, I get the satisfaction of carting it back, turning it into AU, and buying something I want. In a no-selling game, I sigh and dump it on the floor. Lame.

I like having more inventory slots free to pick up useful consumables that I wouldn't normally carry in a selling game.

But I don't like the lack of choices to make in town. I was short 4000 gold for the first statgain potion I saw in the Black Market. In a selling game, I could have chosen to give up some equipment to get the statgain potion -- an interesting and difficult choice, and one that I think has been mentioned earlier in the thread. In my no-selling game, I had to jump back to the dungeon and hope for gold drops (and the potion had been recycled by the time I got the gold). Frustrating.

[ekolis]

But I don't like the lack of choices to make in town. I was short 4000 gold for the first statgain potion I saw in the Black Market. In a selling game, I could have chosen to give up some equipment to get the statgain potion -- an interesting and difficult choice, and one that I think has been mentioned earlier in the thread. In my no-selling game, I had to jump back to the dungeon and hope for gold drops (and the potion had been recycled by the time I got the gold). Frustrating.

Random idea out of nowhere - what if you could "reserve" an item in the stores? That is, pay some fraction of the item's price now, and by doing so the item is not destroyed when the store restocks - come back and pay the rest of the price later!