Selling quirk 3.4.1

[Stephen2]

Hi team, came across a selling quirk that seemed silly to me:

1) Had 3 x Tiger Eye Ring, unIDed
2) Sold 1 to magic shop, for 21 GP, turned out to be Ring of the Mouse
3) The other two Tiger Eye rings became Ring of the Mouse (no further info as not IDed)
4) Was then able to sell each of these to the shop at 290 GP each

Can't be right, the shopkeeper should know he considers all Rings of the Mouse bad and not offer me any money for them?

Thanks,
Stephen

[Magnate]

Yes, this is ticket #1315. We think we might have a consensus on dealing with this, but it's not been implemented yet.

[Estie]

Whats the problem here ? A random ring is worth 21 gold to a shopkeeper (he assumes its probably junk, with a small chance of being good). If he knows its of mouse, the chance of it being better have increased, so he offers more. Assuming 290gp is about what an average ring of mouse goes for, this would be fine.
The average mouse ring might be cheaper, but we enter the area of subjective evaluation here and I dont see a principal issue.

On a different note: the shopkeeper minigame ala nethack where you try to trick the shopkeeper is being systematically removed and selling reduced to a supermarket type transaction. Last rudiments are the annoyed/excited lines of shopkeepers when they discover the real value of some item sold.
I assume this is consent and I am not advocating a change on this, but I want to add a little questionmark. This kind of thing doesnt matter in the big picture of defeating M, but might hold some flair even for advanced players and certainly be of interest to new ones. If any of the latter exist, that is.

[Derakon]

The problem with Ring of the Mouse is more that it's a mixed-blessing item (giving bonuses to DEX/Stealth but significant penalties to damage), but the shopkeepers don't handle that very well especially when the items are only partially ID'd.

As for the shopkeeper minigame, the general consensus among the developers is that shopping is not a very interesting way to gain equipment. It's helpful to the players to have a safe place they can retreat to to restock on certain consumables and exchange items with the home, but beyond that and the Black Market the general trend has been to try to encourage players to spend their time in the dungeon, not the town.

[Estie]

Well I dont know how shopkeeper games encourage time in town (you sell junk, you dont spend hours farming in town).

The difference here is rather:

In nethack, you can cheat the shopkeeper and that is good fun. In angband, you can cheat him too (by selling partly ided rings) but that is bad and morally questionable.

[Derakon]

In nethack, you can cheat the shopkeeper and that is good fun. In angband, you can cheat him too (by selling partly ided rings) but that is bad and morally questionable.

I don't think anyone's making some kind of moral judgement here. But the shopkeepers are expected to be reasonably worldly and to be familiar with the types of items they might be interested in buying, and it makes no sense for them to have unfavorable (for them) valuations for items.

I mean, if you show them a ring and say "This is a Ring of the Mouse; it increases my DEX by 3 and my stealth by 2!", they really ought to know that it also decreases your damage by some fairly large amount, like all Rings of the Mouse do. The fact that they don't take that into account when they present their valuation is a bug.

[Estie]

Why is that a bug ? You can call it "unwanted game behaviour", but not bug. A game in which the shopkeeper has not complete knowledge of all affixes is perfectly valid. If anything is a bug, then shopkeepers basing their pricing on player knowledge of said item.

In fact I would find a shopkeeper that misjudges a ring of mouse far more "wordly" than a perfect machine type who never makes mistakes, were it not for the fact that he makes the same mistake every game.

If someone ever is going to expand on the shop-minigame, getting some randomness into shopkeeper-pricing might be a good idea.

[Timo Pietilä]

Can't be right, the shopkeeper should know he considers all Rings of the Mouse bad and not offer me any money for them?

All rings of Mouse are not bad. Some are in fact quite good. High DEX bonus can be quite big benefit with high damage weapon, bigger than to_dam penalty (more blows), and stealth is not insignificant bonus either. I have used those with almost all of my chars at some point of the game. To_dam penalty also doesn't affect ranged combat.

[Derakon]

All rings of Mouse are not bad. Some are in fact quite good. High DEX bonus can be quite big benefit with high damage weapon, bigger than to_dam penalty (more blows), and stealth is not insignificant bonus either. I have used those with almost all of my chars at some point of the game. To_dam penalty also doesn't affect ranged combat.

You remain the only person I've seen manage to get more damage out of wearing =Mouse for melee than without. Every time I check it completely destroys my ability to kill things because the extra blows are way less useful when they're doing much less damage. Not wanting to kill everything with ranged combat, the only characters I've had get any use out of =Mouse whatsoever were mages, who don't really care about the +DEX either.

I'm not saying it's not possible for =Mouse to improve your melee abilities, but you must be far luckier than I am to so consistently get ones that are usable.

[Estie]

You remain the only person I've seen manage to get more damage out of wearing =Mouse for melee than without. Every time I check it completely destroys my ability to kill things because the extra blows are way less useful when they're doing much less damage. Not wanting to kill everything with ranged combat, the only characters I've had get any use out of =Mouse whatsoever were mages, who don't really care about the +DEX either.

I'm not saying it's not possible for =Mouse to improve your melee abilities, but you must be far luckier than I am to so consistently get ones that are usable.

Exactly the same here. I am really trying to make use of them with melee characters, mostly because Timo keeps advertising them, but the circumstances in which they are an upgrade are too rare. Maybe Timo can post a dump of his next character who uses one, to help solve this mystery ?

[Timo Pietilä]

Exactly the same here. I am really trying to make use of them with melee characters, mostly because Timo keeps advertising them, but the circumstances in which they are an upgrade are too rare. Maybe Timo can post a dump of his next character who uses one, to help solve this mystery ?

You need to get one with low to_dam penalty (-3d5 so lowest possible is -3, average is -9) and high DEX bonus and use it with weapon that has high damage output so that to_dam penalty is not large portion of your damage output and light enough to get benefit from increased blows.

It is rather short window of game where they can be better than without, but it is there. Before pure DEX rings appear and after you find good weapon. I sometimes use them with combination of Reckless Attacks (mouse+reckless > 2xmouse or 2xreckless).

Ring of Mouse is very common early ring so I probably throw away very large portion of those as useless, but with the amount of them some of them eventually usually turns out to be useful.

I think also my favorite race being Dwarf (warriors and priests as class, mostly priests) might play some role in this: -2 penalty to DEX for Dwarfs so relative boost to blows by the DEX with the ring is higher, and I'm not hurrying to get low turncount so I probably use more turns in low levels finding things than Derakon. I also give quite a bit more value to STR than DEX in character creation.

It might be that someone playing something like Hi-Elf or Hobbit Ranger might not get enough boost from the DEX bonus to find it useful enough.

[Estie]

Recently I have been playing dwarves too, though not priest. It is true, finding a good mouse ring isnt the problem - they are very common. However, so many other things need to be just right for the mouse ring to not be a damage loss.
The biggest issue is having a big dice branded weapon *without* finding a good dagger, a plain better type like westernesse, or a better ring. I have had characters where I did get slightly better damage with the brand, but the damage versus resistant monsters was so pityful that I still didnt use the setup.

Another issue is that the setup is inflexible. If I am using a weapon with 2 reckless attack rings and find, say, a see invis ring which I want to use, I can just replace the worse of the 2 rings. In case of mouse ring + reckless attack, I probably need to return to a setup with different weapon.

[Timo Pietilä]

I have had characters where I did get slightly better damage with the brand, but the damage versus resistant monsters was so pityful that I still didnt use the setup.

Branded katana or similar is usually the weapon I end up using with RoMouse.

I don't know, maybe it is just my playstyle that fits perfectly to RoMouse usage.

Maybe it should have more random to_dam penalty to be more often useful, like 2d9 instead of 3d5: 2d version averages 10 instead of 9, but is more likely to get low (and high) penalty than with 3d, or even something like 1d20+1 for completely flat penalty distribution (with -2 as minimum). That way more people might find it useful and not junk.

-2 to dam with +4 to stealth and DEX I could actually use instead of pure +4 DEX ring (if I would use DEX ring, I usually end up using highest possible STR or CON I can find at the point of game where stat-rings are common thing to wear)