Prices

[Timo Pietilä]

Much more rare.

In 3.0.5, items in normal shops were treated as if found at 250'. So you mainly got plain objects, sometimes magic ones, very rarely ego items, very very rarely powerfull ego items like Boots of Speed.

Black Market used to pick a level between 1250' and 2500' for object ganeration. Great items could show up (especially since plain ones get discarded), but they were still very rare.

Nowadays, stores create objects based on a much higher creation level. And it looks like odds for powerfull ego items to be found in the dungeon have increased a lot, so the show up much more often in the shops.

I had several winners back then when i wrote in my notes "no Boots of speed found at all", while today it isn't that rare to find several on one dungeon level.

OTOH it also used to be flat distribution of 1d10 for the PVAL, now it is "normal distribution", so getting one with +10 is still rare. You can find many with low PVAL, but getting one with high PVAL is still rare. ego-item.txt says "values:SPEED[2+M8]" and "M4 uses the m_bonus function to generate a number between 0 and 4 according to a normal distribution" (0-8 in case of speed boots).

[fph]

OTOH it also used to be flat distribution of 1d10 for the PVAL, now it is "normal distribution", so getting one with +10 is still rare. You can find many with low PVAL, but getting one with high PVAL is still rare. ego-item.txt says "values:SPEED[2+M8]" and "M4 uses the m_bonus function to generate a number between 0 and 4 according to a normal distribution" (0-8 in case of speed boots).

Uhm.. as a mathematician, I am afraid that "a number between 0 and 4 according to normal distribution" means absolutely nothing. A normal distribution is a probability measure on the set of real numbers, not on a discrete set like {0,1,2,3,4}.

[Pete Mack]

Presumably it means binomial.

[Estie]

I have seen (and bought) speed boots from armor shop, but with low Pval.

I disagree that speedboots are worth more than !augmentaition; the reason being that you only need them once, you have a (good) pair you dont need another, while you want multiple potions. So when you see them in shop, they are either worth a ton or nothing; the potion is worth half a ton, half a ton, ...., eventually nothing. On average, the potion is worth more.

[Derakon]

Uhm.. as a mathematician, I am afraid that "a number between 0 and 4 according to normal distribution" means absolutely nothing. A normal distribution is a probability measure on the set of real numbers, not on a discrete set like {0,1,2,3,4}.

I believe that the standard deviation used for Angband's "normally-distributed random number" is based on the range of valid values, so e.g. if your range is 0-8 then it might use a standard deviation of 2, or something like that. And yeah, the fact that we don't use floating point makes the distribution rather more chunky than a true normal distribution, but is it so hard to mentally substitute "approximation of a normal distribution" in?

[Pete Mack]

Derakon--it is not a problem. Neither is a binomial distribution, but it's slightly harder to calculate.