Whither pseudo?

[Magnate]

It seems there's now a fairly widely-shared view that pseudo ID as in V 3.x doesn't really work well in v4 with the number of different types of item and their widely variable quality.

The first thing to establish is whether we need pseudoID at all. With rune-based ID there are only a few dozen runes to learn (70? 80?), and the idea is that by the late game pretty much any item is autoIDd on pickup because you know all the runes. With the improvements to ID-by-use since it was introduced in 3.1.0, I'm not 100% sure we really need pseudo in v4 any more.

If people think we do, it needs completely redefining. The categories of "excellent (no high resists)", "excellent (with high resist)" and "splendid" were designed around the contents of V's ego_item.txt, and simply don't make sense in v4.

I haven't thought about this much, but I have one very simple idea to share, if people want to retain some kind of pseudoID system:

Affixes on items have an "affix level", which indicates how rare/powerful that affix is for that particular type of item at that depth. So rCold is "great" on armour until dl25, "good" from 26 to 50 and "average" below that.

My simple idea is that an item would pseudo according to its highest affix level:

Splendid means it has an "uber" affix (e.g. a 5x slay)
Excellent means it has a "great" affix
Good means it has a "good" affix
Average means it has nothing better than "average" affixes

Obviously we can complicate this as much as we like, bumping pseudo up or down if there are more than a certain number of affixes, etc. For example, we could use "mixed" for items with both a "good" affix and a "bad" one.

But there might be a much better way to do pseudo than using affix levels - other suggestions welcome.

[EpicMan]

I agree that pseudo is no longer needed.

[ghengiz]

Although Magnate's suggestion is reasonable, IMHO, I too feel that pseudo is no more needed in the new set of rules of v4

[Derakon]

Assuming that the craftsmanship affixes will become learnable (i.e. eventually you should be able to instantly ID every non-artifact, because you recognize every affix on the thing), basically the only reason you'd have to pseudo something would be because it has affixes you don't recognize...in which case you'd want to ID the thing anyway to find out what the affixes are. I don't think we buy much by investing in pseudo in light of that.

[Magnate]

Assuming that the craftsmanship affixes will become learnable (i.e. eventually you should be able to instantly ID every non-artifact, because you recognize every affix on the thing), basically the only reason you'd have to pseudo something would be because it has affixes you don't recognize...in which case you'd want to ID the thing anyway to find out what the affixes are. I don't think we buy much by investing in pseudo in light of that.

Splendid. Three votes for removing pseudo then. Anyone want to argue for keeping/reinventing it?

And yes, fizzix has argued strongly for all the non-magical affixes (make, material, quality) to be obvious on pickup, so this is could happen. IMO this is a bit of a shame because it means you would instantly know the dice of a weapon or the base AC of armour, and I think it's quite nice to learn that by using it in combat. But a lot of people don't like having to do that, and would just ID it instead to find out. (There's no reason you couldn't learn the affixes without learning the exact stats of the item, but that seems a sure way to please nobody ...)

[Nomad]

Joining the chorus to agree that pseudo is now redundant; the presence and number of runes on an item is really all you need to know, and you can see that on pickup already.

And I agree with Derakon that it should be possible to learn non-rune-based affixes too. (I'd be happy if they were learned the first time you ID them just the same as runes, but if not, maybe as something that kicks in at some class-based character level?) Affixes have changed the balance so that egos are no longer guaranteed to come with good combat bonuses, so wield-testing equipment is much more necessary into the late game, and the ID minigame is more of an annoyance than a feature.

[Derakon]

I suppose the "realistic" approach would be:

* Runes: obvious that it has a rune on pickup, not obvious what it does.
* Material: obvious that it's made of a strange material, not necessarily obvious what the implications of that are. Weight would be obvious, dice/to-hit/to-dam not obvious.
* Craftsmanship: looks like any other item at first glance; becomes obvious over time as the player learns to recognize quality work.

In practice, I guess that means that craftsmanship affixes should be treated just like magical runes for purposes of ID, while material should be just obvious. I don't think complexifying it further gains us much.

[Magnate]

I suppose the "realistic" approach would be:

* Runes: obvious that it has a rune on pickup, not obvious what it does.
* Material: obvious that it's made of a strange material, not necessarily obvious what the implications of that are. Weight would be obvious, dice/to-hit/to-dam not obvious.
* Craftsmanship: looks like any other item at first glance; becomes obvious over time as the player learns to recognize quality work.

In practice, I guess that means that craftsmanship affixes should be treated just like magical runes for purposes of ID, while material should be just obvious. I don't think complexifying it further gains us much.

This is fine with me. I'm keen that we don't give away too much information - I'm happy for the material to be obvious such that Blackrock items immediately show that affix, but it would be nice if the precise effects (other than weight, which is indeed obvious) of material affixes were learned like runes.

Fizzix? I am assuming that Derakon's use of "craftsmanship" covers both make and quality affixes ...

[sethos]

In place of Pseudo ID, I would like to see something on items that would indicate how many unknown runes the items has.

instead of Warhammer(Splendid) I would very much like to see warhammer (3 unknown)

that way you can easily spot the items that you still need to ID.

[Magnate]

In place of Pseudo ID, I would like to see something on items that would indicate how many unknown runes the items has.

instead of Warhammer(Splendid) I would very much like to see warhammer (3 unknown)

that way you can easily spot the items that you still need to ID.

Yep, that seems to be something that everyone would like to see.

EDIT: opened as #1598