Shopkeepers buy for less than they sell for, and presumably they sell all the ego items you sell to them "off-camera" for a very large amount of money, making them by far the wealthiest people in Middle-earth.

It's a nice job if you can get it.

another thing that annoys me; arrows break to much, and forces me trips to surface only to restock ammo.

Carry more arrows, then. The tradeoffs on ammo basically are:

Arrows: lightweight, break easily, decent damage
Bolts: heavy, don't break easily, decent damage
Shots: midweight, don't break easily, poor damage

So to make up for arrows getting used up more, you carry more of them. When I'm using bows I typically stock up to 40 basic arrows in my quiver when in town, sometimes more.

That said, I do switch to crossbows whenever possible because the weight isn't as much of a concern in the late game and the bolt and arrow stacks you find in the dungeon are the same size -- making ego bolts more usable over the long term. Either arrows should come in larger stacks or bolt stacks should be more rare compared to arrow stacks; I'd go with the former.

count me among one who's tried no-sell and hates it. now i know i'm not a good player, and i accept that. selling is a huge part of why i play the game, and i've played pretty much as long as i can remember, umoria before there was angband, and i was too little to really know what was going on. id by use is ok for weapons, i guess, although its a hassle. for potions? come on! who really enjoys IDing by use for potions and scrolls?!? no, i won't do it, i can't do it, its wrong. i'm about the opposite of the min-maxing players that were talked about in that article that was linked. i play games to relax, some huge effort on trying to play the game effeciently as possible seems like work to me. i hate work. i love to just zone out and explore the dungeon for a little while, come up, sell stuff, buy stuff, rinse and repeat. it's like a zen thing with me, at its best.

I'm not sure how some of what you mention applies to no_sell. You don't have to ID-by-use in a no sell game; ID-by-sell still works, you just get no money from it. Besides which, ID by use of potions and scrolls in the early depths before you can afford constant magical identification is essentially riskless as long as you do it in a cleared room with some healing things on hand, and I do as much ID-by-use in a sell game as a no sell game. Angband isn't Nethack (though I like Nethack, too), the focus of the game isn't ID so ID shouldn't be arbitrarily painful like it was in older versions.

I agree with you, playing as absolutely efficiently as possible is usually not very fun. The value of no sell for me is that it aligns efficiency with fun - that is, I can do something (not pick up junk to sell) that I would prefer to do for fun's sake, and not have that be a sub-optimal strategy.

I can respect that you don't like no sell, but most of your post doesn't really say why.

Wanting to sell doesn't make one bad player. This is a game, its purpose is to be fun, so whatever makes you feel good is the way to play.

I have to agree that no-selling is orthogonal to ID-by-use. Still, if you don't like no-selling, then play without. The selling game isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Probably the riskiest item to ID-by-use in the early game is Summon Monster. My latest character barely survived using one; if I'd been smart I would have been standing on a staircase, but I got lazy and nearly died (after blowing all my escapes and healing). And later on Curse Weapon and Curse Armor still exist. I had another character get his body armor blasted at around 500' and spent the next 1500' wearing it before enchantment finally broke the curse. That was interesting. Though if his weapon had been blasted I would probably have given up.

Testing potions by use is almost risk free; just don't do it in combat in case you turn up Salt Water and immediately faint from lack of food. And scrolls are usually safe if you just use them while on a staircase until you turn up Summon Monster. Though, past 800' or so I'm IDing everything I find before using it anyway.

ive been ruined by scrolls of curse, scrolls of summon and summon undead, but also, +1/-1 unid potion can ruin ur setup alot lol, u get unexpected +1-1 go wrong, it suk!

Use-ID is pretty much only useful the first dive, since after that you can usually afford ID; I've been burnt on Summon Monster before, but most of the other dangerously negative (or mixed-blessing, like gain/loss) potions and scrolls don't show up until you've probably been back to town and picked up a staff of ID. I wouldn't use-ID past about 500' personally.

I thought everybody avoided being burned by Summon Monster (or Summon Undead) by making sure they were standing on a staircase before reading any untried scrolls. One day d_m will fix monster energy so that summons are guaranteed not to move before @ gets a turn, and then all will be fine ;-) (at the moment it only happens about 2-5% of the time anyway).