This could be circumvented with clever enough flavor text in the shops, I think. Something that could probably use updating is the description of no_sell in the birth options - as it stands, the one-line description doesn't mention that gold drops are boosted so it sounds like a ridiculous challenge option to someone who hasn't read up on it here.

There *is* help on this option, but it's only available during the birth process, not during the game (see ticket #1447).

Huh? New players have no expectations at all about this, so why would they be "scared"?

In the context of roguelikes, and video games in general, "selling" things for 0 gold doesn't make terribly much sense. Without some flavor text, perhaps portraying a no_sell selling interaction more as the shopkeeper identifying the item for you, but keeping it, then this probably would be persistently reported as a bug by confused new players.

New players have expectations from *other* games they have played. Since vendor trash is the default state for RPGs you can expect players to expect it.

"Find more gold instead of selling items" would fit on one line there

It seems to work in the nightlies...

There is no need to show '0 gold' at all.
No need to even call it selling - it could be 'sacrifice' or donate.

'k' doesn't actually destroy objects (it's just hidden, squelch style), or I'd actually suggest that the 'k' command should identify the object before destroying it.

- Frank

Why not just remove the sell command? Identifying has already gotten really easy and store identify is not really a must.

Then there would be no source of confusion.

"Donate" would be good.

If you think modern shops I don't think many of them do trades. They just sell, they do not buy.

I suspect that's where we'll end up, but we can't do that while no_selling remains an option. (The original issue here was whether the option should default to on or off.)

IMO new players to Angband are unlikely to be entirely new to the concept of role-playing, and will expect to be able to sell items in shops because that's what most role-playing scenarios involve. As someone else said, we'll get a lot of spurious bug reports if we default it to on - unless we also change the store code to do something other than offer 0 gold (e.g. shopkeeper says "I do not buy items from my customers") - but that causes problems for the sell-to-ID mechanic ... and so on. Nothing is ever straightforward.

So when rune based ID has been working in the game for a while, and we decide that we don't need the ID by store mechanic any more, we can turn the stores to real stores that only sell to you :-)