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).

i saw some blah blah about other monsters in room losing a turn if it were to be fixed,

please~ dont bother!

the conseqeunces that can happen are punishment for lozer!

99% of the time I find Summon Monster quite early and it produces a centipede or something else innocuous, so I've never really developed the stairs habit. The 1% of times when I'm a bit deeper and still haven't found it are the ones that are (very, very occasionally) fatal, or at least harrowing.

Wow, you are lucky. I developed the standing-on-stairs technique after losing dozens of chars to OOD monsters in the first few dlevs - baby dragons being particularly difficult for low level chars to get away from or defeat.

The timed restocks happen when a traveling merchant caravan happens though town. They buy all that valuable stuff that the shopkeeper bought from you, and he uses the proceeds to keep him stocked up on his essentials. Occasionally they happen by with a nice enchanted item for the keeper to stick into his stock. The Black Market guy just knows the best caravans to trade with, and bribes them to keep them from trading with the regular keepers, hence the need to charge the exorbitant prices he does.

MAGNATE here's your new sig. "PUNISHMENT FOR LOZER"

A.

And the caravans are terrified of the townsperson-slaughtering PC, hence why the stores don't restock until you go into the dungeon!

By the way, the Berserker in Quickband actually has to slaughter townsfolk

(To get his rage up so he can use his 'Shrewdness' ability to get better shop prices)

A.

excuse me, i feel i am being abused by this angband community! , and it hurts ~!~!~!

i raise serious issues, everytime u are thinking its a joke , please no rage~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhXnZUCAu8c

(Oh, BTW-- ;))

If I were a shopkeeper, I'd poison Potions of Life. Everyone saves them for the end anyway, and if Morgoth goes down, I'd be out of business.

A feeling of death flows throughout your body. -more- You have no more Black Potions of Life. -more- You are dead.

With your final breath, you summon the strength to mutter: "Oh, the irony!"

the problem with no-sell is that i really like selling. the problem with id by use on potions and scrolls, is often you can't tell what they are unless you try them whilst affected by the status they fix, or in certain situations, which is just dumb to me. i know no-sell doesn't automatically mean you have to id by use, but screw giving stuff away. (to fake people in a game at least) as for being a bad player, i just am, regardless of playing sell or no-sell, and i'm fine with it.

I certainly wouldn't *complain* if ID by use got more reliable. I can live with what we already have but there are some annoying bits.

Well that was my technique for using wands of polymorph to speed levelling back in my Moria days. :D

Well its impossible. I buy up the 99 arrows the general store stacks, and the few arrows (if any) the weapon shop have.

I always run out of ammo first, than any of the other consumables I as a ranger carry.

I feel that the 33% (?) break rate of arrows are to often, or the shops need to carry more arrows.

Of course I could switch to a crossbow, but I rarely find any which are better than the bows I find, so I opt for more damage.

Wow, you must be using your arrows to kill everything then. Even when I play a ranger I use melee for most monsters, just because the tedium of retrieving ammo after each fight is wearing otherwise.

yeah, thats probably what happens. myself, i usually only arrow to death shrooms, jellys, things like that, and arrow to weaken strong things. weak things that won't hurt my equipment, stats, or status get meleed

I wish that there were magnetic arrows that I could just cast a spell to collect or something.

To think Angband's inventory management used to be less friendly to archery. I normally go mostly melee anyway, but then I've never gotten terribly far with Rangers.

I see the point of Blackmarket, raised in the poll thread.

Sometimes I'm short just 1k or even less to buy a wanted item in the BM. Maybe some sort of exchange policy?

For this ring of slaying, I'll most happily take your "The Rapier 'Forasgil'"

A quick thought on no_selling. I play certain types of characters. Currently i play gnome mage and try to become winner without the use of melee or firing.

If i find a powerfull sword, that does not give a resist, or some other benefit - it is useless for me. Even the Megadamage whip of slay something is worth nothing. But still i am happy about finding it, because i can sell it in town and hope to get something usefull over the black market (which ridiculously has already several priest spell books at sale, but no mage books *whine*).

If i cannot sell stuff anymore, i will have less often the 'lucky feeling' of finding something which benefits me in a certain way. I think that just finding gold does not give the same amount of satisfaction that the items you can sell do.

On the other hand, i am most likely in for the idea to abolish all shops. You only keep what you think could turn out usefull in the future.

P.S. If identify becomes available via consumable scroll - then the feature could eliminated as well. Why bother with IDing stuff, if it is expected that the player does it anyway. Then all items could be IDed by standard and noone would have to care about ID at all. Or eliminate ID at all - that at last would force the player to try things out.

Cheers,
Tibarius

You can play a no-sell game without having a setting that forces it. Just don't keep anything for selling.

That's true, but the no-sell setting also boosts gold drops to compensate.

jsjjajjajaj now ur talking of ways to sell in no sell? cant anyone tell its ridiculous?~!

?


I'm not sure what you're referring to.

that kind of thing for no sell just said up abov lol~

Don't worry - he's from Nimbin :)

Recall into the dungeon and clear a couple of rooms, then recall back. It's pretty unlikely you'll trigger restock on that short of a trip.

excuse me~!?

I've been trying to look for specific reasons why some people are opposed to no_selling. I've come up with

(1) It is a game of managing slots, and forcing a warrior to drop his 3 scrolls of light to pick up something to take home to sell is a good thing.

(2) There is more money available to the char in selling games, and people want to be able to buy more high-end stuff in town.

(3) Confusion over the fact that you can still donate unaware flavored items to stores to identify them even with "no selling".

If you hate playing with no_selling, and it's not about (1) or (2), could you try to explain it to me? I'd like to see if there is a way to address the concerns some other way in a no_selling context.

The only reason I do any selling whatsoever in games is solely to speed up the process of finding stat potions, and also to buy a rare item with telepathy or speed. Telepathy or speed generally allow you to move on to the "next chapter" in the dungeon, which means more fun. Also, I save money if I'm a pure caster for the escapes spell book (again, to reduce the tedium of scumming for them so I can start moving on to more exciting parts of the dungeon).

For me, it's never about inventory management. It's about IRL time saved by finding things I would otherwise have to scum for.

alright. i'll try to fully explain why i hate no-sell. i really really like selling. it is exciting, fun, and interesting to me. it's one of the biggest reasons i play the game, and i think it provides a unique rhythm to the game to go down and come up, i don't want to stay in the dungeon for long periods of time, i want to come back up for a breather, and sell stuff and check the black market for cool stuff.

like i said, i'm not a great player, i've played for probably 20 years and have never won, and i don't see myself ever winning (except perhaps by accident). i'm not disciplined enough to have a playstyle that lends itself to winning, i'm impulsive and often hold movement keys down. i'm the complete opposite of those people that have to maximize everything, i just like to zone out, kill things, find cool stuff, sell some of it, buy different stuff. i usually make it to about the mid 30s character and dungeonwise, and i'm happy doing it.

its not really that i enjoy managing slots, although i don't really mind it. its also not just being able to buy more high end gear, although i enjoy that. to me, if i found some great item, and just left it laying there, whats the friggin point of anything? it makes everything seem so useless and sad.

i use selling to id potions and scrolls, and would feel bad getting nothing for them. does that not make sense? i don't care, its how i feel regardless of if it's how i should feel. i don't think i'll play 3.3.0 anymore because of the drastically reduced prices on selling things, although some of the other changes seem interesting. id by use is great on things like wands, but potions, scrolls, and even staves are annoying to id by use, because of certain conditions needing to right to ID (such as invisible creatures needing to be nearby to identify a scroll of see invisible) i know i can "donate" it, but i feel like the shopkeep is doing alright without my charity. i dunno if anyone else is remotely like me in playing preferences, but i certainly realize i'm a quirky player.
sorry if i'm rambling, but the reasonings behind my personal preferences are usually hard for me to articulate.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Nobody. It's important to have contrarian views. :)

The only way I see how selling could save you time is to give you more money sooner. What do you see as the difference between what you like about selling and my point (2)?

Thanks from me too, Nobody. It is helpful to read your explanation.

I interpreted your (2) to be that somebody would rather just buy stuff in town instead of exploring for it because they're lazy. In my case, I was making a note that sometimes a character gets totally stuck in a part of the game and can't go deeper because they are missing something crucial (like telepathy, or TO spells), and they're just unlucky. Being able to buy some of these "gateway" items hedges the gamble of the RNG making life boring for a long time.

This also is related to my mental investment in Angband. I don't want the game to take me months and months to win, but that attitude varies per person.

Some people scrutinize every single step and spellcast, and their journal looks like "Turn 145065: Stepped left. I think I see a pair of boots on the ground. I will begin moving towards it. Detect Monsters shows a Spectre that is 16 squares away. Turn 145066: Feeling saucy and stepped diagonal left and up, to keep the defense guessing. Another Detect Monsters indicates the Spectre hasn't seen me yet. Turn 145067: Got paranoid and decided to spend a turn shitting my pants. What if the spectre wakes up and chases me? OMG WHAT IF THE SPECTRE WOKE UP TO THE SOUND OF MY PANTS?? Turn 145068: Recalled."

I don't have time for that stuff. :)

I'm curious about why people are upset over "donating" un-ided (not really sure how you make that abbreviation past tense...) objects. I always felt like you practically were donating them already-shopkeepers pay diddly for something unknown. And id by use isn't *necessary*, and I can't say that sell vs. no-sell has changed how I id things at all. I usually drink potions, read scrolls, zap rods, and usually read scrolls of ident for staves/wands (I find that id-by-use for staves/wands is just annoying). I don't really see that selling comes into play there.

And I think by the time you would have enough money to afford BOS or something of telepathy in the blackmarket, no-sell has usually caught up to regular selling...but it does eliminate the prospect of selling artifacts in emergency situations-something I do miss a little bit.

I play a very fast angband game, so fast that my sister-in-law was watching me for a few minutes one time and got frustrated because she couldn't read fast enough to keep up with my playing. I like no-selling because it means that I spend a lot less time sitting and thinking. Less time thinking about meaningless things=I find cool objects in the dungeon faster=I have more fun. The only time I ever really seriously stop and think each turn out is when I'm finding a challenging unique, or if I see a greater vault, but know I'm not strong enough to think about going into it...but do anyways, because well, I would probably rather die than miss a greater vault.

This is the best description of anything ever.

on another note i had to turn off autosave in oangband, lol ~ who came up with that idea!?

Playing my first game of angband in a while - only 3.2, sorry devs. However, I just had a great pro-selling experience which falls outside of PDs 1-2-3 categories.

A =dam +9 was in the BM for 7.4k AU and my CL 16//DL 18 character had about 4k AU on hand. His entire inventory was sold, including his (self-enchanted) dagger(+5,+6), all armor, -dObj (a very precious object), and all !CXW, leaving the @ with enough AU fpr a dagger (+0,+0). Was it worth it? If I was playing no-selling I wouldn't be able to tell you.

I can actually imagine some crazy solutions to the problems people are talking about (seeing a great item they can't afford). I will present them, though they are (maybe) crazy:

1. Loans

Maybe the shopkeepers are willing to let you go into debt to some degree? Loans could be unlimited in size, or could be based on gold in hand (e.g. if you have X gold you can buy items up to 3X in value). At that point your gold display would go negative, and you wouldn't be able to buy anything else until you paid off the debt.

Due the weird money bug (which we need to fix for 3.3) we know that negative money currently "works" which is what made me think of it.

This would allow you to buy one nice thing beyond your means (e.g. Cap of Telepathy, Ring of Speed, PDSM) but then be SERIOUSLY in debt. It would also be interesting because until you did pay off the debt you wouldn't be able to buy consumables/anything else from town. You'd need to start finding serious money on your dives, or essentially begin an iron game from that point. To me this sounds cool.

2. Layaway

Maybe there is some way where you can put money down to hold an item in the Black Market for awhile. For instance, maybe putting 500gp down on something holds it for 500 turns (or 5k turns, or 50k turns). Every N turns the deposit "burns down" and when it is gone the item goes back to being a normal store item.

I think this is less interesting than loans, but still allows people to try to "stretch" for an item they can't afford. The nice thing here is that once someone sees a =speed +9 that they REALLY want they will totally change their playing style to go after money in the dungeon. This means they may use fewer consumables (to save money) as well as explore dungeons more fully (to find more money also). Hydras may actually be worth going after if what you need is gold.

----

Anyway, many of the other developers aren't super excited about working on shopping/selling. I'd be willing to code this up and try it out if people are interested in either option. Or someone else could take this on as a new project. I can't promise Takkaria will go for either of these, but if the community is interested and the code is there I think it's somewhat likely.

Another similarly weird idea: sell your stats

In the same way that people sell plasma, organs, etc. maybe the player is allowed to sell off points of physical stats. Since all classes value those (unlike intelligence, wisdom, charisma) this seems fair to me. Maybe you get N gold for the equivalent of "losing" one stat potion worth of strength, dexterity and constitution? N should probably be somewhere between 20k - 40k.

------

Creating new ways to sell because no-selling is so good is kind of perverse. But I think the key is that we don't want to obligate people to haul around junk. If the idea of making your character temporarily weaker in some way (e.g. selling some useful gear you were using to buy something new) is good, there should be a way to map that onto something else.

...that is a weird idea...in any event, the value you get from selling a point in a stat should be less than the cost of a stat potion, or else you could make money whenever the BM stocks that potion.

Of those three ideas I think loans are the most interesting and directly intuitive - and a good way to use the negative money glitch in a beneficial way. In addition, it could provide a cool usage for CHR - perhaps CHR could affect how big of a loan you can obtain relative to your current gold on hand?

Agreed. I thougth getting 20-40k for "losing" 3 stat potions was fair.

I could imagine using CHR in that way, although I doubt it will make anyone prioritize CHA any higher.

I think that "making CHA useful" will require some kind of large (possibly variant-esque) change to the game, e.g. summoning.

How about you raise money by selling your house? :D You can get a loan, but you have to give up all or some of the storage slots in your home until the money's been paid back.

Ooooh... mortgaging the home? Interesting.

I also think the loans are the best of the three ideas - mainly because having negative gold will change the game so much (no more consumables) that it will be a really tough decision.

It means I'll have to get the price of speed items right though ;-)

Though I still wouldn't prioritize charisma over the other stats (other than INT/WIS as the classes that don't use them) it would at least be a reason to be mildly happy when finding a !Charisma. At this point giving charisma any value at all is a good thing; making the ambitious leap of trying to make it a priority stat in some cases doesn't have to be the first step in making it not worthless.

Just to be clear, my post was about the additional strategic component that selling adds, not about the general availability of gold. I'm confident the additional gold drops with no selling can be tuned to a point where the gold availability is even if its not already.

While loans sound interesting, layaway seems more attractive to the shopkeeprs. With loans, the player could buy all consumables they need, go deep into debt for the shopkeeper's best item, and then die in the dungeon. With layaway, the shopkeeper doesn't sell the item for a "week" and can sell it if the player doesn't come back in time. If I were a shopkeeper I know which one I would do.

Mortgaging the house is an interesting idea, but I think a powerful strategy would be to mortgage the entire house initially for a large chunk of gold to get a really good head start. At least, that's what I would do. The alternate, to let the character buy the home and/or barn, patio, front porch, attic, garage, and super secret hideout to enable additional late game storage space, is interesting as a late game gold sink (is 3 additional slots worth 100k AU?), though this seems variant territory.

I enjoy the decision of whether to sell some of my gear (esp. Artifacts) for a really good / important item. I wouldn't say I would refuse to play no-selling, though. And I think either the layaway option or the debt option would cover my one interesting sell scenario.

I'm in the middle of my first no-selling game, and I'm still on the fence.

I like that gold drops are now meaningful amounts. In selling games, I ignored most gold on the floor unless it was directly in my path. In no-selling, it's worth a detour to pick up. Coinage becomes flavorful and significant, which is good.

I don't like the frustration no-selling adds to finding a good item that I won't be able to use. For instance, yesterday: I'm attacking with an enchanted rapier for 70 points a round, and I find a nice ego maul. The maul will do less damage because I only get one attack a round. In a selling game, I get the satisfaction of carting it back, turning it into AU, and buying something I want. In a no-selling game, I sigh and dump it on the floor. Lame.

I like having more inventory slots free to pick up useful consumables that I wouldn't normally carry in a selling game.

But I don't like the lack of choices to make in town. I was short 4000 gold for the first statgain potion I saw in the Black Market. In a selling game, I could have chosen to give up some equipment to get the statgain potion -- an interesting and difficult choice, and one that I think has been mentioned earlier in the thread. In my no-selling game, I had to jump back to the dungeon and hope for gold drops (and the potion had been recycled by the time I got the gold). Frustrating.

Random idea out of nowhere - what if you could "reserve" an item in the stores? That is, pay some fraction of the item's price now, and by doing so the item is not destroyed when the store restocks - come back and pay the rest of the price later!

Damn -- I like this idea a lot. I really do think it fixes most of the concerns people have with no selling (other than the "no consolation prizes for unusable equipment" problem.)

its a joke!

why bother making changes to make a change that isnt even meaningful or good to work more like it was before the change?

i think more thinking is required,

please , no rage!~

I am similarly paranoid, Magnate, but I take it up a notch: I only read unidentified scrolls if the staircase I'm on is also in a dead end.

I usually dump said item in my house, and hope any stat gain pots (or shuffle ones) will give me enough blows, so the maul gets better.