[CF List] The 'dis'economy of crossfire

[Kurt Fitzner]

I've been playing 1.3 for a few weeks now, and I've noticed that money is
almost worthless.  This wouldn't be such a problem if it didn't mean that made
the costly scrolls simply as difficult to get as running around to 3 or 4
different cities to find a magic shop that generates one.

A few of the issues I see (and suggestions for change) are:

Level 8+
The 'floating' exchange rate in Nurnberg is interesting, but it
absolutely cannot exist with the 'town portal' spell.  For free money, do
this: create a town portal that goes from the inside of Nurnberg's bank to as
close to Scorn's bank as you can get (Scorn's bank interior is no-spell, so
drop the town portal inside the healing church beside it).  Take a thousand or
so platinum to Scorn's bank and exchange it for gold.  Zip through the portal
and exchange the gold for platinum in nurnberg.  Repeat.  20% profit per
round trip. In ten minutes you can have as much platinum as you can carry.  The
only limiting step here is that you can only carry a 150-200k gold, so once
you get up to about 40-50k platinum, drop 20k of it and continue.  As you can
see, once you get the town portal spell, it's free money for ever more.  This
needs to change.

Level 10-12+ (when you can kill lots of skeletons without getting too badly
hurt)
Generators in places like the 'hall of bones'.  This is a slower
way to generate wealth.  It works best once you get smithery.  Can work with
bowyer too.  What I do is bind all the "use_skill <identifyskill>" commands for
all my identification skills in a single key.  Simply go inside and leave 10-40
generators not destroyed (as many as you can handle at your level).  Then,
stick autopickup at >5 ratio.  Run back and forth killing skeletons in the same
line.  Every few minutes, identify the stuff on each square.  Then keep
running back and forth.  I can generate 10-40k per hour.  At low levels, this
is significantly easier money than should be obtainable.

I'm sure most of you know much more lucrative spots than the above.  The fact
is, wealth is way too easy to come by.  I have a few suggestions I'd like
comments on.  Some of these will end up on my server:

1) Kill the different exchange rate in Nurnberg
2) Add a new value to shops that represents the money they have on hand.  Only
give them 5k or so in ready cash each.  Once you sell more than that in that
shop, the shop won't buy any more until it's reset, or unless someone buys
stuff there.
3) Make generators only put out 2 or 3 monsters each before stopping.  Or,
allow a limit to be placed on them in map generation.  This way, maps that are
simply a bunch of generators can't be used for item trolling.  I can't see
this affecting game play too much.  If I've defeated all the monsters put out
by a room who's generators have spawned 3 times, then spawning more monsters
isn't challenging me.  Or, perhaps a time to recharge.  Spawn up to 3, then
wait for 15 minutes, then it can spawn again.
4) As an alternative or suplement to 3, we can flag items of monsters produced
by generators so they don't survive the destruction of the monsters, or so that
they are valueless in shops.  If they are shop valueless, we could end up with
a sub-economy of players trading in magical weapons obtained from dungeons
that can't be sold in shops.  This would be a good thing... promoting
interaction and role-play.

Another item of 'diseconomy' are artifacts.  Artifacts are way to easy to get.
The main culprit for this is the 9 gates of hell quest.  With 'create earth
wall', I started doing this quest at level 15.  It generates two random
artifacts and 5 stat potions. Another culprit is the elemental tower quest
(demonslayer, flame tongue, fist of the earth, trident of sea mastery, and
thunderfist, plus several random artifacts).   This could easily be locked so
that someone coming again is told 'you've already graduated' when he tries to
enrole.  All quests like this IMO should have 'force' locks.  Stick a force
on the player completing it that locks him out from doing it again.  The Scorn
nobility quests are ideal for this sort of thing.  Can't repeat any of them.

I welcome any comments, suggestions, rebutals, and discussion from the rest of
you.

         Kurt Fitzner (a.k.a Reven @ crossfire.excelcia.org)

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