[CF List] The 'dis'economy of crossfire

[Mark Wedel]

  Going to catch up on this message and follows ups i na single message, so read
below.


Kurt Fitzner wrote:

 > Level 8+ The 'floating' exchange rate in Nurnberg is interesting, but it
 > absolutely cannot exist with the 'town portal' spell.

  Yeah, this sounds broken.  It was probably put in before the town portal spell
was added.


 > Level 10-12+ (when you can kill lots of skeletons without getting too badly
 > hurt)

  This is trickier.  I think the idea of limiting the number of monsters
generators make is completely reasonable.  This also fixes some of the worst
experience flaws.  I think of the third level (hill giants) in raffle1.  More
than once, I've sat by the staircase where only one giant can approach and beef
up my wisdom experience (As a worshipper of mostrai) by hitting them with holy
word or other such spells (can also work on magic exp the same way).

  Yes, limiting generators would likely make some maps easier (you may not have
the power to clear out a room of them, like my example above, but could just
wait it out and kill them at your pace).  But IMO, I think the tradeoff is
reasonable - I'd rather the monsters be tougher than it just be a sure number of
monsters that make things difficult.

  One thing to do is make it so generators generate their inventory (if they have
one), so that it would be very easy to customize the monsters that get generated.



 > 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.

  The problem here is that crossfire is a multiplayer game.  It would really suck
as a 5'th level character that I found I couldn't sell any of my stuff in scorn
because all the shops have reached their purchase allowance because some high
level town hopping hero came in to sell his loot.

  And if you do limit it by character, then you go back to the players having
help character that they use to sell loot, or whatever else.


 > 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.

  More mixed on this one.  Reducing the value, or eliminating items on generated
monsters might change maps a bit - I think it may really hurt the lower level
characters where for many of the maps, the bulk of the loot is from the
generated items, as the preset treasure isn't much (perhaps because the map
maker knew the generated items would also be some form of treasure).

  It could be just as reasonable to reduce the value of most items in general.
What items do people typically buy from stores?  I seldom by magic weapons or
armor from the stores, typically can find that.  Will by skillscrolls (hard to
find them, even in shops at times), spellbooks, and some potions.


 >
 > 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.

  Actually, you can repeat them, you just need to restart from the beginning.
But even then, it may not be worth it - even though that high level character
will breeze through the low level dungeons, the time it takes to do so may not
make it worth it.

  The point someone made in a followup about not being enough maps may be true.
However, a simple counterbalance is then to put the final treasure in a
protected room that you can only get the first time through.  But once again,
this may result in more people using helper characters again.

  some items may be overpriced.  The bonecrusher probably is - I don't think
anyone ever really uses it as a weapon (too heave even though it does good
damage), so it really shouldn't be worth that much.

  But the bigger issue is probably a lack of anything to spend money on.  On to
that further below.

Christoph Bergemann wrote:
 > 1) Introduce some sort of real bank system, so that a player can carry money
 > to the bank and get a credit card. This might be used in some other ideas
 > below and would be practical for the player as well, as he wouldn't have to
 > carry larger amounts of money with him.

  You can sort of do that with gems.  Granted, these are not directly treated as
cash, and do impose some penalty on conversion (overall, I think it is 5%).  At
one point, I think the banks would basically let you get 'cash', but it wasn't
thought to be really good in terms of within the style of the game.

  But is weight of the money any real issue?  Would reduced weight (or say yet
another higher denomination coinage) really help out this problem?  If anything,
I think it may be worse because large sums of money would be that much easier to
carry around.

 > 2) Make apartments for rent and not for ownership. A player might have to pay
 >  some amount of money every time he enters the game for them or whatever.
 > This might also make different apartment sizes an interesting aspect in the
 > game.

  This has to be carefully thought out.  The person who plays infrequently
probably shouldn't be penalized for doing so.  So it would have to be based
somehow on time played.  I'm not sure how to reasonably do this - it would
really suck to get locked out of your apartment for lack of payment when you
have sufficient funds inside (or equipment you could sell to raise sufficient
funds).

 > 3) One might put a level requirement to some artifacts, so that they can be
 > sold in shops to higher level players. Nevertheless I am in doubt if this
 > would be a good idea.

  The item_power idea falls in with this - powerful items would have a higher
item_power, and thus low level characters would be unable to use them (or if
they wanted to, might only be able to use that item but no other good items, so
it may not be a benefit).  But the item_power stuff still need a lot of tuning.

 > 4) Create stores which are only open after the achievement of some kind of
 > quest. Examples of this are already out there like the black market in
 > Pupland or the adventurous shop in Stoneville. One might for example consider
 >  a store open only to princes of Scorn. This might be a way to avoid 3.

  Could do that.  AT one point in the past, stat potions could be found in shops,
but that really resulted in people searching all the shops for the potions they
wanted.  I think one problem right now could be the randomness - you may
actually have money to spend on something (like say a skill scroll or whatever
else), but there are none around right now to buy.  So what do you do?  Decide
you'll wait for the shop to reset and maybe buy it later.  So in some cases,
spending money can be difficult.

  But the point my statement above is that if shops with really good stuff are
available, that really good stuff should probably be static (eg, it shouldn't be
generating random artifacts that player can just check for each time the shop
resets).  But you still have the problem that 'special access dude' can buy the
stuff for his friend that doesn't have access.  There is no way to really
prevent that.


 > 5) Just thought of costs for transportation. Why not have to pay for the ship
 >  to Lake country or wherever you wish to go, nobody would expect them to be
 > free.

  Yes, that is something to do.  But most likely, unless the cost is outrageously
high, it won't make much a dent on characters budget.  And high level/wealthy
characters may have extended their apartment to have the special portals, so
don't even need this anymore.

  It may be more interesting that those special portals need to be charged (100
diamonds or something) each time to work - much more than the ship would be, but
some of them go places not easily reachable, so you can use your portal to go
there if you want, but it will cost something.


 > 6) One great wish of mine: Princes of Scorn should be given the chance to buy
 >  some really expensive castle, perhaps like the guildhouses, but for single
 > players, which are also extensible. Maybe in this way there could be achieved
 >  some final thing a player can save his money for.

  Reasonable to do.  Could add a 'park' to the towns for that matter, and let
people pay different sums of money to get statues of themselves or whatever else.

     
     andi.vogl at gmx.net
     
      wrote:
 > IMO, one of the root problems is that object values in CF are defined in
 > CONFUSING base-values that don't give any clues to the real thing. No
 > mapmaker ever gets a feel for values.

  Some of this can be done by testing.  But yeah, value of items is then effected
by charisma.  More confusing might be high the base value gets changed based on
the random enchantments the treasure code puts on.  For that stuff, the value is
sort of exponential, so as a lower level character, if your lucky enough to get
a +4 item generated, you've just come into a lot of cash.

 > I believe on of the best ways to improve the situation would be introduction
 > of equipment-duration and -repair. E.g. weapons/armour would get "used-up"
 > during battle, a few times a day they need to be repaired for money. Hence,
 > the better your equipment gets, the more money you spend for the occasional
 > repair. Top-level artifacts could consume millions of platinums to repair.
 >

  Yeah, I've seen this discussion before.  This would have to be done in some
form of sliding scale.  Eg, something like an item at 100% is in perfect
condition, an item at 0% is broken (non usuable).  Between 50 and 100%, item
works just fine, but less than that you don't get the full effect.  Cost of
repair is based on the value of the item.

  I say that because I played a game where items would get broken, but the state
was either 'broken' or 'fine'.  It was very annoying to go into a combat and
find out that one of your characters had some broken items, and that is why he
was getting toasted.  So to do such a scheme, I'd definately want something such
that if I started a dungeon with my items in perfect condition, I could finish
the dungeon and still have the items in good shape (50%+), at which point I then
get them repaired. In other words, I don't really want to have to leave while in
the middle of exploring a dungeon to get my items fixed.  Some dungeons are
exceptionally big (I think there are random dungeons that are 99 levels deep),
so those are exceptions.  But I'm think of things like dungeons that take less
than an hour to play.

 > Certainly, trying to fix the most disrupting economy-bugs is also a good
 > idea. At least the bonecrusher-value and broken exchange rate you pointed out
 >  should be fixed. I assume nobody sees a reason against doing that?

Nope.

     
     jsegarraf at terra.es
     
      wrote:
 > I also think that another type of house should be added. It's very funny to
 > "upgrade" a guild finding the objects for town portals and other furniture,
 > so I think this should be done with other houses also.
<snip>

  One oddity in crossfire is that furniture has no purpose.  Savebed has some
obvious purpose, but beyond that, tables, chairs, beds, whatever else don't mean
anything.

  It would certainly be reasonable to perhaps add some reasons for this
furniture.  If you lay down, get hp and mana back faster or something (maybe
improved chance of fighting off disease for that matter).  Nicer furniture maybe
gives better benefits.  Problem is, I think at high levels, this still won't
mean much (spellcaster just equips all his spell regen items to get his points
back faster, have cure disease spells, etc).

Christoph Bergemann wrote:
 > just had another thought: I don't see a real reason, why a shop should buy
 > the items I don't need, in my experience I cannot just go to a shop and sell
 > them some stuff. We might think of introducing second hand stores, in which
 > the sold items remain even after a server reset. Think of the store
 > in Santo Dominion, but remove the "empty" switch (maybe remove items after
 > some time like 10-20 server resets). When we have this we might introduce
 > a better market system, so if there are already 20 Bonecrushers in the
 > store a player just gets 100 plat or whatever, whereas items that are much
 > sought for and remain in the store for only a short time might be

  Could easily enough be done.  I think some of the main store doing both buying
and selling was a simplicity model.

  The above model makes more sense, but see point way above about being 
multiplayer.  Could sort of suck to be the person that logged in right after 
someone else cleared a dungeon and sold all his crap the the secondhand store.

  Some tracking system (perhaps via plugin) could be done - just have a database 
of what items have been sold, and what have been bought.  But I have a feeling 
that in most cases, there would be very few items actually bought from the 
secondhand store.

  It would be very simple to make a shop with a much longer reset time.  There 
could also be some other optimizations to make this store more useful.  Eg, 
cursed/damned items get tossed in the trash, so disappear quite quickly. 
Likewise, normal non magical armor/weapons go away quite quickly.  This would at 
least mean the shop contains stuff people may want to buy (wands, scrolls, 
magical items).  This map could in theory never reset, instead stuff just 
disappears from it, or at least gets sorted (put all the +1 items on some space, 
etc).