[crossfire] treasure chests & wealth

[Vernon T Rhyne]

Quoting Mark Wedel <
     
     mwedel at sonic.net
     
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      The discussion of too much wealth in crossfire often comes up.  Looking at
     
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      the 
     
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      random map treasure chest code, I found some oddities.
     
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        Now I'm not sure how much of the excessive wealth comes from random maps,
     
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      so 
     
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      this may not be a really big deal....
     
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        But looking at the code, the deeper down in the dungeon you are, the more 
     
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      treasures it creates on a level.
     
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        This is readily apparant in some cases, when pretty much every space on the
     
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      map is covered with a chest.
     
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        This in itself wouldn't be bad.  However, the deeper in the dungeon, the 
     
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      higher the difficulty rating, and this means better treasure.  So not only do
     
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      you get better treasure, you get more of it.  And this completely ignores the
     
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      treasure that the creatures you are killing have.
     
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        So my proposed fix is to eliminate/reduce the increase of treasures that
     
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      show 
     
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      up on maps.  Deeper levels are still better, simply because better quality
     
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      stuff 
     
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      will be created.
     
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        (as an aside, there are basically 2 modes of treasure creation on the
     
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      random 
     
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      maps - in one mode, a chest is created for each treasure.  In the other mode,
     
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      it 
     
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      places only a few treasure chests, but fills them with a whole bunch of 
     
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      treasures.  This is why at deep levels, you sometimes see the maps covered
     
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      with 
     
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      chests, and other times, just a few chests with tons of stuff in them)
     
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This changes (for the negative in my opinion) the other dynamic at work, the
acquisition of truly rare items.  Since this is basically a lottery at really
really long odds, these random levels are a significant potential source of
rare items.  If you kill the volume, you dramatically lower the chance at a
rare item.

If we're reducing clutter, I'd argue we should increase the value of
individual-item yield for super-high level treasures.