[crossfire] New crossfire todo list

[Mark Wedel]

Raphaël Quinet wrote:

> In general, I think that the shops do not give enough hints to the player about
> how cheap or how expensive they are compared to other shops.  Even using
> 'use_skill baragaining' does not seem like a very good solution to provide more
> info.  Tying together the selling and buying prices helps by giving some hints
> to the player.

  True - if a shop isn't paying much for an item, it is probably because it 
doesn't want it, so would also sell it for not a lot of money.

  I think it might also be interested in having more specialized shop lists than 
right now.  Every weapon shop basically has the same stuff, every armor shop 
basically has the same stuff, etc.

  It might be more interesting that based on location and other factors for this 
to vary.  An example could be a town that is far from any iron mines - in such a 
town, iron (steel) armor and weapons would be pretty rare, but the wooden and 
leather ones would be quite common.  That can be done just by some new treasure 
lists.

  I think it would be a bit too much of a pain to try and adjust prices in all 
these shops - IIRC, the shop code deals in meta types right now (armor, weapons, 
etc).  Having to have a list which lists out all the different objects and price 
variance would be a real pain, and also prone to get out of data.

  But such changes would also be interesting - if looking for really good bows, 
your best bet may be the shop at ... which doesn't have a lot of weapons, but 
does have a whole bunch of bows, arrows, etc.

  Some people may say 'wait - that means a player can go to some town, buy the 
equipment their cheaply, travel to another, and sell money'.  Of which I 
basically say 'fine'.  It's not like there isn't lots of ways to make money 
anymore (wait, they can go into a dungeon, kill some monsters, ...).  As long as 
this cycle isn't circular (they can't take the same objects back again, resell, 
etc) I don't see a problem with it.  If some players want to play traders, who 
are we to prevent them.

> 
> I think that we should update many of the legacy shops and force some
> specialization: shops should not sell stuff that they are not willing to buy.
> Currently, there are some shops that sell all kinds of items but only accept to
> buy a subset of them (e.g., magic shops selling different types of magic items
> and only buying potions but not wands or rods, or vice-versa).  It would be
> better to remove the shop tiles that do not match the type of items that the
> shop specializes in, or to convert them to the right type.  Or maybe move them
> to an area of the shop that is clearly marked as a place for "other stuff".
> Even the weapons and armour shops in Scorn do not make this obvious enough.
> So if a player enters a magic shop and sees only scrolls and books there, this
> would be a good hint that trying to drop potions or wands would not be a good
> idea (even if it is a magic shop).

  Yes - the old scorn shops have several tiles for items not of their type - 
that never made a whole bunch of sense - those should be updated to have the 
correct item types.

  I think in the big towns, it would be completely reasonable for a shop to not 
deal in types it doesn't like - give a value of zero for them.  In some sense 
this is better - then you know to sell it someplace else, vs getting completely 
shafted on price and having to pay quite a bit more to buy it back.

  Another point which has sometimes been discussed is the idea to 'unsell' 
items.  EG, you accidentally drop something you didn't want to sell.  Problem 
is, to buy it back costs a lot more than you sold it for, and you can't afford 
to buy it back.

  One way this could perhaps be done is like this:
If you drop items, it sells you how much money you will get for selling it, but 
doesn't do the actual transaction.
When you move off the space, it then does the transaction, selling all the 
remaining items there, identifying them, and marking them as unpaid.
I think that can be done pretty easily by using the move_off flags (I think it 
has to be done when the player moves off and not when they use the shop map, as 
if you have multiple players in the store, there is a fair danger of getting 
confused on who is selling what, and/or a player could move onto a stack of not 
yet sold objects before the player gets to the shop map, and thus take items, etc).

  Interesting though related to this - maybe not all shops can identify all 
items sold, so you could actually find interesting unidentified items in shops 
once in a while.

> 
> IMHO, the fact that a "shop guide" has been created (indicating what shops
> are better at buying what stuff) as an out-of-game wiki page is a sign that the
> game itself does not provide adequate information.

  Arguably, any game player data on the wiki is a sign that there isn't enough 
in game help for that purpose.  IMO, you shouldn't really need to go to a wiki 
to find information you need to just play the game (OTOH, hints vs playing is 
tricky.)