Reboots more than once a week?

[fearwig]

The hell there isn't. If your pc goes to the traders directly after reboot and sells exactly FIVE of everything in their inventory, you are being disrespectful to the other players on this mud who are trying to make a living. Granted, it can be hard to survive if you don't sell your items, but please try to use discretion when selling items to the merchants in the cities. I myself have been guilty of this in the past, and try my best to remedy such actions to allow a more fair playing field for everyone else.

Dude. You totally missed my point. First: that is an OOC restriction, and I agree that it is absolutely good OOC courtesy to respect that restriction and to allow others the chance to make the money as well. My point is that in an ideal setting, there would NOT be anything spammy about it, because the act of selling your goods in itself, even all your goods, is absolutely not twinkish, spammy, or anything else negative.

If these items are going to be saleable, useful items ICly, there should be an ability to sell them, essentially no matter what. The fact that merchants can only carry 5 of each indicates that these merchants are just randomly buying them, knowing they'll sit around forever--if they're valuable sale items, ICly they'd want to buy as many as they can get their hands on, if the price is right.

The way things are, you've got a big fat OOC condition sticking in the middle of an IC game. And that's never good. On Arm it's even more detrimental, considering how great the game is about being IC otherwise.


As for "using our discretion"--that's OOC discretion! There is NOTHING IC about limiting how much of your goods you turn into useful material (sid). That is in every way a totally ridiculous statement, I'm sorry.  I can deal with this issue, as a player--it doesn't really bug me that much, and wouldn't even if I were playing a hunting character at present. The problem is that it's absolutely unrealistic, and there's no real reason to it at all. And it reinforces the stupidity of the reboot-camping system, which we can all agree caters to a spammy, OOC mentality.

As a player, I'm a reasonable, nice guy, and I want to be courteous to other players. As a character, I may be a greedy feck--in fact, I'm very likely to be. And I'm going to turn everything I can that's useless to me into sid. As it is, I tend toward being a nice player, at least where this issue comes up. That's not good, and I feel it hurts the game when I have to be a nice player, rather than a realistic character. If you disagree, I think we have some serious disagreements as to what is and is not an IC MUD.

[Forest Junkie]

My point is that in an ideal setting, there would NOT be anything spammy about it, because the act of selling your goods in itself, even all your goods, is absolutely not twinkish, spammy, or anything else negative.

It's twinkish when you absolutely destroy the environment and economy around you by running a damn monoply on the amount of GUTS and teeth from animals being sold. Give me a break. It's twinkish, powergaming, and spammy. These acts are having a negative impact on ArmageddonMUD currently.

If they're valuable sale items, ICly they'd want to buy as many as they can get their hands on, if the price is right.

I agree. But still, there should be a limit. Perhaps a higher bar. Or, one of the ideas listed above by several people.

As for "using our discretion"--that's OOC discretion! There is NOTHING IC about limiting how much of your goods you turn into useful material (sid). That is in every way a totally ridiculous statement, I'm sorry.

Call it what you want. I didn't think it was incredibly OOC for my character to give a damn about how they may actually be hurting the environment when they kill a disgusting amount of animals "just cause they are the shit in combat". OOC discretion is when you use your common sense and play the game fairly. If you are selling five items per week to the same merchant, maybe, just maybe your pc needs to tone down how much of this particular item they retrieve each reboot. Just a thought. My discretion may be rediculous, but at least I'm trying to not screw everyone over with my pack full of ritikki guts. Please guy, give all the other players a shot who hunt and gather too.

If you disagree, I think we have some serious disagreements as to what is and is not an IC MUD.

I disagree on principles, friend. You can't justify selling vast, unrealistic amounts of raw goods. I may not be IC in trying to be courteous to other players, but I won't stop until an immortal says it's a no-no. Until the code changes, or players learn to practice taking in only what they need as food and crafting materials, I think that's the way I'm going to have to play.

[SewerRat_inTheOpen]

A midweek reboot to clear up those dastardly RL whole week-ongoing storms sounds good, keeps us from choking in the sandy winds.

I agree with fearwig that there is nothing wrong IG to sell everything you have, but I think OOC wise, players should be nice to others and not spam collect and sell, thus blocking off all revenue for others.

Even if you are just a specialised kank killer, you do not have to kill 5 kanks and get their antennaes to sell, instead maybe take time to hunt something else after you bagged your first kank for the IG month. Or forage. Otherwise if you bagged two in early month, try to sell one skinned kank fur to the players/merchant houses. They do like to have crafting materials. Talk to their aides-->refer to their lords--->maybe a side contract of supplying them with kank fur every month.

I am rather neutral on this, since I  try to find ways about the problem IG. Like maybe... find a merchant and make friends. Or hunt less of whatever people are hunting all the time.

[fearwig]

"Spam-selling" has nothing to do with "spam-killing". You can get the max number of scrab legs and pincers off a single scrab for a single merchant. Don't give me that "It's IC over-hunting" crap. And only the most sensitive, intelligent community would really have much of a care for what gets killed where or who skins it. There are lots of people IC who wouldn't give a damn, a majority, even, whatever the helpfiles say.

I dunno, people are looking at this OOC code and reading a lot into it IC when I don't think there's anything IC to it at all. If you have six legs and six pincers in game, you are damn well going to try to sell them. Now, if you are a nice player, maybe you will IGNORE THAT ROLEPLAY FACT and not sell them, and junk them or throw them off somewhere instead, despite the fact that they are obviously saleable items, and even valuable. And that's fine enough. But! Remember what's happening. It's a break of roleplay, and players shouldn't be forced to work this way to suit the MUD. Because while you're making the MUD work better through player etiquette, you're overstepping roleplay entirely.

If you can't follow that, and want to pick it out for things to bitch about, and to claim I'm supporting spamming and all that bullshit, go ahead. But if you actually want to read it and think about it with a detatched mindset, you might realize there's something wrong with the way it's set up. That's all I have to say on that topic, I think


I agree that you should be a nice player. Play it how it has to be played, for now. But I implore the coders to look at this and fix it so we can have a continuous roleplay environment, not ruined by little OOC facets like this one. That's what this MUD is about. Roleplay first, balance second. Figure out the balance ICly, don't impose it through OOC ceilings.

[Cuusardo]

It sounds to me like the reason people who are in favor of additional reboots, are in favor because it would be a way to make people's IC lives easier.  (An OOC way to make IC life easier, it is.)  This is Zalanthas, it's supposed to be difficult!  The weather is supposed to suck, and merchants are supposed to be greedy bastards.  The poor stay poor while the rich get richer.

[Delirium]

The poor stay poor while the rich get richer.

While I agree as a general statement, this shouldn't happen because of spawn-point abuse and filling up the merchant's shelves with five of everything before anyone else can. As it is now, it does.

My suggestion is to have 1-2 random items disappear off the shelf once an IC day. If the item is a continually restocked item, it gets bypassed by the code in favor of a PC stocked item.

[creeper386]

The much lauded "pure RP" role in which an interesting character is developed for its own literary sake is very rarely seen on Armageddon, in my experience. That's because it is, quite frankly, not very workable or rewarded by the game mechanics and game environment.

Well, I'm sure someone has probably already covered this, but I'd just like to say ... The richest character I ever had. Didn't use any coded skills to earn his 'sid. I didn't get it because of any OOC friends or anything. I acctually started making it within the first day playing time.

Not always the fact. But I've seen the opposite as the quote, I've seen MUCH more rewarded through RP then through the code.


Creeper

[Praetorian]

Here is a way to look at the 'spawn selling' issue in a different light - might provide a means to a solution.

Economic laws of supply and demand work such that as supply increases, if demand remains constant, then price drops to increase demand to match the supply.  If demand increases, and supply remains constant, then prices increase until demand finds equilibrium with supply.  Now, before someone hows that real world economics isn't applicable to Armageddon let me just state that that isn't what I'm suggesting.  What I -am- suggesting, is the price adjustments that reflect some of these same principles in game.

Suppose you have 10 curved obsidian swords.
sell sword - get 40 sid     "I'll give you 40 obsidian coins for that."
sell sword - get 40 sid     "I'll give you 40 obsidian coins for that."
sell sword - get 40 sid     "I'll give you 40 obsidian coins for that."
sell sword - get 35 sid     "We have a decent stock, I'll give you 35 sid"
sell sword - get 33 sid     "We are presently overstocked, how about 33 sid"
sell sword - get 30 sid     "We are quite overstocked, how about 30 sid."
sell sword - get 25 sid     "Look, we have a large stock, best I can do is 25"
sell sword - get 18 sid     "I am swamped with those, 18 is my best offer."
sell sword - get 12 sid     "-Another- one?  12 sid is the best I can do."
sell sword - get 10 sid     "I don't really need it, but can take it for 10 sid."
(continues at this rate)

As merchant quantity goes up, price decreases.  Salarr is going to pretty much buy a sword for dirt, dirt cheap if it can, since it has the storehouses available to profit on the sale at a later date - and there are always armies to outfit.  This eliminates the whole 'not wanting to buy it' angle, the difference is the diminishing returns.  A crafter could still sell goods, but without travelling and finding other buyers his profitability is going to decrease rapidly.  However, it still enables someone carrying around 5 duskhorn horns to sell them, perhaps at a bad price, but still sell them if they miss the 'respawn' rush.  It still lets the hunter fill his hide with water and go back out.
In a nutshell, the diminishing returns would inject 'slightly' more money into the game for some, but would also remove the whole, 'oops shopkeeper is full, guess I'll have to carry this bag of hides around until next weekend (an IC month) - selling would always be possible, you just might have to settle for a bare minimum price.

[creeper386]

I think a combination of what Praetorian posted would be a great addition. Also if you make the buy back price go down to reflect the merchant has alot of the item. BUT still set a limit to how many items can be bought. Just make it broader. Maybe rich merchants won't buy many, if any cheap items. And poorer merchants would buy less expensive stuff. But over all the mid-range stuff would be bought most as it's not TOO expensive and of average quality. The whole removing items randomly(Preferably at least one or two an IC day as one an OOC wouldn't help much, perhaps even make this a randomized on when it happens and have the chance set up to only do one or two so often.) would ALSO be a great addition. Specially if this was combined with base item cost against acctual cost, and THEN an addition that merchant lists aren't so changing. That reboots/crashes/shutdowns don't wipe the list clean.

It'd be a resource hog possibly, but if done right it could keep everything even resource wise, create a more stable economy and make everything work more realistically.

Summary:
*Price goes down as quantity goes up(Even make the selling price go down. Keeping the NPC making profit of course.)
*Still make some sort of set limit on how much the NPC buys.
*Random removing of items from the list.
*Item list lasts through reboots.

I personally think over all they'd be most effective as all together. Although it'd be a huge project and a resource hog ... but with some tweaking could probably end up being rewarded for a great coded economy.

Creeper thinks it'd still be easier to make money from rich PCs though!

[fearwig]

Huge project? Resource hog? Bah.

This is a bit of a project, I suppose, at least certain aspects of it would be take one or two saturdays to get right. Some these concepts are implemented in even the simplest muds. A randomization effect that occurs once a day, even affecting every single shopkeeper, would have absolutely negligible impact on the performance of the mud, though. Compare to say, combat code, which is ongoing sometimes ten characters at a time. That's something more of a drain, and it still has no impact on performance.

I am happy to see the thread falling in behind my recommendations, though. Ahem.

[fearwig]

It sounds to me like the reason people who are in favor of additional reboots, are in favor because it would be a way to make people's IC lives easier.  (An OOC way to make IC life easier, it is.)  This is Zalanthas, it's supposed to be difficult!  The weather is supposed to suck, and merchants are supposed to be greedy bastards.  The poor stay poor while the rich get richer.

It sounds to me like you didn't read the thread--or if you did, you didn't choose to think about any of it.

If you can explain to me why on earth a merchant would buy precisely five items, all at the same price, and then refuse to buy any more for exactly one half of one month at which point he would have magically sold all those items (and yet would have no spare sid), you can have a big fuckin' cookie. Chocolate chip. And you'll also have the right to say we're trying to avoid IC difficulty with OOC changes. Thanks for playing, have a nice day.

[creeper386]

Well, reworking of the shop code to institute the four things I have there would be a big project. Maybe not the initial code, but the tweaking and changing of things so it's not abusing players and players aren't abusing it. It'd be alot of time for whoever did it. Even if it's not difficult.

The resource hog. I'm talking mostly about saving shop lists here. Also, saving shop lists. That'd take resources. They'd have to at least save before shut downs, which could quite possibly make shut down longer. We have lots of NPC shop keepers. Also, saves in between for crashes could possibly slow things down. Mostly, that's alot of information to save, and it'd take up memory space.

Sure, some extra code in the shopkeepers here and there wouldn't maybe hurt too much. But if you add up EVERY shopkeeper in the game, in addition to the resources the game takes up now ... It could very well make a difference.


Creeper

[fearwig]

Fair enough. Might tack on five seconds, as an outside estimate. But only if the lists were really that much larger. You should consider that not all shopkeepers actually have items that would be sold to them for profit. Only a small minority, really.

[Cuusardo]

If you can explain to me why on earth a merchant would buy precisely five items, all at the same price, and then refuse to buy any more for exactly one half of one month at which point he would have magically sold all those items (and yet would have no spare sid), you can have a big fuckin' cookie. Chocolate chip. And you'll also have the right to say we're trying to avoid IC difficulty with OOC changes. Thanks for playing, have a nice day.

Zalanthas is not earth.  IMO, this limit imposed by shopkeepers is a means to maintain the struggle for survival.

[fearwig]

And you wouldn't say that's artificial? You wouldn't say there's a better way to do it? Because what it does now is it makes IC perfectly valuable items junkworthy if they're not also valuable to a PC. If anything that injures the "harshness" of Zalanthas. Waste is not something you find in a harsh environment. Things you find on the ground should be worthless to all (hence their being on the ground), not useful hides, claws, and other potentially valuable parts.

Make the items worth less, or worth successively less. The total value can be as much or less than it currently is. Just make them able to be sold, that's my point. It's an awfully cocky thing to just assume that someone making a suggestion for a change to the game is doing so to benefit themselves or to make things necessarily easier on players.

You want Zalanthas to be a hard, *IC* world. A hard, but realistic place to live. What you're suggesting is that you just want it to be a hard game with OOC limitations, which isn't entirely the point (though it would sometimes be a result of making the world itself harsh).


The best way to fix this would be with a system that produced a uniform VNPC "sale" of the items (randomized daily perhaps) that would reduce the quantity held by the shopkeeper, in addition to a system of mathematically gradiated worth according to quantity. Lots of DIKU muds have implemented the latter. It's pretty easy. If there's a super-abundance of the item, from PCs selling it all the time, then it will be cheaper to buy and sell. What's that? That's economics! Oh noes!

[spawnloser]

I don't think there's anything artificial to having a max of five items.  It'd be better if the IMMs could set how many the shopkeeper will buy instead of it be a broad limit of five across the board.  Yes, Praet's idea is better, but this is not unrealistic.

"I'll pay 40 sid for that."
"I'll pay 40 sid for that."
"I'll pay 40 sid for that."
"I'll pay 40 sid for that."
"I'll pay 40 sid for that."
"Screw you!  I've already got five of these things from you and haven't sold them.  Come back when I've unloaded these.  Fuck!"

Sounds good enough to me.  Not perfect, but good enough.

[Maybe42or54]

But.. preatorian..

I would love your idea until I die as long.. as..
The highest the NPC buys your wares is less than the lowest they will sell it for.

[fearwig]

That'd be pretty easy, and pretty reasonable.

The shopkeeper sells (to players), depending on the amount of his stock, on a gradient between the price at which he would pay the most (base value--the amount you see now when you sell to a shopkeeper, or some adjusted value similar to that) and the price he sells at now (or some adjusted value based on that price). So it's like, if it sells now at 100sid, and he buys now at 50 sid, the range of his selling would be 50-100, with 100 being his sale price if he has one of the item, 50 being his sale price if he has [max value, maybe based on merchant's ability to store stuff, varying from bazaar hawker to Kadian in range].

The other way would be, as I hinted, to adjust those max and min values to reflect the current prices as the *average* price (both buy and sell), such that it extends to a level lower and higher, equally. It's all pretty simple math, once you think it out and start putting it into code, it just sounds awfully complicated when you try and prose-ify it.

All in all, I think it's a good idea. It will estimate pretty accurately the way a shopkeeper -would- try and operate, despite the fact that it sounds somewhat mathematically complicated. And better yet it would help make "spam-selling" less viable--you could sell 10 scrab legs, but you won't get as much for them as if you diversify and kill other things too. Best yet it puts more factors into the mix. It's so dull and pre-ordained that you'll be able to sell the scrab mandible for 10 sid, et cetera. And it makes total sense that a vendor would accept your item, just at a piss-poor price if he thinks they're not selling well. He knows that the items will sell, they just won't sell for a lot, et cetera. And then you've got the whole VNPC sales issue to consider, which absolutely needs attention.

This may bore some people to tears, but I'm sure someone shares my interest in seeing Zalanthas with an economy.

[creeper386]

What can be done, with modifications for different merchants. Is something like ...

A merchant sells an item for 50 'sid. If he has one. Buys one for 25 if he has none. If he's buying a second on, it might go down to 23 and the selling price would go down to 49. He sells one of them and the price goes back to 50 'sid. Basically making it better to buy when the merchant has more of the item. Realistic I say. BUT, if abunch of items of the same time are sold to him, he won't buy anymore if the sell price is say ... less then thirty. So he can still make a decent profit.

This would have to depend on the cost of the item. More expensive items aren't bought in large quantities. And cheap items aren't bought in mass quantities for the opposite reason, not as useful or worth a profit.

We already have merchants that have a certain spending limit from what I understand. That can be worked on even more. And I don't think it'd be really that DIFFICULT to code in a better working system then what we have now, to both help support everyone and not the people that rush after boots and crashes. As well as create a much better economy on the small scale. We got a beautiful one in the works, but the shopkeeper interaction is still quite basic.

Only problem is people could still rush in and sell abunch of stuff. That could be solved by having each CHARACTER only able to sell so much. And this would be more of an OOC limitation to help keep players in line. Because we all know too many people do a made rush after reboots. It may not be right away. It may even wait untill sunday morning but ussually less then twenty four hours and things tend to be filled up.

Creeper

[Bestatte]

I like the combination of ideas. NPCs offering less to buy things, and charging accordingly as their inventory supercedes the demand. Plus imposing a maximum quota on how much each character is allowed to sell to the shop per game reset. Plus random inventory removals throughout the week.

That way, it works a lot more like pawn shops do. And there are some specialized pawnshops in the real world..consignment stores for clothing, musical pawn shops (where I got my guitar for example), jewelry pawnshops, odds and ends pawnshops -

In most stores in real life, you can't SELL stuff to them right? You can only buy. So this makes it work more "realistically" in a sense, while also providing more playability.

[fearwig]

(re: creeper's post, not bestatte's)

Right.

So save merchant item lists at reboot.

It seems to me the reboots are the real problem, here. If it weren't for the fact that merchants suddenly are willing to buy anything and everything on sundays, you wouldn't even have such a phrase as 'spam-selling'.

Items that have a great demand from PCs (i.e. not scrab legs) would probably need to be removed from the market less often. Those that have primarily VNPC sale value could be removed at a fairly regular rate, maybe 2 per IC day. If the merchant wants your items ICly, you should be able to sell to him, I say. And we can fix anything that gets in the way of that, reboot wipes included.

I just don't like the feel I get off the whole idea of an item sell limit per player. It just feels so artificial. If you think those items should be harder to get, make them harder to get! Make them harder to skin, maybe, or what have you. That's the way this kind of thing needs to be approached. Because if you give people reason to junk stuff, rather than get rid of it in market, you're changing the feel of the game, generally in a really OOC direction. More into the "Game" and less toward the "World", that is to say. Personally, I much prefer to think of Zalanthas as a world.

[spawnloser]

So...instead of relying completely on shops and find a PC to sell stuff to?

Why 'fix' this when it's not truly broken?

What's broken is that people rush out to do their selling on Saturday night.  Fix the problem, not the symptom.

Oh, yeah, and reboots aren't the problem either...and no matter how many arguments you come up with for why we shouldn't have Saturday down time, it'll still happen.

[creeper386]

One, noone has come close to suggesting getting rid of Saturday downtime Spawn. Don't know where you got that from. But I haven't seen the slightest hint of that ANYWHERE. I know I like it personally.

Two, it may not be broken, but lots of things in the MUD aren't broken and they are still tweaked and improved upon. The actions of desert wild life weren't broken, someone still spent much time improving it to make the desert more alive. Why can't we do the same in the markets?

Three, again not broken, but it's still a very basic shop code. The MUD in my opinion just from an OOC stand point would look better with a more advanced economy system, and a more advanced shopkeeper interaction would be a way to get that going on the right track. We already have items that cost more/less depending on location and availability of items in that location and so on and so forth, why keep a horribly bland and unrealistic shopkeeper interaction with it?

Four, aiming at Fearwig here. Yes, it might change some things because of OOC to impose a limit per character. BUT if you don't, have something similar, changing the code won't do any good. And you'll still have people selling just TONS of items when the shopkeeper list clears out. It'll happen, and it's not alot of people doing it most the time. Some of them aren't even bad RPs they've just developed the habit as almost a neccessity to try and stay alive. It's not as bad as it used to be, but this sort of reality still exists.

And it's STILL not horribly unrealistic, for a merchant to not buy alot of stuff from one person. They only have so much coin. Maybe they want to hold out for that nice duskhorn skin instead of buying all your fifty seven dirty 'rinthi rat skins. Maybe there is a chance someone might bring in BETTER quality dirty 'rinthi rat skins then your character. So they want to hold out. OR just maybe they want to see ... IF THEY CAN SELL SO MANY DIRTY 'RINTHI RAT SKINS??? I mean ... I know a merchant doesn't want to buy even a few of something, let alone a ton of something, if he's not sure if he can move it.

Creeper

[Delirium]

So...instead of relying completely on shops and find a PC to sell stuff to?
*snip*
What's broken is that people rush out to do their selling on Saturday night.  Fix the problem, not the symptom.

Both issues have been addressed repeatedly in this thread. The suggestions put forth are meant to fix the problem of people rushing out to do their selling on Saturday night, and to encourage PC-PC selling while allowing objects that the vast majority of PCs will not be interested in (scrab legs, anyone?) to be sold - for absolute bottom-level prices perhaps, but still sold - instead of being junked or laying about wasted.

In a brutal desert world, something being wasted seems to go directly against the grain of what "should be". If the original hunter did not want them, scavengers desperate for enough obsidian to get a skin full of water would want them, only to find that there is absolutely nowhere to sell something that DOES in fact retain value - it is simply impossible to sell them because of an OOC limitation. That is what the suggestions put forth are intended to fix.

[Forest Junkie]

What's broken is that people rush out to do their selling on Saturday night.  Fix the problem, not the symptom.

Finally, a voice of reason!

The ideas put forth are reasonable, and could be implemented. The question is, should they have to be coded? Can't this simple problem be fixed by people just hunting/crafting/jacking all the spawn-items less?