Armor and Weaponry Item Weights

[Synthesis]

I know it's a mighty project, but could someone with the 'value' skill please go around valuing weapon and armor objects in the game, and create an Excel file with their weights?

It's come to my attention recently that many weapon/armor items are ridiculously heavy (or ridiculously light).

These somewhat berserk item weights were fine before Morgenes' change to encumbrance penalties, because you could fight all the way down to "heavy, but manageable" without a very noticeable change in combat performance, but nowadays every stone counts. 

I'm hoping that if we can compile a list of items that are truly out of whack, someone on Staff will take the time to go through and change the weight values to something more reasonable.  It seems like an endless series of 'typo' reports is not the optimal strategy for tackling a project of this magnitude.

Some recent items I've found:
a bracer that weighs 15 pounds...can you imagine fighting at -all- with 15 pounds of weight on your wrist?
a pair of boots that weighs 20 pounds...cement shoes?
a breastplate that weighs in the neighborhood of 70 pounds (and it's not even solid stone)
a pair of greaves that weighs in at around 60-65 pounds.
a helmet that weighs 49 pounds.
a dagger that weighs 5 stone vs...
a bastard sword that weighs 5 stone (you can fit it in some wrist-sheaths!)

And these are human-sized items that are intended to be used by humans.

[Reiloth]

Can't agree more.

[X-D]

I keep bugging them...Not that anything gets done,

What is even better is when you find item #1, bracer weighing 7 stone, northern make..Wow, how exactly do you use a 16lbs bracer anyway? Item #2 Exact same bracer by sdesc and mdesc but muarki make 1 stone...Huh? Look gland, This small gland is about the size of a human thumb...value gland, 2 stone..What, is it made out of depleted uranium?

I've thought about applying for a temporary staff position just to make item weights make some kind of sense.

[Morgenes]

Make sure you find someone with very high value skill so that there isn't any variance from failed checks.

[Synthesis]

Calling all Salarris, we need a cleanup in zone 3.

[Qzzrbl]

I still don't understand how "value" has much anything to do with determining weight.

IRL, I can tell about how much a rock weighs, but I'll be damned if I can figure how much it could sell for.

[a strange shadow]

I still don't understand how "value" has much anything to do with determining weight.

[Eloran]

Derail: Base your ability to weigh something off the assess command, as opposed to value. Make the check be fairly close to what the weight is, but not always spot on.

Add the ability to use weight systems to determine the exact weight.

Oh yeah, what Synthesis said.

[Morgenes]

Arm 2's value system will be different, providing much more reasonable results.  I know it's not much comfort, but we are thinking about this.

[Jenred]

My favorite was a helmet that weighed too much for a human with exceptional strength to wear... somewhere above 60 lbs for a helmet. Yet its designed for humans.


But this is really just one of many similar problems. The list I have now is:

Item weights.
Item values (a piece of stone that is worth 100+ sid when crafted, vs. a precious stone that is worth 10)
Item SIZES (I can fit 25 of something in a bag... this something is large. Yet other items I can't fit 2?)
Item Dam-rolls (Certain weapons are overly powerful compared to items that logically would be better)

So yes, item weights are important, but if any staffer starts on this I'd like to see them apply some consistency across the board.

[alicedavignon]

Wouldn't it be easier to just read out the values from the database and paste them somewhere? Doing this via IC means seems like an awful waste of time.

[SMuz]

Or you could just try and have fun handling it IC. E.g. a dwarf whose focus it is to find the weight of every item in the world.

[Semper]

I think it's also worth noting that the weight of items changes depending on who it has been tailored for. So if a half-giant was the last to wear the item, it'll be a multiple of what the human-sized equivalent is. So a 56 stone helmet could drop to a 8 stone weight once tailored. (not an exact instance, but I've seen -significant- drops in weight after tailoring them)

Also, scales are used very often in Zalanthas, so many of these items you have to go by feel. Some people are more accustomed to judging the weight accurately after lifting it (like merchants being able to know about how many coins there are in a bag by its weight?), others don't have a clue and could guess way off, like me.

However, I think there's always room for improvement in the system.

[Synthesis]

And these are human-sized items that are intended to be used by humans.

[aphex]

Human-sized items that are meant to be used for humans..

Or better yet, halfling size items meant for halflings that -still- weigh 35 stone+...

Just for posterity, I have never seen an item go into the tailor and come out weighing less or more, even when tailoring from HG to dwarf size, etcetera. Perhaps someone else can confirm or deny this, but.. It seems that it isn't a significant change if it exists, less than one stone, if anything.


Some examples:
30 stone HG sized breastplate tailored to human - Still 30 stone.
15 stone greaves or 35 stone halfling sized breastplate tailored to human - Still the same weights. Would be even MORE ridiculous if they went up.

[Synthesis]

Human-sized items that are meant to be used for humans..

Or better yet, halfling size items meant for halflings that -still- weigh 35 stone+...

Just for posterity, I have never seen an item go into the tailor and come out weighing less or more, even when tailoring from HG to dwarf size, etcetera. Perhaps someone else can confirm or deny this, but.. It seems that it isn't a significant change if it exists, less than one stone, if anything.


Some examples:
30 stone HG sized breastplate tailored to human - Still 30 stone.
15 stone greaves or 35 stone halfling sized breastplate tailored to human - Still the same weights. Would be even MORE ridiculous if they went up.

This is probably you making a mistake about how the 'value' code works.

It seems that the coders have coded a significant "delay" period, during which the item's apparent weight and value will remain constant, no matter how many times you value it.  This delay period seems to be rather long, and also seems to be attached to the specific item in question, not to all items of the similar type.  Thus, it's possible that the delay period had not expired by the time the tailor was finished resizing the item.

I'm speculating that this was done to maintain the value of having the 'value' skill:  if you could simply value an item an infinite number of times, you could eventually produce a distribution from the results whose mean would center around the true weight/value numbers.  This would allow anyone with some spare time and very basic knowledge of statistics to work around not having the skill.  In fact, I believe you could do this with the old version of the skill, but it's been so long since it was changed that I can't remember ever having done it.

I suspect that you can still "defeat" the lag system by having numerous people with or without the value skill "value" the item in-game, so long as you can get enough accurate reports. Good luck getting a large enough sample size to produce accurate results, though.

Heh, this gives me an odd urge:  start a non-merchant who starts a gambling game called "Guess the weight."  A number of contestants participate and pay 5 coins to "value" an item, then "guess" (report) its weight.  The person closest to the item's actual weight (which will be assumed to be the mean of the "guesses") wins a small prize (obviously less than the total pot...the house always wins!).  Of course, you'd have now way of knowing whether the contestants were reporting the actual results of the "value" check, or whether they were gaming the game by deliberately reporting values that approach the mean of previous guesses.