1) Why does time pass so quickly on CF? Day/Night cycle is really too fast to have someone who must worship in the morning. Could we slow down time and let more time specific events be done?

Tick length and it's relationship to in-game time has been this way since CF started. This affects a lot: "distance" from, say, Hamsah to Galadon, nightgaunts, Scion powers, shops being open or closed, druids, etc. I think it is a worthwhile project to take a look at changing this relationship (maybe tick length stays the same, but a half-hour passes instead of an hour in game), but it is a very involved project that has a lot of moving parts and a lot of impact on game balance.

I will agree that the current rate of time flow has a detremental effect on RP.

2) Night effects, are there global night effects that occur in all none city areas making it harder to scan, and use the where command?

There are some night effects, but most are not global, and will be restricted to specific areas at the discretion of the area authors.

3) Browse command. Why can you not browse out of level items? It would make sense that you could browse just not buy. Would help players learn about gear and help build inspect goods skill.

If you can't buy, why browse? Not that I'm opposed to the idea, but I just don't really see how it helps you.

4) Market economy. Are goods transfered from greater distances worth more?

No. (*)

Could we have merchant's in busy centers have their inventories flux a bit more with respect to items sold to them? Maybe have items fade after time X depending on their level? Level 51 .. 51 Theran days versus level 1 gone in a say a minimum of 10 Theran days?

We've kicked this idea around a bit, though instead of 'fading', they get 'sold' to a NPC mob. Probably worth revisiting, along with a few additional economy tweaks that have been on the back burner.

Kastellyn the Devourer of Magic, Lord of Legends

(*) With standardization of objects comes the opportunity to do many cool economy related things. We're not there yet, though.

A merchant can't buy my sword for 2400 copper. But he'll buy my axe for 1800. Why can't I just deal with him and sell the sword for less it's inherent value? I'd rather sell the sword, keep the axe, and make a bit of copper to buy some other things about. Please please, my little tactical genius?

TF

Good gravy, how long has it been since I posted here?

>A merchant can't buy my sword for 2400 copper. But he'll buy
>my axe for 1800. Why can't I just deal with him and sell the
>sword for less it's inherent value?

I absolutely agree with this. It's always driven me crazy that I have a 20 million copper item that is impossible to sell because shopkeepers only have a little gold to buy things with. I would live to be able to do this:

> sell ValuableSword
Shopkeeper says "I'd love to buy that, but right now I couldn't give you more than 4 gold for it"
> accept 4000 for ValuableSword
Shopkeeper says "Done! Nice doing business with you (sucker)"

Here's the thing, I don't think that shopkeepers should buy anything you want to sell them.

Here's the way I view it :

We want to have somewhat decent gear for an affordable price in shops.

We also don't want gold to be like water and have every char on the planet have the ability to infinately heal.

We also don't want to never be able to sell anything or constantly have shopkeepers broke.

Ideally, if I can go kill say, the white worm and get white worm gear and it takes me 15 minutes at level 30, then buying white worm equivalent from a merchant should require some amount of money gathering wherein the time spent gathering the money is some time more than 15 minutes and some time less than say, 45 minutes. In this way, its better to know I can get the gear for free elsewhere and thus its still valuable in its own right but I have alternate options which aren't vastly more difficult to accomplish.

As of right now, for instance, buying the equivalent of white worm gear is like 30 gold, which for a non-thief at level 30 is rather insane as it should be, since 30 gold is roughly 25 heals at the healer.

So basically, where you want to wind up is a point where you can gather enough gold to buy this white worm equivalent gear without requiring 8 hours of work to do without severely disbalancing the system.

Enter in item standardization and revamping the buy/sell code. I think you should be able to say, sell unlimited gems but in such a way that attaining these gems at your rank is neither ridiculously easy or ridiculously hard. So, 'farming' of gold, be it through selling gems/rare powerful items or by gathering gold off NPC's or by PK'ing all can be more easily measured.

Similiarly, things like thief treasures can be measured by the difficulty ratio for a thief at X rank to gather. So, if the treasure requires minimum of rank 30 to gather and is ridiculously easy to gather at rank 40, the gold amount vs time spent will be slightly better than alternate means of gathering coins at that level but insufficient at rank 40.

You see what I mean?

On the other hand, if you could sell every item in the game it becomes harder to balance. Here's an example:

If I'm rank 40 I can buy a sword for say, 4500 copper, just to throw a value out there. At that same rank I can somewhat easily attain a sword which is just as good, as I described above in the white worm example, in less time than it would take me to gather that amount of coins. So therefore, if the shopkeeper has unlimited money, I can spend a minimal amount more of effort gathering vast sums of money which will be dramatically better than I need to gather equivalent equipment from shops.

>Here's the thing, I don't think that shopkeepers should buy
>anything you want to sell them.

I wasn't saying return to unlimitted wealth shopkeepers. All my suggestion does is allow you to sell to a shopkeeper that has some money, but not enough to buy what you want to sell.

I pretty much agree with most of what you said, the only caveat is where prices are. Even if snow worm were 15 gold I'd still never, ever buy it in a shop because getting that much gold takes way too long to get compared to the ease of getting snow worm gear. But what do you consider a reasonable rate of gold acquisition?

I know you weren't. I was.

The point is though, if you could do that, effectively every shopkeeper would have 0 coins instead of 800 coins, so its not like it would help much.

As far as snow worm its simple. If it takes say, 15 minutes to kill the snow worm and it takes say, 15 minutes to aquire 1 gold then it should take roughly 2 gold. Those are pulled off the top of my head values, adjust as necessary, but you get the idea.

Edit: Additionally in a system such as this, random stuff in the game would probably have a lower value. Since merchants can freely purchase, the worth ratio's of items would be drastically skewed for balance reasons. To truly measure out the cost vs reward mathematically, you have to control wealth sources.

If the shopkeeper bought that sword from a player at a discout, marked it up a bit, we now have a weapon more worthy of purchase at a better price. So instead of having some lame rusted sword sitting on the shelf that he bought for 600 copper, he's got a short sword of quickness that he bought for 600 and will in turn likely sell it to a character who could use it. So coin actually flows more efficiently in this scenario.

The only hurdle I see in the above economics is purchase level. If that quickness sword is level 16, who'd buy it? But if I can buy it at level 8 for 800 copper or so, then I'm gonna jump all over it.

So I think that the purchase level of gear needs to be looked into, as well.

Sorry that was a short ramble, but I think it makes sense. In a hurry.

The point is though, if you could do that, effectively every shopkeeper would have 0 coins instead of 800 coins, so its not like it would help much.

The difference in mechanics is that shopkeeper that keeps 0 as limit and buys everything he can afford isn't as likely to afford expensive item than a shopkeeper who banks 800 coins(meaning that he doesn't buy anything when he doesn't have 800 coins or more) and buys any item which he can afford when he has more than 800 coins, he can basically afford to buy something that costs 800 coins when he is buying. If the shopkeeper would just keep those 800 coins safe under his matress, then it would be the same thing.

What the other fellow was suggesting though, was selling the item to shopkeeper at the price which the shopkeeper could afford. This could work with the banking shopkeepers who can use their reserves, but in the case of 0 coin reserve shopkeeper, there would be problems. Also, there is the question: Does the player really want to sell the item with such discount? Perhaps the discount selling could be somehow separate parameter, so that player could choose whether to sell with discount or not. Such method could be used for selling the high end items, which normally could not be sold anywhere, as no shopkeeper would afford them.

If the shopkeeper offers to buy your item for less, you're going to sell it for less, since its better than nothing. So, no matter what, the shopkeepers are going to be tapped dry. The problem is, when they're tapped dry, they still can't buy anything.

I get that the item bought would be sold for less, but I doubt it will translate to much of a difference.

But this kind of a selling with discount-mechanism could be used to sell the high end items which shopkeepers would practically never afford(like some gem worth 30 gold). There could be some discount command in the game that a player could use to see the discount price. It is not the solution to the commerce problem of shopkeepers being broke, but rather an additional mechanism on how commerce works.

Also, in if the shopkeeper is banking(buys only when his coins are over the limit) and has less coins than his limit, he could simply tell 'I'm not buying anything today' in order to express that he can't afford a thing.

n/t

A merchant can't buy my sword for 2400 copper. But he'll buy my axe for 1800. Why can't I just deal with him and sell the sword for less it's inherent value? I'd rather sell the sword, keep the axe, and make a bit of copper to buy some other things about. Please please, my little tactical genius?

This is a good idea. Call it bargain:

value sword

Bob the Merchant says, "I don't have enough ready cash to buy an uber sword of kobold killing, but if I did, it would be worth around 800 copper."

bargain sword

Bob the Merchant gives you 35 copper for an uber sword of kobold killing.

Two things:

1. Getting items to merchants to sell isn't the problem. It's having those merchants sell the items. And really, all this idea does is get more items into the hands of merchants, and a bit more gold into the hands of characters. It doesn't solve the real economy problem, which is getting gear from merchants to characters, so the cycle can perpetuate.

2. The huge overall driving purpose behind item standardization is so that the snow worm gear has the same value as any other piece of similar gear. Say there's a pair of level 29 leggings (+15 hp, +1 Dam, -3 SvsB) for sale in Galadon, and these leggings have the exact same value (or very similar, because material enters into the equation - and you've also got weight differences) as the leggings from the snow worm. Now you've got a choice: save the time and buy the Galadon leggings, or take the risk and go kill the snow worm. The trick is adjusting the value of the gear (and the markup in town) so that the effort to get enough gold is worth the expense of buying that equipment in town (like Eskelian is talking about). Unfortunately, that's a very hard number to pin down, especially with the economy as snarled as it is (picture unraveling a tangled ball of fishing line). It's going to take several iterations of cost adjustments to get where we need to be. But we're willing to invest the time and effort into doing so, because we think it's a worthwhile project.

Another thing to think about: with standardization in place, maybe merchants won't buy your crappy rusted sword, just because you were the first person to get there after a crash. Maybe they have a higher standard, based on level, limit and value.

Bob the Merchant tells you, "I'm not even interested in purchasing your rusted iron saber. Go find a jeweled broadsword, then maybe we'll talk."

Keep the ideas coming. I write them all down.

Kastellyn the Devourer of Magic, Lord of Legends

>bargain sword
>
>Bob the Merchant gives you 35 copper for an uber sword of
>kobold killing.

I liked my version (accept, above) because it lets you know what the price will be. Also, it lets people explicitly take less money for something if they want to (RP, for example). It seems kind of unfair that you bring the 40k sword to the shop expecting to get maybe a couple gold, but ending up with 35 copper because you had no way of telling what he will actually give you. But this can be resolved if value does something like this:

Bob the Merchant says, "I can only give you 35 copper for an uber sword of kobold killing, but it's worth around 800 copper."

I'm not sure if you intend to implement my idea or not. Sorry, I just couldn't discern!

But here's my short point. The reason I never purchase items from shoppies is because they sell them at such high levels. So I think changing that across the board by 20% or so would be a good change. Beats me, just a rough guess. I typically have the coin on hand.

But by bargaining items to the shopkeepers, you're placing more coin in the hands of the playerbase, and more items actually worth purchasing in the hands of the shoppies (as long as they're not level 45, which is extreme but not atypical). More coin equals more purchasing power, because we know how tough it is to barter when no shopkeeper wants to accept the bartered item.

I don't know where I'm going with this, to be honest. My mind seems to have given up today. But I do know I'm glad that I don't have to look at every angle like you do. I'd be a wreck!

If certain shopkeepers at certains times had random needs. For example:


You go talk to the merchant, buy something, sell something, browse, whatever. Somewhere along the way though he says "But my son really wants a <insert mace>." or "I've got an anonymous wealthy investor looking for a <insert random helm>, know where I might find one?".

The result is, they're like mini-quests, if you find the item and sell it, the dealer will give you 3x, 4x, 5x what the item is normally worth. Maybe a slab of commerce exp too.

Even if the price would just be buying the item with it's normal worth. Also, the standard mini-quest could show in the quest command, so that you could remember it easier. Or maybe thieves could get such mini-quests from their hometown merchants frequently, which would make the class more interesting RP-wise. For example, this could be a way to circulate limited items back to mobs, with thieves on quest hunting them for shopkeepers. I think it's a good idea and has a lot of neat uses. Maybe a thief could have multiple of these quests in progress at the same time.

Why not just barter the expensive item for an inexpensive one and sell the inexpensive one? I think it's cool that the code requires these sort of commerce tricks. Is something like bargain really required?

I appreciate the reply and I now realize just how BLEH trying to change time would be. Sorry, I goofed on asking for that one.

1) I love the idea of more economic things coming in. Merchants related to specific cabals..or even merchants that wander from settlement to settlement would be neat too. I think there may be something already in the Empire.

2) A another idea could be to have cabal specific bank accounts that they use for projects such as Mavinero's bizarre Galadon whelp center or other weird Herald stuff.

Of course Outlanders would have to build.. spirit/essence by offering items to their Shaman merchant.. so they could attempt... hmm.. a restoration of some area to wilds? Or something cool like an area of wildneress where once was a road.

Scions to build some structure necessary for the bringing of the nightgaunts or making a place where the nightgaunts can stage etc.

This would allow Imms to gauge how far along a specific cabal was with a project and then build an intrigue or three upon it. I always found it strange that cabals were so bland and boring inside.. now you could have research areas and other neat stuff added at a cost to the members of course.

Dissemination of clues as to what is going on and the like so the other cabals & non-caballed characters could start getting involved, taking sides, etc. Make a cabal building something have to defend it's construction by protecting supplies, artisans, and the like.

3)Hidden instructors for some cool things like exotics, mercantile skills, and other neat concepts would be fun too. Some neat quests where you have to find them and them of course find the appropriate compensation for their aid.

I like that fact that CF no longer makes you have to be a PK master to be recognized. I would love to play a character totally based on economic mastery or something of a true explorer guild seeking to build something truly monumental and of course for the better of all of Thera.

Grandiose ideas but things that could be scaled right down to something simple and fun.

>1) Why does time pass so quickly on CF? Day/Night cycle is
>really too fast to have someone who must worship in the
>morning. Could we slow down time and let more time specific
>events be done?

Then pray every Sunday(or the corresponding Theran day) morning instead of every morning if every morning is too often. Simple as that. Alternatively, you could pray on Tuesdays if the weather is cloudy, or whatever suits your role the best.

1) Bear in mind a lot of classes and cabals are somewhat time relevant, as well as other things in the game. By slowing down time, depending on how drastically you would suggest it gets slowed down, can potentially shaft these classes/cabals or enemies of these classes/cabals. Here's an example, I'm a low 30's elf warrior with a rank 40 evil conjurer in my range. Normally I have to wait from 7PM to 5AM to avoid being nightgaunted. That's like 15-20 minutes, give or take, since ticks aren't a minute exactly. If instead, it was say, twice as slow, I'd have to wait 30-40 minutes. If it was 4x as long, now I'd have to wait an hour or more, just to avoid being nightgaunted.

Also, all affects are time based. Sanctuary for 6 minutes is one thing, sanctuary for 20 is another.

2) I believe weather and time of day do have an effect, but I'm not positive. I know scan can be affected by things, just not sure what the exact details are.

3) This would be cool.

4) Some towns pay more for goods than others, I don't think they'd make it distance based since, honestly, it'd be a lot of math overhead at very little significant payout. Not sure what you mean by items fading.