ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

When you sell/transmogrify items there is a hard cap on how much gold you can get. The maximum is 25.0 gold, which you get for every item worth 500 gold or more. You hit this limit quite early and quite often, which feels jarring to me.

I would suggest replacing the hard cap at 500 gold with a function that softly approaches the maximum, for example a simple sigmoid function.
The the current function and the suggested sigmoid:

From your graph, the difference on the high end (between something that costs 800 and 1400 gold) would be 2-3 gold, so what's the point?

As I said, it's mostly a matter of aesthetics. It feels jarring (to me) that all valuable items sell at exactly 25.0. It would look better to get some differentiation. It would also feel more rewarding to get at least a bit more money for the best items.

But it will also allow players to compare two high-end items, to get an idea of which one is more valuable (without first having to sell them to a store and buy them back, that is). Not that the game's value-calculation is all that advanced, but it's probably better than the estimation that new players make when comparing lots of good-sounding properties.

I chose the numbers so that the net income in a game should stay approximately the same. But instead of selling 1000 items at exactly 25.0, you will get some differentiation between the high-end items. I chose an arbitrary max-cap of 27, but if the new max-cap is hit often it's trivial to create a higher cap and stretch out the progression more.

Increasing the max cap to 35 at let the function reach it at 2000+ Range from 0-2000



Using arctangent to smear it out even more.
This doesn't give the "safety" of an absolute max cap. The possible danger is that if the value-calculation goes crazy and estimates a value at 90-billion then the sell price won't be capped. But that's probably not an issue, as such a bug should be fixed anyway.
Range from 0-5000

Why not just make it linear?

I think the current model achieves two things:

• Allow starting characters to get enough gold to buy stuff
• Prevent late-game characters from getting too much gold

Late-game characters probably get too much gold already, as you get so much loot compared to what you may want to buy. But the cap at least tries to combat that.

While, on the one hand, it's possibly overthinking things...on the other hand, I always have gotten a little annoyed that every single high end item sells for the exact same value, in the chest, myself.

And you've already done all the thinking, including making a coded formula, as far as I can tell.

I wouldn't mind seeing this-or at least, one of these curves, they all look reasonable from a glance-go into the game, myself.

Nice to hear that I'm not the only one who has been annoyed

I've been doing some more thinking and would like to change my recommendation to the arctan-function. It doesn't give a hard cap (which is good) and it pushes down sell value enough. Primarily, it makes for much more readable code.

Something like this would be good: ..which would probably result in a little less gold during a full game, but not make that big of a difference.

Oh, there is one thing that just occured to me, though.

Gems have a nice (material rank*4) actual worth right now. I suspect these curves would make it something a lot less intuitive when you transmogrify a gem.

This isn't major or anything, but it'd be nice if such a function either somehow excluded gems or didn't kick in until values over 20. Or even so that the Gem values could be altered to give the same cash. This would be nice.

Just a thought.

No worries, the gem formula is already separate in the code!