b21 store improvements

[Susramanian]

It's great to have a real use for gold. Overall the stores are an improvement over what we had before, but there are some problems.

Problem 1: purple items (double greater egos) are weirdly common. Far more common than blue items. In my ongoing game, I've found exactly one purple item in a dungeon, yet seen at least a hundred of them in stores. It's not uncommon to find half a dozen of them in a shop at once.

Problem 2: Since shops only restock after boss kills, when you find something you want but can't afford, the way to get it is to go grind someplace without killing any bosses until you have enough money. In other words, forward progress ceases. This is an example of optimal gameplay not being the same as fun gameplay, which always means the designers need to fix something. An option to pay the shopkeeper some fee to hold on to the item would do the job, I think.

Problem 3: Stores now play far too big a role in a character's success, I think. We've got this enormous magical world full of mystery and adventure, but by far the best place to get your loot is in town. Yet another case of optimal gameplay clashing with fun gameplay. We should be encouraging forward progress, exploration, and adventure. After I killed a boss, updating shop inventories, I would visit every store in every town and usually wind up with at least one thing that was vastly better than whatever I had picked off the boss's corpse. After a while this became a chore, and yet it was hard to stop because it was optimal gameplay.

To solve problem 3, I suggest making shops have much more restricted level ranges. For example, make the Derth shops only ever stock items with low level materials and low level egos. It'll be useful at the start, but there'll be no reason for high level characters to visit this backwater to find a game-winning weapon. Tune things so that a character of any given level will only have interest in the shops of one or two towns.

Something else I've mentioned again and again (and again) is that we need tighter control over where various materials show up. Let's totally remove any chance of voratun weapons appearing before the Far East, for example. In my current game, I was loaded up with great ego voratun weapons before I even stepped inside Dreadfell. Besides unbalancing things in my favor, it also rendered almost all the loot in Dreadfell obsolete. That's hardly desirable.

[shooth]

I agree on a number of points, but the most important change would be getting the stores back to some sort of time-based inventory rotation. I would also tone-down the utility of the items which populate the store - seems very disproportionately high at the moment.

I loved running an old dungeon for loot, then hitting a town to see what new stuff they had, and I can no longer do this. It encouraged me to buy and try new things, just to see how they worked, even if they were sub par items. The two-boss rule seems to be a really odd restriction, and does not flow at all with the linearity of the game (in my experience anyway).

It seems like item values have risen, and this I fully support - maybe even more is in order.

I like that I can sell items again as well - to keep this in check if you raise the base value, lower the % you get selling higher value items.

shooth

[Susramanian]

Eliminating the time-based restocking was necessary with the improvements to store stock. If you could scum the new and improved stores, that would be very badly broken. I mean, even more than it is now

We need to get the game's focus back in the zones where it belongs. Stores should be a minor and occasional aid to gearing up, not the primary means. In addition to my suggestions above, I'd suggest actually making them restock even less frequently. Maybe restocks should occur at only a handful of interesting points in the game, like this:

First restock: after completing "Of Trolls and Damp Caves" (quest to kill Bill and the Shade)
Second restock: after completing "Into the Darkness" (quest to kill Sandworm Queen, Rantha, Minotaur, and Wrathroot)
Third restock: after killing The Master
Fourth restock: after doing the Charred Scar
Fifth Restock: after completing "The Many Prides of the Orcs"

I'd agree with shooth's suggestions to reduce our buying power, too.

Keep the player's attention on moving forward and exploring. Don't keep hauling it back to boring old towns with frequent promises of fabulous loot.

[Mushroomhermit]

Sus, lets you and me work out a new item scaling system before stores get screwed with any more. We've talked about it before and it still needs to be done. I'm thinkin' base phys power/armor/spellpower scale with the level of the thing dropping it or, in the case of stores, with the player level. Iron-Voratun apply bonuses to things like arpen/crit/defense/spellcrit sort of like a tertiary ego slot. I think If we had that kind of system and got the pricing right on whites through purples you could get a lot more "ooo a purple... but it costs all of the money I've got. Do I buy that or do I steadily buy new greens as I level up?". If a smoother itemquality/progression curve can be made I think stores will be a lot easier to balance.

[madmonk]

Of course you could be really radical...

Eliminate the stores completely!

In my last few games I have not bought anything from stores. Haven't sold anything either! I don't miss them at all.

[Marcotte]

Or even more radical: eliminate all item drops! Only gold drops! All items are bought from stores!

(That's how it works in BOB.)

[madmonk]

Or even more radical: eliminate all item drops! Only gold drops! All items are bought from stores!

(That's how it works in BOB.)

Yes, that also would work...

[Postman]

Another solution: remove blue&purple&yellow items from the shops. Introduce gambling halls instead. In the gambling hall you have chance to win random blue/purple/yellow item from the stock.

[Frumple]

That would be incredibly, violently, annoying. 'Solution' it is not.

It's bad enough having to deal with the random nature of loot when you actually get to pick from a spread of it (i.e. the shops.) without making it so every single one you buy is completely random. I would very rapidly get completely torqued off having to deal with the major source of high end equipment coming from a gambling type set-up. "Oh hey, Archer, man, give me 1k gold so I can give you an item you have absolutely no need for or chance to use! Ahaha! You see this voratun shield? That's what you're getting! Congrats!"

It's close enough to that right now without making it overt. Let's not do that, please.

That said, I wouldn't mind a gambling-type loot vender somewhere in the game, so long as it didn't produce much -- if at all -- better equipment than the normal stores. Best thought I have is a quest or merchant that lets you purchase or construct a few randarts over the course of the game. You either choose or supply the base item, and it produces the item. One, maybe two chances at this, at most, during the end game content. Randomization is good. Absolutely zero control over randomization (i.e. gambling halls) from the player's side is not.

Your idea's not without merits, Postman, but a replacement for the current shopping system it is not.

[Mushroomhermit]

quest or merchant that lets you purchase or construct a few randarts over the course of the game. You either choose or supply the base item, and it produces the item.
Your idea's not without merits, Postman, but a replacement for the current shopping system it is not.

Perhaps if we procure a specified malus of horadric virtues?

[Chunes]

That said, I wouldn't mind a gambling-type loot vender somewhere in the game, so long as it didn't produce much -- if at all -- better equipment than the normal stores.

That's the entire point. You risk getting an item you can't use on the promise that it will be better than something you can buy in the stores.

[Frumple]

Which, as sorta' noted in other parts of my post, is something I'd suggest be very, very, limited. If the gambling is going to produce notably better equipment, then limit the number of chances you get to try it. To do otherwise is both to overvalue grinding and devalue other modes of item acquisition. If unlimited gambling were possible, I'd suggest limiting both the minimum and maximum power of the items acquirable -- they should be better than the worst of shop/loot acquired items, but worse than the best. This is to prevent, or at least devalue, largely meaningless repetitive action as optimal game play, i.e. grinding up cash for another yank on the one-armed bandit.

It's also why, if such a thing was implemented, I'd suggest allowing the player some degree of control over what you get in return. Allow use 1-3, perhaps 1-5, chances of creating a certain sort (i.e. you decide, bow, greatsword, plate armor etc.) of randart, and have this occur late game, so it would be a 'bonus' instead of something that supersedes meaningful choice earlier in the game. Certainly adding it as a primary source of item acquisition is an unpleasant concept; having a chance, especially if the chance is large, of your efforts being completely wasted, is what I'd consider a bad design choice... though definitely addicting design choice. Slot machines make profits for a reason, and it's not just because the machines are rigged