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#805 Cursed items sell for too high.
Selling items while they are cursed only incurs a slight penalty. Shouldn't cursed items be more like 25% or 10% of uncursed value? The following is from the upper level of Scorn Sale Shop on Invidious2:
That is: ring (sustenance-1) (cursed)
It is made of: iron.
It goes on your finger
It weighs 0.020 kg.
You reckon it is worth 17 platinum coins, 1 gold coin and 6 silver coins.
You are offered 5 platinum coins, 1 gold coin and 6 silver coins for it.
That is: ring (sustenance-1)
It is made of: iron.
It goes on your finger
It weighs 0.020 kg.
You reckon it is worth 21 platinum coins, 3 gold coins and 4 silver coins.
You are offered 6 platinum coins, 3 gold coins and 3 silver coins for it.
This is a bit tricky. In the last shop cleanup it was decided to make cursed items worth 80% of their uncursed counterparts. The problem is that this price determination is made in the "base price" calculation; in reality this should be a decision at shop buy/sell time. It is moderately simple for characters to uncurse items simply by praying; B/U/C status isn't an intrinsic property, but functions more like a modifier.
The problem with a 20% multiplier is that it would be moderately simple to buy a cursed item, uncurse it, and sell it again. This isn't that big of a problem since items are generally not generated cursed, but still worth nothing.
Any suggestions for a reasonable multiplier? Ideas for a long-term solution would be welcome, too.
It would involve applying the multiplier at buy/sell time, but I could see using a multiplier of 20% during sell and 80% during buy. After all, shopkeepers are greedy...
That still leaves the issue of buying cheap cursed items, uncursing them, and then selling them for a profit. Is this even a big enough issue to care about?
If we operate under the assumption that most cursed items would end up in a shop by a player selling them, then most savvy players would uncurse the item before selling it if there's a high enough change in value.
Of course, this could lead to higher-level players being able to profit off low-level players who don't have easy access to uncursing items. Sounds a bit too much like real life, if you ask me :P.
With that in mind, I think we should be careful with how the cursed items are set.
If nothing else, the minor penalty to value could be explained if the shopkeepers have easy ways to uncurse items (likely through the same means as the players). That way, they wouldn't care whether the item was cursed or not. Though, for the shopkeepers to pray on an altar to uncurse the item, they'd need a diety, and most of the gods in Crossfire now are geared toward adventurers, not merchants.
Last edit: SilverNexus 2015-05-18
Right now the issue is that the multiplier is applied in
price_base(), which determines the base price of an item. Should the cursed modifier be applied to only the shop prices or the base price as well?I believe part of this problem lies in cursed items of (title). They have a value multiplier, and it is usually not zero. This often results in effects like a cursed club of Woe selling for more than a generic club.
Last edit: SilverNexus 2018-01-03
What if cursed items sold for about 60% of their sell value? It's between the other two values suggested and would imply that shopkeepers would rather buy their items uncursed, but should still be a small enough difference to be impractical to abuse.
Implemented in r20629, thanks!