The Shop Prices are Too High

[ArmOrAttAk]

For beginners anyway. I couldn't save up enough to identify items. I had to resort to asking other players for handouts or my characters would have starved to death.

[Leaf]

I couldn't save up enough to identify items.

You couldn't find or aquire 20gp to ID an item?

No starting skills such as smithery, literacy, thaumaturgy, jeweler, et al. to ID items without have to use the ID altar?

You didn't find any scrolls of identify either?

I had to resort to asking other players for handouts or my characters would have starved to death.

There is "free" food in many of the maps - city hall, beginners, etc.

[poof]

I concur with Leaf. Besides, it is not supposed to be a 'cake walk' to get money early in one's Crossfire career. Later on it becomes much easier. Again, as Leaf said, there is a lot of food just lying around. If you really want to beg for something to get food ask for a "Horn of Plenty" and use it. You'll never go hungry again.

[ArmOrAttAk]

You couldn't find or aquire 20gp to ID an item?

I'm not talking about one item. sure i could id one item. what about the other 5? then you id something and does the sell price increase? no, it doesn't you can't even make back the gold spent id'ing.

You didn't find any scrolls of identify either?

sure i found a few and i used them.

[poof]

You couldn't find or aquire 20gp to ID an item?

I'm not talking about one item. sure i could id one item. what about the other 5? then you id something and does the sell price increase? no, it doesn't you can't even make back the gold spent id'ing.

Actually it does increase, a lot, if the item ends up being magical and not cursed or damned. It is best to try to use whatever skills one has to ID stuff before using spells and money to do so.

[mwedel]

Certainly using the detect magic and detect altars in the magic shop is a first step for anything you find. Sell anything that isn't magical, as you certainly won't get your money back identifying that.

Even at low levels, it is really a crap shoot if you'll make your money up identifying items. The value of +1 items is still less than the cost to identify.

However, this also depends on lots of factors. Identification identifies a stack of items. So if you have 10 magical swords that are merged as one item, the identify on that still just costs the 20 GP, but you probably do get the money back even if they are +1, because you have 10 of them. But if you just have 1 object in the stack, identification probably does not pay off.

Note that if you do the detect curse, you can at least equip the items safely and see how good or bad they are. One of the main the values I find in identify is seeing if the item is worth keeping or not.

And at higher levels, it definitely pays of - a +2 item, even just 1 of them, will more than pay for identification.

But at low levels, you may end up identifying a lot of stuff that are money losers, but you get that one item that after identification is worth 50 platinum, and it more than pays up for all the identifications that were money losers.

For food: You can eat pretty much all monster parts for food also with no ill effects, and those tend to be fairly plentiful.

[Mental Mouse]

Agreed, food is plentiful, to the point where if you're starving, you weren't actually exploring. The "beginner's" entry has a food alter where you can stock up, City Hall has a freebie pile, and almost any corpse will fill you up. "Food of poison" is clearly labeled as such.

Basic routine for IDs should be:

(1) Collect found items into big piles, pick them up by types to get the biggest stacks you can.

(2) Use whatever ID skills you have to ID as much of that as you can. Look especially for items with odd weights, which are likely to have bonuses or other magic.

(3) Use the detect magic and detect curse altars to further weed things out. If you're having trouble getting gold, go to Gramps in the hovels. Bring him his earhorn (from The Barking Mule) and his walking stick (from #3 Riverside Manor) and he'll toss you a total of 5 diamonds. (So why does he live in the hovels? ) There are often a few other gems lying around the residences too.

(4) At low levels, just ditch any cursed items, you can't sell them. Sell anything identified (that you don't want for yourself) immediately. Huge piles of weapons are likely to be normal. If you can't afford to identify them, you can still get something for them. Remember to bring everything to the proper shops -- in particular, identified arrows/bolts and any bows go to Scorn's Best Bows, not to the Weapon Shop. (You can't sell unidentified arrows or bolts.) Scorn Sale Shop pays well for miscellaneous items like pipes. Identified books and scrolls should go to the Library Shop, including identified magical books. I find that the magic shop gives better prices than the other shops on rings/necklaces of Adornment, and most alchemical supplies, but YMMV. (Mosley's Magical Books both buys and sells cheap!)

(5) At this point, you should be down to a few unidentified magical items that you can take to an identify table. Groups of scrolls are likely to be Identify scrolls, so ID them first (drop all other unidentified items next to the table before paying for your ID). If you've got more than a couple of un-ID'ed items left, when you ID the identify scrolls, use the scrolls rather than the table on those.

[Mickel]

I concur with Leaf. Besides, it is not supposed to be a 'cake walk' to get money early in one's Crossfire career. Later on it becomes much easier. Again, as Leaf said, there is a lot of food just lying around. If you really want to beg for something to get food ask for a "Horn of Plenty" and use it. You'll never go hungry again.

Isn't it better if the game got progressively more difficult instead of the other way around though? At level three getting through the day was a struggle, at level 30 it's mostly just a doldrum of standing in the same place for hours, killing one after the other of an endless stream of identical monsters without effort... you can replace yourself with a small Python script and have the computer play the game for you, like I did for a while.

In the beginning, when you need the altars of identification, 20 gold is a fortune. By the time 20 gold is meaningless to you, the altars of identification are too. Would it hurt anyone if the cost was reduced to 20 silver? I know it wouldn't make an iota of a difference to me now. I want more challenges, at all levels of the game, but it should be interesting challenges, not a simple matter of putting 200 dragons in the same room, or making a drink of water cost 200 diamonds.

Being stuck in the game because of a ridiculous price tag on something you need isn't a fun challenge that makes you try harder, it's a dumb challenge that makes you quit the game. This is a game after all. It's for entertaining people.

[mwedel]

The crossfire economy is fairly broken.

The main reason is that it doesn't take too long before you just don't find many items in the shops worth buying. So you're still adventuring, getting lots of money, but nothing to spend it on. The good items are not found in shops, but rather found out adventuring.

[Mickel]

Artificially constructed economies like those in computer games hardly ever work well, and the more restricted the emulation the faster they break, usually through hyperinflation. NPC store sold items become worthless, and so does the currency, and players begin to trade using some other item with a percieved greater value. I'm sure someone who knows economics could say a lot of interesting things about it.

So far I've only seen one game where the economy hasn't broken - Yo Ho Ho Puzzle Pirates. In it, there are no NPC stores at all, and everything is player made. It seems that caused an actual working economy to develop... but it's not something feasible in Crossfire I think.

Bottom line is as long as you have an economy where items with arbitrary properties are sold for arbitrary amounts, you'll have a hell of a lot of balancing to do.