Hey, I'm sure some of these have been suggested but I'd like to group my suggestions together. 1. Tweak How Monster Zoos Work Due to the abilities of certain enemies, some Monster Zoos become frustrating or impossible as enemies blink out of the room. They can seemingly disappear into thin air, leaving you with an incomplete monster zoo, or they can jeopardise one's chances of success. I would, personally, suggest seeing if it's possible to stop said enemies from blinking outside of the zoo. If not, perhaps making it so if a monster leaves a certain radius for a certain number of turns is 'removed' from the counter, but make said radius bigger than the one for the adventurer. Or another method could be to force enemies to return after a certain number of turns. 2. Add in an Independent Sell Function Titan Quest had something like this, and I believe Sacred 2 did too. Basically, in lower levels (10, 11, etc), shops seem to be few and far between - if not completely missing. The idea is that you are able to sell items independent of shops but at a much lower price. So, the shop might give you 2k for an item, but selling it independently will give you just 1k. It won't unbalance the economics because, well... there aren't any. It satisfies the kleptomaniacs and provides some convenience. 3. Female Adventurer Icons Now, this is just me being me, but I think it'd be cool if each adventurer had their own icons. I understand it'd take a lot of work and I'd be willing to pay for such a "skin pack", as it were, but I think it'd look cool if the icons matched who you played. 4. Diggle Eggs Moar plz.
Just a remark on the first idea, the main problem here is that indeed, some monsters seem to blink into walls, which hopefully we can fix soon. Not sure if it would make it into this patch or not though.
D-lock the Zoos! No one teleports in or out! Drive mages crazy! >_> <_< Why does everyone look at me like this is a bad idea?
Why not just have an instant teleport back and forth from the shop? Because there is no penalty for going back in floors, a player interested in getting the most for their money can just walk back to the store. It takes some time but in the face of a penalty like this, it would be worth the hassle. (I know that people tend to have lots of money later in the game, but sometimes those big-ticket purchases of 100,000k or more pop up, so it does have some strategic value, especially on Going Rogue with the lower shop returns for sales.) Also, Titan Quest does not have this feature, but rather, it has unlimited town portals back and forth, so it is effectively the same. Dungeon Hunter does do that sell-it-anywhere-for-somewhat-less-thing, but the penalty is not really a bother since items are generally gotten just by fighting monsters-- so it's different than in a roguelike.
Oh, I thought TQ did have that feature. My mistake, then. Some Dungeon Crawlers do, anyway (I know DoD's a roguelike, but still). I guess my point with the sell function is it's likely quite an easy one to implement. I don't think a shop teleport would really be all that good (plus one might think it could be used to escape combat or something similar, thus adding some potential gameplay/balance issues), whereas an instant sell-for-less function would not have said balance problems. If money is something you need - e.g. those more expensive items - then you still have the function of going back to a shop. Daynab; I had a feeling it was known (as a bug), so I kinda wanted to point it out but suggest how I (as someone with no development experience) would fix it.
Torchlight has a feature where you can give your pet your junk items then send him back to town to sell them for you. He returns a few minutes later. The tradeoff is that you lose your pet for several minutes. One solution could be to add a sell feature to every vending machine. I don't see why it couldn't give you the full price. If you really wanted to you could just go back up a level and sell anything you wanted, anyway. For this to work, first fix the issue where you can't open your inventory once you've opened a vending machine. Then simply enable the shift-click sell interface when a vending machine is open. >Female Adventurer Icons I don't think it's clear what you're asking for. At first you mention "icons", which I think of as little picture-squares which represent things. Then you mention "skins" which makes me think of your character's appearance in the game. And in the title of this you specifically mention 'female" adventurers. There is already a female skin when you choose a female character. So, what exactly are you asking for?
But that, largely negates the need for the store. There's no real trade off. It could be that inventory is Price - 50%, vending is Price - 25% and store is Price, with 'Price' referring - perhaps obviously - to the price you would currently get as the game currently stands. What I meant - and I apologise if you found me unclear - is that I'd like the talent/skill/buff/debuff images to have female versions (and male with all male), and that I wouldn't mind if it was a sort of "skin pack", i.e. a visual DLC pack that "reskinned" the game, as it were.
Re: female icons, if you've noticed, the expansion skills have mostly female icons due to the fact the female character only appeared shortly before the expansion. That's why the core skills all have male icons. Some diversity would be nice, but David would be better placed to say if it would ever happen since he draws them all.
Yeahhh, it's true; I'm not in a real hurry to redraw 200-300 icons. And seconding what Daynab said - I did try to tilt new icons rather more toward the female avatar for the expansion and post-expansion to add some balance to representation across the skills. Considering all the stuff I have to do at Gaslamp it'd be nice (and possibly worthwhile) if I could dump this job on someone else but I'm not especially confident that anyone else can match the style perfectly. In the end my time is better spent on a variety of other things (like fixing Fungal Arts!). Don't worry though, our red-haired hero will get the attention she deserves.
Thanks! I knew it'd be a lot of work and that she has quite the focus in later icons, hence why I suggested it as a sort of DLC pack (that way there'd at least be some sort of financial incentive for all of that work), but I do understand that it's not a particularly high-importance task. Wait... will get the attention? Me thinky that's a hinty to something minty!
Did you know that stores sell things, too? Joking aside, if you were given less money at a vending machine then there are many times when I still wouldn't use it. Sometimes you need every penny you can find when you get an early shop that has a really nice $30,000 item. It's reasonable to earn that in a few dungeon levels, but if you take away any of the sell price of the items you find, it just doesn't make any sense to sell anything except to Brax. By reducing the sell price at a vending machine, you're just forcing me to stick to the same old plan of making trips to shops all the time. The goal is to reduce the tedium of making those trips. Generally, walking backwards in the dungeon is a very safe thing to do. It's not like you're taking a risk to walk back to the last shop. It's just tedious. Ohhh, right. All of those.
My point is it's for those of us who don't want to trek back and forth all the time, or have no use for the money. I'm playing a melee character with the smithing crafting skill. I don't need to buy anything - there is really nothing to buy. If you need/want the money, Brax'll still be there, but for those of us interested in just going down and what have you, it streamlines that aspect a lot. And that's why you should get less money. It's a trade off. You trade a (high) percentage of the profits for the convenience of having a way to sell items without traipsing back through five or more levels.
You're ignoring another group of people. Those of us who don't want to make the trek and who do need the money! Stop oppressing us! My people need to be free! I can understand a certain amount of tedium in a rogue-like. The whole game is a struggle for survival. But walking back to a shop has so little impact on your survival that it's pure tedium. I don't think the game should excessively reward tedium, and if you put a large discount on sell prices to vending machines then that's exactly what you are doing. You are giving me 50% more money if I walk back to Brax. (Or whatever large discount amount you had in mind.) It's the same reason Gaslamp wants to get rid of spore farming and lock-pick farming. The click-farming mechanic rewards tedium. To paraphrase Nicholas, "this makes you hate yourself, and then it makes you hate us." I don't want to hate Gaslamp Games. Please don't make me hate Gaslamp Games!
I personally don't view it like that. It's a mechanic that's existed in some similar games (largely - as we noted above - dungeon crawlers). There's still the option of going back to the shop and offloading. Brax will still remain the full price. You won't get 50% more if you go to Brax, you'll get 50% less if you sell via inventory. We can further balance it, perhaps by giving it a limit. 20 items and then it locks off for the rest of the time that you're on that floor? Allows you to do clear a bit of room for more stuff, but still keeps that Player <> Brax thing going.
It's all relative. If a vending machine gives you 33⅓% less than Brax, then Brax is giving you 50% more than a vending machine. You can look at it either way. For example Brax might give me $1000, but (with this particular discount) a vending machine would only give me $667. If you make vending machines give less, that means Brax is giving more. I didn't necessarily mean Brax is giving more than he would have in an earlier patch. I guess I could have been more clear, but I wanted to emphasize the economics of the situation: that Brax in your scenario gives me more money. That's an encouragement to perform tedium. Having a vending machines give you the full price doesn't make the game any less challenging. All it does is remove tedium. It adds no more fun or challenge to make me ever go back to Brax if this feature gets added. As a counter example, here's a case where tedium adds a challenge: Inventory Management. It's tedious sometimes to go through your inventory and decide what to get rid of to make room for new things, and what to keep. You can spend minutes doing it sometimes. What you are doing is making hard decisions about what you absolutely need to carry with you to survive. Having a limited inventory adds to the challenge of the game. You're going to wish you never dropped that Zodiac Wand if you are low on life and you realize you just stepped on a Thaumite trap. You don't have the time to walk back and go pick it up. If you take two steps you die. That's fun! That's a challenge! Realizing you made a mistake that cost you the game. Walking back to a shop to sell a stack of junk takes no skill at all. There's no challenge, and there are no decisions to make. The worst thing that can possibly happen is you encounter a wandering monster. Or, since you want to just get this trip over with, you turn up the game speed and you walk on a trap that you knew was there the first time you came through these rooms. None of these events add to the difficulty of the game in a meaningful way. A player who needs the money will just walk slowly back to the shop, kill the two or three monsters that spawn on the way, then walk all the way back to where they were to continue the adventure; to continue the fun. That's the vision I have when I think about making selling things easier.
I just casually read through the comments. But per the instructions. 1. I have occasionally had the inability to complete a zoo. Disabling monster teleport would be kind of cool but unecessary. 2. I disagree with the independent sell. You have to manage items. In later difficulties it is definitely not worth trekking back up stairs to sell. You just don't get the gold. That is kinda just how the game is designed. There are too many items and like any good roguelike you just have to choose what you want. 3. Redoing icons is a waste of time. They have other projects to work on, and while I have no idea if they will be in a genre of my liking, if any time is spent on this magnificent game itself, I would want it primarily go to polish (bug fixes and balance). 4. Late game has a lot of diggles... but no diggle eggs. I agree 200% (as in needs 200% more diggle eggs in game).
1. Monster Zoos...fair enough. 2. Agreed. Managing items is a must. Walking back to the shop incurs a penalty in turns, which contributes towards monster respawn and chipping away at one's resources. If you're lacking inventory space but don't want to walk back to the shop...drop your items. 3. Agreed. Waste of time, especially when it's perfectly moddable. If one doesn't like the icons, one can draw some and mod them in with relative ease; I'd rather the devs work on matters that actually require their input to proceed (the new xml handles coming in 1.0.10, for example). Bug fixes, balance, performance - TF2 is what one gets when the devs start focusing on cosmetics rather than gameplay. 4. That could easily be solved by modding diggles to have a % to drop eggs on death once 1.0.10 hits.
Is managing items a must? Yeah, it is, depending on your skill choices and so forth. The point with the inventory-based selling is that it punishes - in some form - the user for not using the shop. You get less gold and maybe you can only use it a certain number of times. On top of that, in later posts I've suggested in the subsequent discussions that it could be limited to certain game modes or difficulties. Adding the mode wouldn't eliminate Brax, it wouldn't render him obsolete. It's a way to satiate one's kleptomania. With the icons; I could draw them? Not really much of a solution, is it? I don't think it's a waste of time and I've also suggested it could be a paid-for release in order to recompense GLG for the work, and David didn't seem against the idea. Yes, I understand there's bigger priorities, but as the topic title says - this is just a *suggestion*. I don't expect it to happen, but I would like to see it happen. I think it would be cool if the icons/skills/yadda yadda matched the hero that you were playing.
In regards to selling items outside of a shop I think we need a compromise. Which means you all should agree with everything I said.
