Posts made by Groth

@apos said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Nah, that's not really true. if it was, people would engage with it once then stop if they were disappointed in the results. But the overwhelming majority haven't done it at all, which means that's inaccurate. This is particularly meaningful since like for example modeling skews really heavily to being disproportionately rewarding to low values, like silk having a multiplier of 15 while star iron has a multipler of 3, as an example, but there isn't anyone of any skill and stat combination that's tossing up a random silk outfit per week at minimal cost for exceptionally high returns. No one is.

Yes, your system favors Silk and Umbra over the insanity that is Josephines creations but that's not the real bar to ride. The real bar to ride is that the result is more or less linear with clout and relies heavily of being able and willing to go to 30+ people events.

There's also that very non-trivial bar to make people engage with a mechanic at all. The default state of any player is that they don't know the command exists or why they would want to use it.

@apos said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

From my experience, a lot of 'this is an inefficiency, and will surely create problems' usually don't exist because an analysis of numbers only miss out on overwhelming contextual reasons that would otherwise prevent them. When I intentionally create huge incentives for something, and more people talk about how it is OP than actually engage with it and use it, that's worrying for entirely different reasons. Like as an example, there was 11 modeling coderuns since the assembly. There's was nearly a thousand separate uses of 'praise' last week. I'm certain without checking there was far, far, far more uses of 'work' than that.

Part of the reason for that is because the 'You must be this tall to ride' sign on a lot of these mechanics is pretty damn tall. Anything less then perfect or near perfect stats is going to see a dramatic drop to less then a quarter of the results the people with perfect stats are getting.

@sparks said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

My thought is that if people are going to focus specifically on the math of a system in a constructive criticism thread, I feel like it should be coupled with an explanation of what they think needs to change in that math and why. Even there, though, it's going to be a pretty niche discussion; I mean, no offense meant to those who derive their enjoyment of the game from optimizing the math, but I feel like a better focus for a constructive criticism thread is looking at the systems at a macro level to see what stymies engagement (or, conversely, makes people feel like engagement is required, which should not be the case).

I don't think the haggle numbers need to change. I'm just trying to explain how haggle works and why AP prices will trend towards 3,000 if AP sales become a thing again. If that's the result you want you can cut out a lot of middle-men by just adding a command that trades 1 AP for 1,000 silver flat.

@kanye-qwest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@jibberthehut for a difference of 2.5 silver per AP.

This number is both wrong and very arbitrary so I'm curious what you think it means. It was probably a mistake of mine to have a right side of those equations at all because it's very misleading, the purpose of that series of equations was merely to demonstrate that the mid-point of haggle profit is at 275 and make it easy for anyone else to check the math if they felt so inclined.

@pyrephox said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Which means that both routes are nearly equal, and each character should just make a choice based on what's more in line with their own goals and experiences. Which is actually an excellent indicator of a part of system flexibility that works.

I'm unsure what you mean by routes here. @Too-Old-For-This was using an inefficient selling strategy because it felt like a good strategy because it produced bigger numbers (for more AP spent), I don't think that's a big problem because they were still in the same general area as the most efficient strategy.

I think it's healthy for players to be aware when they're making a choice because it's efficient and when they're doing it because they want to be a good member of the community and ideally the common sense choices should be close to the efficient ones.

@jibberthehut said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@groth you brought math beyond 1/4 inch seam allowances and 5 to 8 ounce measurements out and I went cross eyed.

Edit: which is to say none of the above made a lick of sense to me (no please don't try to break it down or walk me through it my husband swiftly learned that won't work, I just suck at math rl)

Basically there's three important numbers. How much can you sell for if you haggle? How much can you buy for if you haggle? What is the price on the broker? If the price on the broker is closer to the sell price then the buy price, then it's more AP efficient to haggle buy. If the price on the broker is closer to the buy price then the sell price, then it's more AP efficient to haggle sell.

Which all translates to, haggle buy is more profitable per AP then haggle sell if people are selling you resources for above 275 silver each.

@jibberthehut said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@groth just haggle/findbuyer and collate from the broker. Buying the resources through haggle and then selling is horrifying waste of ap.it really is. Eats into profits.

Actually unless the broker price is below 275, you make more silver per AP on your haggler if you buy it through haggle then broker.

When you buy from the broker and sell on haggle your profit is 500*(Discount+0.10)-Broker Price
When you buy from haggle and sell on haggle, your profit is 500*(Discount+0.10) - 500*(1-discount)

The average discount of a max skill haggler is going to be 0.71 without the bonus, 0.05 better with the bonus before accounting for spending AP on rerolls.

Doing max volume:
500*( 0,71+0,10) - 500*(1-0,71) = 260 per resource per 20 AP = 1.3
500*(0,71+0,10)-300=105 per resource per 10 AP = 10,5
500*(0,71+0,10)-275 = 130 per resource per 10 AP = 13

Doing max profit:
500*( 0,76+0,10) - 500*(1-0,76) = 310 / 20 = 15,5
500*( 0,76+0,10) - 275 = 155 / 10 = 15,5

The reason for that is simply because the 10% bonus on haggle sell means the average price of resources as far as the game is concerned is 275 and haggling profit is symmetrical.

If a resource is on the broker for 275, you can either spend 10 AP haggle buying it for 120 and a profit of 155 or you can spend 10 AP haggle selling it for a profit of 155.

@too-old-for-this said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@groth Hmmmm, I'll have to tinker with it more and see if my numbers change. Right now 300 seems to be my sweet spot for Haggling, and I still occasionally have to roll more than once if I want to get the full 300 or the really good price. Admittedly, I haven't been buying resources from Haggle, I go through the broker so other people can get some of that silver flow too.

How worth it is it for you to rerun the deal because you didn't get the 25%? There's thousands of resources on the broker people are trying to sell for 300 or less right now.

Assuming you rolled 275 and thus got no bonus and you bought your resources for 300, your option now is to either spend 5 AP to sell them for 385 average for a profit of 23k or you spend 10 AP to try again and sell 300 resources for 410 average for a profit of 33k. That's you spending 5 AP for 'only' 10k, before accounting for the fact with your stats you only have a 50% chance of getting the full bonus at 300, which means about a quarter of the time the second roll will be a 'failure' too.

We can estimate three strategies.

Selling 250 at a time, henceforth called A.
Selling 300 at a time, henceforth called B.
Selling 2000 at a time, henceforth called C.

A will get the deal 75% of the time and reroll the rest. So if we want to be lazy and generous* we can say they spend 6.6 AP on finding the deal and they liquidate for 110 profit per resource, 27,500 total and 2400 silver per AP.
B will get the deal 50% of the time and reroll the rest. Again being lazy and generous we can say they spend 10 Ap on finding the deal, liquidate at 110 profit, 33,000 total and 2200 silver per AP.
C will get the deal 100% of the time. They'll spend 5 AP finding the deal and liquidate at 85 profit, 28,000 total and 2,800 silver per AP. If you add in crits which happen 5% of the time, that becomes 30,300 total and 3,000 silver per AP.

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

From my understanding, house income is...pretty insignificant.

Nobles don't get enough "allowance" to do anything with. Wow, I get 4k a week from my house. 16k a RL month. Okay. I guess it's good Arx doesn't use paper money ICly, or I'd probably be wiping my ass with my allowance.

And the houses themselves don't even really make enough to do anything with. Sure, 100k a week or whatever "seems" like a lot. (God forbid you're a smaller house. Oof.) But...with refining and stuff, the base price of materials, etc and that's like nothing. I think I spent somewhere like 300,000 silver when I picked up my character, making 3 pieces of exotic leather things? I could be remembering wrong. And that's not even...the top tier of thing. It's what, the 3rd best leather? 4th?

All the real "income" seems to come through spending AP to do things and how many PCs with the right skills do you have at your beck and call?

Which...seems a little backwards. IDK.

There is a pattern in Arx design where you have an old system that generates values on the order of X. Then a new system is designed that generates values on the order of 10X which makes the old system look kind of quaint.

This is the case for Donate and Largesse vs Modeling and this is the case of Domain income and Lifestyle vs Haggling. I don't think that's how they intend things to be, just a consequence of the new systems being experimental and not tuned to be a coherent part of the whole. Assuming they're happy with the numbers that Haggling produce, I would expect them to increase both Household income and Lifestyle expenses by about 5-10 times at the same time they implement the automated house stipend payouts etc. They're probably holding off because they have grand plans(tm) for the dominions, the backend is practically a full on Orkfia style territory mini game.

Silver and Resources are not infinite, they're rate limited by AP and AP is the one true resource that Arx runs on. However you're right that AP essentially generates silver and resources from the ether.

It would be pretty cool to have Silver and Resources being generated by the dominions (With Arx itself and its market being a special super dominion) and filter their way to the PCs in finite quantities. In the same way it would be kind of cool to have the crafting materials be generated in limited quantities and the prices to some extent be determined by the demand.

@too-old-for-this said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@groth But that bonus is what helps me to get a better price on the amount.

Probably by less then you think, if you want to get the entire 25 bonus 75% of the time, you should be trying to grab 250 resources at a time . This bonus is then added to the result of your actual haggle roll which with perfect stats is about 150 which by the time the actual discount % is calculated means you're getting 66% to 78% instead of 61% to 73%.

What that means is that effectively your buy price drops by 25 and sell price increases by 25. This means that on average by spending 10 AP you'd be liquidating 250 resources for 380-440 silver for a total of 95,000-110,000 a batch. If you tried to convert AP to silver that way it means you'd spend 10 AP to buy 250 resources for 110 to 170 silver for a total of 27,500-42,500. So from an AP to Silver perspective, the conservative approach earns 68k to 83k which is pretty good and pretty close to what you get by just trying to grab 1000 resources at a time but it's still less because quantity has a quality all its own. Trying to grab 800+ at a time also means sometimes you'll crit and actually get a haggle deal for over 800 resources, in fact the average crit with 4/5 is for 860, which means aiming at 700 would net the entire bonus 75% of the time.

I can probably make a google sheet later if you want this in a more readable format.

PS: If you buy Perception 5, your 75% point will go up to 290 resources non-crit and 780 crit and increase your profit per 20 AP by something like 10,000

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@meg ur nail polish is gauche and your haircut looks like...oh wait, this isn't the hogpit

Uh.

What's the deal with haggle? Are nobles not supposed to do it, or what?

Why does a game like Arx not have more system guides?

Nobody really tells you how to /use/ any of the systems. Sure, they'll tell you "enter this command, and then do this, and you get X". Nobody is telling you 'oh yeah, you need to do x, y, and z, to actually get much out of doing this thing', even though most of the not-new players know that stuff.

I don't know if it's because the game is "competitive" or what, but people seem incredibly inclined towards keeping the 'tricks' they learn about the systems to themselves, and the only way to learn these things as a new player is "just go run face first into the wall 20 times until you figure it out".

It can be hard to maintain a guide when the system changes all the time. I don't think anyone is deliberately keeping things secret. I might compile information about the more esoteric systems later this week to put up on the unofficial wiki.

@too-old-for-this said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@groth Perception 4/Streetwise 5. 300 is about as high as I can consistently haggle at and still get a good deal. Pricewise, 375 seems to be my average.

You should be grabbing between 200 and 460 with 330 being your average. There's no punishment for trying to grab too many resources at once besides the fact you won't get the bonus.

@too-old-for-this said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@groth I think you're relying far too much on theory and not enough on reality. I have never, ever been able to sell more than 300 resources in a single shot.

Do you actually have 5 perception and 5 Streetwise/Economics? Not having Stat 5 loses you about 40 resources and not having Skill 5 loses another 60. If you've never managed to grab more then 300, it sounds like you have neither.

@too-old-for-this
I'm not missing that at all. The limitation to how much you can liquidate is AP which currently sharply limits how much you can liquidate any given week.

With Haggle as it works right now, you should consistently grab a deal for between 220 and 490 resources which you can sell for 355 to 415 silver or buy for 135 to 195. What that means is that hagglers can, if they could buy AP, turn 20 AP into 35,000 to 137,000 silver.

The interconnection between work, prestige and haggling makes AP transfers lead to rather undesireable effecs.

If you can buy AP, then you can cost-effectively maintain high prestige since you can buy AP to generate thousands of resources which you pass to a haggler which buys AP to sell those massive resources for the silver/materials you need to maintain that high prestige. Or the haggler can cut out the middle man to just wash AP to silver. That could be shut down by making the hagglers and high prestige less strong, but then you're just shitting in the cereal of the people who arn't doing AP trading.

I think any sort of assist mechanic needs to be more purpose made and not straight up transfer of AP. In RFK it worked the other way around, the people at the top gave their minions tons of dice which made people pretty happy.

Depending on how late we're talking you might be a good fit for early bird europeans.

My biggest issue in the context of MU* tends to be from the other direction. If I'm a scene where I'm having fun and I think the other person is having fun, I have a hard time figuring out how to check their boundaries without excessive OOC.

I've had bad experiences in the past where I didn't properly check and I only learned weeks later that the scene had really bothered them and I still feel bad about that.

The most common situation for me is power posing, I know I hate when people power pose me because it forces me to either give up agency of my character, potentially in a direction that doesn't match their personality, or break the scene continuity of the poses, it sucks.

Yet at the same time even very mundane things like giving someone a hug requires some degree of power posing so what I do these days is that in all cases where it's not 100% obvious they'll go along, I'll oocly ask "Would your character go along with X'.

I wish I could just read minds and cut down on ooc chatter though.

Also, why would you even try to nag someone into a scene they don't want to do? Few people write great if they're not having fun, it's going to suck for everyone.

@surreality
I'm not too familiar with TinyMux but assuming it has the same database backend support that Penn has, it should be reasonably trivial since all you need to do is make it store the bbposts in the database rather then on a gameobject. It's one of those things we always talked about doing but never got around to implement since there was always other things on the to-do list.

@Sparks
If you made a functional prototype it I commend you. One of the issues with trying to do it within the classical MUSH platforms was that you would need the web forum to insert the posts in, a nice thing about using Evennia is that you can have the web part fully integrated rather then try to hack yourself into phpbb.

@Rook said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

Yeah, there seems to be a lot of complexity around MUDs that MUSHes don't use, because MUSHes inherently have 99.99% of the development happening inside the game itself, not in the hardcode like MUDs do. MCP is an attempt to make a unified message bus in a MUD between the client and server, to standardize things, and it seems like it wasn't widely adopted. Likewise, some clients have started to allow SSL connections, to stop employer snooping.

Normal players don't use this stuff.

I think this is much of the problem yeah. Since even though MUSHclient has been supporting these things since pretty much when they came out, I don't know any means you can actually send this kind of data through PennMush softcode.

@Derp said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

What, specifically, about it do you think is relic tech from the 90's?
Or, even more helpfully, show us an example of things that you think would work better than what's already out there?

Specifically MushClient was written for the Windows 95 graphics API and is unable to support free sub-windows without being rewritten from scratch to an API that actually supports modern GUI.

A theoretical modern client that has the same kind of scripting support that Mush-client (Lua) has combined with a modern graphics library would allow you create pretty decent game-specific GUI's if you combined it with some new standards for exchanging annotated data. (Like the already existing https://www.gammon.com.au/gmcp )