Identify Command (Newbie Help)

[Sesexe]

#1 Biggest complaint I hear from newbies = "How do I tell which item is better?"

The inability to identify an item or compare it's relative worth to another because of a lack of game knowledge and/or money springs up time and time again.

I don't know of anyone who likes items in the mud that are !ID. Perhaps there are some who like this, but I'm willing to bet that the majority of us don't like this flag at all, especially when it comes to the Auction. Am I wrong?

2 Birds, maybe we can use one stone?

Enchanters get the identify item spell, right? Bards get the skill, correct? (Bards please enlighten me to how this skill works, I'm unsure atm, and I'm basing my assumptions on my belief that it works just like the scroll or spell identify.)

Why not give all melee the bard identify skill at level 1, and give all casters the identify spell at 1st circle that allows them to identify any item that does not have the !identify flag? Any item flagged !identify would require a purchased scroll of a more powerful form of the spell identify to identify it. (As these items are often few and far between, increase the cost of an 'super' identify scroll? 20p? 50p? 100p? to make up the slight gap generated?)

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EDIT Update.
After points have been made in this thread, I now feel following about my initial proposal.

All characters in this game should get a lore skill (not spell) at level 1, useable 1/day, that allows them to identify any equipment item (or weapon) not flagged as magic.

I still feel there should be expensive scrolls with a more powerful version of identify that allows !ID items to be ID'd.

[Artmar]

Better to create new spell ('minor identify'), that would give lessened info about eq (precise info about item type, acap for armor, damroll for weapons, maybe class restriction flags, but only vague info about all 'magic' stuff: 'it affects STR in a negative way', 'it increases your hit points', 'it gives you an increased chance to hit your opponents'), and then sell the scrolls with it cheaper, or/and give it on lower circles to more classes.
Newbies could benefit from this simplified version, but at higher levels they'd have to switch to present, 'standart' Identify.

Besides, lot of complains about identify are about newbies that don't know if the item they see in the shop is better than the one they have (and don't want to buy some expensive and good-looking stuff only to find out that it's a total crap)

[Birile]

I don't know of any Mud in existence that just allows any old level 1 the ability to identify something. Yeah, it's a pain in the butt, and yeah, I'm all for making things a little easier for newbies, but damn, do we have to hand everything to everybody?? WTF would be the point of an identify scroll if we gave everyone the ability to identify stuff?

!ID items, on the other hand, now maybe that's a valid concern. But maybe it's not. I'm on the fence. :roll:

[Gurns]

Enchanters get the identify item spell, right? Bards get the skill, correct? (Bards please enlighten me to how this skill works, I'm unsure atm, and I'm basing my assumptions on my belief that it works just like the scroll or spell identify.)

Bards get the 'lore' skill which works just like the spell or a scroll. You don't have to mem or buy anything, but you get only 3 attempts per mud day.

I don't like !ID flag. I don't know of a reason for it on any ordinary piece of gear. I could certainly see artifacts being !ID, but that's not relevant for Toril2.

I think 'super-ID' scrolls would be great. Lore and the regular identify spell and the regular scrolls can't ID the '!ID' stuff, but super-ID scrolls can. Make 'em cost a lot. And if they came in, then I'd say to make most of the really high end stuff !ID.

That's the simpler version. :) If you wanted to re-work it entirely, you could have levels of lore and identify spells/scrolls, and levels of difficulty of gear. Low-level identify would have almost no chance of IDing 'highest degree of difficulty' gear, while highest identify would have close to 100 percent chance of identifying the lowest level gear.

To make that doable in any reasonable time frame, the difficulty of IDing a piece of gear could be calculated, based on the stats of the gear. Same calculation as whatever is used for figuring out how many points the gear counts in the zone. Leave the identify spell and the lore skill as the lowest level of ID, make scrolls of this lowest level ID quite cheap, and put out three or four levels of 'more likely to be successful' scrolls. Could make it linear (your chance of IDing any item is the same for 3 low level scrolls as it is for one, three times as expensive, scroll). Or non-linear, since people might be willing to pay a little extra to avoid having to recite scroll a hundred times.

You wouldn't need to give anyone else the ID spell or the lore skill, but they would become significantly less useful. To boost them back up to some utility, the spell/skill should have a greater chance of IDing stuff with greater skill levels. To make things work right, the best scroll, and probably the second best scroll, should have a greater chance of IDing stuff than the spell or the skill. So lvl 50 enchanter or bard would have a small chance of identifying anything and almost certain chance of identifying small stuff, but if you want to save time in IDing high end gear, you buy the most expensive ID scrolls.

[Sesexe]

Gurns, thanks for confirming how I thought bard ID worked. :)

I don't want to see the identify system re-worked entirely. Your suggestion for multiple levels of ID just seems somewhat excessive. Sorry.

I do like the fact that bard's can only lore so many times per day. Perhaps my suggestion about giving mages the spell at 1st circle wouldn't be so hot? Maybe instead we give all chars Lore 1/day at 1st level? Bards just get this in addition to their current lore, which would put them at 4/day? Would this really be so bad? (If you feel ID scrolls are real actual plat sink, you've gotta be kidding. Who do they hit the hardest? Newbies. The end. Like 3 plat for a scroll or even 100 p on a bunch is going to put a dent in anyone's bank account over 30th level? Get real.)

As for newbies not being able to tell what an item does in a store, I think that goes for all of us. Look at auction, Azuth was smart enough to put an identify feature into the auction code, I feel this too needs to be added to the shop code. A way for people to purchase an ID of something before they buy it. That would be good. wouldn't it?

Birile, this is not about handing newbies everything. It's about addressing an ongoing issue that isn't balanced. Newbies use stores to buy their equipment. We use auction and other players. We can ID on auction, and get ID's from other players on the equipment we want to buy/trade from them. Shoppies aren't giving out ID's to the newbies who buy their gear. That's an imbalance. Be real, come on now.

[Ambar]

there has got to be some happy medium .. honestly i think giving id to lower levels without some *cost* is just handing them things
make them understand that identify is available as scrolls and or a spell ata later level

hell lets give ress to lvl 1 clerics

[Katel]

there has got to be some happy medium .. honestly i think giving id to lower levels without some *cost* is just handing them things
make them understand that identify is available as scrolls and or a spell ata later level

hell lets give ress to lvl 1 clerics

The thing is, its only a disadvantage to us who are truely new and don't know the items. I see many people walk around and say that stuff is junk off hand. They know what is good, where to find it and grab it in auctions right away. Meanwhile I am stuck here looking at teh auction (which I didn't even know about till yesterday) using 2 plat for every identify. By the time I am done, even if I do bid on an item it has cost me like more and above what you would have paid for it since I have to go through and ID anything. I spend many dollars identifying stuff others just know right away sucks.

edit: this is nothing like giving resserection or some super powerful spell to a lower level character. We are talking about out of character knowledge crippling new players. If you were to roll up a level 1, you would not have the same problems I do with identify.

I also see propsed solutions which deal with level based systems of Identification. That won't work either because you are trying to use a game mechanism to control out of game knowledge. Once you see it for one character, all your characters and anyone you choose to tell instantly has this knowledge, independant of game mechanics.

Either publish the stats for everyone to see or force everyone to identify the thing before its usable and if you try and sell it before you identify it you get very little (Diablo style identification).

[Sesexe]

there has got to be some happy medium .. honestly i think giving id to lower levels without some *cost* is just handing them things
make them understand that identify is available as scrolls and or a spell ata later level

hell lets give ress to lvl 1 clerics

Ya know Jen, comparing my suggestion for a 1/day identify to giving them something as absurd as ress is pretty frigging insulting. :(

[Ambar]

dont take it so personal, hun

i still agree there needs to be some happy medium

[selerial]

I actually like the idea of Diablo-style identify. However, it would be somewhat problematic to implement. For instance, if a player identifies an item, then gives it to someone else, should the other person have to identify it before they get the full benefits? Also, how would you simulate the "mouse over" information popup? Just look at the item after it's identified to get it's stats? And the !id items would be fairly problematic as well. Now, I actually think it's sort of a neat idea, but there are issues that would have to be considered.

As far as the newbie concerns.. a few possibilities pop in to my head, but the problem is that many of them could be abusable. For instance..

After rolling a new character, give them some number (5?) of identify scrolls in the starting inventory. Better, have a Scardale-only, repeatable (and relatively simple) quest that gives out such scrolls.

After rolling a new character, give them a !drop, transient wand with some number of charges of identify (10?). Or have a Scardale only quest.

However, I think other suggestions would be much more likely to be implemented, and more generally useful and less abusable. These include suggestions made by others such as a "compare" command, in store identify for a small fee (suggest 3p), or a weakened version of lore, though I would suggest a level limit much like that on the "recall" command.

Finally, the ultimate solution would be to allow a publicly accessible equipment database to exist on the web. I know there's a big to do made over the secrecy of stats and such, I think concessions could be made regarding, say, whether a particular zone writer wants or doesn't want such info made publicly available, but it would be fairly simple and render all other efforts and suggestions moot. However, it would also render the whole identify thing mostly moot as well, so it's certainly not a perfect solution.

[Birile]

To boost them back up to some utility, the spell/skill should have a greater chance of IDing stuff with greater skill levels.

I don't mean to be a jerk but this is exactly how Lore works already. It's uber-difficult to ID a high-level piece of eq with a horrible Lore skill, and even at 99 skill it's still possible to fail Lore on an identifiable item. I'm hopin' you just neglected to mention this, Gurnsy!

[moritheil]

The thing is, its only a disadvantage to us who are truely new and don't know the items. I see many people walk around and say that stuff is junk off hand. They know what is good, where to find it and grab it in auctions right away. Meanwhile I am stuck here looking at teh auction (which I didn't even know about till yesterday) using 2 plat for every identify. By the time I am done, even if I do bid on an item it has cost me like more and above what you would have paid for it since I have to go through and ID anything. I spend many dollars identifying stuff others just know right away sucks.

A great deal of this mud's realism comes from the fact that information is so uncertain and must be obtained at a price. With the current system as it is, you must personally learn what items are decent and what items are not, rather than your character learning it easily. I don't mean to sound rude, but I think this is only helping immersion.

True, someone can tell someone else the knowledge, but that doesn't mean that people will tell everyone the knowledge. The fact remains that you have to work at it to get identification on things (or this would be a moot point.) Since spending cash is annoying you, may I suggest something? You can simply field test each item's effectiveness in combat, the way that players used to before att showed all stats numerically.

Yes, you can complain that this is out of character knowledge, but it's the same sort of knowledge that enables you to get a feel for where you are relative to Waterdeep or Dobluth Kyor without referring to any maps - it's experience. People spent hundreds of hours learning the items, gauging the relative difficulty of acquiring them, and that sort of thing. Demanding to be instantly placed on par with them does a disservice to their hard work. They had to go through the same steps every new player does, only in many cases their steps were harder, because the newbie zones, NHC, and other concessions are all fairly recent.

Furthermore, as you yourself pointed out, as you gain in level, identifying things will get easier. If you dislike carefully watching melee to gauge the difference betwen items, then rather than worry about optimal stats now, you could simply climb up in levels so that you can easily earn enough cash to buy ID scrolls.

Diablo has open ID because each item generated has slightly different stats - without open ID, things would be impossible to compare, and there would be chaos. This is not so here; each item has the same stats as other items of its exact type and name.

Learning the stats of several thousand commonly seen items in Sojourn is a powerful force for acclimatization, just as learning dirs from WD to BGR and SS is. There can and should be an entire world out there filled with uncertainty and wonder, and thousands of marvelous items whose purpose you can only guess at.

[moritheil]

PS - if you don't like the auction system and the way it absorbs platinum, you can and should directly buy from people. Ask people who are selling items on the FS board what their items' stats are. They'll tell you for free. Also, each auction item lists the seller. Ask the seller what their item is. If they don't know or aren't around to help you, just move on - there's no sense in spending effort to ID something you aren't going to bid on anyway.

[Sesexe]

I don't know of any Mud in existence that just allows any old level 1 the ability to identify something. Yeah, it's a pain in the butt, and yeah, I'm all for making things a little easier for newbies, but damn, do we have to hand everything to everybody?? WTF would be the point of an identify scroll if we gave everyone the ability to identify stuff?

!ID items, on the other hand, now maybe that's a valid concern. But maybe it's not. I'm on the fence. :roll:

Doesn't it strike you odd that D&D, the game that most muds are based off of, including this one here, does in fact tell you the stats on Normal un-magical items? Even before you start playing the game.

Open a Players Handbook, the main requirement of any participant. Open a Weapons supplement. Look on a player's character sheet, right there it shows the sections for how much dice whatever weapons your char is using do.

Log into a mud. See nothing without an ID.


Ok. Well then. Why?

[Gurns]

this is exactly how Lore works already. It's uber-difficult to ID a high-level piece of eq with a horrible Lore skill, and even at 99 skill it's still possible to fail Lore on an identifiable item.

Lore always has a chance of failure, yeah, hence my choice of the word "attempts". :)

The low skill/high-level item relationship... I never noticed it. Bards have had some major changes since I was low-level, so that may be one of them. (Of course, maybe I never got the chance to lore high end stuff at low levels.) Naturally, I like the idea. :)

[Nurpy Fuzzyfeet]

PS - if you don't like the auction system and the way it absorbs platinum, you can and should directly buy from people. Ask people who are selling items on the FS board what their items' stats are. They'll tell you for free. Also, each auction item lists the seller. Ask the seller what their item is. If they don't know or aren't around to help you, just move on - there's no sense in spending effort to ID something you aren't going to bid on anyway.

Yeah...and a newbie is gonna have the required plat to buy anything but crap from a player? Hardly.

Its hard to get enough cash to buy anything without being atleast zoning level, as a newbie you either get handouts for eq or buy crappy stuff in a store. You will never generate enough plat to buy anything of value unless you find some plat farm that the imms havent removed already.

I'm all for taking plat farms out of the game, but we already got so much plat floating around as it is all it does is put the newer players at a disadvantage.

[Birile]

as a newbie you either get handouts for eq or buy crappy stuff in a store. You will never generate enough plat to buy anything of value unless you find some plat farm that the imms havent removed already.

I'm all for taking plat farms out of the game, but we already got so much plat floating around as it is all it does is put the newer players at a disadvantage.

This just boggles my mind. I mean, first of all, your point is exactly right: anything a noob can afford they could probably get for free in handouts. And the true noob with a good attitude and the kind of person I would like to see stick with the game is the noob who would be forever grateful for any and all help they receive from those more knowledgeable. I can still remember my first day here when Lilithelle welled to me 3 times to help me and Demberdazzle and Beca pleveled me to level 6. Ask Dember how often I thank him for the help he gave me, even to this day. And we're talking over two years ago. Shit, any noob who isn't grateful for the help/eq they get for free and only complains because they waste their plats trying to ID/buy stuff at auction when the only stuff they can afford there would be handed to them isn't the type of player I care to see. There's a particular bard that I recall asking me to bid on the bard glaive the next time I went to Seelie Court and to HAND it to him if I won it. What the fuck? I had two GCD's (the first one I got was GIVEN to me when I was level 34) up until level 47. And I was perfectly content. I'm all for handing shit to players in need, and players who seem worth the attention, but don't send me a goddamned random tell asking me to spend four hours in a zone to give you the top-level weapon for your class when you're barely level 30. People like that aren't the type of people I care to be around and I shudder to think what this particular bard will be like in a year or two.

And why are we so concerned about plat farms? Players who invest the time deserve the plats and there's nothing this does to disadvantage a noob. Jesus Christ. It ain't no different than farming rares or quest mobs or anything of the sort.

[Grumdikanikus]

That Weapon sucks compared to that one.

That pair of sleeves looks slightly better than the crap you are wearing.



Enough said.

Grumy

[Katel]

This just boggles my mind.....continue with wierd rant.[/quote]

ya this thread was about like giving players a way to identify items? I don't know where this garbage rant about ungrateful players and people getting handouts are comming from. Who is doing random tells to ask for top level equipment?

Just to humor you I guess, if noobs should get handouts from high level players to start off, why not just throw it on them to start the game? It seems like to even play the game from scratch you need handouts. I don't know what I would have done so far without handouts from Daksnar and some other lvl 50s who gave me some stuff when I asked for help retrieving my many corpses.

Wouldn't the game be better if you gave even the most basic noobs commands that would help them progress on their own without handouts? If you don't want to publish stats fine. But atleast give some method that doesn't cost exhorbant amounts of money for a player didn't at the start of the game beg for eq and money.