MAngband

Hi :) just read through PW's list of changes to align with Angband. Some of these could possibly be implemented earlier than milestones indicate. I'm not sure these are easily implemented, but I'm sure PW can answer here. I'll list a few of the changes I thought of:

- Small pseudo-ID changes (Angband 3.1.0): make pseudo-id not occur whilst resting; make pseudo-id quicker; make items, when worn long enough, get automatically identified; make {average} items automatically identified; make wands/staves stack even when unidentified

- Implement and upgrade the 3.0.9 dungeon generator (Angband 3.1.0): note that the new dungeon generator doesn't generate any guaranteed excellent items in vaults anymore (the spots marked as "8" in vault patterns will only generate a "good" treasure up to 20 levels out of depth)

- Try to make stores a bit more interesting/useful (Angband 3.1.0): start applying higher-level magic as the player dives through the dungeon (for PWMAngband, min and max levels of objects generated in a store will depend on the max depth of the last customer who entered that store)

- Remove rings of Stupidity, Weakness and Woe, and allow all rings/amulets to be cursed (Angband 3.1.0)

- Add a potion of resist poison (Angband 3.1.0)

Some of these changes look awesome. Especially the resist poison potion. (since drolems aren't easily detected anyway) you cannot avoid having poison resistance, but it makes a priest/pally able to kill the serious poison breathers without the need of "Lordly resistance". And it would make for a fun option to have early on also. (please consider this: 596 heros killed by poison, 47 heros killed by poison, 107 heros killed by an Air hound).

Also the ZoCD is too easily handled at high levels or with the right tools, and the new "dungeon generator" would greatly reduce the benefit of finding these vaults.

Depending on how the shop coding works, I dunno if that's a good option. But in general I feel it would make you find less powerful items in stores up to a certain dungeon level/depth and then enable you to find more usable items in stores as you get deeper. This makes diving more important, and let's face it. It is a diving game. Risk vs reward. And you still need the cash to purchase these expensive items. Maybe it'd be an option to just include store 7 in this kind of shuffling. 1 downside is that the store would no longer be the same as different characters enter it (I imagine items would be recreated as a new character enters unless there's a better way to implement this)

ZAL

The generation based upon charMAXDEPTH could be a little broken.
A character could ghostdive to get high max depth at the start,
Or this could be used with 2 characters alternating going into 7 to *speed up* item generation.
In order to make a balanced shop that is dependent on player max depth, I think it would have to be 'hidden' somewhere in the dungeon (like a special depth that you can recall to that is based upon your character max depth, like @R2025 or @T2000)

I also think you may need to twek the chance of a good item becoming excellent if we removed guaranteed excellent items, just for balancing sake.

Other than that, these sound like some pretty good changes! And this is coming from a guy who hates the changes that have been made to vanilla recently.

sorry almost never online these days, but yes iam still here. I hope i can make it to the next party dive...

ontopic:

features sound great. I think its great to reduce the availability of excellent items (+1)
For the shops since its a multiplayer environment it will be hard to balance... you could make this level dependent too, but i think its still easily exploitable. Maybe just ensure that X slots are low level Y slots are mid level and Z slots are high level. Then every character has some interesting stuff... Maybe have 1 page for each level range

Perhaps an extra black market, which only works for you if you meet certain character requirements?
It could even just be like; you need X points to enter, and you get a certain amount of points for your lvl, your maxdepth, and deepest unique killed.