WhiskyTangoFox

Prerelease 4.3.1

Added 2023-06-18 08:37:54 +0000 UTC

So, after some discussion, and a decent amount of research on the topic of game economies, I've made the decision provisionally to nuke the player's ability to sell items to vendors, by setting the max percentage you get from selling items to 0. You can still give your shit to vendors on the barter screen, but they won't give you caps for it.

Why?

One of the most difficult things to balance in the game is the simple gameplay loop of pickup resources and selling them to vendors for caps. In FO4, (and most loot based games where you can do this), this is the primary mechanism whereby a player reaches critical mass for not having to care about resources anymore. While there are various things I can do to delay it, tweaking values, sell rates, who can buy what and when, adding weight to caps to create a feedback loop, almost anything you do to nerf the loop actually ends up reinforcing it's importance because it forces players to spend more time stuck in it. And on top of that, FO4 does not have any fine grain tools for tweaking the system. And so the realization I eventually came to is that Life in the Ruins is about quests and exploration, and the ability to sell the random shit you find on the ground that the shop keeper never asked for is not an integral part of that. This change should de-emphasize hoarding resources to sell and picking up every single thing (or at least make the game economy more resilient to players who are compulsive about picking up everything), and instead encourage the player to engage in quests and interact with NPCs.

What's Next

I'll be looking into improving the radiant quest options in future updates. In particular, I'd love to do an expansion for Zorzak's Quest Board mod that gives a vendor a fetch quest for a specific type of item, e.g. Arturo has an order for 3 Institute Laser Guns, but we'll have to see how hard that is to implement. I'll likely also be adding things like Special Buyers, which adds more NPCs like Calvin in Vault 81 that buy specific things.

This change also lets me remove Complex Vendors, which I think might have been conflicting with some of Lunar's vendor changes, and doing things like preventing vendors from selling Fusion Cores.

# 4.3.1 - Just a little update
The biggest change this update is a very simple one. Vendors are no longer interested in buying your stuff. Given the limited tools FO4 has to balance bartering, and LitR's emphasis on questing and exploration over the shoot-loot-sell gameplay loop, the nuclear option seemed like the best one. Quest rewards have been increased to compensate. Over the next few updates I plan to look into improving the options for radiant quests.

I've done some rebalancing of the ballistic weaves, leather weaves are more protective, combat weaves are craftable without joining the BoS and can be found on Gunners, and a few outfits have been tweaked. Full body suits that weight > 20 lbs no longer qualify for Gumshoe02 or Dressed for the Apocalypse (if it's that heavy, it's armor). Expect Gunners to be even harder than they already were.

- Added