Looting, Buying and Selling

[TR Shrum]

Is it possible to sell items looted from dead enemies?

Has anyone been able to gain "additional" loot from crates, boxes, and such? I have been unable to find anything since the "North Road" battle.

[Hard Sarge]

I not been able to sell anything (you need a helmet or two ? cheap!)

after the first map, I not found much

I did find a nice "Jack Pot" cabinet in the Fort (and that was loaded with lots of goodies)

[SlickWilhelm]

We should be able to sell at DJ's. Heck, the man's store is hurting for ammo, you'd think he'd want to buy some of this loot from us.

Seriously, though. If this was a design decision to not allow us to sell the loot, then it was IMO a very poor decision.   

[CowGod]

Indeed! i hope that there is a place to sell stuff!!!!

[neofit]

When the game was released in Russia last year a lot of people complained about the inability to sell loot anywhere, which was a rather nice feature in the JA games. The devs replied that this was a design decision and that they wouldn't back down. Maybe they have received enough funds for the US version to back down?

[GODSPEED7]

Well, I don't think that was included in the original JA games though, was only incorporated with the 1.13 mod. I think we got so used to the big extras that 1.13 brought, that we forget that companies never really go that far in 'pimping' out our games!
And for crates and stuff, even once you've opened it, it will NOT appear as 'loot'.. you actually HAVE to take it out and drop it on the ground. Somewhat 'frustrating' as I got lazy with 1.13.. [like using ALT-Y to delete multiple same items].. sigh!

[Erik Rutins]

I rationalize the inability to sell by considering the situation. Until you succeed, you're effectively "behind enemy lines" with a very tenuous supply line, if it can even be called that. Getting things into the country is hard enough, getting them back out of the country and selling them before you're job is finished really seems like something that wouldn't be easy to do or worth spending a lot of your time on if you were actually there as the head of a mercenary outfit. Not to mention that perhaps "Dickie Jay" doesn't want to be directly associated with purchasing weaponry looted from dead government soldiers, etc. Obviously for game balance reasons it also keeps the cash tighter and resource limitations make for a better game overall.

Regards,

- Erik

[ShadoWarrior]

@Godspeed: selling your loot has been a part of JA2 from the original version. There are merchants in the game, such as Tony, that buy and sell stuff. What the v1.13 mod did was to (optionally) allow you to bypass the in-game merchants and sell stuff directly from the sector inventory, saving you the huge hassle of ferrying stuff all over the map and allowing you to concentrate on the battles rather than micromanaging supply convoys.

@Erik: I understand the desire of the developers to do certain things for balance reasons. Developers (and the publishers that fund them), OTOH, need to understand that players should be the ones to choose how they play the game, rather than have play styles crammed down their throats by developers. As such, if players want to be able to loot ALL of the gear from a corpse, or to sell their loot (even if it violates the premise of "being behind enemy lines"), then they should be allowed to do so via configuration options. If "cheating" is how someone has fun, then let them cheat. People play games to have fun, and not everyone has the same ideas of what's fun as a group of programmers (or business execs) may have. There's only so much about a game that can be changed via modding. Some features have to be done in code.

[Erik Rutins]

ShadoWarrior,

I do understand the point, I'm just saying that I can also understand the design decision. It's possible through modding to get access to all equipment, but I think selling would require a design change.

Regards,

- Erik

[ShadoWarrior]

Yes, and you gave a very nice and reasonable explanation for why things are in HG as they are with regards to selling. It's realistic, and I don't personally have a problem with it. Thank you. I don't mind not being able to sell loot. But some people do. Folks were expecting a JA2 clone (of sorts). Selling would require a significant coding change. At least if merchants were to be added to the game. If sector loot selling were done via a method like that used in JA2 v1.13, that would be much simpler, but it would also horribly break the game's balance. I would, however, like to see an option for enemies to drop all their gear. I don't think that would break the game.

[GODSPEED7]

I have to agree, and thanks ShadoWarrior for the reminder, it is true that Tony would buy stuff, but the ferrying made it so long that I think I would simply just delete things, seeing how much money you make later on in the game anyways. I think it's okay the way it is. I think many [including me] we're expecting a JA2 clone! [:-]

I'm very satisfied with the way the system is now, and don't really have a complaint apart from the fact that opened containers won't appear as loot.. does anyone here [maybe Erik Rutins] have a clue if containers can be in any way set as loot once opened?

[ShadoWarrior]

Containers aren't items, therefor they have no "loot" flag that can be set. Most of the problems with looting can be solved if the developers address my complaint regarding the absurd AP cost for dropping stuff on the ground. Currently, it's so broken that the only usable way to loot is to wait until the battle is over and you drop back to real-time mode, thus avoiding the AP issue. This really bugs me because I like to loot as I move through a sector, rather than have to go back over areas I've already covered.

[Hard Sarge]

I can understand/follow some of the thinking, but...

youy can hire troops and get them in country almost any place you control, so you can move around, you can buy weapons and ammo, gear and also send them anyplace you want, so the idea that you can't send stuff out, don't really carry any weight

plus for play balance, nobody is going to get rich selling helmets and Camo jackets, and nobody expects to get the price that DJs is getting for them, I am sure nobody thinks they would/should get 100 bucks for a helmet if they sell it, heck, 5 or 10 bucks would be with in limits (I sell all the helmets I got at that price, I may be able to buy a extra clip of ammo or two, how does that unblance the game ?)

now the trick would be weapons, but at 1/10 of market value would still be good, not enough to break the game, but enough to keep your little empire running

even more so, when the other answer is hacks and Mods to give the player what they want or think they need, if the player think that they got to use a Hack or a Mod to make the game playable, then the game was broke to begin with

[ShadoWarrior]

And that, Sarge, is why the JA2 1.13 team has added the features that 1.13 has. Because a large number of fans asked for them. I am continually amazed at the number of games that get released where the designers fail to pay attention to what has made earlier games great, and what the mod community for those games has done to make them even better. GFI really dropped the ball with HG. Don't get me wrong, I like HG. Otherwise I wouldn't spend time here on these forums. HG has great potential. But I doubt that it will ever even remotely come close to realizing that potential because I don't expect that enough money will be thrown at the game to pay the developers to add all the features (code) that are missing. Nor do I expect, that when the day inevitably comes that code fixes stop coming for HG, that the source code for HG will be released to the mod community (as was done with JA2) so that fans can do what the developers are unwilling/unable to do.

[GODSPEED7]

I agree with Hard Sarge and ShadoWarrior on the issue... I don't see this as a biggie. Really though who the heck are you going to sell your weapons to?? The locals.. all that creates quite a few variants within the game. And try to remember, this game was 'replacing' JA3D and I don't know if you remember, but JA3D was supposed to be a 'demo' of JA3, so this might just be to test and feel the game engine, modability, etc... They might just wait for us to make the mod for it. [;)] to finally decide what they'll implement into JA3. [8|]

[VassagoPT]

godspeed7, JA3D was not intended as a demo nor nothing like that. They always said it would be JA2 in 3D, which meant "do not expect new feature apart from the 3D engine, those will come later on JA3".

And from what I see HG is just that, JA2 in 3D. It's very diferent because GFI lost the IP licence and SF's funding, so they couldn't finish all the planned features and had to "mask" the JA references, mercs included.

But if you guys look closely at the files you can see that night was supposed to work, jump too, electronics too (even the current GUI has space for it), etc.
Unfortunately developers also need to eat and pay their bills, so they can't work if someone cut their funding...

I can't play JA2 anymore, I played it long enough and the fact is the graphics do have impact and repeating the same stuff does get boring... Everything reaches an end, and 9 years is very long time for a single game.

HG is unfinished and unpolished, but like I said a lot of times it is fun to play (at least for me...), so I'm glad they released it even with it's flaws instead of trashing everything, and I don't regret having spent 43€ on it

(also, I still have doubts about JA3 too, because afterall SF is still behind it, the release keeps getting pushed back and the SPM idea is still a possibility...)

[GODSPEED7]

That is why i said a 'demo'.. not in the strict sense of the word, what I meant by demo is that it is giving us a showcase of what JA3 would look like.. It's been a long time ago they said this would be like a pre-version of JA3. They even specifically mentioned that JA3D would be mission based, while JA3 would have the open-endedness of JA2. Strategy First back then actually used the term 'like a demo of..'.

So sorry if the term demo was misleading there, I meant it in the way you explained it.