Morrowind talk:Alchemy Merchants

Ratings

Since the Potion, Beverages, and Ingredients are each lumped into single columns instead of being broken out, it's a bit more complicated trying to come up with a fair way of rating the Alchemy merchants based on the quantity and quality of goods they have available for the purposes of the sortable table. Here's a proposed system that might work:

Potions

Rate by value of potions:

• Bargain Potions: 5 gold
• Spoiled Potions: 10 gold
• Cheap Potions: 15 gold
• Standard Potions: 35 gold
• Quality Potions: 80 gold
• Exclusive Potions: 175 gold
• Other Potions: (This is a bit more complicated, and may require more breakdown)
  • Cure Common Disease, Paralyzation, Poison: 20 gold
  • Cure Blight Disease: 30 gold
  • All others: 35 gold, same as Standard
  • Averaging these together yields a value of about 32. This is the value that will be used, in order to simplify calculations.
• Leveled Lists: 62 ((5+15+35+80+175)÷5) for each of the 5 qualities of potions (not counting Spoiled or Other), averaged. Not entirely accurate, but should be good enough.

So, basically, multiply number available by value of each type, and add them all up. Additionally, to put stress on the restocking supplies, the restocking and non-restocking will be tallied separately, and the restocking value multiplied by a constant (I'm thinking like 10, maybe) before being added to the non-restocking. (This score will not be displayed, only used for sort purposes, so it should place all the restocking suppliers higher on the ranking than non-restocking suppliers.)

Beverages

Similar to potions, rate by value and quantity:

• Mazte, Shein: 10
• Greef, Sujamma: 30
• Cyrodiilic Brandy, Flin, Telvanni Bug Musk: 100
• Skooma: 500
• Leveled Lists: 110 (This is the average price for all of the 8 beverages. Again, not 100% accurate, but good enough.)

Again, values will be added up, restocking and non-restocking separately, restocking multiplied by a constant and added to non-restocking to provide a good total score for sorting purposes.

Ingredients

This is much trickier, as there's a much greater range in value of ingredients, and figuring out the total value of ingredients sold would be a good deal of work. So instead, this will just be based on quantity and variety, using the following formula:

• Score = (((RNum+(RLev/2))×(RQty+RLev))×Constant)+((FNum+(FLev/2))×(FQty+FLev))+((PNum×PQty)/2)
  • RNum = Number of restocking ingredients
  • RLev = Number of restocking ingredients from leveled lists (divided by 2 in the Num factor to approximate the possibility that leveled lists will turn up duplicates)
  • RQty = Quantity of restocking ingredients
  • Constant = Same constant used for Potions and Beverages - probably 10
  • FNum = Number of fixed (non-restocking) ingredients
  • FLev = Number of fixed ingredients from leveled lists (again divided by 2 the first time)
  • FQty = Quantity of fixed ingredients
  • PNum = Number of ingredients growing on live plants
  • PQty = Quantity of ingredients growing on live plants. (This factor divided by 2 to account for the slower growth, and the fact that plants are not guaranteed to produce.)

I hope that these formulas will generate a fair approximation of which Alchemy Merchants have the best stocks of goods, but if anyone has a better method, I'm open to suggestions. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 23:32, 9 December 2007 (EST)

One further change I made from this system (in case anyone is actually looking at the numbers) is that I took the final scores for each class of items and scaled them down to a value between 0 and 999 (so that the sort-key is only 3 digits). I also subtracted this number from 999 to make the more well-stocked vendors sort on top by default instead of on the bottom. I think the results are fairly decent, enough to give a pretty good idea where the best goods are at any rate. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 20:44, 16 December 2007 (EST)

Making Page Functional

As discussed already at Help talk:Disambiguation#Problem Pages, this page is currently high on the list of problem pages. I just tried cleaning up all possible templates that could be replaced equivalent HTML code, but that wasn't enough. I think to make any real progress, we'll need to get rid of most of the potion/beverage icons. Something similar to the revamp I just did at Morrowind:Merchant List is possible here, although trickier in several ways.

An even more fundamental question is, perhaps, are all of the icons needed? Do readers really want to be able to find merchants who sell spoiled potions? Should the summary perhaps be limited to the best quality potions? All the details will still be available on the individual merchant pages; the only purpose of this page would be to help readers find desirable merchants. Do all of the beverages need to be listed here? If we need to provide readers with tips on where to find specific beverages such as Flin or Shein, perhaps it would be better to give each beverage an individual page where sources are listed. It seems that approach would accomplish the same fundamental goal, but in a way that doesn't require a massive and dysfunctional page. Perhaps add a notes column on this article, with a blurb such as "restocking supply of all standard beverages" to highlight the important entries. I think I'd rather see some rethinking of the page's contents before trying to completely reorganize the table to make it functional with all of the current content. --Nephele^Talk 03:56, 25 June 2008 (EDT)

In the interest of getting this page off my todo list of problem pages, and in the absence of any other apparent interest in improving this page, I've done what seemed to be the bare minimum necessary to get rid of the thousands of icons on the page.

• Basically, I've made the potion and beverage columns comparable to the ingredient column with a simple total of the numbers available for purchase.
• In the potion column, I've added a "Best" to indicate the single best type of potion available from the merchant.
• I've also changed the sort key to (999-value) so high numbers are good and 0 is no merchandise. (Effectively undoing the last kludge added by Lurlock, now that descending order sorts are possible).

I personally think the table could still do with some major rethinking: only include values that are actually likely to be of interest; put each entry into its own column; delete the arbitrary sort key values; etc. However, that's more than I'm ready to tackle right now, especially without any interest in the page and without much personal experience of Morrowind. Until then, at least readers can load the page without waiting 15 minutes. --Nephele^Talk 17:15, 15 July 2008 (EDT)

For the record, there wasn't a "lack of interest" in improving the page. There was a lack of ability - specifically, I couldn't even get it to load, much less change anything, so of course that made any kind of improvements basically impossible. Apparently you managed to load it up and make the changes - I'm guessing you just took out the potions/beverages columns? I forget what this used to look like. Anyhow, I guess it's okay if that's what it takes to make it usable again. It's a shame there isn't a way to make the site support the features this page used to have without completely overtaxing the server, but I guess you gotta live with what you got. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 18:06, 15 July 2008 (EDT)