Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-27104094-20171125215702/@comment-31763506-20200413071726

I think the column compression is indeed unnecessary.

The chronological organization change you propose is similar to my suggestion above.

DukeLeto7 wrote: I think the best plan is a consistent refactoring where each investment only has one table entry, in the investment round where it first appears, and this entry contains info on future availability and prices should these apply. For example, the Stineford Magic Shop first becomes available in the Ch 2 free roam, but becomes available again in Ch 4. So the price column would note that it becomes available again in Ch 4 and its price at that time.

The only reason I haven't gone ahead and made the change myself, besides my own laziness, is that I was waiting for the other folks to pass judgement on the idea and Jan Dietrich implied he intended to do the job. As it is, I need to devote an evening to migrating my spreadsheets away from Gofile.

I was trying to remember why we implemented a profitability/unprofitability distinction to start with, so I reviewed this thread, and the edit history of the investments..... and I think that it's like a lot of the arbitrary names I came up with for Temp variables in the Erosian War guides: a convenience that ended up being canonized by accident.

Back before I showed up around the start of the 3rd Arclent War, there was a distinction between "investments" listed by investment location, which included things with no ProN return, and "other uses of ProN", which didn't seem to have any rigorous distinction from the investments. When I made the big Ch4 investments spreadsheet, I ended up splitting the profitable and non-profitable investments into two worksheets, primarily I think because I wanted to calculate the per round profitability of the investments as a percentage using Excel. There was a major discussion here on how to integrate that information into the investments page, and the profitable/non-profitable distinction became an item of discussion, apparently influenced by the spreadsheet.

I can agree that it's not necessarily a helpful distinction given all the non-cash effects of investments, although there are other things I'd be more inclined to fix first. I think the term "round" is misleading, for example, although I can't think of an unambiguously better one right now.

I'm against putting the Ch 5 investment in order of availability unless the same change is made for previous chapters. That's my SQL indexing instinct, though.