Lately, I've been contemplating wheter items should be auto-id'd (like Gods War 2) or wheter it should be done via skill/spell or some hybrid (where maybe mundane items auto-id and magic items need something special).

What are the perceived pro's and con's of both?

This really depends on the context of the game.

Some games have 'unidentified items' to drain money out of the game.
Some games have them to let you kill yourself (Roguelikes, quite often).
Some games have them as a means of risky player-to-player trading (Will trade you unidentified X for item Y).
Some games make identifying items very hard and risky, so its a potential trade-off between breaking an item or making it better. Or finding out its cursed, and making it much worse, or killing you.

I would say that unless you have a compelling, game-centric reason to do so, you're just creating speedbumps that will annoy. Draining money out of the economy is valid, but
it has to really work, to make up for the annoyance you're causing players.

I don't support using a mechanic where you need to cast a spell/etc to just to see the stats of an item. However, it may make sense in some cases to need to identify an item the first time, or selectively. It's really just going to depend on your game design goals. So ask yourself why you're adding the mechanism. There should be a good reason for it, or just let players know the stats of the items they find without additional barriers.

How about not having identify at all? :-)

There's no real concept of identifying existing items in GW2, once the item has been generated you can just look at it to see its stats.

However there are a few situations where I have something conceptually similar, because the item hasn't initially been created. The two main ones are:

Crafting: You find a piece of raw material, which you can look at it to see its rarity and magical type, but you have to craft it into an item before you can see its stats. This is obviously necessary because the stats can't be generated until you've decided what item to craft.

Chests: When you open the chest, a random item is created - but the item can't be created in advance, because it's designed to be suitable for the person who opens the chest. However even if the stats were determined when the chest was created, I wouldn't display them in this case, because the point of the chest is a puzzle (picking the lock) followed by an unknown reward (a random item).

I'm thinking that I will probably go with auto-id'ing almost everything unless it is something that is race specific, then only the class or race will be able to see the information on that. So, if a vampire picks up a sword, it'll just show the sword properties, but if it is a fetish (magic item), then the werewolves will see those properties.

Have you considered what this might do to trading? If I find a fetish and I'm not a werewolf, how will I know its value, if I want to trade it with others? I could have a werewolf friend look at it, but that does mean you'll want friends who you trust. Or is that the point of doing it like that?

Actually, no, I hadn't considered that. :) Good point. I guess from an in-game perspective, it's easy to rationalize it. Everyone knows what everything does unless it is something race specific. If it's race-specific, then how would someone of another race know what it does or what's it's worth.

One thing I've been doing is playing rogue-like games a lot lately (DCSS has been my particular bane). One thing I like about the way they do things is they "tag" items. So, maybe if it has a visible tag of {fetish}, then everyone would know it is a fetish, but only werewolves would be able to see what exactly that does. How does that idea sound?

I don't quite agree :) Humans have a natural tendency to seek out knowledge of whatever they can, including cultures not their own. I would assume the same of beings in a game, if they were sentient.

Personally, I would expect to find individuals who were experts on Fetishes, who weren't necessarily werewolves. Maybe their knowledge would be less exact than a werewolves, but they'd be able to identify things about the item they think they know. But game mechanics-wise, I don't think thats terribly different from having someone identify an unidentified item. Although, going with it, perhaps its not currency the expert wants, but for you to do a quest, or fetch something special needed to identify the item, etc.

Perhaps it would be prominent to let players get the approximate value of an item appraised, but without telling them exactly what its properties are. That way I can still know that I've found a really valuable fetish, but I don't necessarily know what it does.

It's ok to disagree. I understand what you are saying, I'm just not sure the best way to implement it. Maybe a modification to the tag where it ranks the fetishes by power-level (low-fetish, moderate-fetish, major-fetish, unique-fetish) or something similar.

I suppose that depends if you hand-craft every item in the game, based on your extensive knowledge of the game balance. If your game uses a system of 'points'
to help you estimate how powerful a given item should be, then it'd be a given to try and scale that to a 'Value' description of some kind.

Another option would be to provide a telling description of the item, that doesn't necessarily reveal any stats. Such as, a glowing-orb fetish, which glows a certain intensity of blue.
Knowledged players will know that the intensity describes the level of the attribute, and the blue glow means something specific. Less-knowledged players will still be able to guess
that they have something decent, when the description sounds as such.

We have various skills and other means for identification, different types showing different things about the item. You can identify via the various skills, there is a very, very base level of identifcation on the "auction" channel, and while at shops, you can type "list #" (where # is the item you want to see) and the shop will identify the item it is selling for you. Additionally, if you are at a shop that sells the same item type that you are wanting to identify, you can type 'identify <obj>' and the shop will ID it for you. Reasoning behind this is for a few reasons, but among them are it emphasizes different strengths of different character types (not every race/class, or every aspect of race/class is about being an efficient killer), it makes sense that not every person walking the planet would have innate or intimate knowledge of how every single piece of equipment or how every single weapon in the world works or how effective at various things it would be, and it works as another means of a money-sink. Writing this, though, gives me another idea that maxing your skill in a weapon type might should carry with it the ability to automatically identify any weapon of that type (max dagger, any dagger you look at will be identified for you).

OK, that gives me an idea. I'm definitely thinking of making mundane items auto-id'd. I mean, a sword (unless enchanted) is pretty much always going to do the same damage. But maybe if you have three points in Occult (let's say), it'll let you know if it's a fetish. Four points let's you know the power level and five maybe let you know the type if you are not of that race. Lots of good ideas are being thrown out and talked about. I like that. Thanks.

Just kind of talking it out. My skills are scaled 1-5.
* - Proper Race: Know everything. Other race: No clue
** - Proper Race: Know everything. Other race: No clue
*** - Proper Race: Know everything. Other race: Know it's a fetish
**** - Proper Race: Know everything. Other race: Know power level of fetish.
***** - Proper Race: Know everything. Other race: Know type of fetish.

Definitely food for thought.

I like the idea of needing to identify things, but I agree with Hades_Kane on everybody not knowing everything. I feel like things that are visible, tangible, and obvious should be auto-id'd. I mean you can see that the sword is made out of iron/steel right? Or if it's glowing that's pretty obvious. I'd never know from the distance if a sword was sharp, but a whole bunch of jagged edges might be a hint.

Identifying would be useful for say determining why and when it glows, like maybe it detects evil and only glows then. That only has a use if evil alignment creatures aren't auto agressive, say a manipulative npc who pays you to find things, but intends to kill you later. Maybe you know a sword is made of Unobtainium (yes that's a joke), and that's really cool, but you have no idea if it's any better or worse than any other sword. It'd be interesting to have to actually use something in battle or practice before you knew things about it, like the proverbial "damage rating" or how sharp. Maybe a really crappy sword would just break under too much strain (i.e. you try and kill a guy in armor and your overly stiff sword breaks in half – now it's half a sword). Things that are cursed so that, say, you can't let go of them should be marked cursed maybe once you've tried to drop it a couple times and it reappears in your hand.

If you want to base this on character knowledge you probably either need a skill/stat for it or some kind of data structure to hold the information the character "knows". Then you can use that to evaluate what they could know about the item. Maybe you could have npcs who maybe could tell you what it was, but whether they could identify it or not depended on some notion of what kind of knowledge they had. So, the guy on that streets is great at identifying quality and material but couldn't a magical sword from the cheap crap on the street corner. For that matter, a way to store notes (metadata effectively) to yourself about an item and a command to share them might be interesting.

I think that an out and out identify spell that works perfectly every time is overkill and should have a high-level restriction or the tendency to fail more often for lower level players.

It'd be interesting to have an auto-value system based on visual characteristics and character stats, then an character with low intelligence might think something shiny is valuable when it is in fact worthless. Or they might discard something as worthless because it looks worthless without ever noting how sharp the blade is (lead back to the testing it out idea above).

I believe arholly's game is based on White Wolf games, and if that's the case, at least where I played Vampire: the Masquerade, there was a "melee" skill and often times our ST would use your rating in Melee to determine your knowledge about swords, while the archery skill would allow you to know things about weapons in that category, etc. The higher your skill rating (or dots in that skill), the more information you could discern about it.

Correct, it's based off white-wolf games.