As mentioned earlier, some treasures (those of class 'trinket') are only worth points to low-ranking players. If you have gone up a level since you last valued them, they might not be worth the same - in fact, they'll be worth a NEGATIVE number of points! So this is one way that treasures can be worth less sometimes.

A more common reason, though, is because the value of all treasures is scaled. Except for a select few items, all treasure has a 'minimum value' and a 'maximum value'. The more (visible) players there are in the game at the time, the closer to its maximum it will be. This reflects the increased difficulty in finding treasures when there are many people competing for them. So an object will be worth more if there are more people playing.

That's not the end of the story, though! There is a second type of scaling involved. Every 105 minutes or so, MUD 'resets', which entails throwing all the players off for a few moments while objects and puzzles are replaced in their starting configurations. It stands to reason, then, that treasure will be easier to find immediately after a reset than later on when a lot has been found. To account for this, the value of treasure is scaled by a factor which increases as more treasure is dropped in the swamp.

The VALUE command combines both these scaling factors where appropriate.