Investing in stores in Oblivion

[Human Shield]

Merchants don't buy items for themselves they want to resell the items. If their clients max out at a little over 1000 he won't want a 10k item but would want 10 1k items that he can actually sell. They would say to go to a store in a richer neighborhood.

Of course they would realistically offer a higher price then 1000 but enough to be a real good deal to them, or they were a pawn shop or had connect to other merchants in another city they would take it for better (but at a lower price then taking the item directly to a higher merchant).

But investing to increase their respawn money makes no sense.

 

[Here2Argue]

Its slightly more realistic.. but I'm not going to be impressed till I have to watch my step on the roads of Cyrodiil because of all the dynamic horse interaction.

 

[bryce777]

Merchants don't buy items for themselves they want to resell the items. If their clients max out at a little over 1000 he won't want a 10k item but would want 10 1k items that he can actually sell. They would say to go to a store in a richer neighborhood.

Of course they would realistically offer a higher price then 1000 but enough to be a real good deal to them, or they were a pawn shop or had connect to other merchants in another city they would take it for better (but at a lower price then taking the item directly to a higher merchant).

But investing to increase their respawn money makes no sense.

If that's the case then the buy price for you should be similar, but it's not.

If you go into a used car lot with a high end sportscar, I guarantee they will make an offer on it, regardless of where they have to get the money.

It may not be the perfect price, but it will be something they make a profit on, and something that is not unreasonable. They may then move it off to another dealer somewhere else or who knows what. The same thign would happen in a fantasy world as developed as tamriel supposedly is - also, like I said before the reason this seems so odd is that your big city might only have a few hundred people, whereas in reality any town that has a weapons store in the first place probably has thousands of people, or tends of thousands.

 

[Irwanday01]

for me the biggest problems with morrowind system was there was:
1) too much expensive loot found for low level characters;
2) merchants could not afford to pay for the transactions, causing me frustration;
3) not enough money sinks;
4) every merchant would basically give you the same price for an item; pawnbroker would pay the same amount for a sword as a smith would;
5) if you slept for 24 hours the merchant would respawn all the money and you could rinse, wash, and repeat and a shitload of money from the same merchant;


these are the main economic problems I could think of.
If I can assume that Oblivion will have an identical economic structure, than I have a few interesting, possibly moddable ideas.

first with moneysinks. Bethesda has already added horses, and houses. and has made items liks cups and plates nonvalued. but here a few of my suggestions:
1) it should be more expensive to pay for your crimes.
2) All Main cities should have a toll to pass through the gate.
3) renting rooms should be more expensive ( and should be harder to sneak into and sleep in for free). also sleep should be required every three days, after three days your fatigue chould drop 10% per ingame hour.
4) armour and weapons should be expensive to repair. and for unarmored maybe a moral state that needs to be repaired to replace the non existent armour.
5) property taxes for your house(maybe 10 - 20% your house value), and maybe a kingdom tax collected monthly.
6) maybe montly membership fees for guilds.

Loot
1) loot should only be as valueble as can be afforded to pay. for example if the richest merchant in the province has 10000 septims than the most valueble items should cost around that.
2) high valueble items should be impossible to get at low levels, because they shouldn't spawn until you have reached a certain level.
3) the high value loot should not be so abundunt, there should not be 50 deadric dai katanas in this game, at most 10. all the high level items should be rare, that way they're unique and not so common.

Merchants
1) if the merchant is a smith he should pay more for the item than a pawnbroker. Alchemist pay more for potion than pawnbroker, etc.
2) items should be more valueable in certain locations. If a fish cost 10 dollars in Anvil (on the seacoast) than the same item should cost 25 in the middle of the province where there are no fish. or maybe fruits and plants should cost more in bruma where it is always snowing, where crops cant grow.
3) for every 24 hours that passes a merchant should respawn 20% of his loot. that way if you have all the merchants money through a transaction, it will take him five days to be back to his original amount of money.

these are not the best fixes, im sure, but they are the base of what my first oblivion mod will be( a while from now, my computer sucks, if they are at all posiible). any other suggestions would be great. also if anyone else has a economic fixes they can suggest it would be interesting to see a different opinion.

 

[Human Shield]

If that's the case then the buy price for you should be similar, but it's not.

They should mostly stock items in that price range, yes. But wouldn't turn down taking more money.

It may not be the perfect price, but it will be something they make a profit on, and something that is not unreasonable. They may then move it off to another dealer somewhere else or who knows what. The same thign would happen in a fantasy world as developed as tamriel supposedly is - also, like I said before the reason this seems so odd is that your big city might only have a few hundred people, whereas in reality any town that has a weapons store in the first place probably has thousands of people, or tends of thousands.

I don't know if tamriel is advanced enough to have national companies. It seems like feudalism to me with mostly "Joe's magic weapons store". It would be good to put in a few national merchant guilds that worked like that but Beth isn't smart isn't for that.

 

[galsiah]

Again - you're describing a system that simply isnt there. The game does NOT operate on a Zero-Sum basis. How difficult is that? Just because you the merchant has X amount of money doesnt mean he's going to purchase an item valued at X.

And your point is?
So far we know that:
It is nonsense.
Balance may or may not be good.
It might well be exploitable (unless a 10000 value item "looks like" a 1000 item when bartering with 1000 barter gold).

If it did, it would resemble every other RPG where merchants have infinite amounts of gold - and yet operate and live in shithole locations.

Again, they do have infinite gold. Anyone who can buy an unlimited amount of items for 1000 in one day has infinite gold.

...BETH...

Must you really persist with this.

...has created a system where the player wont have to exploit the game (purchase enough small items so the merchant buys the bigger item) in order to sell wares

I'm sorry - how do you know this? If you're refering to investment, then that's a high skill mercantile perk. I.e. something that 90% of players won't have for 90% of the game.

These suggestions about scripting NPC's to shop at merchants, and letting random dice rolls determine what money they have the next day only shifts the "problems" (if you feel it is a problem - again, I in no way am purchasing this game to have a great merchant-selling experience) to the side instead of fixing it.

Again, you seem to be in a unique position to see what exactly has been "fixed" here. Whatever you're smoking must be good stuff.

Personally I didn't suggest any randomizing of merchant gold, but rather a simple system whereby any item could be sold to any merchant, but at a price dependent on various aspects - without any arbitrary, nonsense cut-offs.

The idea that a merchant will pay 1000 for ten items worth 1000, but not even 1001 for an item worth 20000 is not going to get any more credible. It's still nonsense in terms of believability, and it's still an inelegant hack in terms of balance.

There has to be a compromise between what you can deliver and what you should deliver.

Not relevant here. A better system could have been made in a day.

BETH isnt full of dumb people no matter what some of the vocal critics on this forum seem to think.

Neither is it full of geniuses who always make the right decision. Please acknowledge that, rather than defending every bad decision mindlessly. Oblivion will be a good game, I'm sure, but anyone who thinks it is flawless needs their head examined.

A system being better than Morrowind's (if this one is - perhaps it is) is not exactly difficult to produce, since Morrowind's was horrible.

It is certainly not necessary to introduce a global, working economy to produce something better. All that needs doing is to replace an arbitrary cut-off point with a sliding scale of value for money, and to reduce value for money on each sale as a merchant runs low on funds. This is not difficult, and would probably give a similar over-all balance - presuming, of course that level 1 characters are not swimming through loot worth 5000 a piece.

Anymore ridiculous than resting in the middle of a dungeon for a day to regain health?

Think of a better solution that's easy to implement. I'm sure people here would support it if it's good.

Or killing an NPC, and not a single person ask - "Hey, what happened to FARGOTH"?

The reason this is not done is because it would be hard to get working at all, and very hard to do well. This is unfortunate, but understandable.

An easy, better solution does exist for trading, so there excuse for not using one.

 

[bryce777]

If that's the case then the buy price for you should be similar, but it's not.

They should mostly stock items in that price range, yes. But wouldn't turn down taking more money.

It may not be the perfect price, but it will be something they make a profit on, and something that is not unreasonable. They may then move it off to another dealer somewhere else or who knows what. The same thign would happen in a fantasy world as developed as tamriel supposedly is - also, like I said before the reason this seems so odd is that your big city might only have a few hundred people, whereas in reality any town that has a weapons store in the first place probably has thousands of people, or tends of thousands.

I don't know if tamriel is advanced enough to have national companies. It seems like feudalism to me with mostly "Joe's magic weapons store". It would be good to put in a few national merchant guilds that worked like that but Beth isn't smart isn't for that.

I think it has to have something like that. It seems comparable to the roman empire. I don't think they had the idea of big banks like fuggers and medici yet, but they must have had letters of credit and loans or that kind of organization would simply be impossible.

As for prices, the merchant would set something where they felt they could eventually sell it off, so if the market will bear 1000 gp then that would be it.

 

[bryce777]

for me the biggest problems with morrowind system was there was:
1) too much expensive loot found for low level characters;
2) merchants could not afford to pay for the transactions, causing me frustration;
3) not enough money sinks;
4) every merchant would basically give you the same price for an item; pawnbroker would pay the same amount for a sword as a smith would;
5) if you slept for 24 hours the merchant would respawn all the money and you could rinse, wash, and repeat and a shitload of money from the same merchant;


these are the main economic problems I could think of.
If I can assume that Oblivion will have an identical economic structure, than I have a few interesting, possibly moddable ideas.

first with moneysinks. Bethesda has already added horses, and houses. and has made items liks cups and plates nonvalued. but here a few of my suggestions:
1) it should be more expensive to pay for your crimes.
2) All Main cities should have a toll to pass through the gate.
3) renting rooms should be more expensive ( and should be harder to sneak into and sleep in for free). also sleep should be required every three days, after three days your fatigue chould drop 10% per ingame hour.
4) armour and weapons should be expensive to repair. and for unarmored maybe a moral state that needs to be repaired to replace the non existent armour.
5) property taxes for your house(maybe 10 - 20% your house value), and maybe a kingdom tax collected monthly.
6) maybe montly membership fees for guilds.

Loot
1) loot should only be as valueble as can be afforded to pay. for example if the richest merchant in the province has 10000 septims than the most valueble items should cost around that.
2) high valueble items should be impossible to get at low levels, because they shouldn't spawn until you have reached a certain level.
3) the high value loot should not be so abundunt, there should not be 50 deadric dai katanas in this game, at most 10. all the high level items should be rare, that way they're unique and not so common.

Merchants
1) if the merchant is a smith he should pay more for the item than a pawnbroker. Alchemist pay more for potion than pawnbroker, etc.
2) items should be more valueable in certain locations. If a fish cost 10 dollars in Anvil (on the seacoast) than the same item should cost 25 in the middle of the province where there are no fish. or maybe fruits and plants should cost more in bruma where it is always snowing, where crops cant grow.
3) for every 24 hours that passes a merchant should respawn 20% of his loot. that way if you have all the merchants money through a transaction, it will take him five days to be back to his original amount of money.

these are not the best fixes, im sure, but they are the base of what my first oblivion mod will be( a while from now, my computer sucks, if they are at all posiible). any other suggestions would be great. also if anyone else has a economic fixes they can suggest it would be interesting to see a different opinion.

The spawns should not be based on level, but should just be either much more rare or else much much less valuable. The loot given out needs to be toned down a lot because it just becomes meaningless as you reach a maximum loot threshold very very early. Things like that should not just be lying around,a nd would be well guarded or used by a powerful caracter/monster.

 

[Drain]

Honestly, do you think that the system they have is better than the system where merchants have unlimited gold, but the values, quest rewards and loot are balanced?

There has to be a compromise between what you can deliver and what you should deliver. BETH isnt full of dumb people no matter what some of the vocal critics on this forum seem to think. At some point they decided that this merchant system worked best with the game world as a whole; it was probably implemented in this way because - like me - selling items wasnt a huge part of the experience. A system was found that not only addressed some of the issues that MW had, but also didnt put a burden on the player. Barring a FULL FLEDGED economy system, this is one of the valid alternatives to have that doesnt immediately break the system from the get-go (as the Mudskipper and Creeper did).

You still have not answered the question.
Yes, Beth is not full of dumb people, but they screwed economic system in Morrowind and, instead of addressing causes, they are trying to address effects. Maybe you enjoyed Morrowind's story and quests so much that you did not pay attention to painful trading system and ebony dart shuffling. However I doubt that you did not notice the tremendous wealth progression and laughable quest rewards. If quests were interesting, if NPCs had personalities, there would be incentives to finish the quests even when rewards are small. In Morrowind at some point I found that I did not care about finishing quests. They offered no challenges, they were not interesting and they had no substantial rewards. Would you care retrieving stolen jewelry and receiving 300 in reward, if you have 500000 worth of goods lying near Scamp trader waiting for gold replenishment?
Scamp and Mudcrab did not break the economy. They just made its problems more obvious.

 

[sabishii]

I thought this thread was about investing in Best Buy to get $$$ from the release of Oblivion. Woops.

 

[Irwanday01]

The spawns should not be based on level, but should just be either much more rare or else much much less valuable. The loot given out needs to be toned down a lot because it just becomes meaningless as you reach a maximum loot threshold very very early. Things like that should not just be lying around,a nd would be well guarded or used by a powerful caracter/monster.

my plans were to make the loot very rare, and not so valueable that no one will give you a decent price. I was planning on the most expensive item being worth maybe 5000 more than what the richest merchant has that way you can barter a little bit.

also in my opinion if a super strong bandit has a high level item it should be very hard to kill him, something like hiring mercenaries to come fight with you or being very good at conjuring, along with being a badass yourself.

 

[ANDS!]

for me the biggest problems with morrowind system was there was:

I agree with all those complaints except the merchant one - depending on your disposition to them, theyd change the price for you. But the base value - true it wasnt different. That is something to look at however. Suikoden and other games like FREELANCER did have different price values for items depending on where you sold/bought them. Maybe this can be looked at in future expansions as an add-on.

2) All Main cities should have a toll to pass through the gate.

An interesting idea, but not one I'd particularly like implemented honestly. It would make sense for routes throughout the world, but not access to cities. Pay 100 Toll to cross the bridge, or fight your way through the wilderness filled

3) renting rooms should be more expensive ( and should be harder to sneak into and sleep in for free). also sleep should be required every three days, after three days your fatigue chould drop 10% per ingame hour.

I'd just go outside city gates and sleep there instead. Unless of course they made it so that you cant do that (and we know they didnt).

4) armour and weapons should be expensive to repair. and for unarmored maybe a moral state that needs to be repaired to replace the non existent armour.

Agreed, and should scale with the type of armor. But in MW - I dont think I ever had to repair my armor as frequently as one does in WoW for instance (which has an unforgiving repair money sink).

5) property taxes for your house(maybe 10 - 20% your house value), and maybe a kingdom tax collected monthly.

I could see this ONLY for the city you have residences in.

1) loot should only be as valueble as can be afforded to pay. for example if the richest merchant in the province has 10000 septims than the most valueble items should cost around that.

Thats sorta how it works now. Theyll only pay you what they can - even if its worth more. I wouldnt want every item in the game to be designed around this though, because then this puts a cap on what level of items there can be.

2) high valueble items should be impossible to get at low levels, because they shouldn't spawn until you have reached a certain level.

That would take away from the free-form of the game though. If someone wants to venture into the Tower Of Kick Ass, then they can - but that doesnt mean theyll be able to reach the end and grab the Blade Of Im-Gonna-Fuck-You-Up. This happened to be CONSTANTLY in MW, venturing into parts that werent closed off, but I had NO WAY of surviving.

God suggestions on making the world a bit more balanced.

 

[Drain]

Thats sorta how it works now. Theyll only pay you what they can - even if its worth more.

No, if there are no limits to barter.
When merchant is willing to pay a maximum price of 1000 this means that he would give you 1000gp in cash for this excellent daedric armor OR 1000gp in cash AND 10 dwemer swords each worth, for example, 500.

 

[galsiah]

Irwanday01:
As far as loot acquisition goes, we'll need to wait and see. If it is anything like Morrowind, it'll need substancial revision, but perhaps it's not so bad.

As for your general ideas, most seem reasonable, but we'll have to see how the game works out to be specific. I'd certainly suggest not trying to fix the whole economy with your first mod. Focus on fixing one aspect well, rather than making a rush job of everything.

A few quick thoughts:

1) it should be more expensive to pay for your crimes.

Definitely a good idea - if Morrowind is anything to go by.
E.g. in Morrowind, you could kill an Ordinator in plain sight, walk up to his mate and pay the fine, then strip his corpse, making a tidy profit on his armor / weapons etc.
Killing an NPC and getting caught should be a big deal. Hotfusion's economy mod for Morrowind puts the fine for this at about 50000. Probably not unreasonable in that economy.

2) All Main cities should have a toll to pass through the gate.

Maybe. More of an aesthetic change really, but reasonable if it's easy to do.

3) renting rooms should be more expensive ( and should be harder to sneak into and sleep in for free).

Possibly. The price should make sense at least.

also sleep should be required every three days, after three days your fatigue chould drop 10% per ingame hour.

I can't agree here (and you certainly shouldn't include this in an economy mod).
I'm in favour of required sleep, but if you're going to do it, do it properly. Being fine until three days is just silly. I think a sliding scale would work best, so that you have some form of "tiredness" variable stored for the player. Each hour he's awake, tiredness should go up, each hour he sleeps it should go down. After a certain threshold (16 hours? 20?) he should get small penalties, which steadily increase as he goes for longer without sleep. Eventually he should probably collapse / die, but only after a week or more.
This assumes of course that the player should be able to sleep almost anywhere - just perhaps not so comfortably in some situations (less tiredness removed...).

4) armour and weapons should be expensive to repair.

Probably.

and for unarmored maybe a moral state that needs to be repaired to replace the non existent armour.

I don't agree. Unarmored is probably less good in most senses than strong armor. Not having to pay to repair it is one of its few advantages, and provides a little variety.

5) property taxes for your house(maybe 10 - 20% your house value), and maybe a kingdom tax collected monthly.

Good thought. Taxes are good. It should be possible to pay in advance though.

6) maybe montly membership fees for guilds.

Perhaps. What happens if you don't pay though? Perhaps contributions could go towards various bonuses that are taken as normal - e.g. good trading prices, free low value guild items (supply chests), etc. -, and these things could be denied for non-payment of fees.
[free guild items should have little to no re-sale value though, since they've got guild markings on them]

Loot

1) loot should only be as valueble as can be afforded to pay. for example if the richest merchant in the province has 10000 septims than the most valueble items should cost around that.

Or perhaps higher valued items should sell for quite a bit, but for a lower proportion of their value. If the richest merchant can only afford 10000, he's unlikely to pay 10000 for an item worth 10000. There's no point having items worth 10 times what anyone will pay, but twice what anyone can pay isn't necessarily a problem.

2) high valueble items should be impossible to get at low levels, because they shouldn't spawn until you have reached a certain level.

This might be easy to implement, but I agree that it would be better just to make sure that such items are always well guarded.

3) the high value loot should not be so abundunt, there should not be 50 deadric dai katanas in this game, at most 10. all the high level items should be rare, that way they're unique and not so common.

Sure. Hopefully this will be better out of the box. I have my doubts, but we'll see.

1) if the merchant is a smith he should pay more for the item than a pawnbroker. Alchemist pay more for potion than pawnbroker, etc.

Probably a good idea.

2) items should be more valueable in certain locations. If a fish cost 10 dollars in Anvil (on the seacoast) than the same item should cost 25 in the middle of the province where there are no fish. or maybe fruits and plants should cost more in bruma where it is always snowing, where crops cant grow.

Nice thought, but I'm not sure it'll be worth doing. If the items are low value, it won't have much effect over-all, and might still be a lot of trouble to get working. It would add a bit of colour, but I don't see it being easy enough to be worth your while doing - perhaps it'll be easier than I imagine though.

3) for every 24 hours that passes a merchant should respawn 20% of his loot. that way if you have all the merchants money through a transaction, it will take him five days to be back to his original amount of money.

I'm not sure about this. I think a bank + letter of credit system would work better. A merchant would still have an upper limit for the value of letter of credit he could give out, but that would be much higher than his available gold. This way, any reasonable amount of items can be sold to a merchant with a fairly large shop, since he'll write you a letter of credit to cash at a bank. It's credible, but without all the waiting around for money to respawn.


Some good ideas, but some of them could do with fine-tuning - and many will need changes based on how the game plays. Don't try to do too much all at once though. Start with a narrow aspect and fix it well, before moving on.

 

[Drain]

PC: How much will you give me for this Sword of Uber Slaying?
Merchant: Well, it would be hard to find a buyer for this sword, so I can't give you more than 1000 for it.
PC: But maybe you can give me all of your ebony darts, and glass arrows in addition to 1000?
Merchant: Sure.

 

[galsiah]

Thats sorta how it works now. Theyll only pay you what they can - even if its worth more.

No, if there are no limits to barter.
When merchant is willing to pay a maximum price of 1000 this means that he would give you 1000gp in cash for this excellent daedric armor OR 1000gp in cash AND 10 dwemer swords each worth, for example, 500.

Hopefully this will not be possible. If it is, the system is both utter nonsense and doesn't provide any balance.

Hopefully it will work like this:

You have item X worth 10000.
The merchant has 10 item Y's worth 1000 each.
The merchant has 2000 barter gold.

The merchant looks at X, and thinks "I can only give 2000 for that".

Thus the merchant sees X as being worth 2000 to him in any transaction.
So if you try to sell item X for 8Y's, he'll do the following calculation:

1 X gets me 2000.
8 Y's loses me 8000.
Player owes me 6000.

and not:
1 X gets me 10000.
8 Y's loses me 8000.
I owe the player 2000.

If it works the first way, then it might be ludicrous, but at least it isn't exploitable. If it works the second way, then I really do wonder what/whether they were thinking.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

...not every village smith can afford to trade in daedric swords.

But he can, as long as the player has enough equivalents of Dwemer coins, ebony darts, soul gems or other items of low weight and high value to do the intermediate trades.

Which makes sense, because he has a maket for those.

No, because in the end the merchant will still end up with the daedric item and the player will end up with 50,000 gold. All you've done in the end is have about a hundred trade transactions, with the last one being the merchant offering 49 ebony darts and 1k for your 50k daedric sword.

He is not ending up with items he has a market for, *unless* he refuses on all occasions to do part exchanges of his own items for yours. Which I think is unlikely.

If the player does that though, who is more mad: the player or the merchant? If one stayed in character and did NOT camp merchants, even MW's economy wasn't that broken at all, actually.

 

[galsiah]

If the player does that though, who is more mad: the player or the merchant? If one stayed in character and did NOT camp merchants, even MW's economy wasn't that broken at all, actually.

Player: How much can I get for this sword?
Merchant: 80 gold.
Player: That's a bit steep, how about 100.
Merchant: Done.
Player: Actually, sorry. I've reconsidered. I need that sword back.
Merchant: Sure.
Player: How much do you want for it?
Merchant: 90 gold.
Player: 90 gold? Didn't I just sell it to you for 100?
Merchant: You drive a hard bargain - 80 then.
Player: 80!?
Merchant: Take it or leave it.
Player: !???!?

Clearly not broken. I take it all back.

 

[Solik]

There's a lot broken about Morrowind's economy, but I never personally ran into a situation where I bought an item for less than I sold it for.

 

[galsiah]

There's a lot broken about Morrowind's economy, but I never personally ran into a situation where I bought an item for less than I sold it for.

It's very possible. Trust me.
[EDIT: I hope it's clear from the above that you'd usually (always?) need to barter to have this happen. Without bartering, the player would have lost 10 gold above. After bartering, he gains 10 gold. Clearly bartering was a game feature introduced so that players could avoid using it. Genius.]

Another example of Oblivion's economic heritage:

Player: How much will you give me for these 50 arrows?
Merchant: 20 gold, and I'll like you very slightly more.
Player: How about if I sell them one at a time?
Merchant: 50 gold, and I'll absolutely love you.
Player: So you'd like me more and give me more money if I waste our time counting out arrows one by one??
Merchant: Sure - you haven't been here long have you.
Player: This place makes no sense.
Merchant: You just need to ignore all that.
Player: But half the time I'll want to sell items a few at a time while I think about it. How can I make sure I'm not selling them in an exploiting order?
Merchant: That's what's so challenging about this place. Some worlds make it easy for you. Here your faith that the world makes sense is constantly tested.
Player: How much gold do you have anyway?
Merchant: 800 gold.
Player: And if I pay you for training before trading, can you trade with that money too?
Merchant: That depends - did you click on the barter option, then on the training option before leaving the dialogue window? That way I'll have the training money available to trade. The trading system opperates differently based on how you use the interface.
Player: But surely that shouldn't make any difference - should it?
Merchant: I don't make the rules. I'm just here to create balance for you - not to seem realistic.
Player: But surely with all the camping, the order dependent pricing, selling items cheaper than you bought them, and these "user interface bugs" you speak of, you don't even do that.
Merchant: I guess you've got me there... Wait, no... I've got it: If you don't want the balance to be terrible, don't abuse the system. That's right.
Player: But surely as a character I should do what makes sense for me at the time. I mean if I'm playing a thief, why wouldn't I trick you into giving me all your money if you let me?
Merchant: You don't seem to understand. You need to ignore the things that you wouldn't be able to do if this world made sense. Just imagine that it's a standard, generic fantasy world, and that anything unusual might well have to be ignored.
Player: Isn't that just bad game design?
Merchant: Trust in the Devs.

 

[elander_]

If the player does that though, who is more mad: the player or the merchant? If one stayed in character and did NOT camp merchants, even MW's economy wasn't that broken at all, actually.

Yes, the fault is obviously from the player that fallowed the game rules and not from the game that has broken rules.

 

[elander_]

PC: How much will you give me for this Sword of Uber Slaying?
Merchant: Well, it would be hard to find a buyer for this sword, so I can't give you more than 1000 for it.
PC: But maybe you can give me all of your ebony darts, and glass arrows in addition to 1000?
Merchant: Sure.

Very good example. Money limits are pointless unless a game is well balanced to cover all the possibilities of overcoming these limits.

 

[Relien]

There's a lot broken about Morrowind's economy, but I never personally ran into a situation where I bought an item for less than I sold it for.

I hope it won't be possible in Oblivion, because in MW it allowed you to generate infinite amount of valuable goods out of nothing, and you could improve your mercantile skill at the same time. All you needed for this was some merchant with reproducing goods (I tried it in the mages guild in Caldera with scrolls of Summon Golden Saint), and some usable level of mercantile skill. Because the scrolls respawn when you buy them, their amount increases as you sell them back to the merchant. You don't even have to wait 24 hours, you can always take the scroll as payment when the poor merchant runs out of gold.

Ugh, disgusting exploit. Shame on me, I used it once.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

If the player does that though, who is more mad: the player or the merchant? If one stayed in character and did NOT camp merchants, even MW's economy wasn't that broken at all, actually.

Player: How much can I get for this sword?
Merchant: 80 gold.
Player: That's a bit steep, how about 100.
Merchant: Done.
Player: Actually, sorry. I've reconsidered. I need that sword back.
Merchant: Sure.
Player: How much do you want for it?
Merchant: 90 gold.
Player: 90 gold? Didn't I just sell it to you for 100?
Merchant: You drive a hard bargain - 80 then.
Player: 80!?
Merchant: Take it or leave it.
Player: !???!?

Clearly not broken. I take it all back.

Yes it can happen. No it doesn't make sense. But still, had I not read about this on the forums I would have never noticed it. Why would I buy back what I just sold? Sure you are right, things like that should be fixed once they are known. I support it. But please excuse me for not working up any adrenaline over issues like this. So what if its an exploit, I can stand there and sell and buy weapons for a day and become the richest man in Tamriel. But for what? And if I don't abuse it, how much should such glitches bother me? Am I a fanboy just for saying they don't?

 

[Section8]

Again, this statement doesnt really jibe with what MW - and presumably OB - will offer. Save for a few items, and story lore - youre under no obligation to touch the main story. Theres more than enough content to explore and stumble in without being "forced" down the main storyline. Both co-exist in the same universe.

But the problem is, they don't co-exist without major compromises to one another. And ignoring a significant portion of a game, a focal point in fact, seems a little goofy. Granted, in Morrowind, the "main quest" was no more interesting than any of the other linear quest lines, but it sounds as though Oblivion is really trying to buck that.

Also, I don't want to do a bunch of stuff in a static world for the sake of improving my character. I want to develop a character throughout the course of a narrative, I'd just prefer that narrative not to be so overtly presented as a single quest line. It's almost to the point where Caius's Oblivion counterpart might say something like "I'm the person to talk to when you want to advance the plot. You can feel free to explore and do whatever else you want, and if I mention anything about urgency, just ignore it."

I'm sure theres coders and programmers out there smart enough to create a system that evolves on its own and creates its own story - but really, we arent there yet.

It's honestly not rocket science, and I think any developer willing to "chance it" could come up with some impressive results.

If what you want is a dynamic world that has no storyline, that adapts and perhaps creates storylines based on what you do (non-scripted), and if perhaps folks expected that form the Radiant AI writeups - well I guess you would be disappointed. I personally wasnt expecting anything on that level, just a system that made the static uninteresting characters in MW a bit more palpatable.

I didn't expect it from Oblivion. It's the sort of thing I'd hoped for from Morrowind, rather than an almost entirely static world, filled with static characters and lousy hand-crafted quests that didn't even manage to be more interesting than Daggerfall's random generator.

However, I did expect RAI to something more than an NPC scheduler. It's a system tailor-made to create emergent situations that aren't entirely predictable, but instead Bethesda are nerfing its potential in order to preserve the integrity of their quest scripts.

For example? This one confuses me because I'm trying to think of what the DEV's "promised" that didnt turn out the way you folks wnanted it to turn out - or could have turned out in such a way. Some are more better equipped to explain this, but a lot of what we've got hasn't cut the mustard.

Okay, first of all, sorry for being a pedant, but "devs" is an abbreviation of "developers" and doesn't need to be capitalised, like an acronym.

Anyway, there's a whole long list of things that haven't met expectations.

• RAI is being toned back
• NPC interaction still involves Wiki topic selection, and now there's even less to talk about!
• There's no interesting rivalries between factions
• There's no evidence of the player ever having to make a meaningful choice
• The character system is being simplified
• Religious factions have gone missing
• There's less quest content
• Horses are implemented in a half-arsed manner across the board
• Havok physics seem to have no gameplay implementation, and even the eye candy elements are poorly done (moon gravity, etc.)
• No procedural content other than graphics
• The economy is still rubbish
• Even the "nextgen" graphics have been systematically toned back

There's a lot more than that. The general process seems to be "Bethesda remain tight lipped. Bethesda release facts. Codex dissatisfied. Elder Scrolls Forums post angry threads for a few days, and talk themselves around from criticism to unquestioning praise. Codex expresses dismay at intelligence of ESF posters. ESF missionaries come to Codex and post inane topics trying to comprehend how anyone can possibly dislike something they're excited about."

Personally, I would much rather BETH sat down and crafted their own huge world with scripted events that seem random and large, than give us this system that IS truly free and evolving, but only genericlly so.

Why? That's a dead end street. The demands on hand created content are constantly increasing, and so you're going to get less and less in each incarnation. Just look at Oblivion. The game world is larger, since it uses various procedural generation techniques, but there are fewer guilds, fewer character options, less NPC "dialogue", etc.

You're essentially advocating a "here and now" policy that doesn't have any room to grow for the future. I'm suggesting an idea that may not be quite as appealing for this iteration, but will only get better over time.

But isnt that - again - an artificial system? [...] Yea - that was fun, for awhile.

I'm just saying that games should strive to include a means of expenditure that exceeds the player's income, so there's actually a point to collecting and selling all that loot. And yes, it may be an artificial system, but it's a perfectly reasonable one, and it adds something to the game.

For example? Other than MW and I'm sure OB - what games have received good reviews that didnt deserve them?

The textbook example is NWN. A game designed to be a DIY kit, that featured a half-arsed single player campaign tacked on at the 11th hour, something that even diehard fans admit was rubbish. The reviewers? Apparently they loved it. In fact, a good many reviews focused almost exclusively on how "great" the campaign was. One of my local gaming rags even went so far as to proclaim NWN as the #1 game in their all time Top 100, about a week after it's release.

Even though a game reviewer may have a good relationship with a company - does that invalidate the score if its a good game?

The problem is, the end user can't tell when an opinion is genuine, and when it's salesmanship. So yes, it basically does invalidate the criticism if there's no way to verify its legitimacy. Hence the "boy who cried wolf" parallels. It's hard to trust a compulsive liar.

RE4, HALO2, CIVIV, etc - highly rated games across the board. Do you disagree with their assessments, even if you disagree with their business models?

Well, of course I can agree of disagree with an assessment after I've played the game but that's not really the purpose of a review which is supposed to be part of the process that allows a consumer to make an informed purchase.

As it is, the gaming media routinely rates just about everything highly, so while I might agree with the assessment of a game worthy of its high rating (such as Civ IV) it all becomes comparitively meaningless when a much lesser game is rated its equal.