hayaku on 27/2/2005 at 16:19
ok, something I noticed about the Mercantile skill. While a higher mercantile skill will reduce the buying cost of store goods, it will also REDUCE the initial price for sold items too.
I worked this out one time when I was selling large amounts of Dwemer coints one by one to up my mercantile skill. I noticed over a series of levels the price I was initially given went from 31, down to 30, and eventually to 29 (at which point I decided to do something else). Although technically I was better able to secure a better haggle with each level up, I was still geting a net loss.. that is, I was loosing value of items faster than I was able to raise their haggled price.
this is further shown by the fact that creeper, the trader reputed to buy everything at full cost price, gives me notably reduced money for sold items than their listed worth (at mercantile ~38 I get 4666 gold for a 7000 item).
Although I did note that once sold, I could buy the item back from him at the EXACT price. Maybe this reverse mercantile thing was put in to prevent people buying and selling the same item continuously and hence eventually bleeding a traders cash suply dry without actually having sold a single thing. Either way, it still feels kind of odd.
cyrano on 27/2/2005 at 18:34
The economy of Morrowind has been lamented since it was released. HotFusion performed a very detailed examination of how the economy bug works in (
http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=54251&hl=) this thread at the official site. There have been many discussions about how it may be improved, and there are a few significant mods that adjust the economy in some ways. This is beyond the contributions made by balancing mods such as Wakim’s Game Improvements.
(
http://webzoom.freewebs.com/lichcraft/files/VenomByte_Economy_Fixes.zip) VenomByte Economy Fixes: This adjusts the availability of rare items in the game.
(
http://www.pirates.retreat.btinternet.co.uk/METF.htm) PirateLord’s Economy Fix: This makes merchant inventories more dynamic, but more importantly, it adjusts merchant mercantile and speechcraft skills to make the results of the barter system more realistic.
(
http://morrowind.biges.org/EMaTa07.rar) Biges Merchant and Taxes: Biges adjusts merchant mercantile and speechcraft levels and introduces taxes to the game to reduce the glut of player wealth.
(
http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=54251&hl=) HotFusion [WIP]: This is the release that I am looking forward to. The link is to the thread I mentioned before, but here is HotFusion’s description of his mod’s objectives:
Quote:
The plug-in will be modular, and will include more than just a fix for the merchants. The components will include:
Merchant
-Makes the NPC merchants much better businessmen. Mercantile and Speechcraft become important skills for the player. Faction alliances (and the disposition bonuses that come with them) become extremely important.
-Makes bribery harder
-removes the diposition bonus for a successful barter
Ingredients
-Rescales the prices of most ingredients to a more sensible standard.
-Reduces the commonality of pearls
Crime
-Makes criminal penalties much more severe
-Reduces discount for using theive's guild connections to pay off a bounty
Treasure
-Makes glass, ebony, and daedric weapon drops significantly more rare
Miscellaneous
-Alters the value of items taken from the fighter and mage guild chests to 0
-Reduces the value of player-made potions to zero
-Increases the cost of training
-removes the barter options from Creeper and the Mudcrab Merchant
It should be clear that many of these plug-ins modify the same thing (e.g. merchant skills), and therefore are not compatible with each other. Also one of the aims of most of them is to limit the accumulation of wealth to make the game more realistic and challenging. If that doesn’t appeal to you, you may not be satisfied with any of these.
