Don't mind taxes on property, or helping local economies, but really don't want to pay guild dues, IRL I quite happily pay my union dues, but they don't send me on quests.

I like all these ideas. It would be nice to not feel like I could buy all of Skingrad just for the lulz.

The only way I'd be ok with recurring expenses is if you can rent out homes and own shops to offset that.

Otherwise, I'll mod it out in a hurry. Unless the Imperial taxmen personally come to collect...then I'll welcome them appropiately *sharpens knife with a grin*



I never had a problem with too much money in Oblivion, repairs and keeping items enchanted, buying houses and supplies, bribing npc's to get their disposition higher, Oblivion had a lot of expenses, and I felt it balanced quite well. Particularly with mods that give you high end items to buy. I'm still saving up for a Vizard Mask that costs millions, heh.


Oh, that reminds me. A bank would be an awesome addition - have your money earn interest. Someone modded that into Oblivion, which I promptly downloaded. I saw the "be taxed and have your gold go to Councilor Ocato's car fund" mod but promptly passed on it.

It's called the Sixteenth Amendment. At least do a little research before you make assertions like that in public.

Banks would more likely charge you for storing and keeping your coins safe, than entertain the idea of paying interest.

Reducing the gold incoming, aka. random thieves in the roads wearing full glass/ebony worth a kidney, and adding some gold sink like House upkeep, Ordering very rare and expensive herbs from a famous herbalist, whatever. This would greatly improve the I've so much gold that I can't spend it all.

For players who really don't give a [censored] about money, What about living in the woods? setting up a camp(would be really nice) getting your own food/water ( New Vegas hardcoe mode with a turn on/off option would be really nice) and whatever other nice idea they might have.

True, and I have no problem understanding this view, but that's just not how it works for me personally. I like to play TES games for 100+ hours with a single character, and by that time (unless I use mods to counter it), I own every single house fully furnitured and have better weapon/armor than I can buy. So I don't really have anything to spend the money on, which makes exploring caves looking for good loot utterly pointless - and I don't want it to be pointless, I want something to strive for even 100 hours into the game.


That's my experience too.

True, and even more so if you play a modded game, since mod makers tend to want to give you unique armor, enchanted weapons, etc. that is usually worth even more than normal, so you get even more valuable loot to sell.

I understand that some think becoming rich and powerful is an important aspect (maybe even the goal) of a TES game, but to me, the game stops being fun when it becomes easy. That's why I made http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1166585-relz-enhanced-economy/ for Oblivion. It is configurable, but let you reduce the amount of enchanted, valuable loot found, makes the merchants give you worse deals, increase the house prices, add house taxes, etc. I understand this way of thinking is not for everyone, but to me a game is much more fun when it is challenging and not a piece of cake.

This is how I feel as well.

1000 gold is a lot of money in OB, if you believe the fighters guild quest line where you need to help a woman get her heirloom for money. However, 1000 gold was so ridiculously easy to get that it didn't feel like much at all, while the whole game world felt like it was much. So how about always having 1000 gold feel like much, and that a quest that rewards you with 100 gold would be a fair deal? To balance this out, everything in the game would have to scale down a bit so that only the really greatest weapons and armors would be worth over 1000. I don't think that the only fast way of getting money should be looting and selling, but many other means of earning money should be added. Quests that reward us with more than the loot gives us, hunting deer and selling every single part of the animal for profit etc. If an Iron short sword would be worth 40 in-game golds, then a deadric shouldn't, imo, be worth 2600 gold, but more like 900 or something similar. the whole problem with gold being the only currency however is that the minimum amount of gold an item can have is 1 or 0. If it is 1 and an apple is worth 1, we must start thinking if a sword is worth 40 apples or if a fur gauntlet is worth 3 apples. Perhaps the intoduction of silver could bring balance to this, one gold piece worth 10 silver and an apple could then be 1 silver. DA: Origins did it in a fairly good way, having x amount of silver would turn it into gold in your inventory automatically, keeping track of your currency. If an apple would be worth 1 silver, then perhaps a silver dagger could be worth 4-6 gold, (40-60 silver). The question about currency and item value in Skyrim is imporant as it may well make the game or ruin it.

I can see that. Not my thing, but I can see it.



I don't have any old Oblivion saves still around, but my Fallout 3 ones..... first character ran around 75 hours, there's a couple others in the 50-60 range. My current OB character - finally try Shivering Isles and a couple other adventure mods - is around 43. In the beginning of games, I look for loot because I'm poor. But once that's done.... I explore mainly to explore. Yeah, I'm a hoarder, so I'll grab everything interesting and stick it in a chest - I use a basic utility house mod in OB, and get the Megaton house immediately in FO3, for storage space. But I don't really have any monetary goals besides "don't go broke". Typical play of OB or FO3, I've got much more value of junk stuffed in chests than I have gold or caps.

(I tried the "Living Economy" module of Francesco's scaling mod for OB, but stopped using it because having the shopkeepers run out of gold was just tedious. Meant I had to do a fast-travel circuit of the big cities to sell off loot, and do the "hide in a small cell and wait 3+ days" trick every so often just so they'd restock. Didn't add anything to the game experience. Oddly, I was ok with a similar limited-cash system in Fallout3, and didn't grab one of the "more caps!" mods.... but I still had a circuit of shops I'd fast travel to whenever I had a load of loot that I wanted to sell.)

The point is there should always be something you cant afford and want.

Any particular reason?


Edit: I suppose it's useful for the people who like to have a "purchase goal" ahead of themselves. Might be hard to come up with enough meaningful things to buy that are expensive enough that you'll never reach them (I'm guessing that the OB developers figured the array of expensive houses would be enough, for example. )

Data for the curious:
1 ounce of gold IRL costs ~$1400, Silver is $37 a more realistic ratio than 1:10 would be 1:30 (but Tamriels Au:Ag ratio could be crazy compared to earth's). Even if every coin was 1/100 of an ounce (unlikely) you would be paying $14 an apple.... making some assumptions:
say a coin is 50% gold and weighs as much as 2 quarters. a quarter weighs ~.2 ounces. Also assuming gold in Tamriel is exactly as plentiful (and valuable) as on earth...
one coin would be worth ~$280. a 40 coin sword would cost $11,200. the 2600 coin deadric sword would be worth $728,000. Do these numbers sound alright to you? If we wanted an apple to be worth $1 we would need a coin to be about .17% gold. A gold nugget weighs .25 feather and has a base cost of 25 so 6.25 coins per feather. Then your 40 coin sword would be worth 6.4 feathers in gold. Since the ratio of feathers to pounds is still in dispute, we can't know how similar this is to earth, but it just does not "look" right to me. Morrowind did not seem to have any form of raw gold, so that doesn't help. Daggerfall priced gold at 40/kg. A steel longsword would cost 20g (I think). In earth terms this looks like a steel sword costs as much as .5kg gold or 16 ounces or $22,400 ( O.o). In fairness, the price of gold in 96 (when DF was released) was ~$390 (yes our economy has inflated that much since then. Thanks Keynes) so the sword would be $6,240. Looking at these numbers I think its safe to say either Tamriel does not value gold (they have other valuable things like glass and ebony, I guess) or the dev's just picked arbitrary numbers for values.

The problem people seem to have is that gold essentially becomes valueless to the player in the end. Many people seem to think just adjusting the relative value of currency and goods will fix this. No. It's a band-aid approach to a deeper problem. Maybe it will make the game more playable, but it won't make the problem disappear entirely. You will still run out of things to do with your money.
I think there should be a finite amount of gold. say "x" tons mined and "y" tons still in the ground (to be mined). Adding silver would be alright, but its not necessary. Silver weighs more (per value) and would only weigh the character down. Money values that instantly (magically) translate from Cu to Ag to Au to Pt would be irritating to me, a realism fan. (Bank notes like Daggerfall would be ideal. Print your own denominations! :biggrin: .)
The economy should be flexible. Prices should rise and fall according to supply and demand. Ideally there would be things like population growth; wear and tear on tools, clothes, armor, weapons; food consumption; food shortages; mine exhaustion, prospecting, and development. Obviously, this is beyond the scope of intended development of this game, but I think these should be as commonplace in games in the future as good graphics are today.

My major point is that if infinite supply was eliminated, so would be "late game wealth" excesses. If you can't farm glass (which currently respawns forever -- "banditite") for a couple hours and make a house worth, you won't have to decide what to do with it. It does not matter how much money is available, as long as the supply is stable, prices are dynamic, and NPCs understand items values. Simply, "cut out the inflation."

Goods should be created and require shipping, allowing bandits/mercenaries (and the PC) to intervene and steal/protect products. <== a quest line that requires no quest giver. See a merchant under attack? Help the merchants or take advantage of a looting opportunity? This requires no quest reward, as either action has long term effects and instant rewards (if you consider helping innocent people reward in itself)
Goods creation will greatly enhance the smithing skill.
dragons burned the town's fields? Go hunting for meat ==> Profit!
Fire at the clothier? Go hunting for fur ==>Profit!
Market flooded with Weapons? Could mean cheaper mercs. Means less bandits. (don't smith until you can't get paid decently to go adventuring!)
Trade stagnating? Mercs can't find work? more bandits as mercs turn into thugs!

Realistically speaking, what I would like to see (and expected to be implemented as far back as morrowind) is simply dynamic prices. Buy "here," sell "There". Sell too much of "this", prices fall. See Mount & Blade.

Game Economies never seem to work. In the beginning you never have enough money without grinding to get what you want, and in the end you can never sell what you have for what it is worth, and money is no longer an issue for your character because you have so much and there is nothing to spend it on.

I don't know if Taxes is the way to go, but that is just because I just filed my Tax Return and I am a little irked right now. I like the idea of hiring people, but do I have to pay them periodically?

What they could do is make it so there are more expensive things to buy, and, even better, to trade for. Like a nicer house or furniture or something. Or, you could make donations and get some game benifit from it, like a Kharma boost does. Or, give you a museum to donate the swag to so they can disaplay it. They kind of had this in earlier games, Tribunal had a nice museum feature. They could flesh that out.

However, I tend to ignore game economies anyway as they never seem balanced.

If you really need to add insanely and incrementally expensive things to spend money on:
Potions:
Only available from 1 hard to get to merchant, that only sells to the extremely famous. Potion effects are permanent (attribute) +1 up to 200. cost is (attribute)² x (number of potions previously bought)². Or thereabouts. the first potion (to get attribute to 101) would cost 10,000g. the 100^th potion (to get 1 attribute to 200) would be 9.8 x 10⁷g or 98,010,000g. Needs to be balanced out a bit, but there ya go.

You, sir, need to start modding. The modding community would love you. I know I would love to have you in on some of my projects, that's for sure.

Yes modern gold might be worth that much, but look back some years, gold wasn't nearly as valuable then and Tamriel is as you said not earth. We could start at low levels and mainly use silver and on later leves move on to small amounts of gold and even further on use more gold, thus never making 100 gold seem useless. How about?

They're a difficult thing to manage, much like real economies.

Much like the current recession (primarily caused by devaluation of the dollar), game economies fail when the ingame money becomes meaningless because there's nothing left to buy.

The Player needs to value the currency, so that when the player finds gold, sells a valuable item, receives rent from an rpc, he/she gets a feeling of reward and gain. Hence, fun.

I like your ideas for being able to buy more furniture, or make donations. There should definitely be some pricy but stylish houses, like the Skingrad house.

It's been heavily hinted by Bethesda that you'll be able to hire Mercenaries to assist you - a good way to spend excess money as well. Since they've said they're going for quantity rather than quality as far as companions go, you may be able to hire yourself a small army.

Seriously people, you want to be taxed in a video game? Because paying taxes in real life is so much fun, right?

Economy? What's that. Sounds like I'll need to use my motar and pestle more often. Snooze :snoring:

And that's part of the "stages of the game" thing for me. Worrying about gold and struggling to get started is an "early game" thing for me. But once I've gotten into the "late game" (you've got great equipment, you've got great skills, the true threat has been revealed and you're on track to Save The World)..... money isn't that important anymore. Don't need to keep being a consumer to feel success.


But, like I said - that's just me.

We need more ways to spend gold. Some epic item, acces to some kind of dungeon or queast (kinda like the house in Anvil) etc.

Gold is almost just as valuable as it was 100 years ago. The difference is inflation. The price of gold was fixed until '72 at $35. What you could buy with an ounce of gold is similar to what you could buy today. No, not exactly; the means of production have become more streamlined, more resources are available, and the wealth of the world has increased more than the production of gold mines, supplies and demands have shifted all over the place... But, as you alluded, the translation from real Earth to fictional Tamriel does not leave need for overly specific details and, like I said, Tamriel may not value gold like we do. Most of the beginning of that post was curious speculation : )
"start at low levels" "move on" further on". Part of what I'm trying to say is that levels shouldn't translate into wealth. But higher levels (better skills really) should make making money easier. Yes, using gold rather than silver is more effecient because it weighs less (per value), so it would be the preferred medium of currency for large purchases; where silver, being easier to acquire and easier to divide into smaller portions of wealth, would be preferred for day-to-day "I want to buy that apple" trades.

If Bethesda manages to create an economy that suits all levels of people, so low level people who struggle to buy anything and high level people who are struggling to sell things then Bethesda has become the perfect organisation to run any real life country.

All I have to say is that the Fable series are the worst "rpg" games in recent memory