In Oblivion, I found that once I began climbing levels, the more rich I became, and eventually, with higher level equipment, it became too easy to make money. Even though merchants had significantly less money than what items cost, I soon found myself extremely wealthy in short bouts of time.

I would like a system to where you can't become extremely rich in a short amount of time by just selling your loot, therefore making earning money a bit more rewarding.

Any ideas on how this could have been changed? Do you think it has perhaps been reexamined and revamped by the devs? (I'm a console user, so mods are out of the question.)

Fallout 3 style (merchants actually have limited gold) and the problem is solved. in addition to not putting highly priced deadric armor lying around in large numbers in every cave you visit like in oblivion at later levels.

People who go out searching for treasure and risking their lives usually make more money.

I think this is the easiest way.I want the game to have some real money sinks as well.

Indeed, but not THAT much as in Oblivion I hope! I loved the early days in Fo3 when I actually had problems getting enough money from my hunting sessions to even buy back the ammo I had lost-that was great times!

The item value in Oblivion was far too high, and in Morrowind it was even higher. Items should have smaller values, this way the game will be much more fun and challenging.
They should add it to the hardcoe mode, if there is one.

Of course having item generation that makes sense will help.
But I'd like to see some gold sinks to make the economy a little bit more believeable.

It should definitely be harder to get rich than in Oblivion, its fun when your gold has value, but thats typically uncommon later in games.
But of course there should be a feeling of progression.
Its such a difficult thing to balance properly...

I never reall could get a lot of money in Oblivion, because of the merchants' limited money. I just hope they have merchants that can afford your items.

They had unlimited. Capped at 1200/800, sure, but you could sell 10 deadric items for 1200 each and they'd still have money left.

The biggest problem that Oblivion had in terms of getting rich is that there was simply nothing to spend it on.

Yeah, and we need more ways to spend our money. Interesting ways.

I like to stay poor and work hard to make a little gold for a place to sleep and a meal at a Inn.
I play on both the PC and now on the X-Box 360, with the pc I could use mods to control economy and make it a more fun game without getting rich.
On the X-Box its different so in order to stay poor and make the game more challenging and fun to play ,I buy things and dump them in the lake hehehe!!!
It works and keeps the game from getting boring when you get too rich.

Shadow hide you

Jenn

• Make most mundane weapons/armor cheap: Easy to buy, but also not really worth the time to carry around and sell.
  
• Make unique vendor specific items more expensive and desirable, like unique arrows, poisons, potions and scrolls.
  
• Make the difficulty adjuster reduce carrying capacity and increase merchant difficulty.
  
• Reduce restore health items in dungeons, so there is some reason to buy them.
  
• Add more features with upkeep costs, that are worth the upkeep (powerful companions, rented guar wagon for carrying loot, convenient housing, rented powerful items with bounty hunter and huge fines if you don't return them, etc.)
  
• Reduce exploitish money making methods. Make the ability to sell potions an alchemy perk "professional alchemy."
  
• Remove Free Fast Travel. At the very least make free menu fast travel require purchasing a horse first or a set of spells.
  
• Lastly, let the Merchantile perks get people rich, so those who really like hoarding gold aren't left out.

I think moneysinks are needed like BoredVirulence mentioned
Horses and houses went a small way in Oblivion
Paying for enchantments was a big moneysink in MW
Even in FO3 I find myself building bottlecap mountains and there is (almost) nothing in that game to spend money on (and its even worse in FONV)

Yeah, but I'd like to sell my 5000gp sword for 5000gp.

Values for high tier armor was correct, but the amounts of the higher tier armors just lying about were ridiculous. Those random bandits up in the mountains must have been doing well for themselves, especially with all of the nice Daedric, Ebony, and Glass armors each of them had equipped.

The problem was to much supposedly "rare" armor all over the place for me to sell, and the huge lack of anything worth spending money on. :tops:

But what could we possibly need want to spend 100 000 gold on ones we have it? What could possibly be worth wasting such a large amount of money on?

Should there be complete unique, only buy-able, unstealable enchanted rings/armor pieces/weapons that would cost way around 250K each, and custom enchantments wouldn't be able to compete with their power?

Yes, I agree it was a very big problem. But how could this be solved when most of the things you buy are weapons, armor, potions and such? What else could they fill the world with the purchase?

Definitely. Guild task rewards and dungeon loot should feel much more rewarding.

In my opinion, it's far, far too easy to get rich in Oblivion at higher levels.

At low levels money is a problem, but that kind of makes if fun.

But due to the evils of level scaling, by the time your character is in the upper 20s levels or so you can't help but trip over some really expensive loot every few minutes, it seems. Then money becomes meaningless.

And some of the quest payouts seem worthless. For example: 500 gold for a quest? I could just walk down that patch and kill a bandit for 10 times that. And I already have 300,000 septims I don't know what to do with. Jeepers.

If there's anything I hate is that slowly getting really small amounts of money, and when you collect enough, you realize that it's half of the least expensive item you can get.

Just put in more, really expensive things to spend money on, rather than making earning money much harder...

This is a problem intrinsic to every RPG released in the past ten years or so. I would be incredibly shocked if this were not the case with Skyrim as well.

It seems RPG devs find it necessary to make it easy to become wealthy, perhaps playtesting results in complaints if it is too challenging to accumulate wealth.

In my case if I ever reach a point in any game where the PC is so ridiculously wealthy that you can easily buy any item you want and there is no more point to accumulating wealth,

If I no longer have anything to look forward to, no longer any need to scrounge and save up for that cool, very expensive magic item, etc.,

...then the progression grinds to a halt, the game instantly becomes boring for me and it is time to retire that character.

So I will create a very simple mod to increase all merchant prices by 5x. This combined with the more dynamic economy features will make Skyrim a lot more fun for me. Not only will low levels be extremely challenging to survive, but even at higher levels there will be tremendously expensive items to save up for.

I think you could be on to something, like, items only available by purchasing through the mages' guild. But I think they should still be stealable, if your sneak/picklocking skill was super high.

Just increase all merchant prices for every item by 5x, and reduce the prices for selling goods back to merchants significantly, and the fencing prices for stolen goods should be only a small fraction of their selling price.

I like all these points, my only adjustment would be "Reduce exploitish money making methods. Make the ability to sell potions an alchemy perk "professional alchemy."" I personally think anything to do with selling and buying should be kept to the mercantile skill. Another problem the massive amounts of money caused is that it made that skill pretty much useless outside of RPing points of view.

The point about the reducing of health potions is definitely something that would've got me buying off vendors. I don't think Iv'e ever bought a health potion in Oblivion come to think of it... Reducing arrows dropped by NPCs and found would be a plus too, I always managed to resupply most my arrows by the archer characters/creatures I killed or find in the environment.