The acquisition of gold in my opinion is debatable. If you look back even just 500 years the pettiest sum from now (5$) was like 500$ to them. It seems odd that it's the easiest thing in the world to come out of one dungeon and have 5000 gold worth of goods at the time Oblivion took place in and be able to obtain mass quantities of arrows, Resources, Potions, Ect like it was buying candy from a dollar store. Personally, I think gold should be a lot harder to acquire. Makes for a more realistic 'I need to actually survive' kind of role-play. The only thing I can compare it to off the top of my head is the first few hours of Dragon Age 2. At the very beginning you needed to find and earn money in order to pay to try make more money. A more entrepreneurial spirit to the economy system in the age of steel was necessary. That's basic history. And especially now in Skyrim with all the lumber mills, Taverns, Mining, Ect. has come into play, It only seems fair that you should have to work your ass off in order to make ends meat let alone afford that one sword or bow you've had your eye on since it first appeared in store. Easiest way I could think of to do this would be to reduce the amount of gold through quest rewards (not reducing quality armor/weapon rewards, Just the gold) and to reduce the amount at which merchants are willing to buy used/found weaponry off of you. The actual in store pricing for merchant goods would be priced according to rarity/quality and perhaps quantity as well. You may be able to cut deals for buying a stack of 10 potions for 100 gold rather then individually for 12 gold per each individual one.

These are just my thoughts on the matter. This topic and my ideas are freely open to debate. A poll simply would not do any justice to peoples opinions as I'd prefer to hear what everyone has to say as opposed to a number on a bar graph. Keep in mind, This is a FRIENDLY debate so try to refrain from flaming one and others ideas.

No... there's nothing worse than seeing a stocked up shop and not being able to buy ANYTHING.

Then go to a dungeon and find much better stuff for FREE.


Just add expensive, valuable items.

It's not earth.

Here's your answer:

With the CK, up the prices on everything.

Done!

I agree completely. Maybe the barter system should be similar to Morrowind, where merchants only have a set amount of gold at a time, so you can't sell massive amount of stuff to them. I think that stuff that is important to surviving should be worth more money then weapons and armor. A merchant in a small village wouldn't buy massive amounts of armor, he/she would rather buy food and supplies that are more important to the village. Just how many adventurers, that need weapons and armor are their in Skyrim?

What's worse: Being able to buy EVERYTHING and have no sense of accomplishment for getting all of it.

Simple, They then alter it so good weapons/armor are found in a dungeons and put amazing weapons to be bought from stores. That way you can prioritize stuff you find to use for yourself and what to sell in order to make enough money to be that over-powered end game character you'd want to be.

Getting discount for buying in mass sounds pretty neat
On the other hand selling in mass could also force you to provide discount for merchant
Anyway more varied economy would be interesting

Friendly debate? here? AHAHAHAHHAHAHH

OT, the economy system in both MW and OB is pretty much pointless as by level 10 or 15 you're pretty much badly rich. So anything balancing it would be welcome.

The only thing that kind of miffs me is how you can go into a dungeon full of wildlife and find gold in it. It made about as much sense as going into a building where nobody had ever been in in Fallout 3 and finding over 1000 bottlecaps. Seriously, there are times in that game that I'll open a random filing cabinet and find about 80 bottlecaps in it o_O.

Overall I think the only thing they need to do to make it more realistic is make sure that gold can't be obtained in places that most likely wouldn't have them. At least not in a huge abundance (I can understand maybe finding 20 in total in a wilderness dungeon if you're lucky). Though I honestly don't see them making gold harder to obtain. It's kind of a staple in any RPG that if you can get a ton of gold by the end of the game, to the point that it's almost a non-factor.

That's a very interesting way to look at it. Another thing I just thought of would be if store owners notice you're a regular they might cut you more deals on buying/selling in mass. That has more to do with radiant AI then economy tho.



Seems fine to me?

Well OP I agree and disagree; gold should be somewhat harder to get but not as much as you think, and to some extent Bethesda has dealt with this (get to that later).

1. Nirn is not supposed to be anologous to Earth. While some cultures have their roots in certain earthly cultures (Nords as germanic/saxon), nothing else really comes close to Earth.
2. Even if it was dungeon diving would still be an effective way to make gold. The average suit of plate armour was worth well more than a manor and a well-bred warhorse was almost as much, so think of how much you could make bringing back armour alone. You also have relics, magical items, gems, etc... Not to mention your monetary anology only makes sense for the peasants, notice how noble families generally had at least a knight or two considering the cost?
3. Bethesda has addressed the issue of you having the possibility of making too much gold off of say, making hundreds of potions/poisons and selling them by including some form of rudimentary economy.
4. You should know better than to bring up Dragon Age 2 on a forum filled with many PC gamers (like myself); the game kind of spat on us.

Taxes please.

What better way to get rid of all that gold. Fees and taxes would be great, in my opinion. Imagine how immersed you can get in Skyrim when you can get married, have a job, AND pay rent. (Killing dragons on the side of course)

He kinda has a point. You are lucky this topic is not really a hot button, hence why it is going smoothly. If you made a topic about guns or co-op, that is when all the

:flamethrower: :flamethrower: :flamethrower: :flamethrower:

start up

I kind of agree and kind of don't. I mean, In a way it doesn't make sense that wildlife would have gold but on the flipside its a fantasy rpg. Most fantasy books or movies have some sort of treasure guarded by some sort of beast so in that aspect it does kind of make sense. And I get that at the end of a game money shouldn't be an issue, But that's end game. As another poster said, By level 10 you're extremely rich and you never have to actually watch your spending in the slightest, You just look at it, It's good, Take it, No second thoughts. That's just dumb.




1. anologous to earth or not, Doesn't mean it has to be completely unrealistic.
2. Which is why I suggested you could good armor (Of a decent rarity but nothing to special) in dungeons while all the amazing stuff would be highly unlikely to be located anywhere other then smiths shops.
3. Did not know this.
4. I understand that but at the beginning it did the economical entrepreneur stuff really well so I was just giving an example.

Is the war already going when the game starts, or will it start later? If it starts later, it's a good explained event to drive prices up in order to keep things challenging also at the mid levels. In the early game, money is always an issue (as it should be). But in the middle game, somehow money isn't a concern at all (in OB due vast availability of "high level equipment" and infinite money on merchants - I've seen better economy models).

I don't see the point of taxes unless you actually own a home. Maybe taxes could increase with the number of homes you own, making it practically impossible to be able to maintain/owning all the houses there are all the time? If it's a role playing game, I just want more things to have to worry about.

The problem with the economy system in Bethesda games (MW, Oblivion, Fallout) is that money is both abundant and superfluous. Abundant because a single dungeon trip will net you enough money to be set for the rest of the game, superfluous because there aren't even useful items you can spend your money on (apart from a few cheap potions and ingredients maybe, plus luxury goods like houses and horses).

Buying items needs to be much more costly and at the same time you should get far less money for selling items. Then add more useful (but expensive) items to the shops. These items don't necessarily need to be powerful weapons or armor only. There is so much you can do - special artifacts with special powers, potions that are better than any potion you can find or create yourself, scrolls that are better than regular scrolls, enchanted arrows, skill books etc etc. Just give the shops items that are worth buying.

I guess that's something mods will have to do though, looking at the horrible economy systems in previous games I simply doubt they'll get it right this time. Only hope the silly merchant gold system from Oblivion will be gone, because that's pretty hard to fix.

EDIT: Part of the problem in vanilla Oblivion at least was the level scaling - as soon as you started finding higher level loot the amount of money you would get from selling the loot was insane. As long as finding high(er) level items is hard in Skyrim and the low(er) level items only give a few gold pieces when you sell them at least a part of the problem should be gone.

I remember many games over the years that had overly limited money supplies.. they all bombed. Often a patch would come out to loosen the economy.. but the damage was already done and the developers always went belly up.

The simple rule... if you want gold in your pocket as a dev make sure there is gold in the players pockets... otherwise your screwed.

I agree, I never understood the mercantile skill as it was never necessary to become rich. I think it should take high-level dungeon crawls or tens of hours of buying/selling to become rich.

Thats why in Oblivion I never carried armor from dungeons with the thought of selling them. I would pick them up if I wanted to collect them in my house or upgrade from what I was currently using. I imagined it wouldnt be easy to carry multiple suits of armor around so I only picked up smaller items and weapons to bring back to towns to sell.

I don't think they had dollars 500 years ago... just saying.

Challenged? Yes. Limited? Absolutely not. Todd has stated many times anything NPCs do, You can do, I'm assuming this includes doing jobs in order to make money. There is one way. Dungeon diving/Exploring and acquiring treasure. There's 2 more. Doing the main questline, Rewards, Sidequests, Faction storylines/missions. There are so many possible ways to make money, That being said, Money shouldn't be handed out by the thousands if there are THAT many options. Find what way is most entertaining for you and work at it over time to build up your savings.

I like the infinite money system, with the set amount I still sell all my items regardless, but it requires me to wait outside the shop for 3 days and that's just tedious.

The only way money could be difficult to acquire if you either had a hard way of getting money, or if you had a reoccurring money sink. So for example, in Oblivion, you could loot 20 dungeons over a span of 5 days and not have to spend a dime on food, housing or whatever. In real life (or a game that could pull something like this off really well) I would have to spend what money I had on me to buy accommodations just to raid one dungeon, and then go back to spend the money i just looted on an inn, more food, medicine. So basically, there is income and outcome, income in Skyrim is common and outcome is rather rare, while the opposite is true for IRL

I don't want Skyrim to be as "real to life as it can be" I want it to be enjoyable

Something like this should be in a Hard mode for Skyrim. (I do however want some sort of hard mode, but not like Fallout where you just need to drink water/etc)

screw acomplishment.