I had an idea in http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1195762-how-are-you-going-to-make-gold-in-skyrim/.

Short version: characters use Mercantile skill to determine item value, instead of perfectly appraising everything every time.

Long version:
I find looting in TES and Fallout to be very boring. Mousing over every scroll, every book, every set of greaves, every weapon, every piece of string in every corpse's pockets in order to check the weight and merchant value gets very old. Some people like it! I realize that. I get bored with it. Yet I can't shake the habit, because hey, maybe one of those potions is worth 1000, you know? So I check them all.

I was thinking, what would happen if my character wasn't always sure of the value of everything? If values weren't listed, I might miss out on some valuable stuff, but on the other hand, it would be very easy to break the habit of this very boring aspect of gameplay. That sounds good, but what about the players who like picking through all the numbers? What about the greedy characters who really would search through everything if I'm roleplaying right?

Then it occurred to me that there's an obvious and very natural solution: tie a character's Mercantile skill to their ability to appraise on the fly. A high success on a skill roll would give an exact value; a medium success might give an approximate value; a skill failure would simply result in "Value: ?". (Maybe there could even be a Perk that allowed you to have the old style perfect appraisal ability, or greatly boosted that aspect of the skill.)

This would have a double benefit. First, it would help those of us who don't like item sifting break the habit. Second, it would make Mercantile a more valuable skill than it has been in the past, and a more interesting part of gameplay.

Of course, there would be an obvious downside as well: players of earlier games who want and expect infallible appraisal powers, or people who just don't want any hassle with looting, would certainly prefer it the old way.

But maybe some of them could see the appeal of having to actually have mercantile knowledge to know the value of stuff.

Your opinions follow!

The idea has some merits, but many of us REALLY didn't like item sifting. Someone in another thread mentioned the painstaking process of identifying items and taking some based on gold/weight ratio, or taking them all and tediously selling everything.

I'm not completely rejecting your idea, I'm saying it might need to be reworked or rethought.

hmmm..i am fifty fifty on this. On one hand it would make it so everyone who plays doesn't get 2000000 incredible easily you just sell everything. gold in OB was a joke it was to easy to get. On the other hand i am the numbers guy you talked about where yu compare weight to gold value so in that aspect i want to know the value. i haven't decided yet but i would like it so if i sell 50 steel curaisses tey won't all be the same value because supply and demand states that if you have the supply then demand goes down as you continue to supply thus making it cheaper