[rant]

OK, to start off I know this has been mentioned a few times but I haven't seen or found a thread dedicated to it. Item ownership, stealing and selling.

Seriously, I can certainly understand that you'd lose karma for stealing and I can certainly understand if people won't buy unique named items if they were obviously not meant to be with you but Abraxo Cleaner? Seriously? How the heck do the merchants know if you stole it?

I thought FO3 was bad for ownership but at least you could sell the stuff and New Vegas has taken it to a whole new level, so far (after 41 hours play) around 80% of all static or clutter items are "owned". Why even have them there if you can't do anything with them? Why not just make them part of the area rather than separate resources? They are just taking up processing resources for nothing.They are wasted objects, in the coding sense, and pointless resource hogs.

There are so many aspects about this game that are really good but there are some really fundamental aspects that are just killing it.

Oh yeah, I thought I'd just throw in, please fix the constant crashing. No, it wasn't the hardware drivers. Yes, it is the game. (Edit : Before you start asking for proof, this is a bit of a rant. No I don't have proof.)

[/rant]

I believe to a critical extent of FO3, there were too many items that were lootable. As well as this, the majority of non-vacant locations will have items that belong to pretty much anyone and everyone there. I think they are trying to stress the whole scavanging principle of the FO series, much similar to what the original was like.

I understand your predicament, but I guess my only advice is to just kill those you don't like, loot them and their location; or go to animal locations and clean them out.

Reno

I don't understand. You can't sell an item you've stolen to the merchant you stole it from, but you can sell it to anyone else, right? Or am I missing something? 'Cause my char's a kleptomaniac yet no longer possesses most of the items he's stolen, and unless I've really not been paying attention I'm sure I've been selling stolen stuff with no bother...

I started again to create a not so nice guy.

The specific instance I'm talking about is in Goodsprings I'm looting all houses of everything. I'm "scavenging" to make some money and also am playing a, not really evil but totally selfish, bad character. I noticed that after looting all the houses and some back and forths to the general store I had become encumbered. I looked and noticed that a whole bunch of things like chopping boards, Abraxo Cleaner and a swag of other stuff was in my inventory but when I went into barter mode they weren't displayed.

I also noticed that with my other characters that about the only time you can grab something without stealing is if you loot a corpse.

Hmm, maybe the Goodsprings merchant won't buy junk stolen in Goodsprings? Can you try selling it to another merchant, maybe a travelling merchant on one of the roads out of town?

I can only try I guess. I think I may be falling into the ASSuME error. Thinking that this game is so much like FO3 but it's so different. A reasonable assumption but not a certainty. I think overall if I didn't crash so often a lot of these sorts of things I probably wouldn't even blink at. *sigh* This game could be so awesome for me, it's certainly got the potential. That I've played for more than 40 hours with 2 to 3 times that many crashes or white screens is a testament to how much I want this to work I guess.

I only just found this out on my second more evil playthrough and was just thinking "great more omniscient merchants who know every item that is stolen"

It has always bugged me in any game that they do this. It's fine if you steal from a merchant and he wont buy his own goods (although if he knows they are his you would think he would call police/guards) but if I steal from someone on the other side of the game world I don't want a merchant to reject buying it because there is no way he would know.

Now I will admit I have not checked if other merchants will buy my stolen goods yet so I might be jumping the gun with my rant and end up looking stupid later but if it's the same as how other games have worked it's lame and I will be looking out for a mod to fix it for later playthroughs.

I think you are, I can only re-iterate that I've had no trouble selling stolen loot, I have been stealing plenty since the start of the game and if I hadn't sold all my swag I would currently be so over-encumbered as to be slowly sinking towards the centre of the earth.

Other merchants buy stolen stuff just fine. It's only if the item is flagged with an area-ownership matching a particular merchant, that the merchant won't take it off your hands. So just move on to another area to sell stolen stuff from the previous area. But I wouldn't bother with anything that sells for less than 20 caps (unless it's weightless) - picking up every last abraxo cleaner, wrench, scrap metal etc. won't net you much caps for the weight-cost.

I've been playing a complete kleptomaniac (I don't steal everything - ie abraxo cleaner or junk that weighs too much for the caps - but as I'm in VH HC mode I was taking every bit of water and food I can find for the first however many hours of play, and every weapon and bit of ammo to resell). I have absolutely no junk on me and nothing "unsellable" - just move around between merchants a lot.

On the subject of trying to steal and sell everything for caps though, just a bit of advice - It's got to the stage now where I have every single implant and still 80,000 caps on me - for the first chunk of the game I was really micromanaging using ED-E and Veronica as mules, repairing weapons to full whenever I had more than one and re-selling to every merchant to get every last cap without any wasted... now though I realise that level of micromanagement really wasn't needed, mid to late game the weapon reselling alone gives you more caps than you can handle, and you start to ignore any containers you see and only ever bother with corpses and the odd refrigerator when food or water's running low (which isn't often). Playing a melee character though which may have made it easier for me, not sure how easy/hard it is if you were playing with guns.

I just think it’s funny that you can get good karma for killing somebody and bad karmas for taking their stuff.

Anyhow, I steal everything I can find and my karmas great. It’s not like those jerks are helping me out.

I don't understand how you get bad karma for taking a powdergangers campside items. They would have stolen it in the first place.

ditto

What about the skill books? Am I missing something? Some of them are flagged red so I haven't taken them because if I do, it's a loss of Kharma. How do I gain those?

Ah thanks I will have to look into that then, I guess that makes some sense I was just expecting a very Oblivion/Baldur's Gate style system where nothing stolen can be sold to a normal merchant.

Item ownership is really messed up with the bonus DLC items. If you drop them, they are marked as being owned by someone else and so picking them up again is stealing :/

Books and Skill magazines, unless under certain conditions to provide a back story, should never be owned. I have seen about 10 of them in this game so far that I could not read or utilize.

You steal them. Im playing good right now. The only thing I have stolen other than a set of armor is skill books. The karma loss is so small it doesnt really matter.

It was the same in Fallout 3.

I steal anything not nailed down that is out of eyesight of the area NPCs. And I sell all this stuff. And still have extremely positive karma.

steal steal steal steal steal
sell sell sell sell sell
caps caps caps caps caps

I disagree, I'd have to think books containing useful information that aren't destroyed would be quite cherished items in a world like Fallout's and the majority that have been found would be 'prized possessions' of sorts. So, either be the virtuous good guy and leave people's possessions, or the selfish [censored] and take their hard-earned goods for yourself. Not at all out of place or unfair in a game where nearly every action has some sort of repercussion on other's opinion of you, right?

Oh and edit; if you're having problems finding un-owned magazines, loot mailboxes, they're all over.

I don't see how that would make sense. You can own books IRL, and even if it's a silly magazine, how would YOU feel if some stranger came into your house and stole all your magazines and books?

yeah, the one guy's special named helmet I was trying to sell, but it wasn't there. Then after it was still in my inventory.

Not having problems find them, it just makes no sense to put ownership on an item that you can read and not take. In Oblivion, using the same engine, you could read a book without taking it. Or, you could take it if you choose and suffer the consequences, if any.





Hey, I let people read my books and magazines all the time, they gain the knowledge, I keep the book or magazine. Everybody wins.

Ownership on Books and Magazines is just dumb in this game.

Items belonging to criminals should never give bad karma when stolen. I wiped out the ncr prison, cleaned it off convicts. A lot of their stuff gave bad karma.

Along the lines of not being able to sell stuff............. I stole Van Graff armor from outside Silver Rush and not only can I not sell this item ANYWHERE, I cannot give it to Boone to wear either. wtf.

I can understand that. Thats logical and makes sense. But only for books

You need to have magazines with you so you can use them when you need them. Then you have to make a choice.