Personally I find that the barter skill is such a waste of time/energy as is for the developers to keep including. The only perks of having a high or any barter skill I have noticed are bigger bottle cap rewards and cheaper items for sell. You should get higher bottle cap rewards through charisma anyways. I think a good way to make this skill more interesting would be to allow the formation of your own caravan company or investment in an existing company. A perk that could fit into that would be to have access to unique items otherwise unattainable.

Now to the question... if left up to you how would you make this skill better? Would you remove the skill all together to expand on other more beneficial skills? Would you add more perks? Or do you like it as is?

I think a Barter Skill check that would allow you to "shop around" Pit the various traders against one another at higher levels eg get 5% at mid levels 15% around 80 and 25% at higher levels. So that way you could be a "loyal customer" to say the Van Graffs if you like energy weapons.

Also the ability to help vendors expand their stock by creating trade guilds, Like using barter to strike deals between traders so they have more ammo or more melee weapons. Basically to influence the inventory to your characters weapons of choice. Those are my thoughts. If there was something like that my barter skill would go over 30 for sure

Could make for some interesting side quests too/

Pitting vendors against each other would be awesome!

Barter isn't entirely useless, especially with the new patch that made game economics a good deal more expensive. With base Barter and Charisma of 1, the merchants sell .308 AP ammo for 13 caps per round, and I'm not swimming in caps at level 20 anymore even with Jury Rigging. In addition, there are dialogue checks and quest resolutions based on barter, although you can usually bypass them with Speech checks.

Forming your own caravan company... I would have found it jarring, story wise, and I'm not sure how it would work game content wise. An "upgrade" to a single skill should be simpler and less intrusive.

Adding a few more barter-based perks certainly wouldn't hurt. Right now only Pack Rat and Long Haul unlock with Barter. I think there should be more.

I hear there's a mod out there which allows mail-ordering items from the Gun Runners to the player home in Novac. This could be made into a perk-based benefit; say, with 25 Barter you can mail-order from Chet, with 50 Barter from Cliff Briscoe, Miguel's Pawn shop and Mick&Ralph, with 75 barter from the Great Khans Contreras and Bardon, and with 100 Barter from the Gun Runners, the Silver Rush and the Crimson Caravan.

More realistically, each merchant's inventory could be divided into "basic" and "expanded", and with a barter check of vendor-specific difficulty the player could gain access to the extended inventory which offered rare and/or high-level items. Kind of like the special inventory of Mick&Ralph.

Another option: each vendor could offer, after a barter check, a "locally manufactured" item which other vendors would not stock. For instance, if you wanted a guaranteed supply of Duct Tape, or Psycho, or 45.70 case boxes, or True Police Stories, you would've had to "unlock" it with a barter check at a specific vendor.

It is what it simply is.

I like your "basic" and "expanded" inventory idea. Something like that would make barter worth throwing skill points at. Having "guaranteed supply" would be pretty great too.

I never really cared about the whole economy system in general after my 2nd or 3rd playthrough, because every time I had about 35000-40000 caps and 1000s of rounds on all my weapons by level 13/14.

I've played through the game about 8-10 times now. At this point, I just can't be bothered to try and break every bank to get an overhaul of cash. So my barter skill is a very useful vein for my income.

Heh, how about the higher your barter skill, the more weapons mods the vendors carry, and the more often they change them around to offer you the ones they've been HIDING FROM YOU for the last 15 levels..... grrrr. Something they should be doing anyway irregardless, but anything that would make weapons mods less of a random, hit and miss pain in the keister to get ahold of, I'm all for.

What does knowing how to get a better deal have to do with a vendor magically holding more mods? :huh:

Because you're better at sweet-talking them out of the 'special reserve' stuff they would otherwise keep for other preferred customers? :shrug: I frankly don't care, I just want to see the mods change around a bit more often... Most of the damn vendors get stuck on the same worthless, lousy mod selection for an eternity, and even 'waiting' for weeks and weeks and saving and logging out and all the other cheap pet tricks in the world won't get them to offer anything new or worthwhile. So if it took a change in how Barter works to juice them up a bit, i say go for it. In spades.

I have to completely disagree with you. the barter skill can be quite useful, having a high barter skill can significantly increase how many caps you get for selling an item you notice it more when selling high value items like the gold bars from dead money....I have a merchant style character with a really high barter skill and I make bank. You have a couple of good ideas for additions to that field of skill but I don't really see how it is useless or a waste of time and energy lol.

The reason I feel that the barter skill is a waste as it is right now, is that most of what it offers you beneficially (better deals/lower prices/bigger rewards) would fit just as well with the speech skill or even your charisma level. In real life if you have been given the gift of a silver-tongue you could deal with similar merchants (local market/pawn shop/ family owned store) to score better deals when trading and/or lower prices. I understand what kind of game I'm playing and do enjoy it, however I have always (since Morrowind) wondered what a game like this would be like with a more in-depth barter systems, bc nobody expects the hero at the time to be business savvy.

Thanks for your input though. Your points are valid, especial if money is your thing... and who doesn't love money. Those merchants need to pay me at least 10 bottlecaps/per can of pork-n-beans or I'm just not selling. My character hordes pork-n-beans btw.

The biggest contributor to the marginalization of the Barter skill is the endless supply of high-end loot available from NPCs. The most notable of these being 'Fiend Farming', which provides massive quantities of high-value Energy Weapons along with the occasional Hunting Rifle or Shotgun. As long as the player has access to unlimited sellables the economy will eventually break, and all the new ammo and mod prices do is move that point back by a couple of levels.

Another contributor is the ease with which you can amass huge quantities of caps by exploiting how the Blackjack engine works with a high Luck attribute: you can get over 40,000 caps in half an hour or less by breaking the bank in all the casinos, at which point you can get all the implants you want and all the mods you want and still have several thousand left for either Lucky 38 suite upgrades or upgrading your arsenal when something better becomes available.

I always raise Barter up anyway, since I hate getting ripped off in trades, but I've long since accepted that it will not have any real point past the early-mid levels unless a couple of things are done:

1) Cut off the endless flow of expensive loot. The preplaced valuable items would remain, as they are where they are for a reason.
2) Make it possible for a high Barter skill to allow buying/selling below/above an item's base price. This cannot be done by a modder as the equation is 'baked in' and unreachable with the GECK (I've tried).
3) Tie the amount and possibly quality of variable quantity supplies (ammo, crafting stuff, consumables, etc.) to the player's barter skill in addition to the leveled lists.
4) Allow the player to use [Barter] checks to unlock higher-tier items 'ahead of schedule', with the higher tiers requiring higher skill levels the earlier you are trying to get the stuff.
5) Remove exploits such as the 'buy+gamble' trick, as this lets you get thousands of caps of stuff for free since it's virtually impossible to lose at Caravan.
6) Make it (a lot) harder to win in the casinos even with 10 Luck. This would also address the reload shenanigans used to soak the slot machines, since it would become unprofitable from a ROI standpoint due to how many reloads it would take with the now-lower odds,

I can think of a couple more, but they'd probably be considered excessive so I won't list them. Essentially, make it impossible for the players to 'game' the economy and Barter will become much more important since now every cap will count as you no longer have another 50,000 where those came from by L10 or so. This might make Jury Rigging a bit too good, but I'm not sure what to do about that without ruining the perk.

Sir Masters got me thinking, and he's very right. However limiting the availability of high end items on respawn would just serve to make for boring low threat enemies.

To go along with my previous post, a nice wrinkle might be a supply and demand system to traders. After you sell the gun runners 10 Lasrer RCWs the price they offer would be cut substantially, as they would get overstocked. Set a rate at which they might sell certain items so the price slowly rises again. I'm sure they would sell more hunting rifles than AMRs so you could sell more low tier items before the price degrades, but high end prices would degrade quicker due to slower sales.

This allows the barter skill to keep your selling prices higher and offset the degradation without the need to strip the high end items from enemies.

Though programming all that would probably be a pain in the ass, Then again it worked in M.U.L.E. and that was a Commodore 64 game.

Frankly, I don't think it much matters, anyway. If FO were a multiplayer game, with a real economy, then it would. But, it isn't and caps are merely a means to keep you stocked up with stuff you need (that you can't find outside of vendors) so you can keep questing along. Whether you play it straight and scrimp and save and scrounge for caps early on, or game the game for those caps, is purely your choice, and hardly something most people worry a lot about, I suspect. The best weapons can't be bought, the unique ones, so having a boatload of caps doesn't really gain you much beyond the (blessed) ability to stop worrying about having to scrounge and haul every lousy toaster and empty syringe you find to town, to sell for ammo and whatnot. By the later stages of the game, I really am not into doing that crap anymore, anyway.

So, on a scale of one to ten for skills the average player gives a rip about, I'd have to say barter rates about a 2, from me.

You do get better barter with higher charisma, luck also helps but overall I agree. I'm not sure if I could make it fun but something needs to be done about the vast amount of caps the player has by level 15.

The way things are set up, the only way to 'shut off the tap', so to speak, is to not have respawns in the first place, which would have the side benefit of making any area you pacified stay that way.

The main problem with a supply-and-demand model is that the player is the only one 'demanding' anything. As such it would be incredibly easy to abuse, since you could get the price benefit of 100 Barter by repeated use of the 'wait' function to sink prices through lack of sales. You would need to implement a hidden mechanic that kept a tally of 'virtual sales' and used it to adjust the available items daily to reflect 'normal' business.

One way to put a brake on price alteration tricks would be to have the above mechanic not only adjust the prices but whether or not the item is even available. This is already done to some extent by the restock mechanic, which rolls against a chart to see which of the better items actually shows up for sale from their leveled lists, however that doesn't take anything other than that roll into account and is readily manipulated to get the stuff you want. Tying the restock into the 'virtual sales' tabulation would further adjust what's available and for how much.

Since there is only ever one copy of any given T5 or T6 item for sale at a given vendor during any one selling period (i.e. time between restocks) unless their lists are weighted, these items would be more likely to either get insanely expensive or not even be there. The problem here is that you risk developing a case of Elder Scrolls Pricing Syndrome?, wherein you have to sell everything you own for a single item from the next tier up due to how loot availability works, so there would need to be an upper bound on how high the price of the really rare stuff could get.

If the 'no respawns' method is used, then the prices on the best stuff do not necessarily need to be really high since you won't be able to just grab 3 Plasma Rifles out of your stash of 47 and go shopping. Rather, those 3 Plasma Rifles would be incredibly valuable since the odds of getting 3 more in full condition would be really low unless you're abusing the Vending Machine for Weapon Repair Kits. This would apply even more for higher-end armors, since you wouldn't be able to farm, say, NCR for various 6K-cap Combat Armors as the supply would be strictly limited. Sure, there would be the 'golden age' where there was a massive inflow of really valuable stuff, but once that ended you'd be rather hard-pressed to afford more of the high(er)-end stuff for repairs due to running out of items to trade for it.

A smart user of Jury Rigging could still turn a decent profit by buying up the damaged armors, patching them up, and selling them off, but he/she would be using up resources that are, themselves, finite in the process, so that would only go so far.

The Barter skill and the economy mechanics could certainly do with an overhaul as the skill and related perks are underwhelming to say the least at this time and the economy in general is easy to break given some of the farming methods you outline. There are mods for Oblivion that alter and tweak many of the core functions of the game so it is possible within the confines of the engine and working with OBSE. Not sure if NVSE is robust enough yet to handle some of the scripts, as scripting isn't my strong suit. Here are some links to Oblivion mods for some inkling as to what is possible:

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4432
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25078

I made my own variant for Oblivion that turned out to borrow from both of those (I did not look at them prior to doing so). I also changed how training sessions work, and between those mods I am always buying and selling things instead of sitting on more money than Croesus.

It's a pretty universal problem in games that let you loot the fallen, since there is usually an endless supply of same but a very finite supply of things you would actually want to buy, and once those are gone there's no reason to spend the masses of money you're accumulating. Oblivion tried to counter this by clamping down heavily on how much money the merchants have, but instead what ended up happening was that nobody sold the really valuable stuff since you were taking a 50% or higher loss on each item.

In FO3 and F:NV you can 'break' something really valuable by buying a lot of damaged stuff that you know is easier to sell once repaired up, and in F:NV you can also sink a lot of money into weapon mods, however once you have your end-game gear there's not much point in either activity. Since you'll end up selling entirely for caps at that point, and many of the best items go for well over 6000 caps each, you're right back to the 'all this money and nothing to do with it' problem again.

I still think the best solution is to remove respawns, but I have a feeling that would not go over very well.

I like Barter when playing a mercenary kind of character, like when someone asks you to do a job, you can use barter to say "double that and we're deal" or something. I don't like the options like "I'll do it for free!!!!", "Ok, I guess 50 caps is ok" or "No way, you [censored]!". Then I prefer the mercenary approach. "Make it 500 or I guess your son stays with the cannabalistic and rapist raiders..." "You son of a...!!! How am I even...!!! You got no.... Oh damn it all, here's 500 but after this I never want to see you again!!!" "As long as I get pay for a work well done, I'll enjoy NOT seeing you."