Help. I wanna play skyrim, but figure I need to finish oblivion first. Thing that's bugging me is this - how do you raise your mercantile skill? Been haggling like mad, but seems to make no difference. So, learned friends, what do you recommend?

Thanks, 2RM.

You raise it by bying and selling, simple as that. It takes a great while for anything to happen though. You should probably have the haggle slider as tough as you can have it, but I don′t know if that′s required.

The UESP has this to say about leveling up:

"You gain 0.4 experience points per sales transaction, regardless of the number of items being sold, the value of the items, or the setting of the barter slider. You do not gain any experience for buying items, except for spells (for which you gain 0.4 experience points per spell bought). You also do not gain any experience for giving away zero-value items."

Trying selling things one at a time. In other words, if you've got 21 ears of corn, sell them one at a time--don't sell all 21 at once. Yes, this is painstaking and possibly annoying, but it's one thing that works.

Not as painstaking or annoying as selling 2000 arrows one by one

The most annoying thing is there is no keyboard shortcut for only selling one out of a batch. You have to use a slider to select the quantity to buy or sell. That seriously slows things down.

Truth. Yea, you gotta keep kicking that slider over until there's (I think) 2 or 3 items left. Then it sells 'em one by one.

I only know all this, by the way, because I've had a few characters who chose Merchantile as a Major, and then I found their games were leveling up too slowly. One day I tried selling items one by one, and noticed I got a Merchantile skill-up point right in the middle of selling this batch of items (whatever they were).

mirocu...2,000 arrows?

Thanks, everyone.

Be seeing you!

Sure, and one hour after that I sold another 1000. It was as painstaking as you can imagine, and I think I lost a couple billion brain cells too in the process. And it was all for nothing, last summer I took Lothran′s Mercantile skill down to Apprentice lvl I think. I roleplayed he hadn′t sold anything for a while and thus was rusty.

I can tell you one thing, I will never do that again. Never. Never never I say!

Wait, I don't get it. Lorthran sold all those arrows one by one and it wasn't worth it? I would think he'd be able to start investing in shops with all that activity.

Yes he did. But I wanted to only be able to sell/buy weapons from a smith. I don′t want to see fruit, books and regular clothes in their inventories. Breaks immersion big time you see

For those on the PC, there's a mod - Toggleable Quantity Prompt (TQP) that lets you use a single keystorke for buy/sell one, or buy/sell all. That makes it a lot less tedious. I consider it an essential mod these days.

Would have helped a lot back then. Just pure irony that I went and changed the skill back several paces later after all that trouble I went through

I only made that mistake once in Oblivion.

ha ha ha ha. it wasn't a mistake for me. It was intentional. I like games that level up slowly, but I had a couple games that were leveling up too slow...even for me.

I've done this exact same thing. On one character. No one has ever maxed out mercantile, and I wanted to see what was what. Any time I went to sell loot, it was one at a time. Forever. I will never do this again. Ever.

I seem to be contrary to most of you. My last three characters have all had had Mercantile as a major skill. Sometimes I sell stuff one at a time, but most of the time I sell multi items by clicking half way on the bar, then half way again, etc. It’s not so boring that way, at least for me. Even if you sell everything in bulk, it adds up pretty quick. I pick up everything, and if you kill a lot of stuff and take all their loot, the numbers add up quickly.

My armorer skill maxes out early, just after Alchemy, and at that point I don’t repair the armor before selling it. That groups the damaged items of the same type in smaller units making the selling clicky stuff easier.

Back when my characters had Mercantile as a minor skill, I still maxed it out ASAP. So why not just make it a major skill? I like to get full value for my loot if I can.

When I build my characters, I give them skills appropriate to their actual lives. So Mercantile would be a major skill if it was important to the character, as it was for my "Travelling Alchemist." Her job was to travel all around Cyrodiil, harvesting ingredients, brewing potions, and selling both potions and raw ingredients to the various Alchemy shops. She also supplied food and drink items to the various inns and taverns.

This was one character who actually was a Merchant when she did the Anvil Mages Guild recommendation quest.

Waal, y'all, I been selling stuff. No movement on the mercantile rating. So, I wonder, is that because I jumped several levels when Seed-Neeus trained me as a reward for rescuing Daar-Ma on the Hackdirt quest? ie., will I have to catch up my level before it starts registering progress? Jus' wondering.

Yes. When you train, there is a delay for you to see progress on the bar. From what I understand, it still physically increases, just not visually for a little bit.

But but but, what about saving Cyrodiil? What about finding the lost heir?? She preferred just wandering around with no sense of responsibility whatsoever??

This character was actually too responsible. She took her job seriously, with the result that she never had much inclination to "adventure." She went into conjurer/necromancer hideouts, because that's where she was able to get better quality alchemy gear, and she explored caves mainly for the fungi that grew there.

Given that I use an alternate starting mod, most of my characters never hear anything about lost heirs or whatever. They hear talk that the Emperor has been assassinated, but they don't know any details about it.

Why, why would you do that, WHY!!!

Because the game encourages such behavior. All gameplay mechanics encourage certain behaviors. My partner. Brash, used to put her character into sneak mode, point her character into the corner of the prison cell by the hanging chains and hit the "always walk" button. She would sit back, have a smoke, wander out into the kitchen, get some coffee, go to the bathroom, come over to see what I was doing, ect. Thirty minutes later, when she felt her character had leveled Sneak skill high enough she would start the game. Later, in the cave section, just beyond where the rats break through, she would point her character into another corner where the ceiling was especially low and hit the Jump key over and over and over for 10 minutes. She would always pick a low ceiling because her character would hit her head and return to the ground faster. She wasn't the only one who did this. Oblivion's game mechanics encouraged it.

I'm not immune to this kind of thinking myself. In the early days of Oblivion, if I intended to play a character who used a claymore I would give that character an iron dagger to start. Since Oblivion simplified the older game's previous separate blade skills into one Blade Skill it was faster to level Blade by swinging a dagger. Even after I had switched to a claymore I would sometimes use an iron claymore instead of a level-appropriate one, because using a cheap sword in Oblivion leveled my Blade Skill faster. But I didn't stop there. I would intentionally let my iron claymore degrade almost to the breaking point so that it did still less damage. Oblivion's game mechanics encouraged this sort of counter-intuitive behavior.