I'm wondering did anyone use this feature in Oblivion? I know once you became a master(?) in mercantilism you could invest in stores and receive a share of profits. Unfortunately I never got to this point and never knew how it played out. Do you think they will/should implement this once again in Skyrim?

*ahem I apologize for misspelling.

I don't think you shared in profits did you? I think it only added to the vendor's gold reserves. So if you ended up selling off a lot of 2000+ items, you more than paid off your investment and made it worthwhile. But I would definitely like to see the skill expanded beyond this, I don't even recall if Mercantile is in as a skill...

But Tradecraft might be?

I hope they don't have it as a skill

Assassin's Creed 2 and Brotherhood had a way better mercantile skill concerning shop investing, and it wasn't even a skill.

Hmm ya I'm really not sure on this. I heard that most likely athletics was gone and mercantilism is perhaps combined with speechcraft, which would make sense to me. I'm interested to see what it's like to not pick out your list of skills like in past TES games, I guess it will just depend on how much time you spend haggling and trying to raise dispositions.

They did have a pretty cool investment system.

I'd like to see a better way to buff your Mercantalism... other than just buying and selling a lot of crap

I dont even want to know how my friend got his to 100...

The only way I ever get my Mercantile to 100 is by using trainers. Same with Restoration. Those skills took an absurd amount of uses to level. That being said, I hope Skyrim makes it more balanced. It's weird how I can raise conjuration to expert level so quickly, while restoration takes 10x as long.

I think they should allow every one to invest in stores, and finding something else to reward master merchants with. If you are going to spend your time increasing a skill as useless as mercantile, you should be rewarded with something better than an increased maximum pay out on the items you sell.

Never cared about macro nor micro econom in these games. Never invested; in fact I'm not even sure my merc made it to 50?

All I want is a place to sell my goods and leer at some wares

What was the Assassin's Creed 2/Brotherhood way of dealing with investing? I think it would be a really cool thing to implement so that it could actually be used. I think the only skills I ever got up to 100 in Oblivion were sneak and acrobatics just sort of automatically. It never became especially necessary for me to focus on other skills since you get to the point that you can 'beat' everything in the game without worrying about that..especially when it's so tedious.

Maybe a happy medium between Oblivion and Fable 3, because I felt like Fable's way of just owning the store and receiving automatic payments was kind of lame. Not really involved at all and it didn't take any real skill from the player except having loads of cash.

I would definitely be down for something like this, maybe making the risk of investing higher for players with lower Speechcraft/Mercantile experience. And then once you've actually 'mastered' it, you can take it to a whole new level. Maybe having a building, deciding what wares you want to sell, and hiring an employee/security.

Let's not turn this into a business sim... but for the love of pete, I want some form of banking!