something that irritated me about oblivion was that the merchants with the highest gold cap was at 1050 gold (may be mistaken but not by much) and most of the rare/unique 'useless' items were worth more than 5000 gold for example a random ring i found called ring of skimming (water walking on self, fortify 2 attributes) was worth 6100. this particular item was worthless considering i had armor that did the same job and didnt need the fortification. but there was no merchant who had even close to the ammount of money for me to sell it. i hope that they fix this in skyrim and have the merchants cap out at a more realistic price like 50,000 gold or something (considering there are multiple items that are worth around 15,000 gold). anyone agree? also im new to the forums... wheres my fishy stick?

I agree, but not at 50K.....maybe some rare items collector will seek you out and make a deal with you..

Well if they do the economy well the merchant wont buy it at its max value but he will buy it at a high cost so you cant sell deaderic at 5000 and glass at the same price.
And if they do it really realistic when you buy they gain money and when you sell they loose money and it can affect the future items he will have

Hopefully merchants have a certain amount of gold that changes if they buy or sell something. A bit like in Morrowind. Some merchants should have a lot more gold and the amount of gold merchants have should differ a lot. Some would only have 500 or a thousand, some would have 5000, some 10000 and a few extremely rare merchants in the game could even have a 100000. There would be realism but it wouldnt be tedious either because there would always be some merchant who can afford the high level loot. Merchants prizes should be a lot harsher as well and it shouldnt be as easy to make money but thats off topic.

Have to disagree, I am afraid. It's too easy, in fact ridiculously easy to get rich in these games. Oblivion had a really rather daft system, Fallout 3's was much better, with them running out of caps if you sold too much. Anyway, me may be able to increase merchant wealth by helping local economies anyway.

Have some vegetarian option http://www.jandersongallery.com/uploads/1/6/2/2/1622043/4377090_orig.jpg

it is dumb if you put points into mercantile, so that you CAN take advantage of selling higher and buying lower...then the merchants have 200-1000 gold....selling a piece of 6000 glass armor, you screw yourself out of a ton of money unless you take a LOT of random stuff in trade...which usually your at the max encumbrance anyhow.

Mercantile is useless except when your like level 1-5. After that, doesnt matter, as normally you have at least one or more items which merchants cant even come close to affording.

either fix merchants or dump mercantile too. Its stupid as it is.

have houses available for like 30k gold. Make glass armor pieces not worth 6k per piece. That easy. Limit the value of items as they did in Fallout NV. That system works fine.
Morrowinds and Oblivions merchants and mercantile are ...well...useless.

maby some thing like the more you buy from a stor the mory they can sell back

It's sort of an unwritten rule of fishy sticks that if you ask for one, you disqualify yourself from receiving one. Sorry.

Regarding caps - I personally have no problem at all with believing that some random merchant doesn't have enough cash on hand to pay the theoretical full price from a rare enchanted item, or a piece of daedric armor, or any of the other things like that that crop up in the game.

Actually - the first thing I'd do in that regard is completely eliminate the value listing for all items. Items, both in the real world and (nominally) in the game, are worth only one price - whatever somebody else will pay for them. It doesn't matter if you have some antique that some book says is worth $5,000 (or some ring that the menu says is worth 5000 septims) - if you can't find someone who's willing to pay that much, then that's not what it's worth.

I'd make the amount of gold that merchants have on hand dynamic. It would tend to fall within reasonable ranges anyway - the master armorer in the biggest city is going to have more money on hand than the lowly shopkeeper selling cheese wedges to the locals in some little village - but each of them should have less cash on hand if they've just made a big purchase and more on hand if they've just made a big sale.

Another advantage to that that someone else pointed out on a thread a while back (and I wish I could remember who it was, so I could give credit where it's due) is that that could be used for a dynamic replacement for level scaling. You go through a dungeon and loot a bunch of nice armor and weapons. You go to a town and sell it all, completely cleaning out the cash the merchant has on hand. A few days or weeks or whatever later, all the locals (including the bandits or marauders or what-have-you) are running around in this spiffy new armor and carrying these nice new weapons, the merchant's inventory is empty, but he has LOTS more money to buy new loot from you. I think that would be a tremendous way to not only handle merchant gold and the increasing value of items, but to realistically get better qualiity items in the hands of NPCs as the game progresses.

I sincerely doubt that Skyrim will include anything like that, but I still think it would be a great way to do it.

And I'd like to see per transaction caps eliminated entirely. That's just a stupid mechanic. If the devs want to set it so that there's a limit on the amount of gold a merchant has available, then there should be a limit on the amount of gold the merchant has available - not just a limit on the amount they'll fork over on a given transaction. Either get rid of the limits, make them dynamic (again - my preference) or place the limit on the amount of gold on hand total.

You should be able to sell items at their value to someone. If an item is valued at 10000 gold and you can sell it, for example: 64% of it's value, then there should be a merchant that can shell out 6400 gold for it, and you shouldn't have to sell it for 1000 gold. Either that, or adjust the value of the items in the game. Either way, the economy was a little off in Oblivion.

If I have ￡400 and sell something for ￡100 to someone who has ￡300, then my wealth increases to ￡500 and his decreases to ￡200.

If later I buy something from him that's worth ￡300, then I am left with ￡100 and he is ￡500 rich.

It makes sense, doesn't it? What about we get rid of the whole cap thing and give the game an actual economy where money has value and isn't infinite? OOO (or was it Francesco's?) made it possible in Oblivion and that made it a lot better, at least for me.

They shouldn't have a "supply" their supply should be based on a real economic system.
ALA X series, when you sell wares to them they should put those wares up for sale and then proceed to sell them.

And thus their money supply returns in which they used to buy more things from traveling merchants or local manufacturers or possibly overseas trade.

Get some supply and demand going in this game ftw.

here is your fishy stick sir.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://images.uesp.net/c/c4/Fishystick.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.uesp.net/wiki/General:Fishy_Stick&usg=__24ywcCj6uXcaUKGJY7Kv5yRYZRA=&h=230&w=140&sz=11&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=2lk5dO_2SitH8M:&tbnh=168&tbnw=100&ei=0KAbTu_XNvKfsQKR9JTMCA&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dfishy%2Bstick%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26rlz%3D1T4GGHP_enUS418US418%26biw%3D1120%26bih%3D654%26tbm%3Disch&um=1&itbs=1&iact=rc&dur=93&page=1&ndsp=17&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0&tx=47&ty=91

morrowind style but they can gain investment money over time

Have a fishy stick!

I prefer it to work like fallout 3/NV where the shopkeeper has a fixed amount of gold that regenerates over a period of time, but you can still barter for stuff. Oblivion's approach where shopkeepers have unlimited money but has a price limit is terribly unrealistic.

If I was running a pawn shop store...

I would only give a certain amount of cash to each individual, somewhat based on their credibility..

An ugly ogre with blood on his sword might not be high on my 'Sure, I can give you up to 2000 gold" list.. I might try to lower it instead . .... WHILE~ someone who has done me a favour by getting rid of the gang of thieves that robs my trade caravan, I'd search my pocket for an extra coin.. Someone that comes to me often with good non-stolen merchandise, I'd sooner reach for that extra copper coin as well.

So.. Each visit to a store clerk potentially increases the total cash available to you for merchandise by 0.25% up to a total of 10% increase (more if your very charismatic, and have Merchant Perks, or have done quests for the merchant) ... and based on the reliability of the goods.. If later on, the merchant discovers I STOLE that staff of arcane magic, then he'd try to distract me with a few words while waving a guard over yonder to pay the owner some respects (and by taking some change off the merchant (to beat me up or toss me in prison (50/50 chance))))

it'd be nice if some merchants didn't buy Hot merchandise (a small town merchant with Daedric items for sale? I think not! someone would rob him blind in half an hour, tops. I wouldn't buy that unless I had an awesome guard with a pokey stick of +99.1 damage roll) and a no-miss accuracy perk!)

so yeah.. a lot of ideas in here on handling stolen goods, and giving better services to those who are Return/continual customers with a good reputation

ok, but i don't want to be the only person that biz depends on. i often have more to sell then to buy and i dont want to "burn my briges" because i clean a mechent out. he should be able to sell off his stuff to OTHER people and when i come back in a few days he has even more money than before because he sold the crap for a profit. eventuly, with a high volume supplier such as myself, his biz would exspand in-turn having more money to buy my crap!

I liked Morrowind's style of bartering better overall where you want to sell x amt of stuff and buy x amt of their stuff and see who makes a profit in the end not selling things one by one by one. Also that the merchant should not 1000 gold pieces of gold for every transaction, they'd lose money as you gain it, makes sense to me.

I agree with the above green lettered post :celebration:

In oblivion, most merchants had gold reserve of 800 ~ 1200. Some have even less golds, but not worth talking about.
Thoronir and Nilawen had only 800, but gave the best sell/buy price in game for every items. Gunder at Skingrad also has nearly good prices. All three of them had 20+ repair hammer respawning per 3 days.
Smithy merchants buy/sell only armors and weapons (+few misc items), and their price were rather steep. But they have 1200 golds. The one living in Anvil gives best price among his peers.
Paronir has 1200 golds and only buys clothings and jewelies. Her bargain is the most difficult in entire game.
If you are part of Mage's guild, the guild vendors give excellent prices, but some of them have smaller gold reserves and only buy/sell potions/soul gems/scrolls.
At the higher mercantile skill, you can invest in stores to expand their gold reserve by +500.
Advance your mercantile even further, you get another +500.

Basically, you gotta haggle and shop around to find and get the best deal for each item. If your mercantile is higher, you get higher potential profit.
Vendors of Oblivion are very well designed and slightly different, so every merchants do have some values to check out for.
I felt that even at higher levels, 1200 +1000 or 800 +1000 can be very reasonable prices since your bargain only goes upto 60~80% depending on your mercantile (unless you're master who gets glorious 1:1 deal) and even daedric gears have face values of only upto 6000~8000. (I think the daedric cuirass was 6000 and warhammer 8000, approximately). For most cases, you pretty much get fair prices for your items.
It made the game that much more interesting because the game rewarded players for remembering each vendors and shopping around for best deal. They were very well balanced.
Now, FO3 merchants, they only had certain amount of money and resources. Their money/stocks get dry after buying/selling. Most of the times, I couldn't even get rid of my junks because every merchants in Capital Wasteland was dry after I sell half of my stuffs and buy all ammos they carried. The economy of Capital Wasteland was pretty crappy compare to that of Cyrodiil (which was a good thing that fits the game really well) Selling/Buying was a mini game of its own way. Loved it.

I usually collect all special items (daedric, quest rewards unique items, gems, ultra expensive magic rings, etc etc), so selling them at better price was never an issue. With all these money and nowhere to spend, I'd imagine high level players would rather keep their trophies instead of selling them away.

Personally, I want to see Cyrodiilic economy in Skyrim. I hear that there will be civil war, but I'm expecting that it won't be as bad as the wasteland after a nuclear war. Maybe It'd be fun to see merchants with relatively less money and supplies since the trading would be harder through all these snowy mountains and civil wars going on.
FO3 style would be also fun, but I think it'd be fair that vendors have far bigger gold/supply reserves than these of Wasteland.

it would be cool if you could sell artifacts that were useless to your character to a museum of some sort. kind of like how you could get a bunch of gold for the staff of magnus in morrowind.

It really makes me mad that Oblivion doesn't have a working economy. If I steal from and slaughter some apothecary owners, it should bump up the prices of alchemy ingredients. If I sell a ton of iron armor, the price of iron armor should drop. I'm glad your actions affect the economy in Skyrim. It makes the world feel so more real.

Exactly. I didn't mention it in my example, but the merchants do eventually replenish their resources, so you can return after a few days to sell more things. The point it that you can't get incredibly rich or completely screwed over after only a single shopping trip. If, for example, you have some very pricey loot, you're best off conserving it until you need to buy something expensive, in order to nullify the costs - like buy house upgrades or alchemical ingredients for a few thousand septims and then sell your varla stones and enchanted armours at their maximum value, because the merchant is at that point able to afford them at full price. You get rich slower than in vanilla, true, but at least don't get poor as fast either, so it's fair. And on top of that, the mod I mentioned also adjusts item values depending on your current location and general rarity of the goods, so Welkynd Stones can be worth like 30 septims in one part of Cyrodiil, but twice the price in another. I really, really hope at least the last part is present in the economy of Skyrim.

What did you need in Oblivion that costed so much $$? Heck, what did you even need $$ for in Oblivion?

Armor? No Arrows? No Potions? No Weapons? No Repairing? No

Cheap Spells? Yes Optional/Pointless Housing? Yes DLC Housing Upgrades? Yes

So only a little amount for spells, if you played mage and if you liked housing. So selling cheap things was good enough

Hopefully Skyrim will be different.

Hopefully unmodded Skyrim will be different. In Oblivion, only after installing a few dozen mods could my character's enormous wealth actually be put to use.