I played Morrowind on Xbox 360 about a decade ago. I loved it. I've planning on playing through a couple of characters on it again but this time with my new shiny PC copy, but I'm trying to get some of my mods situated. (I've played Oblivion and Skyrim on PC so I'm used to my moded experiences now.)

That being said, I've read in a lot of places that the economy of Morrowind is "totally broken." It's been a long while since I've played it so I don't remember how/why it was broken. Most people seem to think that it is too easy to get money. Maybe that's true. But that seems to be more a problem with the fact that you can save and reload, don't have any needs, and the nature of the character's usually hero nature. No common adventurer should really have the chance to do some of the things the player does. I'm pretty sure I could get rich pretty quick in real life if I could take insane risks then reload from my mistakes, didn't have to eat, sleep, or drink, and could use magical means to heal/cure my afflictions. So, from the perspective of a normal, realistic (has to eat, drink, sleep, and generally not die) average person living in Morrowind, would the economy feel/appear broken? If yes, which mods fix that?

If you are wondering why I would care, I'm thinking of playing a Commoner/NPC style character or two at some point as well as my usual heroic character. I'm sure the hero will always be fine as far as money goes, but would the commoners even be able to survive? I will be using mods that require food, water, and sleeping to survive.

What mods make the economy most realistic? Or is it realistic but perhaps not what people like now?

There are some "econmy adjuster" mods:

http://mw.modhistory.com/search?searcht=economy

I've never used one, however.

Now, if you plan to play as a filthy peasant Commoner, you probably should add a Crafting mod, unless you plan on collecting ingredients and selling the potions.

If there is one thing I have learned in my years on this forum, it is that when it comes to video games "broken" is in the eye of the beholder. One player's "broken" game mechanic is another player's favorite game mechanic, is another player's game mechanic that he has never even noticed, is another player's game mechanic that he has noticed but doesn't care two hoots about.

Personally I don't think the economy in any of the Elder Scrolls games is "broken." But then I roleplay and roleplaying imposes limits on what my characters can and cannot do. My characters are rarely wealthy...unless becoming wealthy happens to be part of their character design and story.

We are given the tools to tell our character's stories in these games. We can choose to use those tools in a manner that supports our roleplaying. Or we can abuse the tools. It's up to us.

Welp. Wrote up a long reply, but it somehow got nixed before I could post. In points, then:

• Yes. Yes, it is broken. The unmodded game in general is way too easy, possibly barring the moments of just starting out, or a player being initially unfamiliar with the game, or maybe not paying attention. Throughout a playthrough, you amass both power and wealth easily and too quickly.
• By level 15 you can and probably will reach wealth of about 150k, meaning you can buy anything and mostly enchant anything. 10 levels after that, you will have more than double that amount, essentially having no reason to care about money anymore - but you will likely still continue to get more as you play on, anyway . This actually created interest in Gold Weight mods (I think ManaUser's the best), so it's at least not trivial to carry your mountain of gold around.
• You become pretty powerful at levels 10-15, but more importantly, all-powerful at levels 20-25 (endgame to "demigod" level), meaning you can reliably kill simple http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tribunal:High_Ordinator and http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Vivec_(god) characters, if you fight seriously. Maxing the GOTY difficulty slider in the options could make this reasonably challenging (less so for that level 100 character which only attacks with magic), as what it does IIRC is decrease the amount of melee damage you deal and increase the amount of melee damage you receive. You could still beat them with effort, or with more easily with 5-10 more levels. Not sure if the difficulty slider exists on the XBox version...
• Although there are some engine problems that contribute to this (the excellent Morrowind Code Patch does fix a bunch), the problem mostly lies in the game content, which is unbalanced. Tons of items are wildly overpriced and/or wildly overpowered, accessible, and easily attained, low level characters can attain high-end gear, enemy and quest difficulty aren't high, many enchanted items give unbalanced to ludicrously powerful benefits, even if they're easily accessed by lower level characters, many offered mechanics are highly abuse-able to plain unbalanced (including but not limited to Creeper and the Mudcrab merchants), there aren't big gold-sinks for the player, and even discrepancies with lore have a factor here (by lore/dialog, trade of Dwemer items, Ebony, Glass and other "ingredients" and contraband is illegal, while in practice you can freely trade with those pricy goods with anyone, and are limited only with Skooma and Moon sugar. Less significantly, you also don't have to purchase entry papers to do as you please about Sadrith Mora. etc).
  Most of the vanilla game's premade spells svck, but even some spells are unbalanced, I suppose. Thinking primarily about Bound items here, especially weapons (no need to buy or find and then carry around heavy gear, a cheap spell can instantly give you a top-end 0-weight piece, even with a pretty nice enchantment). And then there's overpowered or abusable stuff with custom spells, enchantments and potions. Not that there aren't vanilla premade enchanted items that can instakill anything in the game regardless of your character's stats, because there are.

Those problems could be less pronounced if you level up your character inefficiently (the vanilla leveling system svcks though, for the sake of gameplay satisfaction), possibly play more casually, and don't loot-hoard (and ignore the creature merchants), etc. But that'd probably often be artificially limiting yourself, and at any case the problems would still remain.

Needs mods generally don't increase the difficulty by a lot, nor provide a large gold-sink for the player, I think. Not that that one would really matter once you reach 100k.
Realism mods that could provide worthy gold-sinks are some tax mods and property-related mods, though. I think there are a small few such applicable mods around at the moment, though not necessarily fleshed out and probably not many.

However, with all its flaws in execution, this game and engine is still great; mods in general can address all those content issues (and occasionally even improve abuse-able or unbalanced mechanics, or, sometimes, engine flaws). There are a bunch of mods that even go through all the items (especially stuff like weapons and armor) in the game and rebalance their effectiveness, gold value, weight, etc (you need to be "careful" with other mods such as quest mods that may add new unbalanced items, though). There are mods that remove or add guards (or as such) to unguarded powerful loot. And there are difficulty and economy mods. You can read BTB's great and entertaining Morrowind mod list for a good start: http://btb2.free.fr/morrowind.html

And yeah, I guess we'll never know if the original post was longer, or not.

I'd agree with Nakashi here - the economy is very broken. I second the BTB recommendation, but it unfortunately doesn't go quite far enough.

There was a very good thread awhile back that discussed a topic similar to this. I saved it for reference once I get around to modding the economy. http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1513458-poverty-mod-good-idea/'s the link, but you should probably avoid that thread if you don't want spoilers.

I think the economy is just fine in vanilla. The issue is as you surmised, it is easy to exploit the game by doing things like selling to creeper/mudbcrab, which can be further exploited by selling him lower value stuff, waiting 24 hours for inventory to reset, then buying your stuff back at cost to increase his available gold to sell him a higher value item for full price. You can loop this type of behavior to sell insanely valuable items for full price. You can buy and sell one gold items to a regular merchant repeatedly to drive his disposition up to 100 to get better deals, you can buy infinite alchemy ingredients in one sitting and then turn around and make a bunch of potions and sell them back for profit. Etc.

Mods like BTB's Game Improvements aim to fix the economy primarily by closing these loopholes and increasing the mercantile skill of vendors, which is kinda low in the vanilla game. Increasing the vendor mercantile skills also has a side effect of fixing the barter bug where you start to get slightly worse deals after your mercantile skill passes a certain point.

Personally I find the vanilla economy to be just fine, but I have enough self restraint when roleplaying not to engage in such exploits, so I don't need Uncle BTB there to stop me from doing them, but some people enjoy the challenge and Uncle BTB is there to provide. His mod also removes a bunch of other loopholes and generally makes the game a lot harder people like it because it adds a lot of challenge to the game and keeps the game difficult well past level 30 where the vanilla game becomes pretty easy. I prefer Wakim's Game Improvements, which is a less aggressive form of game balancing than BTB without the economy adjustments.

Although I disagree that the economy is broken, at least not for players with a modicum of self-restraint, and therefore I don't believe BTB is at all necessary for the average player, I do heartily agree that it is well worth reading his mod list/guide. It is filled with excellent information about his mod and the mods that they are based on, which is useful for players deciding what mods to use, and it is downright hysterical. I still laugh every time someone mentions a body replacer because it reminds me of BTB's comments on the sans underwear version.

EDIT: I do wish there were an economy mod that increased vendor skills to a reasonable level between 25 and 75, depending on the vendor, with maybe a couple higher than that, without making any other changes (except maybe closing loopholes, I don't really care too much about that one way or the other). That would solve a lot of mercantile issues. My objections to BTB's economy adjuster mod is he increases both speech and mercantile, which makes it nearly impossible to pass a speech check without first grinding speech. If he left speech alone I would probably use his economy mod.

Agreed. Fortunately, more can be done, although some of it may require scripts.
That thread you linked to looks interesting.


Careful that you don't accidentally offend anyone. The question of whether it's good and desirable thing for a player to need to artificially restrain the way the play the game aside - I think that you are majorly downplaying the severity of the problem here. Doing things like using the creature merchants, abusing alchemy or the wait mechanic, etc, definitely expand the problem, but it is very much there even if you do none of those. There's also both a wealth problem and fighting power problem, as mentioned. Also, the vanilla wealth problem is so bad that it doesn't matter even if you restrain yourself so you gain only half the amount you'd have gained otherwise, as it actually makes little difference. To not gain lots of gold in vanilla, you'd have to do far-reaching stuff such as skip gaining loot and selling it, dropping half your gold every once in a while, possibly not selling quest rewards, and as such, at which point it's probably debatable whether you're actually playing the game (looting alone is such a big part of it).
The fact of the matter is - speaking of vanilla playthroughs, does it take you a lot of playtime to reach level 20? Is it a high or maximum level in the game? What state did your characters reach at level 20? Were they all-powerful and inexhaustibly rich, or not? Did you not routinely pick up items with gold costs of 10k and above? Does the game not include many items priced at above 20k, even above 50k and 100k, which are obtainable without buying them? Do simple vanilla items (easily obtainable at level 10) such as the Ring of Toxic Cloud and Amulet of Shadows bear any semblance to the senses of reasonableness and balance (or do they break the game)? Unfortunately, it's not really a deniable thing. It's well-known for years that vanilla is broken like this, and most people you'll find will play heavily modded.

While your short descriptions of BTBGI are actually very misleading/downplaying - it is a positively huge mod originally based on WGI (it is not merely concerned with "closing possible loopholes", but with gameplay quality and balance, which, among other things, naturally includes fixing the many ludicrously-priced and overpowered items, some of which I've mentioned above - which is no easy feat, considering the amounts of items in the game), I do share your feeling of not specifically liking the whole of the BTBGI mod. Not all of its modules or changes are good or necessarily in the right direction IMO. But it's still pretty good - and modular - and does improve the power and gold creep issues. And I also agree that his mod list is great, informative and damn funny!

It's easy if you want it to be easy. Unless you abuse the creature-merchants, and you don't often go to town to sell all the needless crap, collected for nothing else but to sell it, you won't collect as much money as some people do, but then nag about how easy it is. The only difference from newer games is that expensive items can be found early on (but not likely, unless you know the game well). In fact, the fact that individual merchants have limited amounts of money, and you will likely spend it on training, makes it slightly harder to become filthy rich than in later games, imo.

In all fairness, your posts are at least as offensive as mine. But I am sure neither of us is intentionally trying to offend anyone here, just expressing our opinions, which seem to be worlds apart on issues of whether the vanilla game is "broken" or whether BTB's mods are necessary or even desirable. Seems like you have more of a powergaming approach, going after powerful unique items like Ring of Toxic Cloud because you the player know where they are, rather than letting your character's knowledge be the guide.

Yes. I roleplay and do not buy a lot of training, especially not in major/minor skills. It takes me about six months in the real world and over 200 hours of play to get to level 20.

My highest level Morrowind character was probably about level 25 or 30, by then I usually get bored and get an itch for a new character. My highest level character ever was level 30 something. He completed the main questline and the Telvanni questline. I have never completed any other questlines in 2,000 or more hours of Morrowind over a couple dozen characters, but I have started Thieves, Fighters, Cult, Tribunal and Temple questlines.

No. They were powerful, but not all-powerful and not insanely rich. But not poor either. Typically my high level characters have about 20,000 to 30,000 septims on hand, but they also have strongholds filled with many valuable items. They don't sell everything. Some things they collect or use to decorate. Decorating is fun in Morrowind since stuff is easy to position and stays where you put it.

My highest level character who completed the main questline and the Telvanni questline was fun and had just the right level of power and wealth for a character of his level and accomplishments. I wanted to keep playing him, however there were two things that made me bored of him. (1) I find the world boring without ash storms and blight and (2) I did not like the disease immunity you get with the main questline.

No. I do not routinely find such valuable items. Where are you finding these things? I occasionally find items worth a fair amount, but not typically anywhere near that valuable. I do use WGI thought which re-balances item value somewhat, though not as extreme as BTB.

But even when I played on Xbox, which I did for a few years and probably 1,000 hours with half a dozen characters, I never saw an item worth more than about 60,000 and that was a rare item. But unless you abuse the system, you won't get more than a couple thousand gold when you sell an item like that because the merchant does not have that much gold.

I have seen the Toxic Cloud Ring once, if it is the ring you get as a quest reward from one of those crazy Telvanni wizards (Dratha or Therana) but after doing that quest once, I have not done it again with any of my dozen or so Morrowind characters. I also don't typically rush for the Mentor's Ring even through I know where that one is. I have never seen the Amulet of Shadows that I recall.

Again, it depends on playstyle and self control. The ring of toxic cloud may be easily obtainable if you know where to get it, but my characters don't know that even if I do. Unless I have a good roleplay reason for doing a quest for a mentally unstable Telvanni wizard, my characters are not going to get that ring. Most of my characters will never even visit a Telvanni wizard, especially not a crazy one for fear of their life.

I disagree that my descriptions of BTB are misleading. Go back and read my posts and you will see that I mentioned some of his balance "improvements" like increasing mercantile and speech skills and you will also see that I also said I agreed with increasing mercantile but not speech. I like a lot of what BTB does but in every one of his modules, he goes one step too far.

For instance, as mentioned above, in his economy module, he boosts speech which is unnecessary and unbalances the game in the other direction, making speech checks nearly impossible with any merchant or trainer. In his magic module he guts spell making which is something I won't allow in my games.

I do use WGI because I find it to be better balanced than BTB overall. BTB is better for people who want maximum challenge, people without self control, or those who want the game to remain challenging at very high levels, but the tradeoff is that your game will be somewhat brutal at lower levels and there may be some features you may like that will be missing.

I see some realism issues with the economy (a lot of things, especially luxury goods and steel, are a little on the cheap side, while food is actually rather on the expensive side), but I agree with Turija that the economy is not really broken if you don't abuse the exploits. That said, you can still amass a lot of gold in a playthrough, which is one of several reasons I made http://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/43853/?tab=13&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Fmorrowind%2Fajax%2Fmodgraph%2F%3Fid%3D43853&pUp=1 (that and the fact that I wanted to make Morrowind's religions more participatory and the fact that after a certain rank shrines no longer take donations which I think the game should at least have made optional). It's actually mildly tempting to make a mod increasing the price of clothes, jewelry, jewels, steel, and iron while lowering the cost of food--but I'm afraid such a mod would probably cause a lot of conflicts.

As has been pointed out ad infinitum, you'll get a variety of opinions on the economy and mods to address it. For myself, I don't touch BTB's mods anymore because they are too extreme for my tastes. OTOH, I have been very pleased with a smaller mod by Hot Fusion called Economy Adjuster. One of the mods in it reduces the frequency of daedric equipment drops to something like 5% of the time. And out of game context, I know where a lot of the really pricey goods are, but in game I just let my char go where he wants, knowing that sooner or later I'll stumble across some really good stuff. The one concession I make to the power gaming camp is that I may nudge him to areas where there's good stuff, but he may be level 5 or higher by then which changes the dynamics of the game a bit

My chars are vacuum cleaners when I clear out a cave, certainly at the start but that's because he does feel cash starved and selling the loot helps you build up a merchant's disposition, which is very important wrt how my chars make their living. Even a char who limits him/herself to hunting and gathering ingredients and not stepping into caves or ruins can live comfortably and develop their skills and abilities. My chars are usually DIY who don't use trainers. That makes things cheap. You can usually gather enough ingredients to pay for a room at an inn; alternatively, you can camp out in the wilderness and not pay for a bed for the night. If you browse the hints, cheats, spoilers forum you'll find a lot more discussion.

it's broken in that there really isn't too much a player needs to spend on themselves. On top of that, most merchants aren't savvy so the player tends to make decent gold per transaction. this is due to most merchants not even having mercantile above 30%.

In all honesty, once you're high enough level, it's quite easy to raid some Dremora-infested dungeon, and plunder several daedric weapons in one go. But unless one constantly goes back to creature merchants, selling those weapons won't be easy. Usually involves buying everything from a merchant to give him enough money to sell him one such weapon. In my opinion, if the player uses either of these methods on a regular basis, he has no rights to say that such items break the economy.

The thing with mercantile is that it's supposed to be a two way street. Bethesda offered two ways to play the game (if I horribly simplify things). You can either earn money by doing quests, and find most of the equipment and items by yourself. Or you can trade. You can spend on yourself, you can train, you can actually buy your equipment, you can buy potions and ingredients, etc. But what people do is, they find everything on their own, they don't buy anything, but they sell every single pot they find. Not saying this game is the pinnacle of balanced gameplay, but that's not exactly the most balanced way of playing either. If people would buy as much as they'd sell, they'd likely realize they don't have that much money all the time, at least until reaching that inevitable Godhood stage, which, by the way, also ain't at lv 20 unless abusing the mechanics.

But that's part of the appeal of the game. The gamer is not forced into having to continually hunt for significant amounts of gold to support their char's lifestyle and development or to have to continually buy more expensive equipment.unless that's what they want to do. And you can't buy artifacts from the merchants as an alternative way to soak up the cash. And it does seem as if there is consensus that the economy functions better in the early stage of the game than later; at least, that's how I take others' comments.

MW is easy enough in game to accumulate gold over time, just from the quests the player is given. Think about how much gold you can raise from the loot from the first main quest. A lot of times, it seems like the problem people complain about is ostensibly "broken economy" when it looks like their complaint about a "broken economy" is really that they can't spend their money fast enough to suit themselves. Most of the really expensive items for purchase I've seen in the game are weapons or armor, but those seem easy enough to acquire over the course of the game without purchasing but just from engaging in enough fights over time with progressively stronger opponents.

Perhaps some modder will introduce a 1% mod to cater to those wanting to spend their money, offering not more weapons or armor but perhaps travel or vacation resort plans or just really ostentatious clothing or furniture to place around their abode And art, maybe have a bit of fun by having an art dealer or antiquities agent who imports really high value stuff, maybe with a shady past, from the other MW provinces OTOH, the furnishings of the various powers that be are not very flashy, so maybe the Vvardenfell culture frowns on such displays of wealth. Of course, that begins to sound too much like real life

Another issue seems to me to simply be the expectations that the gamer has about what standard of living his/her char should be having. I mean, the cost of living in MW seems reasonable. Even a pauper can go out gathering enough ingredients to pay for a room at an inn. If confident enough, rough it outside but close enough to run to a town if sleep gets interrupted. If people want more realism to soak up their funds, perhaps - and maybe it's been done - a modder will make a mod to enable a char to raise a family I don't know if the companion mods out there introduce ways to spend gold or start a family life.

Or perhaps the gamers feel guilty that their char has all this gold with nowhere to spend it and so blame the economy, saying it's broken Or perhaps we gamers feel like we're getting ripped off that the merchants can't pay full price for a 27,000 gold for a piece of armor or a weapon and if we do sell it to them for a song they offer to resell it for maybe 10+ times the price for which we sold it to them. But then you have other gamers out there complaining about the cheese factor going to Mudcrab and/or Creeper to get full price for an item. Of course, in real life I don't believe a trader would be able to pay his/her bills if the net gold from such a transaction were zero.

Sorry, but as you can guess, I don't really think the economy is "broken", but that the gamers want more gold for those big ticket items than what most of the merchants can normally afford to pay and consequently have to go through a lot of extra work in order to develop the merchant's inventory to the point to which a big ticket item could be sold and that those transactions consume a lot more game time, spreading the efforts over days or weeks rather than in one day.

@Chaka ZG. I think the reason I don't see a lot of daedric weapon drops is I use WGI which reduces those substantially. But I agree with you that you cannot sell daedric weapons for anywhere near their face value, at least not without manipulating the system.

the mercantile issue can be fixed with a patch to the merchants to at least raise the minimum trader mercantile to at least 70%, so that most looted items only give modest returns to most players, and increased speedcraft to merchants would at least taper players influencing them too much.

it's the mercantile levels of NPC mercants that is truly broken for the economy. it's nonsensical that merchants with storefronts in-game are inept barterers. especially the magic item merchants, barely any of them have mercantile above 30% for their expensive wares.

Mercantile yes, but not everyone wants to see NPCs speech increased because it has gameplay consequences that go far beyond fixing barter. That's my main objection to BTB and Hotfusion's economy mods. My recollection is both of those mods raise the speech of not only merchants but trainers as well, which makes a speech based playthrough rather uninviting.

it's only uninviting if you admire every trainer and merchant for lower prices. i kind of see higher speech for them as people with business sense knowing up front that you're persuading them for lower prices above all else. so it should be a bit more difficult to get your way with them until higher in skill and personality.

unfortunately, that just makes the charm spell more overpowered unless it's balanced to be very magicka restrictive for low duration -- however illusion itself is overpowered against speech for all effects.

I remember this discussion arising just a few weeks after the release of Morrowind in 2012. Until recently I agreed with most of the complaints that were made, but I never warmed to some of the solutions that were offered. I like limiting the availability of valuable weapons and armor - the player's arrival on the island should not glut the market with Daedric weapons. I don't agree with raising the price of training, lodging and travel services because it creates an inconsistency with what NPCs would be expected or capable of paying - to say nothing of putting trainers in a much higher tax bracket. Every nudge in one place creates a problem elsewhere.

I have enough self-restraint to avoid exploiting the creeper and mudcrab. I do not sell potions I create simply because it is inconceivable that a merchant is going to buy 'home-brewed' potions. I admit that after first character I played stubble off the boat in Seyda Need he was so desperate for gold that he would pick up every cup and spoon after clearing out a location and it was not easy breaking that habit after he rose in level. Eventually he would just toss the ebony dagger on a table with all the others not even bothering to sell it.

I do think that having merchants offer less for the items the player sells makes sense so I welcome those sorts of changes made by economy mods. When I had to sell my steel dai-katana at a local pawn shop because of some gambling debts I really had to settle the guy offered me less than half it value. "Take it or leave it", he sympathetically offered.

The real source of the pressure on Morrowind's economy is the player's actions. I started to look at Morrowind's economy different shortly after I made a career change in my own life. I had been slaving away from 9 to 5 o'clock every day until finally I took a lesson from Morrowind and became an adventurer. Now I raid the caches of Samali pirates and break down the doors of meth labs. I kill everyone I meet because they are understandably hostile toward me and they are criminals so no one cares if they die. I loot all the stuff I find and even strip the bodies of the fallen down to their underwear. Usually I come back with so much stuff that I have to go to several different traders to unload all of it and sometimes I have to wait until the next day for them to go to the bank and get additional cash (I only trade in cash) to buy the rest of my stuff. The drugs are a little slower to unload, but there are still a few traders that are not too squeamish to accept it. In just a few months I became so fabulously wealthy that I can't begin to spend all the money I have made, and now I complain that life it too easy for me. *sigh*

Got any tips for others looking for a similar change of career? Always good to talk to someone who's travelled the road and all that.

This is pretty much my thinking as well. I would like to fix the things that *are* broken, but not "fix" the economy by breaking the immersion. It should not be the case that my character is the only person in the Morrowind who can afford to rent a room, hire passage on a boat, or pay for dinner. Doing lore friendly "NPC" work should be sustainable but not necessarily terribly profitable. At the same time, I should not be able buy things from a merchant and sell them back at a profit. (I think I remember being able to do that). So perhaps I should ask the question differently: which economy mods, if any, should I get to play an NPC character? Because that would be what I would consider a realistic economy.

Piratelords trade enhancements are pretty well thought out.

There are other reasons a roleplayer might want to admire a trainer or merchant than lower prices. That's the nub of this whole argument about whether the economy is broken. From a roleplaying perspective it is not broken. From a powergaming perspective it is broken.

Personally, I like Wakim's Game Improvements. It is the mod BTB's game improvements is based on, and it reduces the high value of items you find to a more reasonable level and reduces the rate of daedric weapon drops without taking things too far. The MCP also has a tweak to fix the mercantile bug, which is also fixed by increasing the mercantile skill of vendors. Hotfusions Economy mod (and BTB) does that but also increases the speech skill of vendors and trainers, which I don't like.

Unfortunately, there is no mod (yet) that increases merchant's mercantile skill without mucking with speech.

I've always liked the idea behind PTE. Seems like a great approach to the issue.

If you have a lot of mods and are using a merged objects patch you can run into issues though, unless you know how to manually edit the merged objects patch. From the PTE readme.

Great observation. This really resonates with me as a player. Perhaps what Morrowind needs are more items made available to merchants that are worth buying?

For instance, I just started a fresh character who uses blunt weapons. I went to Balmora, ran into http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Meldor's shop and stole the Dreugh helmet and shield right off his shelf. I ran over to the South Wall Corner club, paid off my bounty, and walked over to the Razor Hole to buy the best possible one-handed blunt weapon I could find.

It was an iron mace.

No matter the day, time, the level I am, no matter how much crap I sell to Thorek at the Razor Hole, I will only ever be able to buy an iron mace from him. Those variables don't matter as much as the fact that his inventory is always static.

It's probably not even possible, but I think giving all vendors randomly enchanted items of different grades (iron, steel, daedric, etc..) could add a lot of value to the one way street that is the game's "economy."