» Fri May 27, 2011 6:39 pm
There are many ways to fix the economy in TES:
1) Make "everyday" costs "everyday". If you own a house you have to pay taxes on it. Your armor repair bills are a lot higher (of course scaling with the type of armor. This makes it more balanced as you play the game. A level 2 player couldn't have daedric because the repair would be too high.) If you own a horse or other such animal/pet, it costs money to keep them alive. Put an optional hunger/thirst option ingame, so you would be forced to go to the nearest city's farm or market to buy food. Make all the little items cost more (Lockpicks, torches, potions, scrolls, repair hammers, arrows, ect.). Make training costs alot more balanced. Level 100 blunt should cost accordingly.
2) Make bigger things cost more, things needed throughout the whole game. A house could cost 200,000 instead of 20,000. A horse costs 10,000, and doesn't live forever. Put an age limit on horses so you have to buy them more often. Armor and weapons cost alot more at shops, depending on the type. An iron sword should cost much less than a steel sword, but of course it should still cost enough that it's hard-ish to acquire when it is needed. Set a recommended level for each type of armor, so that you could scale the prices and such to that. When testing, find the average amount of gold at each level so that you could scale the prices accordingly.
3) Make shops worth visiting. No point in going through all the trouble of making armor and weapons perfectly balanced in price if you're just going to throw a full set of every armor set available into one dungeon. If rare items are so easy to acquire, why would somebody waste their money buying it somewhere. Make rare items that you can't buy in shop exactly that. RARE!
4) Make money harder to acquire. Instead of every player's economy coming straight from looting dungeons and such, make it acquirable in other, more meaningful ways. Fable 2 had the BASICS (though far from perfected) with the job system. Make joining and questing for factions more cost-worthy. If i go on a quest for the king of a city, i will be expecting a good pay. Put in more job systems. Bounty hunters for rare monsters, skooma dealers, evil mages, x amount of this substance, ect.
4) Fast travel should cost alot more. Forget the Oblivion methods of FT, go back to a more advanced Morrowind method. Instead of it costing 8 septims to get across the continent, have it cost somewhere around 2000. That would put more meaning into becoming more advanced with factions. The mages guild teleport prices go down if your arch-mage, ect. ect.