There were a few major problems in Oblivion (not sure about Morrowind) concerning the buying and selling of items in shops.

This includes:

1. Shopkeepers had ridiculously small amounts of gold, meaning you could only sell items for a maximum of 2000 at most stores. Have you ever found some awesome weapon that was worth a lot, but could never get that much for it because the merchants had little money? This completely destroyed buying and selling in Oblivion IMO.

2. Trying to sell things in bulk was time consuming, and rather annoying. If you have 500 arrows you want to sell, but the merchant only has 2000 gold, you have to scroll all the way to the beginning just to make a transaction. This wasn't a problem on PC because you could simply drag the sliding bar, but for consoles, it was painfully slow.

Some solutions that could be implemented are:

1. Give NPC's unlimited amounts of gold. I mean, why not? They theoretically already did in Oblivion, it just restricted how much you could trade at a time. This will also allow you to get full price for some of the more expensive items.

2. Allow us to simply select the number we want to sell of an item by typing the number in on PC, or having slots for each digit and you could manually input the number you want to sell. If you can't understand the latter part of that, simply imagine a slot machine, with each image being replaced by a number. If you wanted to sell 143 arrows, you would select the first slot to be a 1, the next to be a 4, and the last slot to be a 3.

This wraps up my thoughts on buying and selling. Is there anything else you felt was wrong with buying/selling, and if so, how would you fix it?

P.S. I have never played Morrowind, so I am unaware of how trading was done in that game. Was it more efficient?

Hmm, I'm not a fan of the system. I prefered the Morrowind and Fallout systems. NPC's had a limited sum of gold that decreased as you sold stuff to them, and increased as you bought items. It would reset later on, but the rule was the same. As you selected items, then would show you the current transaction total. This also added a form of bartering in the sense, you could select a nice sword, but you couldn't afford it, so you traded out other items that you have for it (ex: 15 pelts for the sword)

The Morrowind/Fallout barter system is better, but the people need more cash. It is more work trying to find someone who will pay a decent price for an amazing weapon than it is to find the weapon in the first place. Without my modding of Creeper to have the max amount of gold possible, I wouldn't've sold a thing.

Morrowind was pretty easy to exploit though esp. the mudcrab that paid full price for everything.

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending how you look at it I guess, for me Creeper became a big part of buying/selling in Morrowind. For those who don't know he was a Scamp that would buy your items at full value. He only had 5000 gold iirc, but as was said, if you bought items from him his amount went up. If you bought an item from him that was 500 gold his amount went up to 5500. So you slowly built up his inventory (it never reset) so when you came to him with a 80,000 gold daedric warhammer you would buy a bunch of stuff from him (that you previously sold him) to get the 80K, then waited 24hours, then piece by piece (in 5000gold increments) sold the items back waiting 24hours at a time until you got to where you wanted. Now it was tedious and not so immersive and since training was pretty much only limited by how much money you had, it was a bit overkill. I mean I trained my armorer skill from novice to Master in one level since it wasn't a skill that caused me to level. unless I misremember how the leveling worked.

Although I think merchants needed a little boost in how much money the had I think they did it so the economy, such as it was, wasn't totally borked like in Morrowind. The limit on training of 5 points per level was probably another change they made because of this. But still, in the end, it seemed I had more money than I could ever need at higher levels in Oblivion (alchemy helped with this) I don't know how much needs to be changed.

But I could be totally missing something here as it has been a while since playing OB or MW.

if you had merchantile skill, and it was on the up, traders had so much more gold. but not enough to sell my 5000 + enchanted deadric warhammer. just one more reason to keep merchantile as a skill.

btw, you could sell 500 arrows real quick, you just sold them for what ever the limit that trader could pay for. you don't get as much but its not as time consuming, I am assuming the point of selling arrows is inventory cleaning.

I really like to see NPC's that go shopping and with realistic economic system of course. :foodndrink:

Traders should not buy mindlessly everything I give them. What the hell would a small village trader do with 30 swords of the same type that I just forged? They should be realistic and say "I don't need this many, I can only buy 3, and after I sell them, I'll buy more".

I agree.

At the very least, there should be a few npc's with a huge budget for buying your items. Your 8000 gold shield shouldn't have to be sold for 800, lmao. But perhaps its valid to have only a few npc's, that way you seek them out, and it doesn't quite break immersion having some random shopkeeper have more gold than a king lmao.

Only played oblivion and fallout 3/NV and yea completely agree about how poor the buy/sell system is in oblivion ... max gold is 2200 with 100 mercantile so there was is no difference in joy between finding an amulet worth 2300 or 15300 since it will only sell for 2200 :sadvaultboy:

I fully expect this to be rectified in skyrim and will probably die a little inside if it remains the same

Although this might be more realistic I think it would make players more upset than feeling "cool, that makes more sense realisticly" Usually I just want to get rid of stuff I just looted and not have to travel half the realm to do it. Though that would make Fast Travel even more necessary.

Tribunal solved most of the merchant problems for me as they had decent with gold, multiple traders with 5-10.000, Fallout 3 worked well, the traders had enough money to sell a decent amount of stuff.
Perhaps add some high end traders with far more gold than the standard but only buy expensive items and will only do business if you are famous, think trading houses.

Keep the shopping cart system from Fallout 3, it worked nice and you avoided the stupid confirm for every item.

Merchants with very little gold is a realistic thing, but when you have 31 Daedric Dai-Katanas to sell, it makes things a little ridiculous. There are a few things that could be done to fix this economic issue.

1) Make everything less expensive overall. Remap the prices of everything using a logarithmic (stay with me on this!) curve. Low level items will stay the same price, but higher level items will decrease in price proportional to their value. A steel longsword may go from 50g to 45g, but a glass longsword will go from 17000g to maybe 1700g. A Daedric long sword's price would decrease even more, say from 50000g to 3000g.

2) As a consequence of #1, make gold in general more scarce.

3) Make pristine versions of these weapons harder to find. Versions you get off Dremoras, or Golden Saints will be broken and salable for only a fraction of what they're actually worth in perfect condition. Armorer skill cannot fix this. I am actually very hopeful a system like this will be included since Smithing is in. You will be able to repair a broken Ebony sword for example if you have some raw ebony in your inventory. However if you don't have a high smithing skill, you can only sell the broken sword for peanuts.

Alternatively, they could make the mercantile skill play a bigger role. Merchants could be made better... barterers? So that they sell things for a high price, and buy things for a low price. A higher mercantile skill would then make you feel less ripped off.

yes no more astronomic gap between normal items and enchanted items, like iron dagger 100 gold, dagger of the viper 30000 gold :shakehead: