A lot of things have been improved upon since Arena but here's the one thing which I feel is best in Arena, The Bargaining system, I really enjoyed haggeling with merchants trying to get the most for my items, sure it took some time but in the end that system just added a much deeper experience as I started with a price just high enough for it not to be insulting and counter offer after counter offer ended up getting three gold coins more for my leather boots (the original price was something around 8). And since Vikings were infact traders, (yes I hate the "Vikings used it" argument myself but...) it would fit to exspand the bargaining system.


The bargaining within Morrowind and Oblivion:

I think Morrowinds system gave you a tiny bit more of this feeling than Oblivion, even though there wasn't actually haggeling in the way that you could push the prices up/down by slowly going downwards in what your willing to offer, the reason I prefer Morrowinds over Oblivions is mainly that you decide the price of all items in the bargain instead of Oblivions setting the percentage of items value you want to pay... but as you might know this isn't Morrowind vs Oblivion it is Arena vs Morrowind AND Oblivion...


For those of you who never bargained within Arena:

The entire bargaining starts with the merchant making an offer, here you can choose to counter offer, accept the offer, or reject the trade... if you counter offer you now get to type in the amount and if its way to large the merchant will say "I wouldn't pay that much for a if the emperor kissed it himself. If your offer was well talented the real haggeling begin, he'll counter offer you and now you can choose to accept his counter offer or re-counter offer... this mostly end up with a slight change from the original price but can sometimes (for experienced people who have done it a lot) end up at nearly your original counter offer.

Would you like this system to return? If you haven't tried it in Arena then please do so before stating that Arena is outdated (CENSORED) and that anyone playing it are outdated (CENSORED)'s aswell... I personally think that it adds much realism to bargaining... and could help to removing merchantile without removing bargaining.
And finally please post any suggestions on other forms of bargaining.

One of the few "the old games had this lets get it back!" threads I've seen and really liked. They need to do at LEAST this in Skyrim, Oblivion's was awful to use. :brokencomputer:

I admit I have not played Arena , but this concept seems pretty cool if it could be implemented. It sounds like more of a "pawn shop" type approach that definitely is more realistic than

merchants in Oblivion = "I will pay you 50% of what that helmet is worth"

If they do it like Morrowind more than Arena. I liked both but it would just be too much of a pain to do it Arena style. Unless you could do it for more than one item at a time in Arena I don't remember. If you can do it for all the items you are buying and selling in one trip to a merchant than like Arena.

Well perhaps they could let you select all the items you wish to sell/buy before the bargaining starts...

they could handle it roughly halfway between the two systems - you get a price that you can set yourself specifically, ala Morrowind, but instead of them just saying YOUR OFFER IS REFUSED it could go down to the lowest/highest price that they'd prefer to sell/buy for, and you can work in that range more specifically depending on your mercantile.

Well... weren't mercantile removed?