Just the fact that they're not using the lousy Oblivion level scaling should help a bit (since there won't be ebony & daedric equipped bandits on every street corner)....


I voted "Don't care", because, honestly.... in Oblivion, once I get past the initial "trying to get started" section, I don't buy anything. Maybe a repair hammer here and there, but other than that... :shrug: (and it's not that there's nothing to buy - there's no need to buy anything. You find your equipment in dungeons and from quests. I just consider having a bunch of coins a sign that I'm doing well. I don't feel like something's missing if I can't spend it on something.)



edit: basically, as long as there's no artificial shortages that force me to "farm" coins to get past some obvious roadblock? I don't care.

i think the easiest way to fix it would be to limit expensive items
the reason i got rich so quickly in obliv is because after level 15, half the enemies i face had ebony armor on
they really need to work on how rare npc equipment is

Yeah, I'd like making money to be a challenge, but we know it won't be that way. Why? Microsoft™ Kinect® Support!!

Bah. Point is, this is the most casual, stripped down TES yet. Making money early is going to be E A S Y and we all know it.

Morrowind? Hard early on.

Oblivion? Easier.

Skyrim? Easiest.

All that is necessary is to

1. reduce the resale value for anything you try to sell to merchants,

2. limit the merchant's available gold,

3. and at the same time make all merchant prices high as giraffe [censored] (about 5x more expensive than vanilla Skyrim)

None of these past few solutions are actually fun.

Removing the reward for exploration as Sir Lincoln suggests, makes the game boring... what's the point of fighting if you don't get anything for it?

And reducing available merchant money just clutters up your inventory of trash you're waiting to find a buyer for, not actually reduce your income.

The answer is to keep the player buying stuff. Maintenance can afford a bit, but upgrades are where the true money sinks lie.

Also... massive wealth is only a problem with end-game. In the beginning, it's a pain in the butt trying to get the cash needed to get what you need.

Having an arbitrary disparity between purchase price and resale price is stupid.

Cost-intensive gambling and risky upgrade systems are far superior to arbitrary limits being suggested.

Increasing purchase price increases, not decreases, the wealth of the player by reducing the amount of stuff he buys... when gear becomes prohibitively expensive, the player says "[censored] that, I'll go get it myself".

...what?

This is sort of what they did in previous TES games, just with not as severe of a mercantile difficulty. In theory that could work, but here is why I see it as a riskier plan when compared to low prices:

1.) If you increase prices of mundane weapons and armor, the PC suffers little penalty since they will just get them from dungeon loot instead.

2.) Aside from being insulting, it really makes no difference how bad of a deal we get relative to the actual price of the stuff sold, it only matters how much closer each item sold gets us towards purchasing desirable items.

3.) Despite what is historically accurate, the prevalence of mundane weapons in the TES world makes me feel like they should be cheap.

4.) With large prices, the scales grow rapidly. If Steel is twice the price of Iron and Orcish is twice the price of Steel and Dwemer is twice that price... and then on top of that you have some enchanted items and perfect condition items... eventually the numbers get out of hand and balancing the economy is impossible.

5.) Lastly, for immersion reasons, making generic items very cheap means there will be less incentive to carry every sword you find out of dungeons. You'll be more likely to make money through realistic methods like quests, selling genuinely rare and valuable items or participating in some local work. Only mercantile focused players or players with very high carrying capacity would bother carrying everything out of dungeons to sell them.

Actually... this only increases the player's wealth:
1. Smaller resale value for sales = Gather up all the cheap, 1 drake Potion ingredients and sell them until rich, as opposed to pass over them in favor of fewer, heavier, more expensive items
2. Just find wealthier merchant.
3. never buy a damn thing because it's easier just to find or make it yourself... There's a reason why, when a store (that isn't owned by Activision) needs to drain it's customer's pocket's quickly, it lowers, not raises, its prices.

I say more and more that player strongholds and forts that are made incredibly expensive will keep players getting money.

These solutions worked perfectly IMO as implemented by mods for Oblivion, FO3 and FNV, such as Expensive Wasteland and Enhanced Economy. And they absolutely did not increase the PC's relative wealth. On the contrary, they made the PC feel much more impoverished and it was a struggle to survive.

Of course, the objective is not to make things so expensive that you want to give up playing the game, or just never buy anything. If increasing all merchant prices by 5x is too much for you, I'm sure there will be a different mod that increases merchant prices by 2x, or you can tailor whatever economy solution works best for you. Perhaps you would prefer the vanilla version of the game? Or maybe you prefer increasing merchant prices by 10x.

In my case, if I ever reach a point where I become so filthy rich that there is no more point in accumulating wealth then the game instantly becomes boring for me and I must retire that character.

If there is no more progression, no more saving and scrounging to try to buy something I really want, nothing to look forward to, then the game is over for me.

In order to prolong that feeling of poverty, I've gotten a great deal of mileage out of installing mods that make all merchant prices about 5x more expensive, and make it harder to get rich by selling loot (resale prices much lower than vanilla game).

I have never played a version of Oblivion or FNV where I didn't need to buy anything at all:

• spells will need to be purchased in Skyrim as they were in Oblivion, in which case, after my mods they will be tremendously expensive, both lower level as well as high level spells.
  
• I will most likely buy a lot of expensive arrows during my Skyrim playthrough
  
• hopefully there will be some really cool, powerful and expensive magic items in Skyrim (if not, then I will use mods to add some)
  
• I will need to buy lots of crafting materials and alchemical ingredients
  
• I will use survival mods to incorporate hunger, thirst, hypothermia and sleep deprivation features, so that I will need to buy food, drinks, and rent rooms for the night

But if you did that then you'd be finding daedric long before affording a full suit of steel. All gear would be redundant log before you can afford it..

Let me make sure I understand correctly.

Do you believe that you should only find items at exactly the moment when you can afford to buy them in shops?

Or do you believe that all the items you find should be level scaled?

If you find a high-level dungeon at a low level and decide to bust your ass to try to take on a whole clan of Volkihar, or whatever, shouldn't the magical items be worth the tremendous cost of dying dozens of times to make it through that dungeon? (worth in terms of value for use, not resale value)

Just to make things clear, I'm not advocating any changes to the vanilla game, only mods that make everything much more expensive and harder to become rich via reselling loot.