I do agree with this. And to all those complaining its unrealistic to suddenly gain loads of armour/weapons, its also unrealistic for every armour shop to sell every type of armour all the time.

And also, not directly relevant, but I play a mage and I hated buying spells in Oblivion only to find that I couldn't use them because my skills were too low. *Waits for someone to quote me and post about 'dah immersionz' and 'dumbing down'*

Just getting it out the way



Oh. My. God.

I'm sick and tired of people treating this like a game. ITS MY LIFE. STOP DISRESPECTING IT OR I SHALL DUEL THEE AT SUNRISE! IT IS MY RIGHT AND PRIVILEGE TO EXPECT EVERYONE TO PLAY AS I DO. ANYONE NOT DOING SO SHOULD BE REMOVED AS HERETICS.




As you were

Why dont you buy a house in Whitefall, its 12k gold, then the house in whiterun is 5k.
There are plenty of ways to spend money.

Be GLAD that merchants dont display these items. Thats the whole point.
Smithing and enchanting you choose NOT to take, in order not to make the game too easy.
But if you would be able to buy an enchanted glass sword at say lvl 10, then you might as well get 100 smithing and 100 enchanting cause its the same thing.

I dont understand, I've been finding elvish and orcish armor since lvl 10 in vendors. Maybe you are not having any luck? Ebony armor and such shouldent be sold in vendors i dont think maybe very rarely.

I agree, this the game doesnt have very money money sinks or things to aim for. I like that in the Baldurs Gate games you'd get vendors with items that were really expensive that you would probably never be able to afford. But it added to the flavour and plausibility and eventually after a long while you could afford these cool items.

It doesnt make any sense to me that vendors scale to your level, theres no need for it, its extra work for very little gain. Perhaps its to assuage the poor players hurt feelings that they cant afford such items. All they need is Random tables of items with a few set static uniques.

There should be lots of things for the player to spend his money on, more outputs than inputs and you have happy gamers(its the mmo way).

Why would you expect the Merchants to have the good stuff? You have to go out and find it. Otherwise, your not playing a game, but having a shopping trip to the mall.

Scaling in Skyrim is no where near as noticeable as it was in Oblivion, the only thing that comes close are the few quest rewards that punish you rather than reward you for choosing to play a certain path early ingame.

I disagree here. If anything, it makes dungeon crawling more worthwhile because you need the wealth such activities bring in to purchase superior weapons and armor.

The shop-keepers get it imported from Dungeon Crawlers and Bandit Fences in Cyrodiil, Hammerfell, High Rock, Morrowind, and the 90% of Skyrim between the space of the playable gameworld.

I wish it was possible to pay Smiths to upgrade your gear for you, instead of forcing you to invest in Smithing.

Who exactly has made this "every shop should sell every armour type everytime" argument ?
Funny how strawmen always creep in when people can't make an actual decent counter.

As for the "realism must sometimes be sacrificed", sure it may be SOMETIMES required, but it's more often than not used to justify lazy design than because it's actually really necessary.

I completely agree with OP. These items should be available at all times, but obviously at an outrageous price so you can't afford them until later on. Unfortunately the economy is once again broken, like it was in OB. You should never be able to afford the fancy stuff at lower levels, and you should be forced to use smithing if you wanted to have it at those levels.

Saving up for something awesome is another great sandbox feature, but it's pretty pointless when you can loot those items before you can even buy them. Sigh.

And in this way you can logically justify the entire simplification of the entire game. Autodungeon feature? Well, you see, people can't carry a lot of axes! Someone carrying an AK47 around in game? Well, you see, people can't carry a lot of axes!

Give an actual argument against vendor item scaling, or find a way around it, because I can assure you that your condescending to everyone who dislikes it isn't going to win hearts or change minds.

Hi! I'am with your games from the begining. I hardly testing 3D with Skyrim, now, etc, etc. I decided to write about some of Skyrim and other TES games disapointments but I admire the rest of work You done with this title. I've found several bugs in the game, too which are disapearing of some objects sometimes, hope other people tested it more.

1. This...the leveling. As we know Bethesda keeps the leveling of the world with leveling a player's character. This is really bad concept. In Skyrim it is better then in ealier games but the most annoyng is the situation when after a player's character leveled 1-2 levels then he finds much better stuff in orydinary hamlet's shop withis few days!!!! The stuff a player working hard for, for example to get better shoes, after 1-2 levels he can get even better but he cannot because new ones costs much more and there is any olders shoes he worked for (the same shop, a few days) And I ask. Is this so difficult to make normal and constants level monsters?? Really? Why not make this to be typical for older RPG games? Levels of the monsters should be from the lower level (as player is) to maksimum level (as player will be) but there should be different monsters so the player couldn't defeat some monsters when at lower levels and it cannot be linked with the level a player enters an area. Of course in Skyrim is some like that but you cannot find weaker type of monsters in new entered areas. To defeat stronger monsters the player has to use better stuff and tactics. This is stuff which should make a player stronger. IF You want to keep the leveling system in should be linked with a part of world only or with differnt starting places. For example, Nord character can start in WhiteRun, Reptile in South East City, etc. When it will be good if some surrounding places has lower lewels when player starts his yourney next to them, and higher when starts in different place. But I think that if the player finds often the same high level monsters (other types as is made in skyrim) when in higher level it kills the game!

2. Area scaling. Nobody finds tha this is really, really bad. The world should be 3-4 times bigger with the same places in it because now we have the situation when next city is in the same distance as a next corner shop from player's home in real life. This is very annoying!!!!! Really and very unnatural. Why You still keep this? Why, when makes the same world bigger will support crafting much (more animals, more plants, more ore, etc.).

3. In Skyrim there is the third big mistake. There is any characer screen!!!!! As Skyrim claims to be a RPG game this is unintelligible. Why You have done this? A character is very important for seeing effects, stuff and as character grows.

My opinion is that: fix those things mentioned above and you will make a historical- big game. Now it is a medium-good game with some annoying and unnatural elements.

I already gave a perfectly plausible explanation as to why they do not show low levels higher tier kit. It was then met with a wall of "yeah but if I did this" and frankly, that gets silly fast so I made that post to draw a line under it.


There ARE far bigger immersion issues than vendors, don't complain about little easily overlooked things when there are other things completely beyond explanation.

In summary, I offered a perfectly plausible in character solution/explanation to the issue, this was not good enough for some - my feeling is that if you're THAT hung up on 'realism' that you'll argue theoretical "yeah but my character would then...." ...pick something less realistic to complain about first.

The perfectly plausible explanation is that they chose to grade vendor gear in levels so that nobody could become too powerful, or excel too early. What you didn't give a reason for was why this was the best execution of that idea. Similarly, this is not a realism issue, this is the fact that progression through the game world feels very player tailored, which dulls any sort of ambition when dealing in mercantile, and also puts a great big question mark over the existence of the speechcraft tree. Many of the complaints here state that if the price had been raised on more powerful items, players would have some financial decisions to make. It's a fairly elegant solution to a problem widely voiced. What I don't understand, is what effect this change would have on you. For those of us who care, it's a fantastic change. For those who don't, like you, what does it matter? Or are you arguing that because you don't care, nobody should?

FYI, when we say we want static vendors, it means that or two vendors in the entire land would carry one or two ebony pieces, and some vendors would only carry Iron or Steel for the whole game (such as the guy in Riverwood). We don't mean a giant list of items that span the entire game all with every merchant.

Merchants should occasionally have nicer stock but damn - they really should be shrewd about their goods unless you've gained favor with them or something. I kind of miss the favor wheel from Oblivion, even. Okay, maybe I don't miss it's minigame, but I do miss it's intentions.

Because Adam Smith hates your guts. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdamSmithHatesYourGuts

i think gear shouldnt be scaled but not int the sense that everything is available at the start - the contrary - it should be REALLY hard to find high tier equipment and hardly anyone should sell it...especiall dwarfen stuff (where the hell do they find it anyway?)...this way items wouldnt be so inflationary and it would be much more exciting to find something cool...in tes games it simply gets boring after you find the 5000s ebony weapon in a dungeon...gear should be MUCH scarcer...i would love if tes was more like resident evil in fantasy...even arrows should be hard to come by so that you really have to think if you take the shot or not...

No, my 'in character' explanation was simply that the vendor doesn't think you're worth the time. Acceptable to me, but this was then met with "well my character would simply do " and that's when I realised it was pointless debating and that people with that train of thought/mindset should really be complaining about other, more pressing 'realism' issues.

Why don't I want it to change? I don't recall saying that, I don't believe it causes an issue for most gamers and as such I'd think it would be better for the world to have dev time spent on other things. But then I've said that before in another thread too as I'm sure you'll recall. I simply feel that, at this point, addressing concerns of a fairly small group (no disrespect to them, but it is small, if vocal) at a cost of doing other things for the wider group is a poor use of resource.

I do appreciate that there are seriously hardcoe role players out there, but I'm also aware that most of the hardcoe RPG players (certainly the ones I know) are well aware that there are limitations in games, especially new ones and certain hopes/expectations are unrealistic.

Perhaps I simply expect different things to some, I'm not expecting some ALFA NWN type endeavour here and I think the game is better for not having that level of depth given it is single player and what really makes roleplaying is interacting with other people.


Anyway, this has veered a bit off topic, I only visited the thread to offer a plausible explanation to try and help people along to get passed this 'problem'.

"Hello, I've got this huge bag of gold, I'm looking for a good gear, what can you sell me ?"
"Only this garbage, you're not worth my time, I'm a merchant whose entire point and career is based on selling goods for money, but somehow your gold don't interest me."

Hu ?
That's... supposed to be believable ?

I also found Orcish and Elvish equipment available in Whiterun near the start of the game. I was maybe level 4 when it started showing up. I mean it's only a piece here or a piece there, and I haven't seen armor yet but I haven't seen any increase in the equipment in my leveling up. Actually the vendors I've run into are all still selling stuff that was fairly easy to acquire near the beginning of the game. Which isn't disappointing to me in the least because it gives my character more of a reason to go digging through the Nord tombs and battling hundreds of Draughr for one well enchanted Dwemer sword.

But is it somewhat realistic that some items arent there when you are low level. Since the days pass very quick in the game, its very logical, as time progress, the economy on the market improves and new items get to the store (coincidentaly with your level). And the economy should improve because, although there is a civil war, there are also the presence of the Thalmar who injects money and trade with other cultures.

Yup and that's the opposite of scaling. If it was scaled, you wouldn't see certain things until certain points.

People talking about scaling are [censored].