I'm going to state from the start that this is going to be another one of those "I wish it was more like it was in Morrowind" topics. If that makes you cringe too much to contribute to an conversation, please look away and pick another thread.

Considering the developers use the last months of level designing placing the items in the world, I think it's good time for me to try to reason with them.

Item Placing
One of the many things I loved about Morrowind was exploring. I got the game with my 3D card and I didn't really understand enough English to follow quest lines. I loved the fact that when I entered a random tomb I could find spiral staircase that took me to labyrinth inside of which there was Nord warrior with tons of great loot, one of which was the best heavy armor helmet in the game, hidden from view though. It really made exploring and dungeon crawling rewarding and believable when you found random dead adventurer with rather good gear even you were just level one - although you rarely could survive these dungeons if you were weak. The monsters didn't level much with you. In fact, if you went into a tomb out of your league, you died horrible and swift death.
To this day it's the thing that brings me back to Morrowind. I didn't have Internet back then, so now I can see all kinds of stuff that I missed. Oh I didn't know that you could access that daedric face of a god if you levitated up the cave in the nord burial tomb. Oh great, there's pair of pretty great gauntlets behind that bowl of corpus meat in one of the sixth house base you go through in the main quest.
Stuff like this made the world believable. Like these people really own stuff, outside what they are carrying. They may have glass armour on the shelves, ebony blades on the table. If you had swift hand you could steal them, but you probably had to fight that guard first that was standing right next to it calling you n'wah outlander. I could even kill the old Telvanni wizard and get almost full set of daedric armor off him, if I could beat him. Mind you, he was part of the main quest, and I could kill him before or after I was done with him.

This was one of the big setbacks in Oblivion. When you were level one everyone was wearing leather or chain mail. Once you gone past level 20 you could face bandit with full set of glass/daedric armour coming at you. What are these fools doing? They are carrying so much money on their armor they could retire and spend the rest of their lives getting drunk of skooma in the house of earthly delights.
You never found items higher than steel from the world. Even the alchemists had novice/apprentice set of tools on his/her table. Best alchemy tools could only be found in random loot once you were high enough level from the pockets of some random scrub necromancer.
This fact made me skip every mine and cave in the game, pretty much. Unless there were goblins outside, in which case I would steal the totem and watch the rival goblins fight for their totems when I dropped them in the world. After fighting through multiple caves with nothing more than few lions and rats I decided to use them just for getting mushrooms when I needed some for alchemy. What an waste of level design, I think.
Only dungeons worth crawling though were the Ayleid ruins, for their valuable Varla- and Welkynd Stones other items placed on the tables were usually not worth going through, unless it was a note or a key. It was usually always something you wouldn't bother even picking up.

I think this was somewhat of an response to the 16 minute (or something like that) speed run of Morrowind at level 1. How the person managed to do that was that he knew where he could find good alchemy tools and stack potions that he could beat Chuck Norris with one finger. The developers didn't want you to find good loot until you were high enough level. However I think this type of handing the "problem" was wrong. No one would think that the player of that speed run was playing Morrowind for the first time. The fact that he could pull it off was because he had obviously played Morrowind a lot.

Looking at the later games with same engine (Fallout 3 and NV) the lesson had pretty much been learned. Not to the extend it was in Morrowind, but still vast improvement over Oblivion.

TL;DR: Level scaling items and only cluttering the world with rubbish loot takes away the fun of exploring and stealing, which I'll try to tackle on the next point.

Stolen Items
Sneaking in Oblivion was done way better than it was in Morrowind. It was so good that I decided my first character to rely on stealth when I first started Oblivion. Stealing was great concern. There was little stuff to steal (see the first point) and if I would steal that strawberry, every vendor in the world knew that strawberry was too hot of an item to buy. Oh I don't want to buy that strawberry, you obviously stole that from Fargoth. I heard Fargot looking for that particular strawberry. I had to join Thieves guild in order to sell that hot strawberry.
Really?
I think mix of Oblivions and Morrowinds system would work best. ( To the "Why not like Daggerfall people: In Daggerfall, you could steal everything vendor has during the night and sell it back to him without the vendor saying anything - Morrowinds way of handling stolen goods was an improvement).
In Morrowind you could sell stolen items to everyone except the person/people you stole them from. It makes sense. However you didn't know what stuff was stolen. You could steal an diamond from Alchemist, carry it in your inventory for days and later try to sell the 35 diamonds from your inventory to get guards after you, because one of the diamonds you had in your inventory was the very same diamond you stole from that Alchemist.

TL;DR: Oblivion was too harsh on thieves. Every trader magically knew that that carrot you stole was really stolen. And, there wasn't really stuff worth stealing.

I propose following ways to deal with this:
Stolen items have the indication that they are stolen in every item listing (even alchemy screen).
1) You can sell the items to every vendor except the one you stole them from (Morrowind system).
2) You can sell the items to every vendor except the one you stole them from, but for a half price.
3) Only shady traders will accept stolen goods. There would be quite many of these traders, maybe even as much as half of the traders in the game. Quite like the "I don't want to trade with you if you have drugs" system worked in Morrowind, except you wouldn't have to drop them at their nose before they'd open their inventory for you. The stolen items wouldn't show up in the trade screen of more law abiding traiders.
4) System where the "heat" of the items drop after some time.

Discuss.

The part about the strawberry made me laugh

Nah um! I know you stole my strawberry, I'm going to put an APB!

Well said. I suggest you duck though.

I didn't like morrowind.
in fact this entire thread could be here without mentioning it
this being said, I completely agree
I've yet to meet a person that absolutely with out a doubt loves level scaling and the stealing, well, those cyrodil strawberries are the [censored], other than that, once again agree that the stealing system needs an overhaul

I don't like what you propose however, it's basically the same thing only the vendor loves that strawberry and hasn't told everyone
I propose that once you take it without anyone seeing, it's yours, you've taken it, the end.

Finders keepers =)

it was extremely easy to steal in morrowind. i mean you could walk into a treasury in vivec and the guards wouldn't mind.

items in this fantasy setting shouldn't all be mass produced in china. a crafter would leave a certain engraving on his wares so that it would be obvious if you tried to sell him a certain item.

edibles wouldn't have engravings, so they should be fair game. i like the shady trader idea in that they wouldn't care if it was stolen or not.

i think common items that everyone has wouldn't be recognizable, and the harder an item is to have/produce, the more likely a trader would detect that you stole the item from him/her.

how about a system of chance that combines rarity with persuasion, so that if you have enough speechcraft, you can convince a trader that the rare item you are selling them, that they know was stolen, wasn't stolen by you/was another person's. and common to rare items increase the chance of being caught.

TLDR:there was a lot of trouble to travel to a fence in oblivion as opposed to morrowind, but this added more immersion for me, and with common items negated and more shady traders prevelant, i think it will be a good system.

Sure, but if I talk about airplanes in front of group of people from which some know what airplanes are and some who don't I like to say that I'm in fact talking about airplanes.
This way those who know what airplanes are don't need to think "Wait, is he taking about airplanes?".

As to what comes to your suggestion, I think you have a point - point which the next person I'm quoting puts out better.



Yes. I think the 4th system if put in game could "easily" (I don't know first thing about programming, implementing this probably isn't easy) have variable tied to it in the editor. If you steal something personal to someone, say unique sword the heat would drop slower than something basic like strawberry.
If person knows you've stolen some item you could persuade with speechcraft or mercantile to at least pay 50% of what they were going to pay for it if the item is hot.

Little bit on how the stealing has worked on Morrowind and Oblivion: The items have drop down box in the editor, on which you can specify the owner. It can be guild or person. If you steal item that person x owns in front of y you'll be in trouble only if person y cares about person x enough or thinks highly of law. If you steal something belonging to person x in front of person x, person x will kick your ass. You steal my strawberries, taste my axe!
If the item doesn't have owner then it's free pickings, but I wouldn't like stranger to me coming to my house and take all my strawberries, unless it's not a stranger. I think the game should specify an owner even on little items like strawberries for that reason.
I guess there could be variable on how highly the person thinks of the item. It could make cool addition to Radiant AI. Steal some persons family heirloom and they'll search for it all around. Even buy it back if they find the person you sold it to and perhaps track you down. Steal something they likely wont care about when they like you and they wouldn't mind.
In oblivion the characters care as much about you stealing their strawberry than if you would steal their sword. You can get death-sentence in Oblivion for just using grab key on a strawberry, just lifting it from the ground.

I think the whole point I'm trying to get to in the OP is that it's pretty limiting in sandbox game to force you to join a guild to sell your goods (, make a spell and enchant an item while we're at it). While it can be great perk, player shouldn't be limited to it.