a complaint thread about a feature that doesnt have really any info out about it yet. this intrigues and revolts me you know like one of them old timey freak shows

I'm right there with you.

Personally, I've never had any problem with having "too much" gold in the "late game" of any single-player RPG. Having larger piles of gold than you know what to do with is a sign of success. It's one of the ways to gauge your personal power.

Struggling to find equipment and cash, and not having the resources to do what you need/want.... that's for the early game. If you're still struggling to get the gold to buy stuff in the late game, you're going to feel like you haven't actually gotten anything, like your efforts were for naught, and that you're not succeeding.

I also don't generally feel a lack of having some big-ticket item to buy - like the comments I've seen in other OB economy threads, saying "I got all the houses, I'm still rich - they need to add some actual expensive stuff for us to buy!" Why? What purpose does it serve? (especially since it sounds like people don't care if it actually does anything, they just want to be able to buy something big, like a castle, or a county.)


Now, admittedly, I've never experienced the un-modded Oblivion game. I've always used a level scaler that toned down the spawning of ebony/daedric/glass. And I also don't play 200+ hour characters, or even enough to hit lv30+ on any character (slowed down leveling, too). So, I've never had enough cash to buy all the houses (not that I'd ever want more than 1). 25000 gold? Is a vast amount, to me.

But it doesn't matter, because beyond the first few levels, the only thing I buy from shops is empty soulgems and repair hammers - you loot so much gear, why do you ever need to buy anything? Shops are just there to sell stuff to.


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Thinking about it, the only RPGs that I've really needed large amounts of money in are the mostly-linear console JRPGs..... because those games don't drop alot of gear upgrades - the vast majority, you need to buy. And the cost of those items is scaled to your progress, along with the "gated" zone progression. ( i.e, you've completed Area 1 and got strong enough to kill the boss blocking the route to Area 2. You've built up alot of cash because you were killing monsters who just drop gold & potions. At the first town in Area 2, they sell the "next level" of armor and weapons for all your people - and what do you know, the prices are all so high that you'll blow most of your wallet on them, and probably have to farm a bit more gold to equip your secondary party members. But this only works because the games follow a very linear progression of areas/levels/gear.)


Meanwhile, in games that drop lots of loot? You don't buy gear, you find it. Sure, if it's a game with random loot (Prefix Sword of Suffix), there may be a gold sink in the form of a "gamble on randomly generated loot" vendor, but beyond that..... shops are for selling stuff and buying consumables. Not gear. You get that from monsters & quests.

I dunno how you guys play, but I never got really rich in Oblivion, Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas. Unless I found it, I always had to save up for something. Usually, when playing Oblivion, the first house that I bought was the Imperial shack, which cost 2k gold. I always had to spend at least a few hours of playtime to get the money together. Of course, I can imagine that if you kill everyone on the street and rob every house, you'll get easy money, but that never happened to me.

To eliminate this money problem, just increase buy price of items, and decrease (like five-fold) the sell price of items (from players perspective). Also, IIRC, WoW has a nice system in place for this, loot is rare and buying from shops is expensive.

I agree that Fallout 3 is really hard to get cash and New Vegas too for a little while but Oblivion is so easy to make money. I'm always around 100,000 gold at level 20. Maybe I'm better at selecting what items I like to keep or I sell them for 70% of value but I never really had a shortage of money in Oblivion except at the beginning and one Alyeid ruin can easily change that.

Oblivion doesn't exist yet? I must have gotten the leaked copy then.

Herp, We're in the Skyrim forum buddy, thus any thread in it is going to have a direct relation to that game. Obviously his point is that we're talking about a feature of a game that we have 0% information about.

Personally none of my characters have ever been super rich. I've never had that option. I choose to believe that the people that do have this problem, spend too much time accruing useless currency. I guess these are the same people that complain about health/magika potions being to prolific.

Very easy to fix the problem you have OP while retaining the current economic system.

Which is...only carry what you would realistically be able to carry..so when you loot a dungeon, you dont come out with 7 glass helms in your pocket.

Only loot what you can in real life keep on your person ie 1 of each armour which you wear anyway.. 3 weapons max.

+1

Like I said, 25k is alot to me. Even by lv20. (Of course, another factor beyond my scaling mod keeping the level of looted gear down, is also the slowed skill development - my barter skill has barely had any time to build up by then, and I generally don't or can't tweak the sale % higher. So whatever the base % is - 35%? - that's what I'm usually using.)

lol i found its too hard to get money in morrowind and oblivion because when ever i had eny money i ether used it to repare my items or on new armor and couldnt aford enything good because of repairing my items

I can sympathize with complaints on how quickly one went from nothing to Giraffe Money Morrowind and Oblivion. However, I don't see it as unrealistic. I mean for one thing you're curb stomping bandits and raiding dungeons. That's a pretty specialized skill set almost guaranteed to make one wealthy if one is successful. So how do we make you feel like an bad ass adventurer AND make money mean something after the start?

SCALE ARMOR REPAIR COST WITH MATERIAL
To mitigate the mass accumulation of wealth, I think the costs of repair should scale rapidly with the rarity of the material. So if you want to repair your ebony armor, you had better either have some ebony or have a pile of money to pay for the parts and labor. If you want to repair daedric, then you've got to have ebony, access to the mage's guild, or truckloads of coin to pay for the expertise. Likewise for Glass and Elven armors. These rare material weapons and armors aren't just bronze plates and blades that you can hammer back out flat. Where iron may be 1g / unit to repair, I imagine Daedric would be something like 50g / unit.

RECHARGING SERVICES
Maybe you don't have the soultrap spell but you have enchanted gear anyway. The mages guild should offer charging services for ludicrous amounts of money if you don't already have filled soulgems.

MAKE THE QUEST COMPASS A METAPHOR FOR PAID INFORMANTS
If you get a mission, no quest marker shows up on the map. To get it you have to listen to rumors around town, which will likely mean paying off the local know-it-all at the pub, or greasing the pockets of a local bureaucrat. (Also makes speechcraft more useful). Only if you've shelled out a good amount of money does the Oblivion style quest marker and guides become visible, because at that point you've "paid for all the information".

GUILD DUES
Membership has its privileges, so pay up.

GOLD SHOULD HAVE WEIGHT
Now the accumulation of mass wealth carries the traditional problems - how do you store it? You'll need (i) a way to concentrate wealth (gems, rare artifacts, etc) as well as (ii) a place to store it. Plenty of gems in game to do (i)... except now you might find yourself buying them whenever you can. 10 gems worth 200 gold is easier to shlep around than 2000 g pieces. As for (ii), banks have always specialized in storage of valuables... for a price. But how do move your gold from some frontier town base to the main city's central bank? Looks like you'll need a caravan for that. But a caravan rumored to be bursting with gems and gold must be a pretty sweet looking target to bandits and outlaws. I wonder what compelling game mechanics can be found in defending and moving one's own wealth?

Seems to me the "too much money" problem is just BURSTING with potential for interesting new game mechanics.

As far as I was aware, repair costs in Oblivion did scale with the "value" of an item - I certainly noticed that some of the mod armors I've tried (where the author went crazy and made the value 50k), the repair costs were prohibitive. (Which is, of course, why you just use Armorer and repair it yourself. 2k gold to have the smith do it, or 100g for 10 repair hammers, plus you get some skill points out of it.... hmm, decisions, decisions.... )

Hmmm... perhaps have different varieties of hammer, with certain types being necessary for repairing certain materials, then scale the cost of the hammers as well. It would still be cheaper than general forge repair, but you'd still know you're wearing "the good stuff" by how much it costs to maintain.

I never ran into an issue of "too much gold" in Oblivion, but then I never went dungeon diving for extremely long amounts of time. I did quests and then started a new character to try something new. I've probably ventured into each dungeon at least once, but never on one character.

Fall Out 3 on the other hand I always had massive amounts of caps by 10 hours in. Mostly just due to things like cigarettes, old money and bullets (to the many many weapons I didn't use). They had no weight (or low in the case of cigarettes) but were worth a (relative) ton of caps each. The easiest way to change this would have been to not find so many bullets that I was forced to buy them to continue my adventure, but not so much that I was always stayed totally broke that would not be terribly fun. And seriously, finding energy cells and energy guns which sold for ridiculous amounts almost every place I went was plain stupid tbh.

With skyrim, I think controling the item level and level scaling is the best thing they can do to adjust the economy. Armor was worth so much in Oblivion, yet rich clothes and gems would barely pad my wallet? Like I said I never ran into issues with money in Oblivion, I had to save pretty often but there are some definate ways to change things about. Drop the sell price on armor and make things like jewelery, clothes, books, and who knows what else available in rich well protected houses that are actually worth breaking into!

While I agree with the bartering system MW had, I found its economy very flawed. I eventually buy an item for dirt cheap and sell it back to the exact same vendor for a higher price than I bought it for. Take that formula and find a vendor with a self restocking item that is worth a lot and you can become stinking rich in no time.

The other day I was at my friend's house, and he asked me to help him out with a mission in FoNV.
Watching him play for like five minutes I realized why it had always been so easy for me to get max level so fast, and have all the best loot at all times.

He looted maybe 10% of his enemies and 5% of the containers available, and took items on an arbitrary basis rather than looking at stats, weight and value.
It was no wonder to me that he was svcking so hard: with 5 hours of playtime he had a 9mm pistol and no armor, at which point I had had the cowboy repeater (amongst an arsenal of conditionally effective weapons) and leather or or faction armor (I can't remember which one I was using at the time). I was swimming in ammo, food and water, while he had half a dozen stimpacks and nothing else.

The problem with game balance is not that designers are designing bad games, but that their target audience does not know how to play.

Therefore the only mechanic I can imagine that will not alienate the console kiddy crowd would be inflation or gold weight: only those who play the game with the rabid hardcoe gamer attitude will encounter it, and everyone else will be blissfully unaware of it.

Eh, I don't think I need to delve into anything specific beyond stating that the economy just needs to be fixed. Once you get past an early level, nothing is beyond your reach and everything is ridiculously cheap. Houses, mansions, incredible well crafted or magical items, and sought after services were all within your coin purse.

In comparison to other games, the solution has a simple foundation. It just gets more complicated the more stuff you pile on to it. In short, make acquired items, services, and real estates more meaningful and useful while also increasing the price by a great deal.

I'm not sure about other people, but high prices on useful items/services is my kind of economy. You cannot do everything in one play through, all potential avenues have their respective perks, rewards are more... rewarding.

Agreed, with something like this in place, money management (which tends to go out the window quite quickly) could constantly play a role even with extremely rich characters. Perhaps richer characters would want nicer food, or have to pay higher taxes, or other fees.

As for purposefully gimping my character, while it's something I try to do is some respect (like traveling with a single doctor bag, or avoiding fast travel in dire situations) there is only so much I can do in that respect, apart from throwing away gold, at which point I just feel stupid.

If they don't have a hardcoe mode option, someone will surely come out with a mod to do the same job. I love PC gaming

Considering the more dynamic economy features in Skyrim, I'm interested to see what kind of mods will adjust this.

I think there will be a lot more interesting details to play around with compared to what we had for Oblivion.

now if money weighed something and the way you can get moeny weighing less is by magic pouchs? Never got how anyone can carry 1 million gold. Maybe everyone has underwear that breaks into a vortex. Still would make the game harder.

We don't need money to have weight, what we need is less money. Fallout 3 made it work really well, You'd be lucky if you made 20,000 caps in 1 file. I could do it but it will take time and a whole lot of dungeon raiding.

If instead of picking a perk at level up, in each level you just become capable to learn yet another perk, and then you could approach a skill master to bribe, or talk him into teaching you a perk for that skill, then the problem of excessive wealth on higher level would be gone for good.

When you approached a skill master, and made friends with him, he could agree to teach you a perk that you would choose, and he decides that you are ready for it, but each lesson would need some perquisite requirements, items, ingredients, your character's level of his/her skill level, previous deeds and the like.

Each lesson would also cost dearly, and the higher level perks would cost you even more, so in higher levels, you would always be hoarding money to be able to afford the wages of those skill masters for new trick that they could teach you.

And this would be a satisfying payment, because you would be learning new tricks that could change your lifestyle, or at least would have a visible effect on one aspect of your role in the world.

IMHO they should have done the perks this way, and solved the issue of excessive money on later stages of the game for good.

I think they have left it pretty clear that no matter your level there is no such thing as "killing a dragon with ease". Todd said dragons are like Big Daddies...that says it all.

I hope mammoths are pretty damn hard to kill too.