I agree with all you said.

What happens if you destroy their main industry ? Like destroying the mill ... They all become poor or what? And why would you do that?


Also, there should be more rare items, found in dungeons, museums, vaults, rich people houses/castles,... And if they are stolen, they are marked as stolen, in the whole city, then after few days, in whole Skyrim. So you have to sell them to fence or keep it for yourself, but hide them ...

And prices totally have to be fixed...

BIG NUMBERS!

on a serious note i hope traveling merchants, if they are in the game, can take care of themselves. as someone else said, i never really got to use the caravans in FO3 because they died too soon.

Auction should be rather easy if real time interaction applies to economy:
*auctioneer-babble* *holds up daedric shield* "daedric shield 3000 septims" *more babbling* "going once! going twice!" ...

Making items cost a lot sounds nice, but it is basically inflation. Remember the bubble? Not so nice. In those prehistoric type times, everything was cheap, hardly any inflation, hardly any gold in circulation anyways. Maybe in the larger towns.

Also bribing people with items sounds fun for real time interaction. Select item to hold, hold it in the direction of person you are offering, select the offer dialogue option, NPC responds based on their interest/need of the item.

Also I like the idea of asking for price of items hanging around in the shop. Drag item to shop owner, select offer dialogue option, owner says price, accept option or just drop it back where you found it.

A realistic economy sounds nice in theory, and it would have great visual effects in town:
Poor NPC's old commoner clothes with tons of moth holes in the arm pits, patches, amateur seam jobs.
Poor NPC homes with old piece of iceberg lettuce half eaten slightly limp and flies buzzing around, moldy loaf of bread.
Poor NPC house with peeling paint, broken window panes, jammed shutters, holes in the roof thatching, broken furniture.

NPC's need to buy new food regularly due to spoilage and consumption. NPC's need to keep up their homes due to regular wear. NPC's need to buy new clothes due to regular wear. There is only so much amateur sharpening and repair you can do to a shortsword before it wears down to the size of a dagger. NPC's need to do plenty of growing of food, fishing of fish, hunting of beasts, not to mention selling and serving, plenty of work to be done.

When the PC comes around, selling his 100 daggers, 200 loaves of bread, 100 wedges of cheese, 20 diamonds, 10 barrels of ale, off of some freshly corpsified neerdowells, ninja sells to anyone and everyone for almost nothing, goes off to raid another hundred dungeons, comes back to find a flourishing metropolis of overweigh NPC's where the poor village of five huts used to be, everyone with daggers on the mantle, daggers on their belts, holding up cabbage carts with daggers, etc. munching on cheese and chugging ale in the streets.

Sounds fabulous to me!

PS: Anyone know if merchant ships will be in game?

I like the idea that I could donate bread to a town and watch it grow.

Ultimate realism!

Agreed with everything you said except for how much money the shopkeeper has. I like the IDEA of his money decreasing as you sell stuff, but this isn't fallout. That's one thing that I hated in FO- if you made a big score and you can't sell it until the end of the game when ppl have more money, then whats the point of pillaging? Yes, in FO everything had less value, but in the TES games, everything (hopefully) will have more weight into the economy. I don't want an entire town's economy to be useless to me after one visit- they should continue to have a decent amount of money no matter what (not necessarily like OB, but not to the extreme of FO).

Every NPC should carry a little weight. For example, Tamika from Skingrad should have more weight than a drunkard, and if Tamika died, it would hurt the economy a bit until someone took over the business. Killing the drunkard wouldn't cause too much impact. So if you love dropping off items, keep everyone alive. But if you need to buy things, perhaps kill a few people and let the economy sink.

I reject the notion that hardcoe Roleplay is about how realistic a game is. Immersion is mostly good for any game, but how believable the world is, is irrelevant to how much you act out the role of your character.

Other then that, I think you make some great suggestions.

Hey you dont have enough money to buy my deadric warhammer for 5300 but you can buy 500 of my glass maces for 1300 a pop :sadvaultboy:
This I imagine will have definatly been changed to a style more like fallout 3's barter system and if not then I will be left alone to cry to myself about been on PS3 with no mods

I agree with every point the original poster made.

I especially like the idea of things that are common in the north, like an ingredient, will be more expensive in the south where they are rarer.

I just hope we have access to higher level items in stores. I found it absurd that what appeared in stores was level dependent. Is no one else finding better items for selling? More Morrowind like shop system would be good, with a few tweaks of course.

Something that I think would be a good addition to the list would be the value of an item decreasing the more you sell it to a shopkeeper- first, this means there would be benefits to selling an item in bulk to a shopkeeper (or buying in bulk). I think the more an item is purchased, the higher demand will be and therefore a higher price- the same is true for selling an item to a shopkeeper. If you sell them a pair of boots they didn't have, then the price they would be willing to pay to have it in inventory would be more than they would be willing to pay for the same pair if they had ten in the back room. This was actually made into a mod for Oblivion (maybe Morrowind? I forget) and I really liked the effects it had on the economy.

I like all the ideas from the OP. Main problem in obliv was the merchants had unlimited money, but only paid out a certain amount each time. Very strange system.

Yep. They couldn't afford to buy a 3000 septim weapon, but could afford to buy three 1000 septim weapons. Fortunately this was fixed in Fallout 3, so I doubt that system will be back.

Great post.

I skimmed a few entries so if someone said it earlier sorry. Just a thought for balance between casual and harcore. If people want loot dumps make specific shops that buy bulk at a cheap price (Skyrim Wal-marts even with the freakish people inhabiting them in rural areas!) and for the harcore gamer/RP aspect other shops that buy and sell items at a more relevent price to the item. I.E. "Shop Sky-Mart buy's a caliper for 1 septim per caliper and will buy 30 glass greaves for 1000 gold. Shop Sky-Mart would have a slightly larger gold capacity for the casual loot dumper.

Shop "Crazy Eddie's Axe Extravaganza" (He even has a Dwemer Netch Eater in the shop square) Doesn't give one damn bent septim about your freakin' caliper and will not buy it. Period. However that lovely rare daedric pole-arm will fetch a hefty price. These guys will have a large purse but the refresh would be much longer for another purchase.

I think we will always have a refresh until the game is smart enough to have that NPC merc company value that daedric pole-arm enough to find out about it - gather funds and equip the specialist with it thereby allowing the shopkeeper to buy and sell more.

There are holes in the logic but there are holes in any economy. There would of course need to be logic there to prevent debasing an item or currency and exploiting trade between bulk and specialty.

Just some thoughts.

P.S. Side jobs should include Beer/Ale/Spirits making and Taxidermy (oh yeah, dragon head tropthy). and please let skyrim have the return of "Named Soul Gems" Bethesda!!!

i kind of had an idea about this. doubtful we'll see it in a game anytime soon though.
but say you have a unique steel shortsword with a mediocre enchantment. there is really no way of putting a price on that in the human mind, but computers have been pricing them mathematically and systematically since the beginning of rpgs.

i think there should be a system where instead of selling it for gold, it can be more like actually bartering where you give them the shortsword and ask for something you (as the player) think would be worth (though you can still sell for gold if you wish). keep in mind that there would be no price you could see upon looking at it in your menu, this way it can fall to your judgement and add depth from your mind to the game.

the way it could work is depending on that skill (mercantile/speechcraft or something), you could do a better job convincing the person you are making the transaction with the item's worth. then the computer would roll. the number the computer rolls is what the person you are making the transaction with thinks its worth. so you could say, "i want to sell this shortsword for 60 gold." the computer randomly rolls 52, and the person says, "i'll give you 52". (the number of times you can do this before annoying the other person depends on your skill). but you could also say, "i will sell you this shortsword for that enchanted ring." well in the computer's set value (which you cant see) the ring is worth 58 gold. so if the computer rolls above that value, you get the ring (probably a high skill), whereas if you roll lower, the person refuses to give you the ring.

how this will work is say there is a perfect median set in the computer of what this item is really worth. the more you stray from that median, the more jurastic the chances of the roll become.

so say the sword is worth 60 gold. you want to sell it. so this could go one of many ways.
1. you guess 60 with a low skill. the computer rolls and could give you numbers more like 25-60 gold or something.
2. you guess 60 with a high skill. the computer rolls and gives you numbers closer to 55-60
3. guess 120 (an unreasonably high number) with a low skill. the computer will roll numbers more along the lines of 40-100.
4. you guess 120 with a high skill. the computer rolls number closer to 100-115
or...
5. you guess 55-65 (almost what its worth). the computer takes this number as about the right value rolls just as it would if you had guessed correctly depending on your skill
6. you guess 20 (very low). the computer takes this as an offer, and as you would expect, it would be accepted no matter what your skill.

and not only your skill would count. it would find an average between your skill and the person's skill you are trading with. and also, the more you traded with the same person, the more steady their prices become

not only would this simulate the human mind working randomly as it does in real life, but it would force you to get a feel for the economic system in the game world. you would find yourself saying things along the lines of "a nice sword is probably around 300 gold, while a poor one would be 60, and an outstanding one is 1000", or maybe something similar, but depending on what its actually worth they could be along the lines of 3000, 600, and 10000. and when you are actually selling for gold, you could feel less like "this is worth 10 gold and my skill is high, so i can get 10 gold for it." and more like "this looks like i can get 10 gold for it, so i'll sell it for 10 gold". and things like that would be for you to figure out by experience, forcing you not to rely on your skills in the game, but also in real life, while also testing your knowledge as a player.

and as for what categorizes "poor sword" and "outstanding sword", this would be a perfect way to incorporate the new item viewer available from the menu. like an outstanding sword could have a lot of engravings and details, while poor swords could look generic, or simply have cracks or signs of rust.

i know its not foolproof, but i'm sure there are ways safeguards can be put in place to always make sure its balanced. but i think something like this would be cool anyways.

and i know it sounds like a chaotic mess, but thats programming for you. anything behind the scenes of a game really is a chaotic mess, but once its put into practice, this is really a more user friendly and natural way of transaction than knowing set values ahead of time.

and this whole concept comes from the idea that not everything in fantasy rpgs would have a price tag on it.

well thats my idea haha.

Most of what you actually wrote went right over my head, because I do not know much of what goes on behind the scenes during a games development.
From my point of view, the simplest change to the economy might just be altering the exact value of items to reflect a more realistic economy - we do now know that, in Skyrim, prices can be altered based on region (a town who's main industry is broken will have items priced higher than another to simulate the town purchasing they're goods from out-of-region.)

With that confirmed, it may be simplest to "get by," without overhauling the economy system like you said - which might be something to consider in the next TES game.

If we hope for too much of an overhaul, we won't get it, unfortunately.

I would like to see bandits stopping trade caravans and the town runs out of supplies and you need to either supply the town or go clear the forest out of bandits.

^ That would be a good repeating quest, once in a while you have to save the town from economic collapse.

@TheEldestScroll sounds like a merchant mini-game to me. I'd like to see the ability to combine speechcraft and merchantile to be able to push items on to anyone for a good sum. Especially if you have drained the shop keepers funds, why not go on to fleece the locals? "See this dagger? Doesn't its sharp blade shine with such brilliance? And today I am offering it for only 20 gold. It's a steal!" and the NPC says "Well, I don't know, I already have a dagger..."

I agree that the oblivion trade system was especially strange. Part of a new system could be that shop keepers may create NPC demand from groups of adventurers and bandits that might buy weapons or armor, etc. This would give the merchant an excuse to buy your items even though they have a few already. Some merchants might openly state that they are the official merchant supplier to the royal guard, and any weapon you sell might end up gleaming at the side of a patrolman. If implemented poorly, it could result in a constant loop between the inhabitants of dungeon-X and their items, so when you sell them, the items are basically re-appropriated to the same dungeon.

I would be happy if by slaying a single group of random bandits and selling their daedric/glass stuff I woudn't get enough money to buy everything worth buying in the game, really.

My major economy concern with Oblivion was the lack of anything worth buying and bother with accumulating money for. Things improved a little in Fallout 3, but not much - you still get rich fast and easy, and dumping money into repair is not very exciting. Just having something interesting and expensive which you can barely buy at the end of the game would make me happy, like some castle upgrades or unique artifacts/abilities or something.

As for realistic economy - I don't see it happening in vanilla Skyrim... let it be balanced, for starters.

What the ... ????

This is a SINGLEPLAYER GAME.

We dont need an excessively complex economy - just make sure the player can spent the money he gets on useful stuff.

What if they like you enough that they will buy more from you and sell it else ware. That way you can unload your new loot for money if you want!

I can suspend my disbelief about the stolen items. Maybe shops mark the items with a seal that only the shop has when you purchase the item. If you steal the item then the mark wouldn't be on it. Kind of like an ancient security tag. I'm not saying they would do that or even suggest that but I can suspend my disbelief regarding that matter.

I agree.