I never had millions in Morrowind either.

That mudcrab merchant there was a help, so I got to half a million or so. But then I had my 2 months filled and after that time, I always lose interest in playing a singleplayer game, no matter how good it is. Only MMOs keep me motivated (much, much) longer, though at some point even they lose their appeal.

you can pretty much get infinite money in MW by doing this. commit a crime go to the armory is bazaar district in mournhold and talk to the high ordinator. kill him, sell his armor to merchant right there in the store. dispose of corps and press wait button so he respawns. just repeat and you can get millions of gold

I think that because there are some people in Oblvion with a pretty nice house and they say something like I make 10 gold a year and its like I would pay say over 10,000 gold for that house. Most of this makes no sense.

10 gold a year, who says that? o.O

Beggers brag that they can "eat for a day with a single coin" which means that even eating crap costs 365 gold a year.

I think thats more of a saying though, like the greenpeace one, a pound for a panda, though if we were to make any assumptions as to the scales of economy in TES, we need to see if we can liken the gold septim to anything, there is also the dwemer coins

have you played the quest that focuses on the curropt gaurd captain in Cheydinhall I think? If you have you would know what I am talking about. Also you are offered a job 2 pieces of a gold a week.

Especially if that NPC (and/or all occupants) mysteriously die.

:rofl:
I agree with that. Assault with a deadly weapon, or attempted murder, should be seriously frowned upon. If they're really trying to enforce some peace.

Hmmm...i dont have any proof, but i think that the house is then owned by the county, so you have to kill everyone in the county, but then it would be property of Cyrodiil, so you have to kill everyone in Cyrodiil, but then it will be property of the empire, so you have to kill everyone in every province of the empire, hmmm...maybe if we got Mehrunes Dagon to help bliviongate: (wait a second, we're gonna do all that, just for a house?! :huh:

On the one hand, an apple costs 2 gold. On the other hand, a basic shirt costs 1, so food is much more expensive than clothing, probably because so few people in the games are growing crops to the point where food is becoming scarce and valuable. If someone in Oblivion claims to be making under 100 Septims a year, then they're either lying, just not eating for that entire year, or else they're hunting to live or growing their own food. It doesn't fit with the rest of the game's pricing.

In Morrowind, we've got the Seyda Neen tax records which show annual tax assessments from roughly a hundred Septims to several hundred for a bunch of fishermen and a local merchant, so they're probably making somewhere in the 400-2000 Septim annual income ballpark if they're paying any sort of "normal" tax rate. 2000 for a shack doesn't contradict that (1-5 years of TOTAL earnings isn't that far out of line for a "cheap" modern house).

Specific items in both games fall way outside the norm, so you've just got to pass it off as "it's Nirn, not Earth".

I still think that basing weapon and armor repairs on the cost of the material would make wearing that fancy Glass and Daedric far too expensive for a low-level character to maintain in decent shape. Repairs should require both a suitable quality repair hammer for that material and "parts" which would again be totally dependent on material costs. Basic Iron, Fur, or Leather would be dirt cheap to fix; Glass, Ebony, and Daedric would bankrupt a small country. So much for all those heaps of gold you collected: that 70,000 Septim Daedric Warhammer needs 37% repairs after that fight, at about 17.5% of its total cost in materials: 12,250 worth of parts. Hope you collected enough loot from that cave to pay for it......

There are few problems:
1. Everyone carries at least a small pouch of gold. You kill thousands of people during one playthrough in each game. Even if you try not to roleplay a murderous freak. So you end up with their gold.

2. Armor and weapons. Your enemies have those too, so you have too much of that junk all the time. You never need to buy it, since it's easier to just kill for it. Selling the extra ones earns you more gold than their tiny pouches.

3. The actual pay from your jobs/quests svcks compared to the money earned from killing and looting, but it adds to your bank account (Remember to have those in TES5)

4. There are very, very stupid design choices that make trading unrealistic, exploitable, boring, or all these.
In TES2 you can sell 100 daedric armor pieces to one guy, who keeps writing you checks for millions of gold pieces. I don't think a multi-millionaire would spend his time being a crappy smith.
In TES3 people are more poor, the trading betweeen items works perfectly, but you keep up finding items of more worth than anyone on the island has, and that's frustrating.
In TES4 everyone has infinite amount of gold again, they just ain't giving it to you. They pay you 1000 gold for an item worth 10 000.


Basically Mount&Blade handles the trading, looting and earning better than most games I've seen. Different supply/demand for different items in different cities. Always something new to buy/save money to. Having an army being really expensive. No getting rich by killing and enslaving everyone you see. (most loot can't be recovered after fight, slaves being kinda cheap)

Giant hordes of bandits wearing glass and daedric armour not enough for you?

In Morrowind, while such items are relatively rare. you can find them at Level 1 if you either know where to look or know how to get around whatever's guarding them, or in some cases which friendly NPC to taunt and provoke into a fight. Using the two built-in "exploit" merchants in Morrowind, and/or a bit of simple barter mechanics over a few game days, you can get full value (or at least a fair price) for your Glass and Daedric items. In OB, those items don't appear until higher levels, when they suddenly become "the norm" for everyone, but the merchants will only offer you a maximum of a certain paltry amount for any one item, regardless of value (even though it becomes painfully obvious that they have an unlimited gold supply hidden somewhere). The two games are both "broken" economically, but in different ways. You can get filty rich in both, for all the wrong reasons, because the actions of the merchants just don't make sense.

I don't think this is a TES II vs III vs IV situation
No TES game has got the gold balance right
Daggerfall had some good features like banks, letters of credit and gold weight and I never made the huge sums from alchemy that were possible in MW and Oblivion but still I always end up with more money than I can spend in all the TES games

Not only is food very expensive in Oblivion but most meat is cheaper on a lb for lb basis than fruit and veg. Whats up with the price of leeks? Not exactly an exotic foodstuff.

I would make it like in Morrowind where there were two sets of Daedric. You just had to be hardass to find all the pieces to the set. A hardass that could dominate someone who would just kill a super-powerful wizard for it. And the second set of Daedric would have super-powerful enchants, just like in Morrowind.

well the problem with that you never have to buy gear can also easly be fixed i think by getting gear let old like if you kill a bandit with i say for fun a steel chest plate asumin you wil break or dmg it wile you killing him you need to repair it but if you let it repair would heat the chest to make the dmg part fixes the chest becomes thinner over time as even with the repairs so parts of the steel will never come back so a chest you got tru combat never can be as good as total new 1 unless you replease the missing metal from the chest were the hole was making armor more expensive even if you learn it your self as you need more then a hammer now to make you chest as new or buy a new 1 < sorry i coulnt tell thise any shorter>

also with bandit clans 1 bandit clan can be succesfuller then the other but how succesfulle they are the harder they are to raid < more traps more guards and maby hired mages> to prefeant low lvs to loot their stuff so a easy to raid bandit clan should never posses things like ench super weapons or artifaqs or lots of jewels no matter how high lv the main player is

and indeed what most people think remove the lvling system and sucsess full clans already high from the start as they got there stuff already tru skill so that places are not recomanded for low lvs but still a chalange for high lvs and also remove lved items

just ideas tought to stimilate the economy

So you mean to have the armorer/repair skill more like it was in Fallout 3, where you needed an actual piece of the equipment or a piece of something similar to repair it, i guess it could work, but what about enchanted armor and the daedric, if we have one or two sets in the whole game, you are either gonna be paying a sh**load of money or it's going to have to be undamageable or something (i vote for the first option)

i thought it was funny how in Arena if you found a sack of 100 gold you could just go through a door, go back out and it would be there again.

I think the problem with most of the TES games is that once you have the gold theres nothing to spend it on except weapons and armor, i think the next TES game has to have more houses and other things to by, what would really be cool would be if you could buy stock in a store or even own a store or buy property. (kinda taking ideas from Grand Theft Auto but it could work)

i think the prices of items in general are far too high.
historically speaking, 100 gold coins is a small fortune.

Using similar materials for repair doesn't mean it needs to be a similar item, like in FO3. Any iron item could provide raw materials for fixing another iron item, if you've got either the skill to convert it or the coin to pay someone else to do the job, and you can get scrap iron or iron "clutter" items almost anywhere. Any Daedric item should yield materials for fixing another Daedric item, although your local corner shop won't stock rare and expensive "Daedric materials". Enchanted and Unique items don't need to be handled any differently, as long as we can tell what they're made from, and get replacement material. Oh, that rare and expensive Dreugh cuirass you special ordered all the way from Morrowind.......did you remember to import some spare parts for it as well????

My take on the economy in TES games (I've only played Morrowind and Oblivion, and only recently started MW, so don't have a high-level character with lots of money yet):

I do think that eventually, the PC should probably wind up pretty rich. That said, however, I too wish there were more cool things in the 'end-game' to spend lots of that gold on. Perhaps, also, more philanthrophy options (Maybe donate a million Septims to the Imperial Church, and get a cathedral named after you, or donate 10 Million and accomplish some major missions, and become Sainted, or something, lol).

That said, however, I always thought the economy in Oblivion could use some tweaking; for one thing, it does seem that some of the higher level, more valuable loot should have been more rare (Ebony, Deadric, and Glass items, for example, were just too common in Oblivion). On the other hand, the game compensated for this by a truly stupid vendor system - like, for example, the fact that even though you were selling items to vendors at far below their value, the vendors never got more money for future purchases.

It seems to me like as you do business with a vendor (particularly when you have low Mercantile skill and are only getting 30 percent of the value of the item), that vendor should gradually grow richer. That is, if I sell an item worth 3000 septims to a vendor for 600 Septims (because that is all the money that vendor has, but my mercantile skill means I *should* have gotten 1000 Septims), then at some point in the future, that item should be 'sold' by the Vendor, resulting in the vendor increasing their gold (to like, maybe 1000 septims).

Of course, that would negate some of the Mercantile skill bonuses, as implemented in Oblivion (in OB, when you reached Mercantile of like 75 I think it was, you could 'invest' something like 300 septims to increase the amount of gold the merchant had available). That problem is relatively easily solved - just give Mercantile skill other bonuses. It makes no sense that a Merchant wouldn't get rich off you if you are selling them valuable items at prices where they are ripping you off.

That does mean that over time, merchants would get much richer, meaning you would then be able to get much richer off them, exacerbating the 'too much gold' problem. As has been said by other players, the answer is more gold sinks for the players to dump gold on.

Take, for example, the Star of Azura. In Oblivion, you could get this item simply by running a quest. A quest should be involved, sure, but the Star of Azura is such a powerful item, it should also cost about 500,000 Septims (for those who might not be familiar with the Star of Azura, it was basically a reusable grand soul gem, which meant that once you get it, there is essentially no limit to the number of souls you can capture and, thus, no limit on crafting or recharging enchanted items, which means that all 'costs' associated with enchanted item recharge disappear once you have the star, so it's reasonable that the Star should have a very high cost associated with obtaining it - even at 500,000 septims, it would be worth it to get the Star).

On the topic of enchanting, perhaps the cost of using the Altars of Enchanting should be greatly increased?

In Oblivion, to get Master Level alchemy gear, you couldn't buy it, but you could find it as loot. That should be reversed - it should be something you have to buy, and it should probably cost you about 100,000 septims, or maybe more, for the set (or, perhaps you craft it yourself using components, some of which you must buy, and maybe some of which you find as loot or part of quests, and the purchased components would cost the 100,000 septims or so).

So, one the one hand, I think the economy should be such a) very valuable loot should be more rare, b)but players should more reasonably be able to, in most cases, get closer to the full value that they *should* be able to get, based on the combination of mercantile skill and how much the vendor likes you (speechcraft/charm spells), and vendor available funds should increase as you sell them more valuable stuff (so that you aren't always 'capped' at 800 or 1000 septims per item regardless of how much money the vendor would have made off of the previous items you've sold), and c) there should, as you get to higher levels, be more gold sinks to spend money on, since you will have a lot of money available in the 'end-game'.

It would be interesting to have more realism here: In real life, you never get rich by being a hard working, law abiding, good citizen. No, criminals and con mans are the ones with the dough.

So, even if you reached high ranks in Fighters or Mages Guild, or some Knightly order, you would only get some weight behind your name, maybe a house (as in TES2) and a decent but not great salary.

But being in Thieves guild gives you acces to fences and other illegal merchants, drug cartelles, and whatnot. There you could really earn some gold, but that would of course be a bit illegal. So there's a risk to it. Houses bought with drug money could be confescated (?) by law officers. Dirty money too. And you would spend years in prison.

And killing endless number of people, stealing their money (as you pretty much do in all TES games) should also have consequences.

Edit: On artifacts and their price.

The artifacts choose to appear for some heroes, and they vanish after a while. So who the heck would buy something like that? It didn't happen in later games for some reason, but I'm hoping they fix it for TES5. One example is the Skeleton Key: a single item that makes one skill, set of items (picks) and one minigame completely useless in TES4, while it would only need a small fix: Make the item leave the owner after a month or two, or after so many uses.
The artifact should be found to be used, not for selling or displaying. One hero shouldn't be able to have his hands on more than a couple of them, and they would leave you eventually.
Or, I've been totally misunderstanding this whole thing. The Mournhold's Museum of Artifacts, for example.... Help, Lore buffs!

But there are some pieces of armor which might be very difficult to find, e.g. daedric, rare artifacts. Iron is understandable as it is a mundane metal, but daedric weaponry and armor, that is something completely different, the craft of daedric armor itself is a long, difficult, expensive and complicated process, not only requiring masterful knowledge of armory, but cooperation with daedric souls, a daedric item is essentially ebony crafted in a strange process at the time of the blood moon and completed with the binding of a daedric soul, it isn't as simple as stick a piece of daedric on it.

I don't mean to sound pessimistic, problem is that although it is a good idea, it needs a considerable amount of tweaks to be a fully solid vision. (not to mention be lore-friendly)

And to add to daedric, wouldn't repairing an enchanted item, using mundane item weaken the effective charge permanently, after all you are taking a percentage of charged material and replacing it with non-charged material.

about the deadric method its indeed hard for the deadric soul i got a easy awser buy a soul stone with a strong deadra in it but about the red moon only thing i can think about is well it is apearantly a needed power sourch to create the item but isnt it posible to mimic that power sourch? of course its must be a very hard way to optain that and also need grand master armor for it
as for leather armor its more fun to if it work that way as skins of animals will have a good use to now instead of being only selleble thing or like in morrowind alchemy stuff

Id like less leveled item drops(or none at all), so looting a great piece of armor is more unusual. Also id like some people to be veryrich, so i can break into their homes at night (i hated breaking into houses in oblivion, always got disappointed with what even the rich people had in their homes).
id also like other opportunities of making money, like starting a little business or dealing skooma perhaps? lol

Trying to repair Daedric armor from mundane Ebony would run into all of those issues, but material from another Daedric item is already infused. The repair might be considered more like a "skin graft" from one set to the next, and only a Master Armorer with some advance equipment and plenty of experience with the material would even attempt it. As for other Enchanted items, the enchantment shouldn't be affected all that much by a few small pieces added or removed.