Now Fable II, that game has too much gold.

Of course its nice to walk down a cave to know that you will find alot of tresurem but in oblivion, that was just too much tresure in 1 cave. Lvl scalin would fix this, as the bandits and maradurs wont have that uber enchanted armor. If I we to give you 1 dollar every time I found that sorcerer ring worth of 25000 gold in every playout, youll be rich!!!!!

But seriousely, I dont want expensive items to become rare, but just dont give all the enemies powerfull items, but make it feel special when you obtain a powerfull item that make you feel like you were lucky enough to find it.

There's no reason to split up the currency. The only reason it's done in the real world (ignoring various, even-less-applicable cans of worms like credit), is that gold would be too heavy to carry about. Incidentally, gold was too heavy to carry about in DF -- a problem solved by SPENDING some of that gold on a piece of paper from any bank that could be used in gold's stead with merchants. That system, I liked. But if weight isn't an issue, there's no reason to even implement that currency complication.
I don't want to have to think about how many X's all of my various Y's compose in a game. I want to know how much currency I have on me at, more or less, a glance.
What do you actually hope to gain by splitting up currency?

TES games take place in an empire, empires need taxes to pay for things. The next game should introduce taxes even sales taxes(you can get by it through black market dealers).

As stated, the problem isn't with availability of money, it's lack of meaningful ways to spend it.

One EASY way to fix the surplus of money at higher levels is to tie the cost of armor and weapon repairs to the cost of the material. You want to fix a fur gauntlet?: pretty close to free, and any shmuck who knows how to pick up a hammer and tongs can do the job. You want to fix a Daedric boot?: now you've got to find the tools, the spare parts or raw materials, and somebody capable of using them, which costs a LOT! Any lucky adventurer can find a legendary piece of equipment, but only a Noble should be able to afford to risk it getting damaged.

Another way would be to have to equip a Mercenary group or arm a Rebellion in the game. Whatever you've got to spare would go toward winning a war, of which you're only one small but significant part. You can do your part directly, but arming others to better carry out their roles in other areas could be equally important. I'm tired of these "world revolves around you" plotlines.

Building up a fortress (or walling off a town) could chew up money in vast quatities. Luxury items should be EXPENSIVE, not triple the price of a cheap equivalent, more like 100 X the cost. In OB, the difference in price between cheap clothing and fancy threads was only a few Septims. Glassware went from 1 Septim for basics to 4 or so for fine silver, not what I'd consider "expensive".

Do you know how long it would have taken me to buy it if it was 25,000?

10hrs?

You're assuming that the price of housing would increase while the monetary and economic value of the currency would remain the same.

Well, personally I don't go all out when it comes to farming gold in my games; from that perspective it's pretty balanced. I do suppose you could easily make way too much gold if you're so inclined though....

So, I'll vote that it's fairly balanced since I do not want to be forced into farming gold apart from what I make on a certain quest (I'm not much into random dungeon crawling with no purpose; dungeons get tedious fast).

Off topic: Hence I'd like Beth to further the virtual world play without the need of too much dungeon crawling. Give us more options (I loved the arena in Oblivion for instance).

Gold should be hard to come by. If it's not, then you won't value it, which totally defeats the purpose.

Risen does a pretty good job, I think. It's possble to amass a pretty big fortune, but buying potions, magic runes, armor, and high-level training will quickly drain your funds to nothing.

Either:

1) Make gold harder to come by.

Or,

2) Give the players lots of desirable and expensive items to buy off merchants (that cannot easily be stolen)

I usually have a big lack of money. Crafting own spells etc is very expensive.

the problem is not that there is too much gold in the games. Whether you have one thousand or ten thousand, it's just a number which is meaningless on its own. What matters is how well the amount of gold you have is balanced to gameplay. rewarding the player with less gold isn't going to make any difference, if the things you would spend it on also cost less. And as the games are designed right now, reducing the amount of gold players are likely to find won't make any difference, because there still isn't anything to actually spend it on, so players are still going to find themselves with greater and greater amounts of gold piling up, and nothing to spend it on. This is because you can only buy mostly lower level items, and you can usually easily find things much better than what you can buy, and things like potions and arrows which you have a limited supply of are easy enough to come by in loot, and even if you need to buy them, with all the items you likely sell, it's unlikely that you'll have any difficulty with them. Now, the game does have houses which you can't acquire by any other means, but even if you buy all of them, that makes no difference once you have them all.

Bethesda needs to balance the amount of gold you earn to the amount of gold you spend better, for one thing, there needs to be more things worth spending your gold on. More items that are actually worth buying, more WORTHWHILE services other than buying things and what not (Note the worthwhile part, meaning that there's no need for services that exist for the singular purpose of giving players something to spend gold on, if there is something players can pay for, it needs to be something they have a reason to want.) gold should also be a little harder to come by, this doesn't mean playing for hours and not finding more than a hundred coins hard, if gold is TOO hard to come by, players will feel that they're not being adequately rewarded for their actions, but you shouldn't be able to explore any dungeon and come out with ten thousand gold worth of loot, or rob one fairly easy to break into vault and make thousands of septims at a low level, finding large amounts of gold should be possible, but it should be something that players will feel quite rewarded for doing, and should allow you access to some useful items or services that are worth spending it on, and there, the bit about balancing the amount you earn to the amount you spend must once again be emphasized.

Kinda poor in MW right now. I keep blowing it all on training my skills because I am a lazy bastard. Hell, I'm not even buying equipment, just training and occasionally spells. But, I am currently a low level character. By the time I am a high level, money rains on me.

Its up to eachs playstyle. If you save every dime, make everything which is not nailed down to gold and never ever buy something you probatly end up very rich. My Oblivion balance was not that great, even WITH traders installed who are not capped/out of money I always "found" enough ways to get rid of the coin. Agreed, expensive modded-in clothing/armor & other fluff; which usually is not bought by modern days powergamers; did their part in money drain too.

Meh. I don't see the point in over-balancing the economy in a single player game. Some things you can do to balance the economy out takes away from other elements of the game.

For a character starting out in morrowind, it will probably be really hard to make money, but you'll eventually have a surplus of it once you've killed enough dremora lords and met creeper or whatever. But, if you were an experienced player starting a new character, it would be quite possible to make some good money pretty early on (finding daedric daggers to sell, repairing glass daggers, etc)

Oblivion, however, seemed like gold was never too difficult or too easy to come by. It remained too constant. You couldn't find any non-leveled items around of value (such as glass daggers or daedric stuff in morrowind) to sell, and I think this took away from the game experience, if only because it didn't make any sense that the only items that sit around in the outside world are rusty iron pieces of [censored].

Even with that system, Oblivion's economy doesn't please too many people, and in the end it still was fairly easy to make gold, but in more annoying ways than morrowind, I thought. But I don't care that much.

I like the idea of having a balanced economy, but as long as the Elder Scrolls remains single player, I don't see that much of a point, and I don't think they should sacrifice other game elements for the sake of a balanced economy. I'm fine with it as it is - or better yet, how it was in Morrowind.

The problem could be solved by costs of being wealthy. For example if you own a house full of magical items you must hire a guard and pay him weekly, or thieves will ransack your house while you are away. At level 20 there should not be a bandit population larger than the civilian population that have full glass armor. Also having to pay to maintain a Castle or fortified town would certainly be a good thing to spend on.

Raising the cost of the Imperial City waterfront shack to 25,000 Septims would have prompted me to load up a mod with affordable housing, or mod the price myself.

The game had almost NOTHING in the way of safe storage otherwise (with a couple of rare exceptions, if you can find them), so a Level 1-4 character basically has to carry everything he or she owns, until they can scraqe together 4000 Septims. Even then, you just have to dump everything on the floor until you can upgrade the place. Things like the Arena, where they assign you armor, are problematical until then if you've got to haul the gaudy and otherwise useless attire around with you. Alchemy apparatus can be bulky for a full set, especially if you've got nowhere to store most of it while out gathering herbs and other ingredients.

Morrowind had no shortage of safe storage: dropping your stuff in the street and then coming back a week later, it would still be lying there untouched. That, to me, was more than a bit unrealistic. Oblivion's guaranteed 3 day reset of everything was equally unrealistic, where you had exactly 3 days to pick up your stuff before the invisible street cleaning crew removed whatever you had left behind, and then restocked all of the crates and barrels with fresh goods. Having a CHANCE for an "unsafe" game cell to reset after a certain amount of time, increasing the longer you were away and reduced by the "risk level" of the location, would be a much better representation of the risk of leaving stuff lying around. The city streets should have an enormous "risk level", since the high number of passers-by would virtually guarantee that anything you left there would get picked up. Dungeons could have a moderate risk level, since there's always the possibility of another resident returning after you thought you'd cleared it, or fresh occupants moving in. Remote wilderness locations should be safer, where the odds of someone accidentally strolling past would be slim. Non-secure "safe" areas should almost never reset, as the odds are that nobody will attempt to burglarize the place over the short timespan of the game, but it could happen, unless you hire a guard. "Secure" areas or containers would need to be locked by the player, and would offer the only true risk-free places to store your unique items and valuables in your absence.

As for prices, 4000 for a shack is "fair", some of the better housing should have been more than it was, and there really should have been something truly "spectacular", for a spectacular fee.

An apple is worth about 2 gold so trading the value of 2000 apples for a small house seems somewhat unrealistic.

Prices in general are skewed, where "clutter" can't be made any cheaper than 1 Septim, but "mid-range" items like "Expensive" clothing or basic iron weapons are only a few Septims above that. Do you compare housing prices to apples, clothing, or armor? That Apple costs the same as, or more than, a pair of trousers or a shirt. The results vary in credibility, but this is Nirn, not Earth after all.

Maybe the answer is to inflate the prices of a lot of items to increase the spread between cheap and expensive.

you right

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For the issue:
I think in TESV betheda should make some kind of tax collector that collect every mounth maybe 10-30% of your total gold.

Not too much Gold. Too little to use it on.

When you begin the game and don't know the tricks to get money, you can be very poor. But when you reach level 30, find dozens of Glass Items everywhere and can create amazing potions, you easily get the money for multiple houses and ultimate items.

Make some things more expensive and add something expensive. Removing the 100% scaled loot fixes 99% of the problem. The rest is what Morrowind was and that was ok, in reality there are good ways to make money and eventually you are rich. That shouldn't be made impossible.

Not much of a problem.

I do believe there's too much gold - in Morrowind, for instance, I was pretty much set after raiding my first Daedric ruin. In Oblivion, actually, this wasn't as big of a problem as there weren't as many rich merchants around (or were there? I've never played without Francesco's and the related economy tweaks). Still, I definitely believe the economy has to be redone for TES V. I'm not just talking about more realistic value and fluctuating prices, I'm talking about actual merchant interaction as well.

Do you think (money aside), some simple backwater merchant who makes low-level equipment is going to accept your heavily-enchanted Glass Broadsword? Of course not. Yes, he deals in the same item classification, but this is the kind of thing I'd imagine seeking out a collector to sell too. Overall I think the *ability* to pawn off high-value items is far too easy, but I agree that the prices have to be redone.

Thirdly, we definitely need more money sinks in TES V - akin to the ships and houses in Daggerfall. I'd definitely love more things to spend (or rather, lose) money on - the random events Allstarn08 mentioned sound like good fun!

Thing is, Bethesda doesn't try to make you "an average person".
The gold situation is fine. Mods can fix things...

Morrowind has good money sinks when it came to enchanting and spellmaking. Those services were reasonably expensive, and with spellmaking it wasn't something the player could do. Enchanting was also made difficult enough (without using alchemy exploits and the like) that you were usually better off going to see an enchanter.

Well, I definitely dont want to goldfarm. Make it so that goldfarmers swim in money, if they want to. Thats probably their point.

But the ordinary player who just does quests and exploration should still have enough money for his needs.