Can someone either explain or point me in the direction of an explanation of how vendor buy/sell rates work?

I have a vendor who seems to want to sell things to me more cheaply (and pay more for things he buys from me) than other/vanilla vendors -- which is actually the exact opposite that I want it to be.

I have tried playing with faction settings, as well as using a switch after ShowBarterMenu in the diag topic (ie, "ShowBarterMenu -50" etc) -- but nothing seems to work the way I would expect it to and/or the way that some things I have read say they are supposed to.

Help?

On your NPC object, on the 'Stats' tab, what value did you give the NPC for 'Barter'?
If its low, and the players is high, then that is why they sell cheaper, would be my guess.

Also, the NPC level could have something to do with it as well.

Disposition is also a factor. If they really like you then you'll get better deals with them. If you really want them to be hard nosed, you could always try lowering their disposition towards you.

The vendor is a class VendorWeapons "Gun Merchant" (giving him Barter as his first tag skill), and has the flags set of auto-calc stats and pc level mult (with a level mult of 2.0, a calc min of 8 and calc max of 30) -- since the test save I'm using is a level 20-something with a 58 barter, that doesn't seem like it should be the issue... at my playing around with settings a bit aren't making any difference.

As it stands, the vendor is selling things at cost -- that is to say, not inflated at all. All other vendors are inflating normally, but I cannot figure out what the critical difference is when comparing him to some other vendors.

As for disposition, he is set to 35 - just like seemingly most vanilla NPCs. Tried lowering it to 0, and it made no change at all.

Are you using a dirty save game? If that NPC was 'active' in a save game you made, then all the changes you are making 'later' to that NPC will not take effect in game. The NPC is being loaded from the save game instead of the mod.
Are you using a clean save game or a dirty save game?

I -believe- it is a clean save...

More specifically - the save game I'm using, the vendor does actually exist - but in a cell that has never been initialized - ever. It is also noteworthy that there are changes that I have made which have been reflected in his prices... by changing some settings on his faction, I've been able to change it from "selling at cost" to "selling slightly above cost, but still less than other vendors".

(My control is a 20cap item -- I've changed it between him wanting to sell it to me for 20caps, vs. 28caps --- while multiple vendors in Megaton want to sell a 20cap item to me for 35caps)

Based on the fact that at least some changes have been reflected (oh, I have also changed his inventory without having to wait for a respawn), and that that cell had never been initialized in the save game, have made me think that I was "OK" on that end --- but it is a worthy point, and one that I'll pull up an earlier save game where he didn't exist and try it out just in case.

But so far, the fact that some things have impacted him and others have not, lead me to believe that I'm either changing the wrong things, or something else "funky" is going on.

Using a fully clean save didn't change the behavior I'm seeing.


I am noting one thing however -- it seems using an int after ShowBarterMenu in the diag options is actually having an effect when it is positive, but not when it is negative. (And I still cannot explain why his "default" (ie, no int) is different than what seems to be the standard with other vendors. *sigh*

Maybe the below GMST's are what you're after?

• fBarterBuyBase [GMST:000311BE]
  
• fBarterBuyMult [GMST:000311C5]
  
• fBarterSellBase [GMST:000311C6]
  
• fBarterSellMult [GMST:000311C7]

Thank you for the thought, but...

No. These effect ALL barter in the game - very much not what I want. I want only to impact this ONE single vendor.

But you could mod the values to and from their default values on-the-fly with FOSE's http://fose.silverlock.org/fose_command_doc.html#con_SetGameSetting or http://fose.silverlock.org/fose_command_doc.html#SetNumericGameSetting in your dialogue result scripts... that is if you're not opposed to requiring FOSE.

Uhh... yes, I could - and that would have a similar effect, but by no means the same effect.

Regardless, I figured out what the problem was... and it was a noob one. I was changing the parameter on ShowBartenMenu in FO3Edit (where I do most of my work). It wasn't until I went back into GECK that I realized that I had to do a recompile when changing that value. *facepalm*