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Most of us who have playing MW know that the in-game economy is broken. Money is too plentiful, and things to spend it on are too sparse. Presently, money is really only usual for three things:
1) Enchanting It requires an NPC enchanter (ie someone with a fully functional enchanting lab) to create cconstant effect item. Many people mod out this restriction to allow creation of powerful items in the field, which I think is a mistake. The extreme difficulty of enchanting high-end gear was a deliberate design decision, and a good one. Even so, enchanting tends to break the game, even if it does cost a ton of money.
2) Spellmaking You always need new spells
3) Training This is where most people spend most of thier money. The problem is that it totally kills the game. Money is so plentiful that it isn't long before you can reach any arbitrary level that you want.
Of the three items mentioned, two of them tend to be game breakers if you spend too much gold on them. That leaves us with only one "safe" money sink.
Notice that I didn't include equipment as an expense. It is only at the very beginning of the game that you have to scrimp and save for equipment. The best stuff (or even the mediocre stuff) isn't availble in stores, but is found as loot.
In fact, the best stuff is insanely easy to find. A trip to a Daedric shrine gives you enoough Daedric weapons to arm half of Oblivion.
Now, imagine if the situation were different. What if the best equipment wasn't generally available as loot, but was sold in stores? Seeing as how Daedric weapons tend to cost 50,000 septims and up, this would greatly extend the peroid of game time when saving money is a major factor in the game, which is good, because I think that the accumulation and managment of treasure is a very fun part of adventure games.
Now, what if the store inventories were randomized? You don't know which merchant, if any, actually has one of those rare Daedric items for sale. You'd have to shop around. You might actually stop and talk to some of those merchants, just to see if they have anything new. Shopping might even actually become kinda fun.
I think that all of this is possible. Inventories can be randomized by using the Rand function in conjuction with the Additem command, selecting a few items from a pre-written table. Different tables could be constructed for different types and wealth levels of merchants. The inventories could be reset one of two ways:
1) The merchant could simply delete himself every few days, and an indentical ID could be spawned in the same spot. This will clear out his entire old inventory.
2) Another series of random checks could be made, using the removeitem function. This would be much more work intensive, but might give more natural feeling results.
Now we still have the problem of the easy availabilty of high-quality gear. WormGod (of MW Advanced fame) used an elegant solution to keep treasure drops more sane. He drastically reduced that odds of Dremora and Golden Saints having Daedric gear, but gave them all access to various Bound WEapon/Armor spells. The result was that finding Deadric gear was a rare and exciting event, and the Daedra were generally more powerful (both are good things).
As for the pre-laid stuff... they could be replaced with more modest stuff, or the player could just practice a bit of self-discipline and NOT immiedieatly bee-line to Maelikishishi to get that Daedric Longbow.
Now, I'm NOT saying that I'm working on such a project. If you've been following the Sim-Manor thread, you know that my modding time is spent elsewhere. I will probably tinker with the idea occasionally to help reduce SIm-Manor burn-out (in fact, Sim-Manor will include a few travelling merchants that use the randomizing scheme described above).
Ideally, someone else will read this and decide to start work on it themselves... but I know how unlikely that is. Most modders (myself included) are too busy with thier own ideas to even consider working on someone else's.
I'm mostly just interested in feed-back on this idea. Any thoughts or refinements? Any other possible methods of restoring some balance to MW's economy?
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
But first, read the Old Sim-manor Thread!
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I would be very interested in such a mod, although I lack the skills to contribute to it. I'm currently using a mod that triples training costs, but reducing the amount of free cash would work as well, and I really like the idea of shopping around and saving up for items rather than just picking them up.
The biggest problem I see is interaction with other mods offering new weapons and armour. If I'm running Assassin's Armoury there are still going to be lots of enemies running around with glass and ebony weapons, and unless you make plugins for all the popular armory mods then you'll have to leave them switched off.
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WormGod (of MW Advanced fame) used an elegant solution to keep treasure drops more sane. He drastically reduced that odds of Dremora and Golden Saints having Daedric gear, but gave them all access to various Bound WEapon/Armor spells. The result was that finding Deadric gear was a rare and exciting event, and the Daedra were generally more powerful (both are good things).
Is this available as a seperate mod?
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Kain_II
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Acolyte
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i think this is a great idea. i mean, who would really leave such valuable items lying around? also, random merchants would also be good. but it can be dont alot easyer. you just make a crate or barral where the merchant keeps his items and put a lvled list item in there with all the same lvls on it and it will randomly chose one. so you put many random items in a box and make the owner of the box the merchant. this would be good because you could find a rare item in a shop one day and, if you dont buy it then and there, someone else could get to it first.
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~~Kain Okaw~~
Strategy Morrowind -
www.freewebs.com/strategy_morrowind
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Badger: In cases where another mod adds powerful weapons, the player will have to practice self-discipline. But really, anyone who uses a mod to reduce the frequency of powerful items will probably not balk at passing over power gear offered up by other mods.
Since you mentioned training... I've always thought that a good change to the training system would be to set it so that each trainer can be used only once (or prehaps once per skill, but that'd be harder to detect). This way, trainers are still a powerful and useful resource, but aren't the god-makers that they are now.
Kain:  Why didn't I think of that? A leveled list would be both better and easier! The contents could then be regularly reset by "flicker deleting" the barrel. Additionally, this way it wouldn't alter the merchants, which reduces conflicts.
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
But first, read the Old Sim-manor Thread!
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Since you mentioned training... I've always thought that a good change to the training system would be to set it so that each trainer can be used only once (or prehaps once per skill, but that'd be harder to detect). This way, trainers are still a powerful and useful resource, but aren't the god-makers that they are now.
The way I like training is to build up weak skills so I can start actually using them, and thus increase them normally. So I'd just reduce the maximum skill of all NPC trainers to 40. But I think training should be handled in a seperate mod, with Economy just doing money and items.
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Badger: In cases where another mod adds powerful weapons, the player will have to practice self-discipline. But really, anyone who uses a mod to reduce the frequency of powerful items will probably not balk at passing over power gear offered up by other mods.
But if I see a glass parrying wakizashi lying on the ground I want to be able to grab it, not go out-of-character and make a decision about whether it's right for me to have it at this stage. But now that I think about it if I don't use the Armoury levelled list (use the Economy one instead), all I'll have to do is add the new items to various merchants myself so I can buy them, but won't find them lying around.
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Lord_Athius
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Hi all,
A couple of ideas and thoughts from the new guy:
Training might simply be moded to take the amount of TIME that it should. There is no way that you should be able to go from being a longsword moron (rating 05) to Szarin (perhaps the greatest sword deulist in history) in 180 hours of practice and training. The time scale is more what's broke here than the monetary scale.
An option might be a mod that allows you to train normally, but only implements the training increase after enough time has passed. Perhaps one game hour per incremental stat increase.
ie: to increase from a skill rating of 37 to a skill rating of 38 would take 37 game hours.
Sure, you'd still get people training and then sleeping for a month, but the kind that does that wouldn't want or be using such a mod any way.
As to money in Morrowind; spot on, the economy is broke. Instead though of having every Tom, Dick and Harry out there with Daedric armor, even in the Daedric ruins, why not a mod that reasigns the armor already present in the game based on "threat level" of the NPC. Low threat NPC's, who wouldn't logicly have the gear they're carrying anyway, get lower end gear, while people who have the kind of gear that matters are insanely tough to begin with. If you see a guy in Daedric armor and you're under 20th level, RUN, do not walk, to the nearest exit.
Making the rare and powerful armors rare as well as powerful would go a LONG way to fixing one of the major problems. The Indy Banking mods, with the limiting factors it installs, are also wonderful. Making all those bloody coins WEIGH something was brilliant!
There are also mods that enforce sleeping, eating and drinking requirements. Again, these are brilliant mods that extend the neccesary time to complete the game and make it far more fun and challenging.
The first time I played Morrowind (about 15 months ago) I had defeated Dagoth Ur and destroyed the uber robot at level 14 on day 47. THAT sucked big time. The mods can make make things far more immersive and if a mod can be put together to do some of the above mentioned items, the best RPG on the market becomes far and away the best RPG on the market.
Herroditus
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Halius, the Emporer is a more extrordinary man than you think. He somehow foresaw this and then, unlike many another of his ilk, he selflessly acted to preserve not the Empire and the power of the Empire, but rather the people of the Morrowind and the Empire as a whole.
Lord Herroditus Athius,
Protector of Morrowind
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_TaddeuS_
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Adept
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Well, fixing Morrowind economy is exactly what I'm trying to do with my balancing mods. They are 2 (one for weapons and one for armors). You can find the thread of the armor one here, or follow the link to my site in the signature to get more infos (and eventually the mods  ).
From my point of view, in Morrowind not only economy but also difficulty are broken.
- Economy because you can find rare and precious items pretty easily, making you rich after 2 days on Vvardenfell.
- Difficulty because with such items your character can become a semi-god with ease...
My 2 mods try to solve the 2 problems at once, balancing both the power and the cost of weapons and armors. The interesting thing is that this way the weapons/armors prices become comparable to those of the other items in game and also with training costs... So hopefully no more power leveling...
Here I read some interesting thoughts, like the chance of giving several rare items to merchants (like it was in Daggerfall!!). Well, I think I can do this. And I can also try to remove some of the power items/armors from leveled lists thruogh the game.
Let me know what you think and if you have any idea to suggest me!
Just a little info. I'm working on other 2 balancing mods: one for alchemy (based on Srikandi's Alchemy but with a number changes and improvements) and one for miscellaneous objects.
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Italians Mod it Better!!!
Homepage: Taddeus & Nymeria Internet Hideout
REL thread: Necessities of Morrowind 2.0
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There has been some discussion on this previously.
There are some relatively simple fixes.
1) Increase the speechcraft and Mercantile skills of all trading NPCs. Have you noticed how 'traders' and 'pawnbrokers' charge more for their goods, and pay less for yours? This is why, both of these classes have high mercantile. The high speechcraft has the effect of making it harder to increase the disposition rating, which also has quite an effect on prices offered and paid. This would make the early part of the game much harder - I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets his cash in the early stages by stealing and selling everything that comes to light. I dont think I've ever left Seyda Neen with less than 1500 gold in my pocket and a full suit of armour.
The net effect is that you really have to barter for goods and services, and that faction traders of the same faction as yourself are the only real means of selling stuff for a reasonable price.
2) Add a weight factor to gold. I know that some mods do this already, but if gold weighed 0.01, then you simply couldnt carry that much gold around with you. 1000 Gold would give you an encumbrabce of 10, 10,000 an encumbrance of 100. What do you drop? That daedric battle axe or all your gold? If you do manage to sell some daedric loot, you'd have to leave your gold behind....
3) Random hostile 'robber' NPCs can be created and placed in game, both in cities and wilderness areas, who are effectively levelled by the amount of gold the player is carrying. The more gold, the tougher the NPC. These could even be set as 'sleep creatures', or added to the relevant lists.
4) The levelled lists of daedric tombs should be more effectively weighted as has been mentioned, or the daedra themselves toughened up considerably.
5) Script the fast travel NPCs so that travel is offered via script with the prices set much higher, perhpas 10 times as high as at present.
It has always struck me a bizarre that by the time the player reaches about Level 15 they are the richest person on the planet - hardly the homeless poor orphan that the storyline calls for!
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maxpublic
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The easiest way to fix this involves three steps:
- reduce the maximum skill level of master trainers, and increase the cost of training. In my own mod I reduced the skill of master trainers to 75 (and many of them require that you belong to a specific faction), and increased the training cost by a factor of 10.
- change the drop tables so that expensive items don't show up as often as they do now.
- most importantly of all, change the pricing for enchanted and magical items. I did this and the effects on the game are dramatic; for example, my daedric items are 1/10 the cost of the vanilla game. That 50,000 gold bow is now worth just 5,000 gold - and with training costs 10x the vanilla cost, that 5,000 gold will be gone after two or three points of training....
The only objection I can see to this system is that daedric and other enchanted items might be too easy to purchase. But IIRC, no daedric or unique items are for sale to merchants, unless you yourself sold them in the first place. So this is a moot point.
In any event, I've been using this for quite some time, and it works rather well. It's easier to fix the economy by cutting the insane prices of magic items rather than going at it from the other end.
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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One idea I had recently for economy balancing came while I was playing System Shock 2. In Morrowind, you find a weapon that's better than your current one, throw the old one away, and easily repair the new one if it should degrade/break. It's only really necessary to have one good weapon.
In System Shock 2, things are a bit different. Weapons degrade quickly, and if you don't have the points to spend on the Maintenance skill, you're sol if your weapon breaks. And even if you do have Maintenance, you need a disposable maintenance tool which can be in short supply.
The end effect of this is that throughout the game I was usually carrying at least 4 pistols and 3 shotguns in various stages of disrepair so that if I got especially unlucky and 2 of my weapons broke in a single fight, I'd have something left to fall back on.
The following changes would bring that kind of situation to Morrowind, I think:
- Increase Repair costs at merchants by a factor of 10x-100x.
- Increase armorer tool costs by a factor of 5x-10x, and possibly make them weigh more.
- Make it so armorer tools respawn in merchant inventories more slowly.
- Make weapons degrade faster.
The end result of those changes would be significant. The armorer skill would actually be useful. Finding another Daedric weapon wouldn't just be an easy-cash moment, it'd be a thank-god-I-have-a-backup-weapon one. Plus, you might not want to waste degrading your Daedric weapon when you come across a not-so-tough opponent, so by falling back to a weaker weapon it'd be a more interesting fight.
I imagine it would take a lot of playtesting to get such a system balanced well. If anyone's interested in trying, drop me a PM/email when you're done so I can try it out. 
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It's easier to fix the economy by cutting the insane prices of magic items rather than going at it from the other end.
Max
Fix it from both ends and its really fixed
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Tanit
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Acolyte
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Quote:
One idea I had recently for economy balancing came while I was playing System Shock 2. In Morrowind, you find a weapon that's better than your current one, throw the old one away, and easily repair the new one if it should degrade/break. It's only really necessary to have one good weapon.
In System Shock 2, things are a bit different. Weapons degrade quickly, and if you don't have the points to spend on the Maintenance skill, you're sol if your weapon breaks. And even if you do have Maintenance, you need a disposable maintenance tool which can be in short supply.
The end effect of this is that throughout the game I was usually carrying at least 4 pistols and 3 shotguns in various stages of disrepair so that if I got especially unlucky and 2 of my weapons broke in a single fight, I'd have something left to fall back on.
This is actually quite curious when you think about it. It's extremely unlikely that a pistol or shotgun would break during the course of a combat - jam temporarily perhaps but not break completely. I would consider this behaviour in a game to be some sort of contrived balancing mechanism (4 pistols, 3 shotguns!). It doesn't reflect reality.
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The following changes would bring that kind of situation to Morrowind, I think:
- Increase Repair costs at merchants by a factor of 10x-100x.
- Increase armorer tool costs by a factor of 5x-10x, and possibly make them weigh more.
- Make it so armorer tools respawn in merchant inventories more slowly.
- Make weapons degrade faster.
The end result of those changes would be significant. The armorer skill would actually be useful. Finding another Daedric weapon wouldn't just be an easy-cash moment, it'd be a thank-god-I-have-a-backup-weapon one. Plus, you might not want to waste degrading your Daedric weapon when you come across a not-so-tough opponent, so by falling back to a weaker weapon it'd be a more interesting fight.
The problem in changing items as suggested above it that it really breaks other things in trying to arrive at a fix. For instance: why should armorer's tools cost 5-10x more? They are relatively simple items in an armor economy and shouldn't be rare by any means due to supply and demand. Why should they weigh more? They represent an item that weighs X. Artificially inflating the weight to Y is unrealistic in the physical world.
It seems to me that weapons degrade fast enough in the game as it is. What is weapon degradation? It may possibly be one of three things with an edged weapon - blunted, bent or broken. In the first case, anyone that uses such a weapon with skill would keep it sharp with a file or whetstone. In the second case, one could probably repair it to varying degrees with one's boot. In either case, the armorer skill should apply. The third case would be difficult to fix In any case, if you increase the rate at which a weapon degrades, you then get the disposable weapon. It degrades so quickly that you throw it away rather than giving it a name and keeping it as an heirloom for your children.
I would think that - and I'm not sure that the game doesn't do this already - that weapons should degrade based upon the quality of the item. If you have a cheap sword, it should nick and bend around someones head rather easily. The better items should last longer and I see no reason for enchanted items not to remain at 100% indefinitely (it's magic!). Perhaps eternal sharpness can be a spell?
Bethesda's economy model has been discussed since day one with a myriad of suggestions on how to fix it. Achieving a good fix without seriously distorting other factors is extremely difficult. I guess that it depends upon what you regard as being important as opposed to the next person. I would recommend stepping back and taking a "realistic" view of how things operate in the real world before making changes in physics/weight/value etc. Just my .02
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- most importantly of all, change the pricing for enchanted and magical items. I did this and the effects on the game are dramatic; for example, my daedric items are 1/10 the cost of the vanilla game. That 50,000 gold bow is now worth just 5,000 gold - and with training costs 10x the vanilla cost, that 5,000 gold will be gone after two or three points of training....
Actually, the selling price of magical gear has never bothered me. The wealthierst merchants have around 1500 gold, so the 50,000 septim price tag is only relevant when trying to buy something. In MW, the economy is a buyer's market, and you must sell items based on what the merchant is able to pay, not on the market value of the item.
If you use Creeper or the Mudcrab merchant, this is no longer true, but these two guys don't fit the lore, don't make any sense, don't follow the normal rules for Mercantile, and make all other merchants irrelelvant. They are clearly Easter eggs thrown in as a private joke by one of the devs, and not "real" parts of the game. I never use them... and even then, I find myself swimming in cash.
The reason why I'm more interested in making expensive things available for purchse, rather than making sellable goods cheaper, is because currently, there's precious little to spend your gold on, anyway. If the only semi-reliable way to aquire a set of Daedric or Glass was to amass several hundred thousand septims and agressively shop around, money would take on a whole new meaning.
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
But first, read the Old Sim-manor Thread!
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maxpublic
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Disciple
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Actually, the selling price of magical gear has never bothered me. The wealthierst merchants have around 1500 gold, so the 50,000 septim price tag is only relevant when trying to buy something. In MW, the economy is a buyer's market, and you must sell items based on what the merchant is able to pay, not on the market value of the item.
Actually, this isn't true. Creeper and the Mudcrab make merchant transactions less painful, but you can do the exact same thing with any merchant in the game. When I first started playing I discovered that I couldn't get full value for many of the things I collected, and at the time I didn't know about Creeper or the Mudcrab. My solution was what I term "the swap 'n sell": I sold items that were within the price range of the merchant, rested until the merchant regenerated gold, repeat, wash, rinse, etc; then, when the merchant had enough of these items I sold the daedric whatever and at the same time bought all of these items back. Then I resold them to the merchant again. In the end I figured I got 60-70% of the gold I would've gotten had I been able to sell the daedric thingymajig straight off, but when you have a weapon worth 50,000 gold, getting 30,000-35,000 gold for it will still buy you quite a few levels in the game.
The problem isn't solved with merchant gold limits; in reality, the merchants have no gold limits. The 'limits', such as they are, just make the whole transaction process more of a pain in the ass. Lowering the available gold or increasing regeneration time does nothing to solve the problem; it only makes it * even more* of a pain in the ass, and the game that much less fun to play.
In my own game I reduced the price of magical items and increased the amount of gold available to merchants. So if I hit an armorer in Balmora I can indeed sell that 5,000 gold item in one transaction - no more swap 'n sell - but I can no longer buy several levels off this one transaction. The end result from my modifications is two-fold: gold is now in short supply, and a single item won't buy you one level, much less a half-dozen of them.
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The reason why I'm more interested in making expensive things available for purchse, rather than making sellable goods cheaper, is because currently, there's precious little to spend your gold on, anyway.
And that is why you reduce the amount of the gold in the game. Vanilla Morrowind is a Monty Haul-style giveaway; the only way to fix that is to remove the Monty Haul-ism. Do that and you'll find yourself constantly short of gold, not having more than you know what to do with.
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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Lingon
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Initiate
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WormGod (of MW Advanced fame) used an elegant solution to keep treasure drops more sane. He drastically reduced that odds of Dremora and Golden Saints having Daedric gear, but gave them all access to various Bound WEapon/Armor spells. The result was that finding Deadric gear was a rare and exciting event, and the Daedra were generally more powerful (both are good things).
This is acutally agood idea. But maybe it could be combined with having a deadric blacksmith able to create the items for you. They would be expensive and require some very special materials.
And maybe have deadras drop material fragments instead of full items
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”Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”-- (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)
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Creeper and the Mudcrab make merchant transactions less painful, but you can do the exact same thing with any merchant in the game. When I first started playing I discovered that I couldn't get full value for many of the things I collected, and at the time I didn't know about Creeper or the Mudcrab. My solution was what I term "the swap 'n sell": I sold items that were within the price range of the merchant, rested until the merchant regenerated gold, repeat, wash, rinse, etc; then, when the merchant had enough of these items I sold the daedric whatever and at the same time bought all of these items back. Then I resold them to the merchant again. In the end I figured I got 60-70% of the gold I would've gotten had I been able to sell the daedric thingymajig straight off, but when you have a weapon worth 50,000 gold, getting 30,000-35,000 gold for it will still buy you quite a few levels in the game.
The problem isn't solved with merchant gold limits; in reality, the merchants have no gold limits. The 'limits', such as they are, just make the whole transaction process more of a pain in the ass. Lowering the available gold or increasing regeneration time does nothing to solve the problem; it only makes it * even more* of a pain in the ass, and the game that much less fun to play.
I am aware of this work-around. However, I don't think of this as a "feature" of the game so much as an unintended consquence of how the barter system works. The merchants are supposed to have purchasing limits. Some of the devs have even said so. The idea was that you could sell items for 1500-2000, tops, but purchasing a specific item would still be expensive.
Selling a single Daedric Dai-Katana nets about 120,000 at full price. That's enough to reach about level 30-40 in one swoop. I can't believe that the game was intended to work that way. If you abide by the gold caps on the merchants, such a sale lets you buy a few training sessions, which is more reasonable.
I understand what you're saying about lowering prices... but I want a game where purchasing items is a major factor in gameplay, just like in Daggerfall. Reducing the amount of gold in game is only half the cure... there needs to be something worth spending it on so that the tightened economy creates interesting and difficult choices for the player.
I'm glad that a healthy discussion has started up here. One thing that is clear is that there are so many popular playstyles that a single "definitive" fix will never be possible (not that I thought that would turn out to be the case).
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
But first, read the Old Sim-manor Thread!
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PPK
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Hotfusion3,
I admire your attempts to fathom a decent way to fix the economy in Morrowind. Much like my recent post about my "Hardcore Ruleset" mod there are so many subtle and or huge differences in opinion that it is difficult to balance everything to suit a wide range of people.
One of my pet peeves about the traders in Morrowind is that they always carry the same stock, so a mod which randomised things a little in this area would be great ! After all, there must be other brave adventurers somewhere (hypothetically of course) who are collecting unusual loot & selling it at various outlets. It would be fun to stroll into Arrilles tradehouse for some arrows and find something interesting. Maybe you could add a dialogue topic to traders called "Recent Additions" or "Special Items" that checks a players mercantile/speechcraft/reputation to see if that trader is willing to reveal what he keeps in his special drawer/backroom ?!? Just a thought. (it would be as funny as hell to bribe a trader say 400g and he shows you his special goods - gold encrusted linen gloves with a skill drain on them  )
Training = Im trying to fix training in my mod. Ive got it working so that paying for training increases a skill temporarily, it is up to the character to make the most of this increase and gain "real" skillpoints (i.e. permanent changes) by practicing the skills out in the wilderness. This happens to add a new dimension to the game as well where you can train your character's skills before venturing on a particularly nasty quest. Hey, if I was gonna go and raid a Daedric Shrine I would definitely go and seek some training just to give me confidence (what a coward I am, hehe).
Good luck with the development of your ideas,
PPK
Edited by PPK (06/09/04 04:06 PM)
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maxpublic
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Disciple
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The merchants are supposed to have purchasing limits. Some of the devs have even said so.
Perhaps so, but they don't. If you rely on players to police themselves then you don't need to fix anything at all; these players won't use Creeper or the Mudcrab, nor will they use the swap 'n sell - problem solved. No mod needed.
But if you're like me and rather it were actually fixed, then you'll want to go beyond self-policing. This I did and it works, and it works well. Or as well as it can, given that the coded barter system itself is broken and doesn't work as it should.
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I understand what you're saying about lowering prices... but I want a game where purchasing items is a major factor in gameplay, just like in Daggerfall.
You can have both. These aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I also have this as well, since merchants in my game sell all sorts of items that I, personally, want to purchase. Not just weapons, armor, potions, enchantable rings, etc., but also a couple of thousand different types of clothes, furniture, wall hangings, and even homes. By lowering the amount of gold in the game I can't buy everything I want, or even close to it; I have to make choices as to what I want, and when I want it. I never did get around to collecting the 1.2 million gold it would've taken to buy the castle I plopped down in the Grazelands, even after becoming the Nerevarine - the gold went to other, more immediately useful things.
And only the gods know how much it would've cost to furnish the thing. :-)
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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This is actually quite curious when you think about it. It's extremely unlikely that a pistol or shotgun would break during the course of a combat - jam temporarily perhaps but not break completely. I would consider this behaviour in a game to be some sort of contrived balancing mechanism (4 pistols, 3 shotguns!). It doesn't reflect reality.
Actually, it is referred to as jamming rather than breaking in SS2. However, I'm personally far more interested in gameplay than in reality. Right now the economy of Morrowind is broken to such a degree that I have no desire to play it, so any solution is preferable to nothing.
The further advantage is that modifying on the repair end makes the system apply universally to all weapons and armor. Changing armor/weapon stats manually works great until you add in 100+ mods with their own custom armors/weapons.
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maxpublic
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Disciple
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The further advantage is that modifying on the repair end makes the system apply universally to all weapons and armor. Changing armor/weapon stats manually works great until you add in 100+ mods with their own custom armors/weapons.
And I gotta tell ya, if weapons/armor were any easier to degrade I wouldn't use the mod. Based on my own personal experience I went the other way and made them much harder to degrade (Morrowind's weapons and armor must be made from soft aluminum!). While it might help - somewhat - to balance the economy, it makes no logical sense at all. Hard armor can take one hell of a beating without losing any effectiveness, and unless a sword actually breaks a whetstone and time will fix just about any other damage it might take.
BTW, swords usually don't deform, if they're made of steel. They'll more likely break before becoming permanently bent. One of the benefits of steel over iron is that it's more flexible and far less likely to deform or shatter.
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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Tanit
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Acolyte
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And I gotta tell ya, if weapons/armor were any easier to degrade I wouldn't use the mod. Based on my own personal experience I went the other way and made them much harder to degrade (Morrowind's weapons and armor must be made from soft aluminum!). While it might help - somewhat - to balance the economy, it makes no logical sense at all. Hard armor can take one hell of a beating without losing any effectiveness, and unless a sword actually breaks a whetstone and time will fix just about any other damage it might take.
BTW, swords usually don't deform, if they're made of steel. They'll more likely break before becoming permanently bent. One of the benefits of steel over iron is that it's more flexible and far less likely to deform or shatter.
Max
I agree with you entirely. The bending would refer to soft iron/copper/bronze weapons. I had in mind an ancient story of when the Gauls with their long slashing swords first fought the Romans. Their soft iron swords supposedly bent and had to be straightened by their owners with their feet during combat (as told by the Romans of course). This of course would limit the options in weapon degradation to two: 1. Nicks easily fixed by the owner. 2. Catastrophic failure (shades of the Shards of Narsil...)
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There are some really excellent ideas here. If I had the spare time, I'd implement a few.
Here are a couple of mine too.
1) Pickpockets. Not muggers, since any decent player will have no trouble (or perhaps reload if they do) fending off one of those. A pickepocket would spawn in towns/cities (some distance behind the player I suggest), and then approach the player. Once inside a certain distance some gold or certain items would automatically be removed from the inventory (or perhaps add a failure chance dependant on certain factors), and the pickpocket runs off.
Pickpockets could be levelled quite easily.... a higher level pickpocket would spawn nearer the player (increasing chance of steal), be able to run faster, and possibly have some degree of chameleon or invisibility too.
The level of pickpocket a player experiences could be dependant on a number of factors... how big the settlement is, how well-dressed the players is (a rich-looking target draws attention), or how often the player has successfully been pickpocketed before (news of an easy victim spreads).
2) Training failure. A similar concept to increasing training times, but with a random element to make things that bit more realistic. Essentially, the higher a skill, the more likely a training session would be to fail. Combined with higher costs at higher skills already in place, this could very effectively prevent abuse of training as the cost would increase exponentially.
Since stealing is the easiest way for a player to gain gold and items, it makes sense that it should be an easy way to lose things too. I can't really think of any scriptable way to have players 'homes' raided, ir items left in the street dissapear, but pickpockets are a definite possbility. Very tempted to go write a pickpocket mod now....
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LichCraft 0.95 beta - discussion thread
Homepage and download link
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I'll see if I can knock up a quick tech demo esp over the next day or so, along the lines discussed here : altering some game settings, altering the stock levels at Arilles to be more random, altering his mercantile and speechcraft, altering the price for training, spells, spellmaking and fast travel...maybe set Wayn in the fighters guild up too to check that the training increase is implemented.
Will let you know how its coming along
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Sheez
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I have to say that I agree with some of the general ideas presented here. Morrowind's economy does tend to be broken, as far as the characters obtaining far too many septims and having too little to spend it on. Having completed the side-quest for Aegis Keep and now exploring that, I find the costs necessary in creating and maintaning a stronghold to be realistic, if pocket-straining at times. If a mod were created where the character's cost of housing wasn't floated by their particular house, then that could aid in the balancing issue. I also like the idea that a creature such as a dremora or a golden saint would disappear with its weapons. If the armor of a saint can fade back with it into the outer realm areas, then why not its weapon and shield as well? The same thinking goes for Dremora and pretty much all atronachs. The only real way then to obtain a daedric item would be to either make it or quest for it. (Mod idea's anyone?) That would mean that each weapon would be special, and less likely to be sold. Even allowing the character to name and/or customize the blade or weapon of choice would help. If consorting with the Abyss and its denizens was the price of Daedric weaponry, then it would be a more carefully approached choice, as opposed to the mentality mentioned above where the character runs towards the nearest shrine to get the best weapon he or she can wield in the game.
However, with these limits, one also has to look at the other so called money sinks. If Daedric weapons are nixed to the general populous, and ebony is about as good as most folk can get assuming they have the money or skill to defear someone with the weapon, then enchaning becomes a less money-consuming skill, as the players will have less money to enchant the things they want. Not saying that this necessarily has to lower to ridiculous standards, however with the lowered economic capacity of the character, there still need to be some things that they have access to, at least a reasonable amount of the time.
I guess that's about as much as I've got, will likely respond later though.
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Tanit
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Acolyte
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However, I'm personally far more interested in gameplay than in reality. Right now the economy of Morrowind is broken to such a degree that I have no desire to play it, so any solution is preferable to nothing.
The further advantage is that modifying on the repair end makes the system apply universally to all weapons and armor. Changing armor/weapon stats manually works great until you add in 100+ mods with their own custom armors/weapons.
Ha Aerelorn! It's just a question of outlook and what you personally want from the game. My current character is around level 70 and I have always enjoyed the exploration end and helping PWP's/PIT's (People With Problems/People In Trouble) more than anything else. I only recently completed Tribunal and have yet to complete Bloodmoon.
After a certain point, the economy ceased to be important to me as I achieved the wealth that I desired to free me from the drudgery of a hand-to-mouth existence. I can live a well-deserved philanthropic lifestyle and go adventuring as I choose. I no longer care if I can get the best deal from a merchant and that the mercantile skill is supposedly broken. I do, as a matter of principle make sure that I get the item for slightly less than asking price  This is fun to me.
What are your goals in the game? My goal is usually to acquire enough cash (legally) to become independent so that I can then REALLY start adventuring. I make the money within the framework of the game - irritating at times but a necessary step to get where I'm going. I don't really regard this as being fun. As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather have a rich uncle leave me his estate so I can skip this. In fact, I may start my next character off with some of my current items added through the console. A cheat? You could regard it as your rich relative leaving you some treasured family heirlooms (Cuirass of the Saviour's Hide!).
If you regard the economy as broken, why not just take the rich uncle route once and go adventuring? Less stress that way and perhaps you'd get your $$$ worth from the game.
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What are your goals in the game? My goal is usually to acquire enough cash (legally) to become independent so that I can then REALLY start adventuring. I make the money within the framework of the game - irritating at times but a necessary step to get where I'm going. I don't really regard this as being fun. As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather have a rich uncle leave me his estate so I can skip this. In fact, I may start my next character off with some of my current items added through the console. A cheat? You could regard it as your rich relative leaving you some treasured family heirlooms (Cuirass of the Saviour's Hide!).
If you regard the economy as broken, why not just take the rich uncle route once and go adventuring? Less stress that way and perhaps you'd get your $$$ worth from the game.
Well, there's a lot more impeding my enjoyment of the game than just the economy. But my basic goal is exploration. I like finding nifty new items. I like increasing my character's power through the use of a great deal of effort. That works fine for the first dozen levels. Money is scarce, my equipment is subpar, I'm running out of arrows, and I'm not sure if I'll make it out of the next tomb alive.
That all changes really quickly by the time I hit level 15-20. I've got tons of high-end equipment and all the money necessary to enchant it so that it's more powerful than anything else. Sure there are mods that will make the enemies harder so it's not a cakewalk, but there's nothing left to find out there in the world. I generally end up stopping about then.
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maxpublic
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That all changes really quickly by the time I hit level 15-20. I've got tons of high-end equipment and all the money necessary to enchant it
One of the things I discovered when I started on the first version of Morrowind Redux (initially an effort to fix the spell system, as discussed in 'Balancing Spells') was that so many things in Morrowind are interconnected it's very difficult to change one thing without affecting - and requiring changes as well to - quite a few others.
Pricing is one of these things. It's a very, very big thing since money can buy levels - a secondary effect that can further be corrected by reducing training skills and increasing the cost of training. But then you also have the problem of having enough gold to enchant anything - which means you need to correct the enchanting system so that players can't buy uber-items made to order. Not to mention the potion system so they can't use the 'ash yam' exploit to enchant those items themselves. And while we're at it let's correct the weirdness in spell making, the oddities in armor and weapon prices, and hell, let's just replace the in-game merchant system (which doesn't work because Mercantile doesn't work) with a scripted equivalent....
It's a line of dominoes. To correct the exploits and make the game challenging right up to the end you have to knock the first one over and let it lead where it will. Unfortunately, the end result is my current version of Morrowind Redux - something entirely incompatible with just about every mod in existence unless I tweak them to work with Redux first.
Not that I mind. I'm a modder, I can adapt anything. :-) But the point is you can't just correct discrete elements for most things in Morrowind. Because, as you quickly realize, these elements aren't in fact discrete at all.
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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Tanit
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Well, there's a lot more impeding my enjoyment of the game than just the economy. But my basic goal is exploration. I like finding nifty new items. I like increasing my character's power through the use of a great deal of effort. That works fine for the first dozen levels. Money is scarce, my equipment is subpar, I'm running out of arrows, and I'm not sure if I'll make it out of the next tomb alive.
That all changes really quickly by the time I hit level 15-20. I've got tons of high-end equipment and all the money necessary to enchant it so that it's more powerful than anything else. Sure there are mods that will make the enemies harder so it's not a cakewalk, but there's nothing left to find out there in the world. I generally end up stopping about then.
Ah, I see now. It's pretty much the same old thing in the exploration of the island if you've done it multiple times. Same places, same quests. That essentially comes with beating the game. What you might consider and what I've chosen to do is accept my current role at level 70 as "Protector of Vvardenfell" and go investigating new mods or adventures that people make. I sometimes dress in normal but stylish clothes and take only a dagger for self-protection and find that this adds a huge challenge for me -especially on Solstheim.
I just find walking through Lady E's forest to be a feast for the eyes and the various graphic upgrades have made Vvardenfell truly lovely to wander around. I like running into various people that Neoptolemus has added. I like seeing the people added in taverns by GhanBuriGhan.There are so many cool things to see as opposed to challenges to overcome.
Actually, I found that after beating the main quest the first time, the second time isn't half as entertaining and would be even less likely a third time so I make my own entertainment by becoming a resident of Vvardenfell and sort of role-playing. As I said I live a life of leisure and occasionally venture out when a new adventure beckons or a new weapon is discovered. You might try just playing out to as high a level as you can stomach and then retire for awhile! Try choosing a simple home that's right for you, fill it with things that you value and just pop into the game for a quick adventure when one shows up on your doorstep thanks to all the wonderful modders out there! You'll probably get more mileage from the game and enjoy it as it is - or you may not if challenges are your modus operandi. HTH
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One of the things I discovered when I started on the first version of Morrowind Redux (initially an effort to fix the spell system, as discussed in 'Balancing Spells') was that so many things in Morrowind are interconnected it's very difficult to change one thing without affecting - and requiring changes as well to - quite a few others.
Pricing is one of these things. It's a very, very big thing since money can buy levels - a secondary effect that can further be corrected by reducing training skills and increasing the cost of training. But then you also have the problem of having enough gold to enchant anything - which means you need to correct the enchanting system so that players can't buy uber-items made to order. Not to mention the potion system so they can't use the 'ash yam' exploit to enchant those items themselves. And while we're at it let's correct the weirdness in spell making, the oddities in armor and weapon prices, and hell, let's just replace the in-game merchant system (which doesn't work because Mercantile doesn't work) with a scripted equivalent....
It's a line of dominoes. To correct the exploits and make the game challenging right up to the end you have to knock the first one over and let it lead where it will. Unfortunately, the end result is my current version of Morrowind Redux - something entirely incompatible with just about every mod in existence unless I tweak them to work with Redux first.
Not that I mind. I'm a modder, I can adapt anything. :-) But the point is you can't just correct discrete elements for most things in Morrowind. Because, as you quickly realize, these elements aren't in fact discrete at all.
Actually, one of the 3 characters I had a lot of fun with used Morrowind Redux. It was also the only one of my characters to ever use magic, because it was actually useful under Redux. You're right about the incompatibilities though, that's what made me stop using it.
However, I'm wondering now how many of those could be solved with some external programming. If you have a formula worked out to give a good value for a weapon based on ac/wc/enchantments/etc, it'd be fairly trivial to write a program to rewrite all your selected mods with new armor/weapon values. That'd get rid of one obstacle anyways.
It's been so long since I played either Redux or MW that I can't remember what the other incompatibilities were, or if they could be dealt with in a similar way.
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Ah, I see now. It's pretty much the same old thing in the exploration of the island if you've done it multiple times. Same places, same quests. That essentially comes with beating the game. What you might consider and what I've chosen to do is accept my current role at level 70 as "Protector of Vvardenfell" and go investigating new mods or adventures that people make. I sometimes dress in normal but stylish clothes and take only a dagger for self-protection and find that this adds a huge challenge for me -especially on Solstheim.
I just find walking through Lady E's forest to be a feast for the eyes and the various graphic upgrades have made Vvardenfell truly lovely to wander around. I like running into various people that Neoptolemus has added. I like seeing the people added in taverns by GhanBuriGhan.There are so many cool things to see as opposed to challenges to overcome.
Well, the challenges are what I really like so that doesn't work for me.
However, the problem isn't that I've been everywhere before(in point of fact, I've never gotten around to beating the game). If I were to replay this very instant I could explore the same areas again and have fun for about 10 hours or so...then I'm suddenly rich and powerful and I end up bored. There are artificial ways to make it take longer, but they end up making the game into a chore rather than extending the series of challenges.
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Tanit
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Well, the challenges are what I really like so that doesn't work for me.
However, the problem isn't that I've been everywhere before(in point of fact, I've never gotten around to beating the game). If I were to replay this very instant I could explore the same areas again and have fun for about 10 hours or so...then I'm suddenly rich and powerful and I end up bored. There are artificial ways to make it take longer, but they end up making the game into a chore rather than extending the series of challenges.
Sorry if I find this interesting but I've never arrived at this point in the game. Have you considered that you are now in the position of "Umbra"? Seeing as you are a modder, this would be a fascinating thing to play out for other people to enjoy. You are now the "UberSoldat" with no equal. There are no warriors in all of Vvardenfell that can test your mettle. You weary of life and long for a challenger to come to release you from your hellish existence.
Are you so powerful at 20th level that none are your equal? This could make for an interesting quest with your named character being the object for others to interact with. Why, I'd come looking for you if you truly wanted to die and were a boastful sort!
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Very good idea, this. To add a few thoughts:
I almost never spend money on training, once I get up to level five or so. I purposely do it the hard way, so I don't max out too soon. So my cash tends to pile up quickly. Fairly early on, money ceases to be a concern. When I need to bribe someone, I bribe him a lot, because I can.
I buy the occasional enchanted item--but only when I have some grand soul gems to make constant effect items with--which is rare. I really think the enchanters should either know how to create soul gems or have a trade link that replenishes their supplies. How does Galbedir make all those scrolls, when she doesn't seem to have a steady supply of soul gems of assorted caliber?
Aboiut ingredients--it's always bugged me that most of the ingredients aren't worth much. Given the fuss it takes to acquire some things, I'd think they would be worth more to people who don't normally lug claymores and full body armor around. Furthermore--why is it that spore pods are worth the same pitiful few coins whether I sell them in Seyda Neen or Molag Mar? They're an import in Molag Mar--shouldn't the price reflect the scarcity? I'd think it wouldn't be too hard to write some scripts that take the location of the sale of ingredients into account.
I like the idea of varying a merchant's inventory. However it's done, I'd like to see evidence that I'm not the only person who stops by and trades. After all, these shops are supposed to be operating even when the player isn't there. The pawn shops are the most glaring example, to me. Stuff I sell there never disappears, even though the proprietors warn me that it might.
As for high-end armor--I like finding it in tombs and such, but I sure wouldn't mind being able to buy it. As you said, there isn't enough to buy in the shops.
I'd download a mod that addressed some of the economic issues just as soon as it came out. I say go for it.
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Some folks here might want to check out a mod called More Morrowind II by John Boat [Jaga Telesin.] It's at the Summit.
It increases the time needed to raises a skill and also raises the price for training a skill. It comes in 3 flavors - 2x longer, 3x longer & 4x longer.
I've been using it for a while in conjunction with Wakim's, MW Advanced, Mephisto's creatures & a few other things. I've never had any problems with it (I load it last.) I use the 2x to start with since slogging out the early levels isn't that interesting to me anymore and then switch to the 3x as my character is at about lvl 10. I switch to the 4x version about lvl 25.
With this scheme, it usually works out for me that a lvl 15 character can't afford much training or enchanting anyway, since she can't actually kill the things which might drop uber goodies.
I'm going to make myself a small mod that drops the selling price for daedric, ebony & glass stuff too I think. Maxpublic's idea sounds pretty interesting.
anyway - just a thought. carry on!
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Ronin's "Everything You've Every Wanted to Know About Mods But Were Afraid To Ask" Thread
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OK, I'll do some testing today of some ideas which have been brought up here.
it seems, from first glance at the CS, a relatively easy job to make everything more expensive. One thing I did notice is that appears to be no premium for magic items. This doesnt surprise me, but why is that? I'll also look at extending the merchants gold respawn time from 24 hours to somthing more like a week (maybe thats a little long?). A quick check of Arille's stock shows that he has a mixture of random and 'static' stock items. I'm wondering if thats because he's the first trader in the game, and the devs wanted him to have certain specific items? Still I will use him for my studies.
I'll make a new character, and go and buy a 'shopping list' from Arille without the changes, take a silt strider to balmora and visit the Fighters Guild and Mages Guild, buy a spell, make a new spell, repair a specific item, and purchase a specific training. I will note the effects of persuasion.
Then using exactly the same character, but with some of the changes implemented via a small plugin, I will perform exactly the same operations and see what the results are.
Once i have the results I'll post them here, and if anyone wants this esp please feel free to let me know and I'll mail it over. I get the feeling this will need alot of collaboration 
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Varana
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Adept
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MeghanAJH: Thanks for that suggestion! 
I also find level progression quite okay until level 15 or 20 (and I like to be at the safer side when entering a dungeon *g*), so I refrained from installing such plugins that alter level progression from the start.
Switching midways didn't occur to me until now for some reason... 
Regarding trainers: I actually find them useful and good as they are (maybe a bit more expensive) to bring skills like Sneak, Security, Marksman or the magic schools up to a level where I can start using them... raising Sneak by using it is rather pointless at a skill level of 5.
So maybe a cap of training at mid-level (skill level 40 or 50) wouldn't be a bad idea.
Well, that doesn't have much to do with economy anymore...
There were some posts some time by Iudas explaining the Mercantile skill; they might be useful. He basically found out that the skill isn't broken per se, but that NPC merchants need to have a much higher Mercantile to yield realistic results.
Patrograd: Enchanting doesn't alter the value of an item. A non-magical exquisite ring and an exquisite ring with an über-enchantment both are worth exactly the same.
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Rigid, unbending:
Law's dominion eternal -
Order triumphant!
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_TaddeuS_
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Adept
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I'm really interested in what it's coming out here. As I said, my 2 balancing mods (and a third coming soon) are trying to achieve exactly the goal of fixing Morrowind economy and the difficulty of the game. In a new version I'm building I'd like to add some variety to the merchants inventories and remove some of the high-end gear you can find in the wilderness.
Now, the questions are:
- what items you would like to see less dropped?
- what merchants should have high-end equipement? I think Arrille and other general merchants shouldn't have them. I can add good weapons to some merchants and good armors to several smiths. Let me know who you would see in the list...
As for repair options, I plan releasing an esp dedicated to this aspect. It will raise the cost of repairing weapons, making Armorer a good skill for who use it and creating a good gold-drain for others...
Note that my mods on armors and weapons slightly raise the object Resistance. So if you'll use them in conjunction you'll have thougher weapons, but they'll be more expensive to repair.
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Italians Mod it Better!!!
Homepage: Taddeus & Nymeria Internet Hideout
REL thread: Necessities of Morrowind 2.0
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Patrograd: Enchanting doesn't alter the value of an item. A non-magical exquisite ring and an exquisite ring with an über-enchantment both are worth exactly the same.
hehe. I know, I just found the game setting that controls this. Surely this is wrong?
Anyway, here is some base data using the Morrowind original settings.
I created a character, female Dark Elf, of class Agent. Relevant skills: mercantile 20, speechcraft 35, personality a whopping 75
I have gone to visit Arille, who's initial disposition toward me was 62.
Saved game.
Bought Iron Shortsword, Chitin Cuirass and Imperial chain coif, list price 100, Arille's original offer 91. (???curious)
Bartered price down 10% to 82. Accepted by Arille first time
Load game
Same purchase, bartered price down 12% to 80. Accepted on attempt 8 at a loss of 7 disposition points.
Load game
Same purchase, bartered price down 15% to 77. 20 attempts, all failed, at cost of 19 disposition points.
Load game
Made 10 admire attempts, with a 40% success rate. Curiously, this didnt result in a fall in disposition, as the admire success seemed to have a greater effect than admire fail. In fact, after all this flattery Arrille's disposition was, 62.
Anway, onto the SIlt Strider. Travel was offered to me as follows:
Balmora 12 GP, Vivec 9, Suran 15, Gnisis 42
This is surely way, way too cheap. Even a multiplier of 10 wouldnt make this a realistic price. Fast travel is very useful, especially to weak low level characters, and its price should surely reflect this value? Effectively I could travel to Vivec and back for less than the cost
of a low level Iron shortsword. daft.
Anyway, arrived in balmora 12 Gp poorer, and joined the Fighters Guild. Went to wayn, saved game.
Wayns initial disposition was 71.
Sold him the same items I had bought from Arille, initial offer 66 GP.
Went through the save and barter routine from before.
My offer of 72 GP accepted 2nd attempt (no loss of disposition)
Offered 74 GP accepted 3rd time (-1 disp)
Offered 76 GP accepted 9th attempt (-8 disp)
Offered 79 GP accepted 15th attempt (-14 disp)
Offered 82 GP accepted 10th attempt (-9 disp)
Offered 85 GP, all 20 offeres refused (-20 disp)
Remember, these items cost me 77 GP only 10 minutes before, thats a 10% profit for doing nothing other than talking.
Wayn wasnt as good at the old flattery game as Arille though, and was much easier to admire into submission. Even though the success rate was still only 40%, his disposition jumped to 90, which had the effect of adding a further 10% to my margin. I was able to sell these items for 92 GP (19 % profit) leaving his disposition still higher at 76 than when I had started.
Went to Facile Charsal next to him, and purchased training in Block, from level 15 to 16, for the cost of 123 GP.
BY raising her disposition to 76 through admire, I could get this training for 119 GP. (only a 3% discount).
Popped next door and joined the Mages Guild.
Spoke to Estildalin, the high elf spellmaker, original disposition 71.
Bought Fire Bite and Paralysis on touch for 128 GP
MAde a new spell, fire damage 1-5pts on target, paralyse for 10 secs on target for 267 GP.
Schmoosing her up to 87 disposition had no effect on either of these prices, which are controlled by a game setting.
Will now make an esp to increase the speechcraft and mercantile of these NPCs. Will increase the cost of Fast travel and some other game settings which seem to be less than perfect. Will then test again and report.
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If this is boring you just let me know 
Made up a quick esp and tested using the same charcater, buying and selling the exact same items from the same traders.
Arrile now asks a whopping 122 GP for the items (34% more), and was impossible to admire into submission. 10 attempts produced only 1 success, and by then the disposition was down at 0.
I could barter him down to 92 GP, which whilst it is a hefty discount (25%), is still 16% more than the very best we could barter him down to before.
Went up to the Silt Strider and paid 136GP to travel to Balmora. had I wanted to go to Gnisis I would have had to walk
Joined Fighteres Guild, went to see Wayn. He offered me a miserly 37GP for these goods that i had paid 92GP just minutes before. The best price I could get out of him was 43 GP, representing a 47% loss, as opposed to the 19% profit we made before. Like Arille, there was nothing I could do to admire him into better prices, and much like Arrille he eventually sank to 8 disposition after 10 admire attempts, not enough to trade with in future.
My block training would now cost me 316GP, and like the others the trainer was now impervious to my low level charms.
Firebite and Paralysis now cost me 337GP, and combining them into a spell 534GP.
So, my iron shortsword, chitin cuirass and imperial chain coif, travel to Balmora, training in block, purchase of two spells and combining them into something useful now cost me 1279GP, where before they cost 606, probably less by the time I'd sold and then bought the weapons back from Wayn.
This is more money than I could reasonably expect to recieve from doing the SEyda Neen starter quests, robbing the customs house and selling all the gear, and so works pretty much as intended.
So, now to move onto that expensive loot distribution 
ANy thoughts?
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Tanit
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Acolyte
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_TaddeuS_:Quote:
- what merchants should have high-end equipement? I think Arrille and other general merchants shouldn't have them. I can add good weapons to some merchants and good armors to several smiths. Let me know who you would see in the list...
I would think that higher-end items would tend to be in larger cities where people with more money live (Vivec? Mournhold?). There may be the occasional real find at a shop in the middle of nowhere but in general, such items would eventually end up where the money is.
I would like to see a series of named unique weapons that vary from the standard item by only the slightest bit in different categories so that you feel that you actually have a unique item. I could see these as being available at small shops. I'll never forget being disappointed after finding a named weapon and discovering that there was more than one floating around.
I'm not sure how varying the stock of a merchant works but I would be careful in randomising their inventories as I have sold things to merchants that were required in later quests and have needed to go and buy them back.
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I have written a script that affects certain of the higher level traders in the game (basically the fifteen highest level smiths that didnt have a scirpt on them already).
This script uses the Random 100 variable to add and/or remove certain daedric items from their inventories (as suggested above). This has the effect of, over time, creating fluctuating levels of daedric gear in their inventories. Nothing unique is added, and each NPC specialises in a particular field - some do armour, some do weapons, some only do swords, others only blunt weapons and so on.
The chance of an item being added or removed is less than 30% on each activation.
The problem I can see with this is that players will still gt hold of the gear by killing the trader, which is possibly easier than getting it off a deadra. Maybe I need to add an element to remove all daedric gear if their health falls below the maximum?
Like I say, if anyone wants this esp to look over/test and/or alter, drop me a PM with your email
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I must say I love this here thread - a mature and sensible conversation on how the economy of Morrowind should be mended. I must say that for me the economy is not too wrecked with Taddeus' Balanced Armors/Weapons and things adding to the cost of Training, but I shall still follow this thread.
As for your question, Taddeus, well, I really appreciated you "fixing" Assassin's armory, which was broken balance-wise but so very, very neat. Is there a chance you might take a look at the items from the most-played plugins too? I sure hope so!
Other than that, hm. I cannot think of situations where items other than armor and weapons rock the economy.
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I think the main issue is that in Daggerfall we had houses, ships, horses, carts and many things to spend money on it.
Morrowind trading is a pain, we had banks in Daggerfall and so money was less a issue (with bank loads, and random quest generation and money was no issue), the fact trading is broken is because you cannot really say to the player their 5000 armor can only be sold for 1500, people dont like the idea of selling a item by a fraction of its real cost and so they go looking for the creeper.
Now training is a diferent issue, no matter what you do the system is broken if you intend to force people to raise levels "the old way" (AKA pratice) but even the old way is broken since finding a rat as trainer to raise armor ratings is a common trick.
Levels are not the issue, we have level list to present a challange and since "NPC hunting" is also anoying I doubt many people will just go around hunting for NPCs to raise their levels, most people just ocasional train to raise skills they dont use often ... take a spellsword that have some major skills that can be rarely used depending on the player style.
The point is the skill system is open to abuse as implemented, fixing the ecomony really does not fix the abuse and it sould not, every system have a exploit here and there and trying to make a "perfect system" just leads to some kind of nightmare that is no fun to use.
Problem with money is as it stands we have to use cheap tricks to get enough at low levels with detracts from gameplay, fixing the ecomony sould not to make it "harder" but to make it less of a pain.
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cyran0
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Initiate
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Fixing the Morrowind Economy
Patrograd: Not boring! I’m hoping that the changes that you made to the mercantile and speechcraft skills of those merchants was not unreasonable, it would be sad to have to over-tweak the system. I’ve been watching this tread for a while, and was starting to see it quickly return to resignation as this topic traditionally does. I appreciate your enthusiasm.
I haven’t investigated the mechanics of transactions, so I don’t know to what level we can modify it before we’re into hardcoding. In my mind, it might be as simple as a multiple of the base value, the ratio of the player’s to the merchant’s mercantile level when selling, and the reciprocal of that ratio when buying. All merchants should have a high mercantile skill, after all, this is their vocation and they have been doing it longer than we’ve been swinging a sword. The effect is that the player will lose on both ends of the transactions unless barter is applied or the player raises his mercantile skill above that of the merchant (say 80?). This is a crude formula, but perhaps a starting point. I think the ratio would have to be adjusted to keep the extreme ratios from being unrealistic. The other matter is barter; let disposition govern that. The greater the player’s disposition, the greater percent adjustment in the offer price can be achieved. Again, I don’t know if a mod can manipulate transactions to this degree.
I have more general observations regarding this thread. I’ve learned to live with the glaring inconsistencies in the economy, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like to see it fixed (or improved, at least). Like many of you posting in this tread, I find the abundance of money the most unbalancing aspect of the game. I have created ground rules for my play to prevent me from taking advantage of the game’s loopholes.
I don’t train more than one each day, usually much less and only miscellaneous skills that are too low to use effectively. Once those skills are in the twenties or at most thirty, that’s it. Training is part of the game, and a reasonable aspect. A professional soldier trains before entering combat. I like the suggestions that limit how often one can train, to what skill level one can train, the duration or effectiveness of the training (recall Daggerfall and the fact you might have to train a skill several times before it would increase by one), certainly the cost (we are discussion the economy here), and I even liked the idea that you could train a skill only once with a given ‘master’.
I don’t sell valuable stuff. Only silver, bonemold, steel or less makes it to the market. That keeps a lot of money out of my hands. Recall that it is ‘illegal to traffic Dwemer artifacts, and what adventurer (whose livelihood and life) depends upon the quality of his equipment, is going to sell that ebony blade? Of course, that leaves me with a pile of very valuable stuff (I can’t bring myself to leave the good stuff behind) in my place that represents an accumulation of wealth that is unrealistic. It would be nice if there was not such a glut of these ‘extremely rare’ items in Vvardenfell. I don’t understand why I’m being attacked by a smuggler armed with a steel axe when he has a Dwemer axe in a crate over there. Yes, I understand it at some level, but who among us is not using the best weapon or armor within our grasp that suits our character? Perhaps such items should not be available in random crates. I like the idea of corpses of daedra opponents being without valuable weapons. Let the weapons return to Oblivion with the slain daedra, or let them use bound weapons (another unbalancing aspect of the game, but I will try to stay focused). These items should be extremely difficult to find (recall your thrill at acquiring any piece of daedric armor). If a few, high-end merchants could offer them, let it be a backroom exchange when your disposition is high enough, as someone suggested. The option of having quality armor made for you (given you have the raw materials) still exists with the Tribunal and Bloodmoon expansions, and probably several plugins.
I don’t make enchanted items so it is difficult for me to appreciate just what sort of supply of gold one must have on hand to explore this aspect of the game. It is as HotFusion first point out, we all have different styles of play, and the modifications introduced by a plugin may mollify one person’s concerns, but outrage another’s. We can’t change just one aspect of the economy and expect it to work well for everyone. But perhaps it makes sense if it requires a mountain of gold to make a single, obscenely-enchanted item. We’ve all received as a reward the family heirlooms of grateful quest-givers. They may not seem like much compared to the items that you create out of a soul of a golden saint, but it represents the wealth of several generations. Again, these should be rare in a logical world.
I understand why these elements exist in the game. The developer’s wanted everyone regardless of style of play (or ability) to be able to enjoy the experience. Those of us complaining about a faulty economy do it not just for the sake of realism but also challenge, (from which we derive our pleasure in playing the game). I can be happy that the value of items in transactions decreases as my mercantile skill improves, it means less money in my pockets and a more challenging experience. Is it logical? No, but I can imagine that the whole of Morrowind is beset by a terrible economic depression—the point is, I live with it.
I like the idea of fast travel costing more. (I never liked the idea of Mages Guild teleport service being availably to low-level members, think Daggerfall again, to say nothing of accessible by the public at large, but that is another matter.) Again, I believe it is another example of the developers placating to the average gamer, and I can appreciate that. I remember the feeling of complete disorientation when I tried to walk to Balmora assisted only by vague directions when I considered the cost of the stilt-strider would consume too much of my then limited resources. I miss that feeling!
I’ve invented money sinks to help keep the cash low, but at some point in the game it just doesn’t matter what you (realistically) do to hold yourself back, you will have more money than you can spend (perhaps excepting the purchase of enchantments). I made a sizable down payment and I have a monthly mortgage on my home (thanks to the console), and every slave I free gets 100 gold to start his new life (I only received 87 gold when I got off the boat).
I would like to see these ‘problems’ with the economy fixed, but that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying this game world we travel.
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maxpublic
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Disciple
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The abundance of gold can be fixed, and within the constraints of the game without the need for scripting. I know this because I've done it, and have been using my own home-brew fixes since a few months after the game came out. The system works; if I could easily separate it out from Redux to give you an example for testing I would, but I can't.
Essentially it boils down to deflating gold accumulation, while closing exploits (e.g., training, enchanting). The changes are easy to make, but they're extensive and boring to do. Here's the laundry list, off the top of my head:
- change the pricing of all items to more accurately reflect reality, and to keep expensive items out of the hands of low-level characters. As an example, an exquisite dress costs between 500 and 1000 gold (I think; I don't have the CS up at the moment). The cost of *all* clothing has been modified to fall in line with a certain formula, and you won't find exquisite clothes in random crates.
- speaking of crates, modify the randomization of containers to be stocked with a lot of heavy, low-cost items. Remove the random appearance of magic items altogether. Don't allow the random appearance of pricey items in containers; these should be on the bodies of bosses. Don't allow silly things, like having the player find a chest of chainmail, but the bandits guarding that chest are wearing leather rags. If the player wants the chainmail, he'll have to strip it off the steaming corpse of his foe.
- alter the weapons and armor in the game both in terms of price and AR. Iron is virtually worthless, as is everything weaker than iron. Make iron and the weaker armors useful, and make anything better than these armors pricey. For example, in my game a steel cuirass costs 1,000 gold; all other armors are based in price off the steel cuirass, modified by AR, health, and weight. A thousand gold is quite a chunk of change in my game, and something a player won't see for awhile - unless he foregoes spending on other essential items. A daedric cuirass prices at 20,000 gold, but no merchant sells daedric items of any sort, nor are daedric items dropped by daedra, nor do they show up in crates. You can only find them in certain places (e.g., the vaults), or on certain very powerful NPCs.
- as mentioned before, the best trainers in the game only go up to a skill score of 75, and all training costs are 10x normal. Almost all of the better trainers require that you be a part of the guild or House they belong to (e.g., the only Speechcraft master trainer is in House Hlaalu).
- mages will only magically transport characters that belong to the Mage's Guild, and the service is expensive (around 500 gold per trip, before other modifications).
- bug and ship travel has been increased in cost as well. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think it's either 5x or 10x the normal Morrowind values. It's cheaper than Mage Guild transport, but not by a whole lot.
- enchanting services are hideously expensive, even more so than the normal game.
- and, of course, there is no Creeper or Mudcrab.
I'm sure there are some things I'm forgetting here, but the end result of all this is that gold is always in short supply and you have to save up to buy the things that you want. The really expensive items (e.g., Daedric) aren't for sale anywhere; you can only find them in specific places or on specific characters. And you probably won't want to sell them when you do.
So, it's a combination approach: reduce the appearance of expensive loot, and increase the price of items players like to spend money on (at least in relation to everything else; my daedric is much, much cheaper than Morrowind daedric, but you can't buy it anywhere - just sell it).
Obviously, this approach won't appeal to the Monty Haul types. If you like having millions of gold in the bank and being able to buy daedric greatswords from John's Emporium and Pawnshop, this won't work for you.
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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Players killing traders for daedric equipment is a problem. Some mods put items in glass cases that cannot be accesed, but I'm not sure that randomised inventory items could be scripted to appear there. Perhaps you could make it impossible to provoke traders or their guards into attacking, and add a script ensuring a truly massive bounty is put on the player if they try to attack or pickpocket the trader.
Personally, I think one of the problems witht the economy is that valuable items are far too easy to come by - not necessarily due to lack of scarcity pas se, but because we've all played the game to death and know exactly where everything is.
What I suggest is someone create a mod which changes the locations of all or most of the uber-items in the game. The daedric longbow could be put in some other shrine, the glass armour from the tomb where you get Sul-senepul's bow could be moved elsewhere, the fists of randagulf relocated to somewhere less blindingly obvious, and so forth. It's when a player has all the equipment he'll ever really need that things get boring. Money is a means to this equipment, and vice versa. Both need to be addressed.
Gold, in it's pure form, isn't *too* overly common. If valuable drops are reduced and 'known valuable items' moved elsewhere, I think a surplus of cash and expensive items will be far less likely.
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LichCraft 0.95 beta - discussion thread
Homepage and download link
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There's some great stuff there MAx, and I think you;re right on pretty much every point. I'll get shot of those daedric additions scripts, and have a play with some of the other things you discuss.
Bigger job than it first seemed 
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maxpublic
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Disciple
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Quote:
Players killing traders for daedric equipment is a problem.
And one easily solved. You put the equipment into a chest, assign ownership of the chest to the merchant, then place the chest outside the walls of the shop 'in the void'. Without TCL the player won't be able to reach the chest, and killing the merchant will get them nothing other than what they sold to the merchant previously.
If you want to avoid the second part of this - killing the merchant to retrieve sold items - you can script the merchant to self-delete and respawn.
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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Patrograd: That was certainly not boring! I really like the results that you reported. I assume that you obtained those by fiddling some of the numbers in the Game Settings menu.
Have you considered randomising the inventory via a container and a leveled list, as Kain suggested? This would be an easier way to scramble the merchants' inventories, although it would have a slightly different feel to it. The inventories could be periodically reinitialized by deleting and re-spawning the container.
As a matter of personal opinion, I think that a 30% for any given Daedric item to be in stock is a bit too high. 10% might be better. This would almost guarantee that the merchant would have 1-3 items at any time, but the exact inventory would be wildly unpredictable.
In Daggerfall, I would religiously stop at every armor store that I came across, hoping to find one of those rare Daedric items. Even when Daedric gear was in stock, it oftentimes wasn't a piece that I needed. Shopping was fun, and even a little exciting. You never knew if that Daedric left pauldron was just around the corner. I miss that aspect of the game.
As far as the availibilty of Daedric items in the field, in think that altering some of the leveled treasure drops would fix this. Maybe if Dremora Lords and Golden Saints only had a 1 or 2 percent chance of having a single Daedric item? You could still find them "in the wild," but it wouldn't be a reliable method of getting good stuff. You'd have to rely on the merchants for most of your gear.
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
But first, read the Old Sim-manor Thread!
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1 problem with doing this some person might say a screw saving for deadric weapons/armor and open up consol "player-> additem deadric staff 1" hahahahaha stupid mod i dont need money i could picture ppl saying that and yes that includes me
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maxpublic
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Disciple
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Quote:
Bigger job than it first seemed
Big and boring. Easy, but very, very tedious. It took me forever to reprice everything, especially since I've added in thousands of items from player made mods: pots, pans, inkwells, tea sets, clothes, weapons, armor, etc. etc. I love all the stuff, especially the 'little items', and they all had to have a price in line with everything else.
Resetting the crates isn't too hard. You don't need a script for randomization; this is essentially built into the table itself. What I did is something like this example:
- we have a crate of clothing in a bandit stronghold
- we want the crate to have x number of items, plus a random x number of items, but we want all the items to be the same type of clothing. Have to make some nested spawn tables here.
- we want the most likely thing to show up to be common clothing, followed by expensive clothing, with a tiny chance of some extravagant clothing. Let's assume that exquisite clothing is tailored, not 'off the wrack'; this is a medieval-style economy, after all.
- let's set our percentages to an 80% chance of the crate containing common item x, a 15% chance of it containing an expensive version of that item, and a 5% chance of it having the extravagant version of that item.
How to do that? Check out the random table for the crate. In the first 16 slots we put in 'common clothing', in the next three 'expensive clothing', and in the last one 'extravagant clothing' (all subtables). Since the game chooses the item randomly (and we can set the tables to fill the crate with just that item, once it's chosen which one it is) this gives us the exact percentages we want.
If we want the percentages to be 90%/9%/1%, we'd fill the first ninety slots with 'common clothing', the next nine with 'expensive clothing', and the last with 'extravagant clothing'. Teeeeedious, but it works.
BTW, you can do the same thing with randomly generated encounters. In the first version of Morrowind redux I made something like three-quarters of all random spawns Lady E's butterflies, with declining numbers thereafter various creatures (running into an Alit was pretty unlikely).
So, you can do all of this without any scripting. You can do the same thing with merchant chests attached to the merchants (random generation of items,e.g., -5 items from the sword table, which in turn accesses the common/expensive/unusual sword tables, and so on). The nesting can be somewhat confusing at times, at least for bears of little brain like myself, but it does work. :-)
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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read this entire post here in two hours..... yay. And I'd just like to drop my two cents in (or septims, whichever you prefer)
One of the other problems that you neglected to mention, as I saw. Was the USEFULNESS of some items in relation to others. For example, in the heavy armors, you have the iron,steel, and silver armors making up the bottom of the ARs, about 20-30 on my character(Heavy skill 80-90). But the HIGHER end stuff, ebony,daedric, is in the 100-140 region. So between the armors you have a 70 point armor rating 'gap' between the initial affordable armors and the high end 'uber' stuff you are trying to limit . I would bring the 'high end' armor ratings down a bit, or introduce new armors that bridge this gap  . So the only armors that can get you to the end result of 300-333 AR you have to work your a** of for.
Just tell me if Im not making any sence....
[edit] typo an my part, thats an armor rating of 200, making it a gap of 150.
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
Edited by stargate525 (06/10/04 11:28 PM)
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maxpublic
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Disciple
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Quote:
For example, in the heavy armors, you have the iron,steel, and silver armors making up the bottom of the ARs, about 20-30 on my character(Heavy skill 80-90). But the HIGHER end stuff, ebony,daedric, is in the 100-140 region. So between the armors you have a 70 point armor rating 'gap' between the initial affordable armors and the high end 'uber' stuff you are trying to limit
This is a good point. In my own mod I did just what you suggest, and here's the AR of an example cuirass, by material. Note that some of the regular Morrowind stuff isn't here, and there are types of materials which don't appear in stock Morrowind - but you'll get the idea:
Fur (L) - 50
Leather (L) - 50
Light Studded (L) - 75
Chitin (L) - 100
Daedric Leather (L) - 125
Obsidian (L) - 175
Ringmail (M) - 150
Chain (M) - 150
Dreugh (M) - 150
Shalk (M) - 175
Clannfear Hide (M) - 175
Adamantium (M) - 200
Dragonscale (M) - 200
Silver (H) - 175
Steel (H) - 200
Daedric (H) - 300
Notice that the gap between the weakest of armors and the strongest of armors is 250 points. I left out weight, health, and cost, which distinguish armors with duplicate values from one another (e.g., Dragonscale is lighter than plate, has more health than plate - and is considerably more expensive than plate). These ARs are the actual values for all characters of all levels in my mod - there is no armor skill, so the AR never changes no matter who wears it. In regular Morrowind you'd want to alter the ARs accordingly.
In any event, what you get is a relatively small spread. Plate is only four times more effective than fur. It's only twice as effective as chitin. Daedric is only half again stronger than plate (although it has a *much* higher health rating) and is incredibly difficult to procure. If you cut daedric out of the picture as a special case the entire spread, from fur to steel plate, is just 150 points.
By doing something along these lines, you give a character good reason to purchase the lesser armors. For one thing, they'll be in her price range; for another, they tend to be lighter (and in my game, the heavier the armor the bigger the hit to stealth score, which matters for thiefish types). It not only justifies increases in price, but gives the player a good reason to either save up for the armor if they want the extra AR, or to forego somewhat better armor as a waste of good gold (depending on how they view the matter, and what kind of character they're creating).
This is one of those not-so-discrete elements I was talking about earlier. When you alter prices you have to ask yourself *why* any sane character would purchase armor x, when the AR for that armor is so low and for a little bit more gold she can get something much better.
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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_TaddeuS_
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Adept
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Tanit:
Ok, I'll have to think on that. I'll add some crates to the bigger merchants and smiths, who could add to their inventories some rare items. However I think each merchant should have few expensive items (from 1 to 4). Then I've to make this crates change their equipement every 7-10 days...
The crates will obviously be "in the void"!
Patrograd:
I'd like to see your esp to get some inspiration from it...
Artheon:
Yes, I plan balancing other mods as well. I've already on my HD some other rebalances done, like Metal Queen and Morrowind Advanced... And I hope to release in a week an updated version of my mods to improve them. This will be the final version. After that I'll only rebalance other mods.
However, take a look to my weapon and armor rebalancing. All the stats/prices are changed here to reflect usefulness of the items. Also prices are comparable to those of every other thing in the game (potions, scrolls, train, ...).
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Italians Mod it Better!!!
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REL thread: Necessities of Morrowind 2.0
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Some more random thoughts
Would an armorer sell armor repair tools? I figure an armorer is in the business of selling new armor and repairing other folks stuff. I cant see him cutting off his nose to spite his face by selling th DIY kit. I can see general merchants selling these though.
Enchantment and enchanted items. Why is it that you can acquire a soul gem, perhaps at great danger to yourself, perhaps at great finanical cost, purchase an item you intend to enchant, go through the enchanting process (probably losing a soul gem or two along the way), then go to someone to sell it and the item isnt worth any more than before you started? Surely enchanted items should be much, much more expensive than they are, particularly when you consider how much it costs to employ an enchanter. I mean, if you are an enchanter by trade, how are you going to make a living?
Similar story with potions really. These are also way too cheap. I cant see anyone being an echanter or an alchemist by trade.
The effect of increasing the prices for these items isnt purely negative of course. It means that if you use your skills to enchant items yourself, or make your own potions, you can make a reasonable living this way. If I were an alchemist, I might go out into the woods and gather (or purchase) a host of ingredients worth, lets say, 500 gold pieces. Then, I bring them back to my lab, and depending on my alchemical skills I probably lose about 100 GP worth in the process of potion making. I take a considerable amount of time, I have invested in purchasing the very best potion making equipment (And you can spend thousands on this), I have all the hassle of ingredient storage and sorting. I make a whole bunch of potions, go down to my nearest trader and sell all these potions for little more than the cost of the ignredients. Why bother? What kind of a business is that?
So if this is my thinking, this must presumably also be the thinking of the people who make the potions that you can buy in game? Again, these potions are incredibly valuable to the player (as are enchanted items, as is fast travel), but their economic value is pitiful.
In a 'real' economy, the player should be able to make a good living out of skills other than fighting or stealing. If you cant make potions, or cant enchant, those that can will charge you a fortune for their services. If you can, *you* can charge those who cant a fortune.
I guess there's a scarcity element here too, as the cost of things is a combination of the skill and time needed to produce them, how many of them there are avialable, and how useful they are.
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_TaddeuS_
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Me too, I think enchented items should cost more gold than a common item. We have to look in the game settings to find how to fix that.
As for potions I think the situation is the opposite. I think potions made by the player should cost less. While it's true that on rare potions this can make the player lose money, consider the effect on common potions. If I buy saltrice and (put here another thingy with restore fatigue) I'll spend only 2-5 septims. And I can make potions worth 10 times this value with little effort.
Lowering the price of player made potions will make you live on simple potions. When you are going to prepare a rare potion you should think: I want the effect (make the potion) or the money (sell the ingredients)?
BTW, why enchanters cost soooooo much money. I'd like to see a lower cost for them...
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Italians Mod it Better!!!
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REL thread: Necessities of Morrowind 2.0
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Tanit
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Me too, I think enchented items should cost more gold than a common item. We have to look in the game settings to find how to fix that.
I've also found this to be puzzling. After all, a Grand Soul Gem with a quality soul in it is worth around 80,000 Septims and when you combine it with a Daedric claymore and a major enchantment, one would think that the sum of all the parts would be worth more than just the claymore alone! Perhaps a filled soul gem +weapon cost +enchantment cost X2 or so?
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BTW, why enchanters cost soooooo much money. I'd like to see a lower cost for them...
I think that magic should have an element of risk to the caster. I've never tried enchanting an item but I would think that a major enchantment to an item would involve personal risk and that is what you are paying high prices to an NPC to perform. Perhaps enchantment should cost even more?
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Varana
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If I were an enchanter, I'd live from what I charge as fee for enchanting... which is certainly enough; not from selling enchanted items. Except scrolls, maybe, as their price seems to be dependent on enchantment.
The thing is - if you raise the prize of enchanted items, it effectively puts more money into the player's hands - except you severely restrict those Cruel Shardswords, chitin clubs with a few points fire damage, etc. carried by generic bandits or found as loot in their caves.
Alchemy is a money-making machine as it is. Granted, it's difficult tp produce a potion which nets you more than the Daedra Heart and Void Salt you put into it. But as Taddeus said - ingredients for Restore Fatigue potions are in ample supply, and those are the ones that get you money if you want it.
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Rigid, unbending:
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I've always thought magical enchanting should have some time associated with it, dependant on difficulty. When you pay someone to enchant an item for you, it should be more than just a matter of 'ok, done. Thanks for the cash'. I'd like to envisage that they are undergoing complex and delicate rituals whilst I'm not around.
So... anyone know if there's a way to add some time peroid for enchanted items before the player can get hold of them?
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LichCraft 0.95 beta - discussion thread
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Taddeus - Balancing the value of player made potions is pretty easy. Just lower the value of iAlchemyMod in the game settings. Setting it to 1 will cut the value of all player created potions in half.
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so are any of us going to actually get together and work on fixing these many problems? The way this is going, it seems more like a complete overhaul than just a 'fix' anymore. If we as a group decide to work on something like this, count me in!
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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lol, yeah to be honest I think this is going to be a project which needs it's own website and forum at this rate
Perhaps we could try to create a comprehensive list of all the desired changes and then have people 'claim' modules and go away and make them.
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LichCraft 0.95 beta - discussion thread
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cyran0
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Again, I’ve never gone through the process of enchanting an item or having an item enchanted through the service, so please excuse my naivety (perhaps I’ll try it out next time I play). I gather it’s very expensive to have it done professionally, but I’m not certain why it should cost so much. The player provides the item and the soul; that should represent most of the value of the item and therefore its cost. Of course, a little something for the enchanter is appropriate. After all, he has house payments, a kid in college and alimony to his first wife. But it sounds as if it is out of proportion with the payment made for other services. And yes, the resulting enchanted item should have considerable value, although perhaps not equal to the sum of its parts. If that value can be fixed in a mod, it could be made to be comparable to similar enchanted items found in the game.
VenomByte: I think that a time delay to complete the enchantment is appropriate and possible. We could use the armorers that fashion custom armor as a model.
Patrograd: I think armorers would sell hammers. Pep Boys sells oil and filters even though they might wish that you pay them to perform the oil change. Those that are going to do it themselves are going to anyway. An armorer would want to get part of that action (selling hammers) as well.
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so are any of us going to actually get together and work on fixing these many problems? The way this is going, it seems more like a complete overhaul than just a 'fix' anymore. If we as a group decide to work on something like this, count me in!
Well you can count me in for fixing the NPCs low mrcantile and speechcraft skills, and altering the in-game settings for travel etc
Needs someone who really knows all the quests to move those valuable items to somewhere else...but not the quest related items. Any takers?
Needs someone to fix all the armours and stuff? Sounds to me like Max knows his way around this....but maybe he's busy....
Then needs someone to sort out all the drop lists.....any takers for this?
Needs someone to sort out the NPCs and their equipment?
Voluntters called for I think at this stage.....sign up below
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Well you can count me in for fixing the NPCs low mrcantile and speechcraft skills, and altering the in-game settings for travel etc
Needs someone who really knows all the quests to move those valuable items to somewhere else...but not the quest related items. Any takers?
Needs someone to fix all the armours and stuff? Sounds to me like Max knows his way around this....but maybe he's busy....
Then needs someone to sort out all the drop lists.....any takers for this?
Needs someone to sort out the NPCs and their equipment?
Voluntters called for I think at this stage.....sign up below
Might I recommend using a one-shot global script to alter the merchants' skills? Something along the lines of:
"merchant_name" ->setmercantile xxx
"merchant_name" -> setspeechcraft xxx
ect
ect
Stopscript
This would avoid mod conflict problems.
As for moving the pre-set high-end stuff, I don't think that they need to be moved so much as randomised or removed. If (for example) the Daedric Longbow is merely hidden in another shrine, it won't be long before the player knows the new location, and we have the same situation all over again.
One solution would be to use a script like this:
Code:
set var to ( Rand 100 )
If ( var <= 20 )
placeitem "Daedric Long Bow", "cell_name", x, y, z, angle
set done to 1
Endif
If ( var <= 40 )
If ( done == 0 )
placeitem "Daedric Long Bow", "cell_name2", x, y, z, angle
set done to 1
Endif
Endif
etc.
Stopscript
This method has the advantage of not altering any cells.
As for armor and weapons, Taddues has already done excellent work on this problem. Check out Taddues' balanced armors, if you haven't already.
I'm really excited about this project, and want to help, but I simply must get my own WIP out the door first.
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maxpublic
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Needs someone to fix all the armours and stuff? Sounds to me like Max knows his way around this....but maybe he's busy....
I would recommend Taddeus' mod for this. Although I do indeed know my way around just about every blasted item in the CS, including a few thousand player-made items, I tailor everything to my own game and not to vanilla Morrowind. Taddeus already did this for vanilla Morrowind and I'd probably just end up using his material as a reference anyway (no sense in reinventing the wheel, and all that).
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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Most of the non-unique expensive items are not quest related, so these can be looked up in the CS and found easily enough. I think the idea of randomising their location is a particularly excellent one.
One further problem with this is that it really requires a huge knowledge of possible alternative locations. There would be no point moving everything around the same couple of dozen locations well-known to a certain player. Plus it's much less fun for the person who knows where everything *might* be.
What I suggest is the following:
A large group of people do the item relocation. Someone could be responsible for the relocating of all daedric weapons, someone else for all the daedric armour, someone else for the glass weapons, etc etc. Since we all have unique knowledge of Morrowind's different locations, we'd then get a huge variety in where things are located, far better than any one person could possibly achieve.
And then of course someone who does know all the quests inside out can do the unique items
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LichCraft 0.95 beta - discussion thread
Homepage and download link
Edited by VenomByte (06/11/04 04:18 PM)
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Tanit
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so are any of us going to actually get together and work on fixing these many problems? The way this is going, it seems more like a complete overhaul than just a 'fix' anymore. If we as a group decide to work on something like this, count me in!
Well, one would have to ask the question: Is it worth the effort? Perhaps a lot of time and trouble to the talented individuals willing to undertake such things. One of my thoughts is that there isn't enough gold flowing out of your coffers due to the expenses of simply living.
Perhaps there should be a monthly tax levied by the Empire based on your wealth that is required to be paid or you become an outlaw.
It would be interesting to have random events requiring special taxes to support a war or to relieve famine in another part of the Empire.
Perhaps if you live in a town, the town council will tax you if you have a house there. Perhaps tax you more if you are not of their "house".
How about civic organizations to which you can belong that need money for noble purposes and can grant you some sort of recognition for your help. Or for that matter, membership fees to the Thieves Guild/Mages Guild/Thieves Guild or donations to the Temple or whatever.
I am not really interested in mods that require you to eat, bathe etc. since these are things that I really don't care to be bothered with - although they represent a certain outlay in money. How about a certain amount for monthly maintenance expenses? Gas? Lights? Cable?
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maxpublic
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Perhaps if you live in a town, the town council will tax you if you have a house there.
Property taxes are evil, in any world. A property tax means you don't really own the property, you're just renting it from the government. Fail to pay your rent and you get evicted. So much for 'ownership'.
But...you could require the character to spend x amount of gold each month just for maintenance. Little things to keep the roof from falling in, or vermin from exploding out of control, and so forth. The bigger the house, the more maintenance it's going to require. I wouldn't know what would happen if you failed to pay the maintenance, but eventually the town council might insist that you hire an exterminator to deal with the several thousand rats that've taken up residence in your home while you were gone 'adventuring' during the last six months....
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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Property taxes are evil, in any world. A property tax means you don't really own the property, you're just renting it from the government. Fail to pay your rent and you get evicted. So much for 'ownership'.
HaHaHa Max! Not a property tax per se, just an "assessment" for the greater good of the State in time of need.
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But...you could require the character to spend x amount of gold each month just for maintenance. Little things to keep the roof from falling in, or vermin from exploding out of control, and so forth. The bigger the house, the more maintenance it's going to require. I wouldn't know what would happen if you failed to pay the maintenance, but eventually the town council might insist that you hire an exterminator to deal with the several thousand rats that've taken up residence in your home while you were gone 'adventuring' during the last six months....
Max
Actually, this could also be kind of funny in that one could start having "creatures" (rats etc.) appear in your house in ever-increasing numbers and perhaps diseased ones later. You'd have to go on a "find the exterminator" quest to get rid of them permanently.
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One of my thoughts is that there isn't enough gold flowing out of your coffers due to the expenses of simply living.
Perhaps there should be a monthly tax levied by the Empire based on your wealth that is required to be paid or you become an outlaw.
It would be interesting to have random events requiring special taxes to support a war or to relieve famine in another part of the Empire.
Perhaps if you live in a town, the town council will tax you if you have a house there. Perhaps tax you more if you are not of their "house".
I am not really interested in mods that require you to eat, bathe etc. since these are things that I really don't care to be bothered with - although they represent a certain outlay in money. How about a certain amount for monthly maintenance expenses? Gas? Lights? Cable?
Adding an entirely new class of expenses is best left to another mod entirely. While adding a cost of living is a viable method of deflating the currency, it is outside the scope of what's being discussed here.
Besides, *cough* *cough*someone's already working on this angle 
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
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ok, it looks like my post triggered some people wanting to begin one this..... someone asked for a list of everything we are planning to do, so here are a couple of the big ones;
1. randomize merchant inventories to include higher end weapons and equipment, and have the inventories 'reshuffle' on a certain cycle.
2. create less availabilty of high end level weapons and equip. by implementing the following;
1. replacing some daedric weapons with bound spells on daedra
2. randomizing the set loot to a number of different places.
3. fiddle around with alchemy and enchanting.
4. make a less steep armor curve, bridging the gap between the lower and upper end equipment.
somehitng wrong with these,left something out, just post later down or edit this
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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_TaddeuS_
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3. fiddle around with alchemy and enchanting.
4. make a less steep armor curve, bridging the gap between the lower and upper end equipment.
My balancing mods are aimed at resolving these and people who tried them seem to be pretty satisfied. Well, I didn't released the alchemy thing yet, but I plan to make it public in a few days. I think they can be a good base for this project. What do you think?
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Quote:
Quote:
3. fiddle around with alchemy and enchanting.
4. make a less steep armor curve, bridging the gap between the lower and upper end equipment.
My balancing mods are aimed at resolving these and people who tried them seem to be pretty satisfied. Well, I didn't released the alchemy thing yet, but I plan to make it public in a few days. I think they can be a good base for this project. What do you think?
So, are we looking to incorporate some pre-existing mods? I think it would be great if this was possible, as Max said, no need to reinvent the wheel
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My balancing mods are aimed at resolving these and people who tried them seem to be pretty satisfied.
Yes your balancing mods (Weapon and armor) are excellents and thanks for make the assasins' armory balance mod. I hope in future you will continue doing the same work you do with assasins' armory with other plugins.
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SoNico717
The Throne Of Asaroth Team
[WIP]The 6th House Army V1.5
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So, are we looking to incorporate some pre-existing mods? I think it would be great if this was possible, as Max said, no need to reinvent the wheel
I thought that was the idea, all of us working on one aspect of the overhaul/fix, and sending them to someone to merge together and post on a site. Any existing mods we could use would just put us ahead of the game.
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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sry about the double post but if you would'nt mind taddeus, could you let us use some of ure balancing esp's as a base to give us ahead of the game?
fusion: If, as I assume, we are actually goiung to make this, are you still going to put economy fixing scripts in your sim manor mod as well? Would we have problems with compatability if you do? 
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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fusion: If, as I assume, we are actually goiung to make this, are you still going to put economy fixing scripts in your sim manor mod as well? Would we have problems with compatability if you do?
I was already planning on adding an optional plug-in to make facilities like the forge compatable with Taddeus' work. I like Taddeus' work very much, and don't want to play without it... but I am also planning on liking Sim-Manor very much ... so I'll make sure compatibility isn't an issue.
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But first, read the Old Sim-manor Thread!
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great to know. Ive been following your sim manor post as well and if these two weernt compatable Id have a hard time trying to decide between them!
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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_TaddeuS_
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Obviously my balancing mods can be used, I did them for that reason!
As for putting them all in an unique esp... I think it's better to keep this modular: a mod for weapons, one for armors, one for random inventories and so on... This way people will be able to select what they want to use and can avoid conflicts with other mods they have already installed.
I can take care of the weapons/armors/objects/alchemy part.
But there's still many things to do:
- random inventories
- adjust the merchants or some game setting to make commerce more balanced
- fast travel costs
- repairing costs
...
I could do these myself, according to the suggestions put in this thread. But on the other hand, if someone else is interested in doing them I'll leave the encoumberance to them... 
To beancounter:
Thanks for your suggestion about alchemy. I used it to set the actual cost of player made potions to 1/4 of the original...
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Italians Mod it Better!!!
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REL thread: Necessities of Morrowind 2.0
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One idea to prevent alchemy abuse and the economic problems therein would be to prevent merchants having unlimited supplies of any items. Perhaps have them restock the 'base' items every 48 hours or weekly or something instead.
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LichCraft 0.95 beta - discussion thread
Homepage and download link
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_TaddeuS_
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My alchemy balance is based on Srikandy's work and she'd already fixed the problem of merchants having unlimited supplies. So you can assume this as done...
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Italians Mod it Better!!!
Homepage: Taddeus & Nymeria Internet Hideout
REL thread: Necessities of Morrowind 2.0
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I can take care of the weapons/armors/objects/alchemy part.
On the subject of alchemy...
Many of the ingredients need their prices rescaled. Generally speaking, vegetable products are over-costed, while animal products are over-costed.
The alchemist in Ald-Ruhn is willing to pay 10 septims apiece for atrama root, a common weed that grows just outside his door
Hackle-Lo, another common weed in the Grazelands, is worth a whopping 30 septims!
A kagouti hide, the skin of a viscous and deadly predator, is only worth 2 septims
Personally, I think that common plants should never be worth more than 1 septim, whereas animal hides should be woirth 10 -20 each.
Gathering ingredients to make money is part of the game. The Spymaster even suggests that you make a living by gathering plants and hunting animals for their hides. I'd just like these options to make more sense.
Edit: another thought.... Does anyone else think that pearl-diving is entirely too good of a deal?
Granted, kollop-hunting is actually very dangerous for low-level characters, but once you get some decent hitpoints, or a good attack spell, you can quickly amass a fortune on these things.
I think that the problem isn't the cost of the pearl (100 septims actually seems quite reasonable), but at the excessive commonality of the pearls. You can find them everywhere! Reducing the odds of a kollop containing a pearl to something like 10% would actually make pearls somewhat rare (the odds are currently 50%, which is way too high).
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
But first, read the Old Sim-manor Thread!
Edited by HotFusion3 (06/13/04 01:34 PM)
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Any chance thses mode altering herbs and suchlike will be compatible with the Herbalism mod (Balor and Shanjaq) or Advanced Herbalism (Andoreth)?
I like the idea of re-pricing animal hides too, hunting should really be a feasable occupation.
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LichCraft 0.95 beta - discussion thread
Homepage and download link
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Any chance thses mode altering herbs and suchlike will be compatible with the Herbalism mod (Balor and Shanjaq) or Advanced Herbalism (Andoreth)?
The various herbalism mods work by altering the plants from which the ingredients are harvested. They do not touch the actual ingredients at all.
So, yes, compatibilty will not be an issue.
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
But first, read the Old Sim-manor Thread!
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Well I guess I'll take the initiative here and claim the alchemy fixing/altering mod. Just make sure you tell me if I am missing something in this list.
reprice alchemy ingred.
alter merchant restock of certain items.
change probabilitys of certain plants/creatures to have an Ingredient in their inventory.
Note: I'll probably start working on this immediately so the sooner the better for asditions that I missed.
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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heh, just noticed I missed taddeus's post, sry about that, I guess I'll do the rendom inventories then...
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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Yes, I've already a good part of the alchemy thing completed. I can surely add in the suggestion about lowering plant ingredients costs and raising the animal ones...
As for the random inventories: you can add random items to alchemists also, since I'm not adding that feature in the balanced alchemy mod... I suggest doing that with the "crate behind a wall" method.
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Quote:
I suggest doing that with the "crate behind a wall" method.
about that.... Iv'e got my crate behind the wall, and I think I have a nice simple script that can do the job of replacing.... but since im not exactly the best scripter, i could really use someone looking it over.
......................................................................................................
begin randomshuffle
short currentday
if (currentday == 1)
removeitem,_potions, 100
additem,_potions, 100
endif
if (currentday == 15)
removeitem,_potions, 100
additem,_potions, 100
endif
end
...............................................................................
this willl be put on the chest behind the wall, should set the chest to clear it's contents and replace the items. _potions is a levelled item list of all the sellable potions in the game. Should make 100 completely random potions in her inventory. Should replace on the 1st and the 15th.
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that script won't work. First off, there isn't any mechanism for incrementing the currentday variable, nor is there a reset switch. Moreover, adding and removing the same potion ID won't create a random inventory. Try something like this :
Code:
Begin Scriptname
short CurrentDay
short DaysPassed
float x
float y
float z
float angle
short timer
If ( CurrentDay != Day )
set CurrentDay to Day
set Dayspassed to ( Dayspassed + 1 )
Endif
If ( CurrentDay >= 15 )
set x to GetPos x
set y to GetPos y
set z to GetPos z
set angle to GetAngle z
PlaceItem, ContainerID, x, y, z, angle
Disable
If ( timer > 50 )
setdelete to 1
Endif
set timer to ( timer + 1 )
Endif
End
"Day" is a global variable that comes with vanilla MW that reports the current game day. "ContainerID" is the ID of the container. The container must be filled with random leveled items.
The way random items work is that when the player first interacts with the container, the exact contents are determined. Once you peek inside, the contents never change. To force a true re-shuffling of the contents, you have to completely delete the container and create a brand new one in its place. That's what the Disable and SetDelete commands are for. The various GetPos commands measure the exact location of the old container and place the new one in the same spot. The timer is there for safety. Sometimes deleting an object right after disabling it causes problems.
To see how Random items work, open up the Leveled Item tab in the editor. You'll get lots of examples.
I'd be glad to answer further questions! It's good to see so many people pitching in.
Edit: Ack! I just saw that by "Potion" in your script, you meant a level item! Sorry! You clearly know about leveled lists!
However, the script still won't work. After the player peeks inside, the Leveled item is replaced by the actual potions. You can't remove them with a command like RemoveItem, "Leveleditem", 100
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
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Edited by HotFusion3 (06/13/04 11:07 PM)
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Is it possible to create a mod that would allow you to barter for enchantment, armor repair, or training?
That is, instead of just paying a ton of gold for a high-priced enchantment, you could trade a daedric weapon of value equivalent to that of the enchantment?
That would solve the problem of noone being able to pay a fair price for daedric gear.
(I know that you can just sell the enchanter the gear after they perform the enchantment for you since they get all of the gold you pay for the enchantment, but you have to get that gold in the first place, and it isn't very realistic...)
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thanks fusion. Like I said, I'm not a scripter, although I am trying to learn... bear with me. So can I use that base script for all the levelled containers, just change the miscellaneous whatnot specific for that particular container? And I also have a question about the levelled lists. Although I do know how to make them, I am unsure about how to get a ratio in them. For example the fine alchemist in balmora sells higher end potions, so I wnat her ratio to be something like 10:9:5:3:1 for the various qualities of potion. I just put in 10 of the one, nine of the other, and so on down the list, correct? And looking over your script, wont the box reset every frame ure in the cell on the 15 to the end of the month? I dont see a do once thing there or something to stop that from happening. Just tell me if I'm wrong.
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I'm not sure what the problem is here. If you use a leveled list generator (e.g., "poor quality potions", "average quality potions", etc.), then add them to the chest like so:
-10 poor quality potions
-5 average quality potions
and so on
Every time the chest regenerates (which is a GMST value, set by default to four months IIRC) you'll get a new stock of different potions. You could also fold the whole thing into a meta-leveled list with the breakdown you specify in your post. If you want the chests to regenerate faster than four months you can set the GMST value to whatever you want, then modify the 'freebie' chests in the Fighters and Mages guild so that a player doesn't loot good stuff out of them every two weeks, or whatever.
Max
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Quote:
So can I use that base script for all the levelled containers, just change the miscellaneous whatnot specific for that particular container?
<snip>
And looking over your script, wont the box reset every frame ure in the cell on the 15 to the end of the month? I dont see a do once thing there or something to stop that from happening. Just tell me if I'm wrong.
Yes, this script should generically work for any container, as long as you alter the container ID.
The box should reset continously after day 15, because after day 15, it will no longer exist. A new box is created in its stead. Remember that newly created objects start with all of thier local variables set to zero.
The sequence looks something like this:
Day fifteen arrives. The chest deletes itself, taking its entire inventory with it, as well as the script itself. A new chest (with a fresh copy of the script) is simulteanously created. For the new chest, CurrentDay is zero, and the cycle repeats.
At least, that's how it should work. Most scripts don't work the very first time.
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There's one thing I'm worried about this script: if you delete the crate, you'll refresh its inventory. But then the crate will not belong to the merchant anymore, so he won't sell the new items. Now the problem is: is there a way to assign ownership of a crate through script? I'll look into the script manual for that. But if this doesn't exist we'll have to use another method.
I think the refreshing thing setting the GMST fMonthsToRespawn (if I remember well) to 1 can be a good choice. This way the crate will renew it's content every month, and will always belong to the merchant.
EDIT: After a fast search I didn't find anything to assing ownership of a crate to an NPC...
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Homepage: Taddeus & Nymeria Internet Hideout
REL thread: Necessities of Morrowind 2.0
Edited by _TaddeuS_ (06/14/04 03:58 AM)
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There is no way to directly assign ownership to either a crate or to individual items, since TESCS lacks the capability to refer to specific instances of a given item type, and ownership is a variable assigned only to instances.
What this means, is that you'll have to either add/remove items from a given pre-assigned container (I assume this works, but haven't tried it), or else add/remove directly from the inventory of the NPC.
Edit: adding items to an 'owned' container does indeed work.
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LichCraft 0.95 beta - discussion thread
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Edited by VenomByte (06/14/04 06:18 AM)
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mjemerso:
The repairing/enchanting windows are hardcoded and have different functions than the barter one. So I don't think what you ask can be done with a mod...
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what I have is a general 'potions' leveled list. Inside of which are leveled lists for each quality of potion. I did some experimenting last night and figured out how to get the ratio in. I'll try that script fusion and see if it works.
EDIT: It didnt work.... on the 15th the container takes its ranodm with it, but the merchant dosnt get the new container's contents..... I think someone said that above.
edit of the edit: venom predicted that
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
Edited by stargate525 (06/14/04 02:13 PM)
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Quote:
There's one thing I'm worried about this script: if you delete the crate, you'll refresh its inventory. But then the crate will not belong to the merchant anymore, so he won't sell the new items.
Erg... I'd forgotten that ownership is an external parameter, and not actually part of the object ID...
That makes things trickier. We can always fall back on a series of Rand functions, coupled with an extensive list of Add/RemoveItem commands, but that's a lot more work, and a lot less flexible.
I'll cogitate on this for awhile...
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Okay, here's a few ideas:
1) We add two special containers, both hidden behind a wall. One of them is a permanent, unscripted container owned by the NPC. the other is a self-deleting, respawning container filled with random leveled list items. A script attached to the respawning crate transfers the items to the permanent container. If the range possible items covered by the random list is relatively narrow, this actually won't be too hard. Still, it's a PITA.
2) We could simply place the random lists on the NPC's inventory directly, and have her self-delete and respawn. This would work, is easy to implement, and is generally an effecient soultion to the problem. However, it will create conflicts with other mods, and will also reset any other local variables that that particular NPC has, which might be a problem. Additionally, this would make the NPC a prime target for murder, especially since we're going to be addiing some very high-end stuff to her stock.
3) A more exotic solution would be to combine both concepts. What if we made a second NPC, and placed her behind the wall, and gave the random items to her? She could then be set to respawn, just like the crates discussed above.
Of course, if she's behind the wall, we can't talk to her, so here's my idea. A script is attached to the visible shopkeeper (the one actually in the shop). If she is activated by the player, her normal activation is canceled by the script, and a ForceGreeting command is used to initiate dialogue with the hidden NPC instead. The player would never know the difference, and the items would still be safely hidden behind the wall.
The only thing that I don't know is if the ForceGreeting command can be triggered remotely. Do commands like this:
"NPC_name" -> ForceGreeting
work? I'm at work right now, so I can't check.
This method will still change the original NPCs, but at least it won't reset any local variables. Besides, in a mod this far-reaching, some conflicts are going to be inevitable.
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While tedious to initially write, I favor a method that uses one permanent, behind-the-wall crate that periodically replaces items one at a time. This would provide an additional level of realism in that a random chance (say 30%) could be check before each potential replacement to see if it actually ‘sold’. In this way inventories won’t be completely overturned, but evolve slowly over time. I also feel that some items should always be available: armorer’s hammers, arrows, ingredient staples. Such items could be given a zero chance of being replaced. Thoughts?
edit: Oops, forget about that last bit, I forgot for a moment that we are using leveled lists.
Edited by cyran0 (06/14/04 09:19 PM)
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Or as an alternative, you could chuck the in-game barter system and add scripts to the merchants for buys/sells. This has none of the inventory problems and allows you to restrict the merchant to a very specific set of goods.
Main problem: it's compatible with nothing. You'd need to add new merchants to the game, since any mod which alters an existing merchant will break your mod. It's also a bear to script (easy, but very time-intensive) if your merchant is capable of buying a large number of items (e.g., all sets of armor, or all weapons).
Solution: leave the regular merchants alone. Create a few new merchants called 'curators'. These guys buy and sell very expensive items to their rich clientele. They'll eagerly pick up that daedric longsword of yours, because they know a dozen nobles on the continent that would love to hang the thing on their dining room walls to impress their neighbors. They'll also sell you items like this because there are always people like you, trying to dump expensive items, and nobles going broke who need some fast extra cash. Curators would only be in places where they're actually likely to have clients (e.g., Vivec, Sadrith Mora, Balmora).
The curators run by script. They don't use the regular barter system. They'll only buy expensive items; they aren't 'crass merchants' and won't deal in anything but the finest of goods. A benefit to using the scripted system is that items sold to the curators will disappear forever; they won't be added to the curator's inventory, so a player can't later kill the curator to get back the stuff they've sold.
This seems to be the most mod-compatible system proposed so far, and the scripting solves the problems with inventory and availability.
Max
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I think the best way to do it is creating a permanent crate behind a wall and assigning it to the merchant. Then attach a script to the container that can add or remove a set of items from it. Each item has a 30% of being added or removed from it.
For example you could do a daedric armor crate and the script could include:
-daedric cuirass
-daedric helm
....
-daedric boots
You can also make some pieces more rare, lowering the chance of making them appear into the crate and/or raising the chance of them disappearing if they're in.
This way you can't use a leveled list, but you can simulate a leveled list by the script. The simulation is more powerfull 'cause you can assign different rarity to each item and the refresh time is as you want it (a day, a week, 10 days, ...).
A sample script doing that can be the following:
Code:
begin random_ebony_armor
short LastDayHere
short random_number
short refresh_number
if ( LastDayHere < DaysPassed - 7 ) ; the 7 means it changes once every week
set refresh_number to ( ( DaysPassed - LastDayHere ) / 7 )
set random_number to Random, 7
set LastDayHere to ( DaysPassed - random_number )
endif
if ( refresh_number > 0 )
set random_number to Random, 100 ; removing items
if ( GetItemCount "ebony helm ID" > 0 )
if ( random_number < 30 ) ; 30 is the chance of item to appear/disappear
RemoveItem "ebony helm ID" 1 ; you can change it for every item you want
endif
endif
set random_number to Random, 100
if ( GetItemCount "ebony cuirass ID" > 0 )
if ( random_number < 30 )
RemoveItem "ebony cuirass ID" 1
endif
endif
.....
set random_number to Random, 100 ; adding items
if ( GetItemCount "ebony helm ID" == 0 )
if ( random_number < 30 )
AddItem "ebony helm ID" 1
endif
endif
set random_number to Random, 100
if ( GetItemCount "ebony cuirass ID" == 0 )
if ( random_number < 30 )
AddItem "ebony cuirass ID" 1
endif
endif
.....
set refresh_number to ( refresh_number - 1 )
endif
end
This can be a little boring, but after all we have to randomize only rare items, so I think it wouldn't take so much time. Besides all the scripts are identical. You have only to change the item IDs, the chance of them appearing/disappearing and the number of days for every refresh.
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REL thread: Necessities of Morrowind 2.0
Edited by _TaddeuS_ (06/15/04 04:59 AM)
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ok, now I'm REALLY confused about this scripting thing ! you people get me a script that works, and I'll implement it on all the merchants, traders, etc. I'll throw in some more confused just for reference to my state of mind
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I'm looking forward to this mods... Taddeus balanced mods are great and i can't wait to see the whole game balanced....
Thank you guys!!!
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SoNico717
The Throne Of Asaroth Team
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So how do you justify hiding the crate in the void? Why should it be impossible to rob these merchants? I understand the game balance side of course, but isn't "game logic", that is, internal consistancy important too?
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So how do you justify hiding the crate in the void? Why should it be impossible to rob these merchants? I understand the game balance side of course, but isn't "game logic", that is, internal consistancy important too?
They don't just leave merchandise worth hundreds of thousands of Septims lying around on the shelves - it's kept in a secure location, and if you purchase it the merchant will go and get it. You don't know where it is, and there's no option to pin the merchant to the counter and cut fingers off until he tells you.
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I agree with Badger's conclusion. A single Daedric Dai-Katana is probably worth more money than most of the large manor homes in Balmora. A merchant who kept that kind of mercandise on the shelf would get robbed so often that he'd be on a first name basis with the burgalars. The very rare stuff is probably kept in some kind of vault (probably located in Vivec), possibly insured by a large company of traders, or maybe even by the government.
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
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Edited by HotFusion3 (06/15/04 10:15 PM)
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Well, i think if you use indybank, morrowind advanced, and add weight to gold, all you have to do now is remove creeper/mudcrap merchant and tweak all the shopkeepers to have a realistic(in morrowind) amount of money and change there supplies to be randomized. I am currently working on a mod to do the tweaking and to remove creeper and mudcrap merchant. If someone else wants make rare loot MORE rare, and add randomized supplies to shopkeeps than that would be the last thing we need to fix morrowind's economy.
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If someone else wants make rare loot MORE rare, and add randomized supplies to shopkeeps than that would be the last thing we need to fix morrowind's economy.
that's kinda what were doing here........ only It would be nice to load all of the balancing mods up as one set, instead of messing with the whole ten ESPs to fix ten different things which people will merge immediately upon Downloading. We should just merge these all together from the getgo instead of this whole 'modular' buisness. I mean what good is a patch unless it covers the ENTIRE hole eh?
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Not everyone wants the same changes made. Leave the merging of the mods to those who decide they definitely do want them all in place.
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LichCraft 0.95 beta - discussion thread
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I prefer it modular.... but you can make then both.... the modular and the complete version.
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Thrice:
My balancing mods lower the costs of weapons and armors. With them, only rare artifact will cost more than 4000 septims. Raising greatly merchants funds won't be so necessary, since now they'll be able to buy and sell every kind of weapons.
The aspect I would take into consideration is improving the bertering skill of these merchants, to avoid people to clean all of their money and inventories. I think this can be done by tweaking some game settings and maybe raising their Mercantile and Personality (possibly with a little script to avoid incompatibility with other mods...).
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REL thread: Necessities of Morrowind 2.0
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A lot of these ideas are good, some bad, and some have some merit if they were reworked, and I'm definitely going to re-read this thread for some ideas in my TC. That said, however, I'm still puzzled by one thing that seems to be the most desired method, and that involves placing the merchant inventory in crates behind walls.
While I certainly understand the reasoning given by the daedric weapon example, it seems more than a tad unlikely that everytime you buy something from a merchant (including a potion worth 5 gold), that merchant goes traipsing off to some super-secret, ultra-secure hideout to get the items that is impossible for the player to ever see/find (not to mention the fact the merchant would have to leave his store unattended for a few minutes while s/he got the items). Even the vaults of the Houses are visible/accessible in the game; if anything was so secure, you'd think those would be. I'm not even talking from the point of view of "give the player a chance to steal if they so choose," but rather "where the heck are they coming up with these items?"
After all, for a merchant to sell you something, there should be a supply somewhere they are pulling the items from (one reason I removed unlimited items in my game). While this is all aimed at balancing the economy, a lot of it seems to be addressing issues that "aren't realistic," but I don't see how invisible sources of items are any more realistic. Yes, I realize that making it visible will negate the ability to use leveled lists since they disappear once the container is opened; so why not just use a script to make the container unopenable while the merchant is standing there? The player would then have to kill the merchant to open the container, and then respawning/varied wares becomes a moot point anyway.
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I just released the improved version of my Balancing Mods! The first step is done...
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Italians Mod it Better!!!
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REL thread: Necessities of Morrowind 2.0
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Some mods have a glass container allowing items to be on display, but still making it impossible for the player to access. Rather than having items in a container in a 'void', perhaps put the container into one of these glass cases instead?
If you really want to, you could then add scripts to the glass case for attacking it and suchlike if you found unpenetrable glass frustratingly unrealistic. Or make it magically booby-trapped. Whatever satisfies your desire for realism.
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Perhaps we are investing too much energy in trying to protect players from themselves. If someone wants to murder a shopkeeper for his daedric goods, then let him deal with the aftermath of a (personal) economy glut with money. Still, I would like to see this project successful.
JC: The crate isn’t behind the wall to protect bargain restore health potions from thieves, but as you recognize, extremely valuable items. I suppose everything else on the leveled list could be put in a second crate in plain sight, but that would not be as convenient for those developing the mod. As for sacrificing a bit of realism, well…it’s the price we may have to pay. It is not that the shopkeeper in question has better security than the Redoran vault in Vivec (which should be greater, by the way), but we are trying to limit the availability of such items in the game. It does not serve our end it we remove the daedric battle axe from a Dremora Lord’s inventory and add it to that of a puny merchant.
In all of this, I hope that we haven’t lost sight of Patrograd’s observations about the relationship between the merchant’s mercantile skill (and speechcraft) and the outcome of bartering–still a greater issue in my mind than random/evolving inventories. If there are going to be scripts assigned to traders, then it makes sense to alter their skills at the same time. And no, I have no problem accepting a seventh level pawnbroker with a mercantile of 80.
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Quote:
After all, for a merchant to sell you something, there should be a supply somewhere they are pulling the items from
Take a look at the post I made about curators, and suddenly this begins to make sense. A lot more sense than 'there's a vault someplace'.
A curator has buyers and sellers, but rarely does the curator keep the seller's collection in his basement. He knows what the seller wants to sell, and he goes out and gets a buyer. Once he's confirmed that the buyer wants the piece and actually has the money to buy it (in Morrowind, by forking over the gold), at that point he goes to the seller, gives the seller the gold, collects the piece, and brings it back to the buyer.
This is what our hypothetical merchant is doing. The player can't rob him *because the curator doesn't possess the items in the first place*. The curator only acquires the items once the gold is transferred from the buyer, to the curator, and finally to the seller. The items themselves may be half-way across the continent, sitting in some noble's display room.
Now realistically we might decide to put in a 'delay' factor to account for the curator going to the seller, transferring the gold, picking up the item, and coming back to his office in Vardenfel. But does this add anything at all to game play? Nope, it surely doesn't. All it does is introduce an annoying 'waiting period' that does nothing to enhance the experience.
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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ManaUser
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Quote:
Now realistically we might decide to put in a 'delay' factor to account for the curator going to the seller, transferring the gold, picking up the item, and coming back to his office in Vardenfel. But does this add anything at all to game play? Nope, it surely doesn't. All it does is introduce an annoying 'waiting period' that does nothing to enhance the experience.
I guess I disagree with this part. If that's what's supposed to be happening, I think the game should represent that as closely as possible. A short deley would also serve to enhance the impresion that you're buying something exotic. The custom armor makers have a similar setup, and I think that works well. Though I do realize that a crate in the wall is also the simplest way to do it.
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I think that my tastes are similar to Maxpublic's on this. To me, the waiting peroid is just an extra clicky task that I have to go through. Now, I know that mods tht add that level of realism are pretty popular (take a look at the various NPC schedule mods). In fact, people like Max and myself may very well be in the minority.
However, our goal is to tweak the economic aspects of MW, not to enhance the realism (although that will be an inevitable side-effect). Adding a waiting peroid is extra work and CPU time that does not directly addresss our aims, however popular such an addition might be. Personally, I think that if we're considering writing code for such a time-delay system, it is indication that we've passed the point of diminishing returns.
Ultimately, the final fate of this project will rest in the hands of the first people who actually write some scripts. I simply cannot work on this until Sim-manor is past the alpha stage, but after that, I will happily start work on a trial mod.
Max, I understand what you are saying about the curators. The idea has several merits, not the least of which being that it avoids conflcits with other mods. I do dislike having the curators divorced from the normal Mercantile / Speechcraft system, however.
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
But first, read the Old Sim-manor Thread!
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maxpublic
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I guess I disagree with this part. If that's what's supposed to be happening, I think the game should represent that as closely as possible.
The curator idea is something I put into my own home-grown mod to buy daedric and enchanted items, in the same way that the museum in Mournhold does; and while it works just fine (or did, until I decided to tear the mod apart and rework it) it's a bother to wait for the gold to come in. Sometimes I forgot that I'd even sold a piece and needed to go collect my earnings.
My waiting period was a month, sometimes longer depending on how expensive the item was. During that month (or two months, or three) so many things had happened that my sale to the curator would occasionally completely slip my mind. Not to mention trying to keep track of when it was I had sold something, and how many days still had to pass before I could collect.
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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maxpublic
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Max, I understand what you are saying about the curators. The idea has several merits, not the least of which being that it avoids conflcits with other mods. I do dislike having the curators divorced from the normal Mercantile / Speechcraft system, however.
I used it because the mercantile system is already broken, and because there's no way within that system to tell a merchant to buy item x, y, and z from category 1 and to not buy items a, b, and c as well. Any merchant that'll buy a daedric sword will also buy iron knives. The developers had the same problem, and that's why the buy/sell routines for the museum in Mournhold don't go through the regular barter system.
But regardless of what's actually used here, I'm not pushing the curator system. My point was to justify why it is you can't rip off the merchant in question, i.e., he doesn't have the item and won't go get it for you until you give him the gold to pay the seller. That's just good business, especially when dealing with some unsavory adventurer type who makes a living by killing people and stripping their steaming carcasses of gear.
Max
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The four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order.
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there are almost infinate ways to blalance the economy. Some are feasable, some are not, and others would create more problems than they solve. on this note, we should come up with a FEW of these methods and try to combine them. For instance, could we put all the levelled containers for a city's merchants in a vault that the player could loot, but as soon as he leaves the vault after looting, the containers delete and then continue to suppy their merchants? Also, the realistic problem with the whole 'crate in the void' issue seems pretty strange, considering that, just by using magic, you can beam yourself to the other side of the continent. Therefore, realisticly the crate could be built into the wall when the building was built and the merchant accesses it by a spell that only he knows. There, 'crate in the wall' problem solved.
The curator idea intrigued me when I first read it, but I am curious about how they woud work. From what I could tell, they purchase valuable items above X amount of septims and then sell them to client A,B, and C on the mainland. The only problem with that system you would lose the item permantly. The only way you could get it back would be to haunt the randomized merchants for another one, which could take years. Also it wouldnt be profitable for the curator to do that, sending it off to the mainland, paying for a ship to carry it, hiring a set of security guards to guard it on it's way across the ocean, not to mention the march from Ald'Ruhn all the way to Vivec or Seyda Neen, export fees for the item being shipped.... All these expenses could add up to many times more than the value of the item in the first place. So the answer is 'he saves money by sending them off in large shipments'. But if you use that logic, it would take years, even decades for enough daedric/ebony/glass weapons would fall into his hands to ship at once. And what buyer would wait ten years for a sword, no matter how pawerful? And he would have to STORE his partiall shipment as well, but that would be solved by the magical box method.
Just some of my thoughts/ ravings....
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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anybody still listening to any of this?
oh and bump.
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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We're still here, but this is a set of ideas that has graduated past the "talking" phase and needs to get into the "doing" part. Patrograd, Taddeus, Max, and myself are all still interested, but there isn't much more we can say until some esps start rolling out.
I'd like to point out that Taddeus has just finished his "Balanced Items" mod (which re-prices the various enchanted goods), and that Max has been tinkering with variants of his curator idea.
I have some ideas of my own, but I am currently busy with other things. After I get Sim-Manor past the alpha stage, I might take a vacation from that project and develop some of the ideas expressed in here. Maybe.
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
But first, read the Old Sim-manor Thread!
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I've been off the forums lately, and I just found out that I will be gone most of July and part of august, so I cant keep the randomizer mod too myself since I wont be able to work on it for over a month. If somebody else wants to do it, thats fine with me. If not, u'll have to wait until at least late august.
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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My alchemy balance is based on Srikandy's work and she'd already fixed the problem of merchants having unlimited supplies. So you can assume this as done...
I wanted to do this a long time ago but my 1st level modding skill failed its check miserably. I went to her site but see nothing about merchants; I only see alchemy/potion stuff. Where has she changed this, or even, how?
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_TaddeuS_
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The Srikandi Alchemy mod includes this fix. So if you use that mod, you'll have also the fix.
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Italians Mod it Better!!!
Homepage: Taddeus & Nymeria Internet Hideout
REL thread: Necessities of Morrowind 2.0
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I just thought that I'd mention that I've very nearly finished a mod that incoporates many (but not all) of the ideas that have come out of this thread. Expect to see a beta Economy Fixer in a few days.
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Read the Sim-Manor thread!
But first, read the Old Sim-manor Thread!
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I just thought that I'd mention that I've very nearly finished a mod that incoporates many (but not all) of the ideas that have come out of this thread. Expect to see a beta Economy Fixer in a few days.
Woo! Can't wait to see it
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I just thought that I'd mention that I've very nearly finished a mod that incoporates many (but not all) of the ideas that have come out of this thread. Expect to see a beta Economy Fixer in a few days.
Yeah!!! awesome, i thought this project was dead!!!
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SoNico717
The Throne Of Asaroth Team
[WIP]The 6th House Army V1.5
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How about this. Make a mod that raises the prices on items, charge a fee to enter guilds, make realistic stuff to buy, homes, other properties(mines, egg mine, stores, temples, and guild buildings{only if you have reached the top of that guild}) to run as you see fit, make it avaliable for players to hire and pay mercenaries, guild members, to bribe off guards(individually), buy silt striders, a better slave market and owning system, the ability to buy ships, hire crew, and sail around Morrowind as a Merchant, Pirate, or join up in the Empire's Navy. More areas to join in the Legion, having a better bank system, a stock market, being able to rob the lattes, being about to put a bounty on peoples heads, and being able to write writ for the Mora Tong to kill people.
That could help.
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Greetings,
Just read through this entire thread, and there are some fantastic ideas here. I especially like the random merchant inventories. However, I didn't see any mention of randomizing the gold they carry. The way it is set up now simulates (I assume this was the intent) day-to-day business. Is there any way to set a maximum value for a merchant's gold, then randomize it (maybe 40-100% of maximum) each day? This could simulate slow/busy days, rather than assuming each day is a good day for business. Hopefully this could add yet another touch of realism to the game.
Just a thought,
Kynilir
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the random gold wouldnt make much sence in a real world situation. I know from experience that most merchants will try to start out with a set amount of money at the beginning of each day, deposit any extra, and withdraw from the account any shortfall. That way you can always make sure you know exactly how much money you have......
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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p.s.
and that would make things very difficult for people to sell things off, which would be less of a problem with the balancer in, but still a problem
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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Kynilir
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the random gold wouldnt make much sence in a real world situation. I know from experience that most merchants will try to start out with a set amount of money at the beginning of each day, deposit any extra, and withdraw from the account any shortfall. That way you can always make sure you know exactly how much money you have......
Hence why I suggested a range of 40-100%, rather than 0-100%. The 40% is their beginning funds for the day, and anything above that is business that was conducted before you arrived in the shop. Of course, 40% is just a suggestion, and it may entail adjusting some maximum values as well. If you like the values that currently stand, perhaps some extra coins on top of that could simulate other business - perhaps a range of 85-140% might suit you better. In my opinion, PCs shouldn't be the only ones shopping at a given shop, and money on hand should not be some arbitrary, even figure. I think it's perfectly reasonable.
At any rate, I'm not even sure this can be done. Haven't tried to mod anything in more than two years now, and it certainly had nothing to do with merchants. Anyone know if this is possible, or can anyone point me in the right direction to get started?
Thanks,
Kynilir
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i'm psyched to see these things. a couple more thoughts --
*i like the curator/middlemen idea w/out the waiting periods.
*as i never played daggerfall, the suggestion (by venombyte, i think, i'm not going to go looking for it) that training occasionally fail at higher levels is brand new to me, and i think it's great. i keep training cheap at low levels because as others have pointed out a number of skills are essentially worthless at low levels -- but jumping the prices when you get higher is a good idea.
*and this makes me think: what if at high levels increasing your skills required both a master trainer and practice? when your destruction goes to 91 from practicing it, it goes back to '90 +', which is 90 and the ability to raise it to 91 when you pay a true master to watch you in action and critique your technique. and said masters not only charge an insane amount but tell you, if you haven't earned your plus from practice yet, that you need some more real-world experience before they can teach you anything else useful.
*i think taxes and/or regularly assessed factional dues and similar are a damn fine idea. maxpublic's objections to property taxes are not without merit, but i don't think uriel septim, et al would agree.
*can i just say how happy i was to read a mention of system shock 2? still my favorite game ever, though m'wind might come close if i ever finish the thing -- or even make a quick hop over to mournhold or solstheim. anyway, one of my dreams is to see the ss2 research skill make its way into m'wind. e.g., kagoutis are like twice as hard to kill unless you have a decent alchemy score, get some kagouti hides and the right potions, mix 'em up...the only problem with just doing it that way (they then are twice as easy to kill) is what if you're commanding them to fight for you?
*in a magical world, merchants who protect their merchandise with powerful, specialized magics is a perfectly reasonable, 'realistic' idea, as was mentioned somewhere above.
*the ability to make enchanted items is one of my favorite parts of the game, so i hope nothing will make that impossible. my PCs never use those expensive professional enchanters, the cowards too afraid to adventure themselves. and my characters only enchant for love, never for money. selling potions, that they'll do...
*kollops -- someone suggested dropping their pearl-odds to 10%. just please don't give me kollops like pre-herbalism plants, then i have to try and remember precisely which damn coast i went off? i think pearls should just come in different grades of quality and value -- black pearls (i think n'dib had black pearls?) are rare, worth 100, are powerful alchemy ingredients, common white pearls are worth much less.
*specialized merchants like curators -- jewellers? maybe alchemist merchants should be made much more common and the arrilles of the world sell (and buy) nada ingredients, nary a corkbulb root nor a crust of bread. then you'd need another merchant in the tradehouse, maybe upstairs...okay, right, other-mod conflicts there.
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ewww....how'd the bandersnatch get all frumious?
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One idea I had recently for economy balancing came while I was playing System Shock 2. In Morrowind, you find a weapon that's better than your current one, throw the old one away, and easily repair the new one if it should degrade/break. It's only really necessary to have one good weapon.
In System Shock 2, things are a bit different. Weapons degrade quickly, and if you don't have the points to spend on the Maintenance skill, you're sol if your weapon breaks. And even if you do have Maintenance, you need a disposable maintenance tool which can be in short supply.
The end effect of this is that throughout the game I was usually carrying at least 4 pistols and 3 shotguns in various stages of disrepair so that if I got especially unlucky and 2 of my weapons broke in a single fight, I'd have something left to fall back on.
The following changes would bring that kind of situation to Morrowind, I think:
- Increase Repair costs at merchants by a factor of 10x-100x.
- Increase armorer tool costs by a factor of 5x-10x, and possibly make them weigh more.
- Make it so armorer tools respawn in merchant inventories more slowly.
- Make weapons degrade faster.
The end result of those changes would be significant. The armorer skill would actually be useful. Finding another Daedric weapon wouldn't just be an easy-cash moment, it'd be a thank-god-I-have-a-backup-weapon one. Plus, you might not want to waste degrading your Daedric weapon when you come across a not-so-tough opponent, so by falling back to a weaker weapon it'd be a more interesting fight.
I imagine it would take a lot of playtesting to get such a system balanced well. If anyone's interested in trying, drop me a PM/email when you're done so I can try it out.
I can't say I've noticed the broken economy yet. But the way I play is avoid carrying more than two large weapons and a small knife at any given time, avoid carrying loads of other objects that realistically i couldn't actually carry anyway. Usually the spare weapon is an axe for chopping down tree's.
Never have extra armor in the inventory. Increase your combat enhanced difficulty, aswell as keep the blade breaking switched on, which is very annoying when it happens without warning, but more believable and I like it that way. I stop myself from carrying more than a certain amount of gold at any given time, rarely use trainers. I'll carry a pair of repair tongs, a lockpick and probe. One cure blight and one cure common deseases, if I find something cool then I force myself to drop something or simply leave it. Sometimes I'll decrease my strenth via the console just to enforce my way of playing it. I keep all the magic making tools back at my home, installed mods that require me to eat, sleep and drink regularly so i have to contend with carrying equipment for those, aswell as a portable bedroll and straw for a campsite. When I'm done with all that, I find it pretty hard to become an uber god character, not to mention I still to this day haven't bothered to do the main quest fully, so I'm left to my own devices with little help.
Probably not the best method for everyone's tastes, but I enjoy it, and I've not got bored of it yet.
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What if you just replaced or offered an alternative to gold coins as a currency? You could then get around some of the broken merchantile skill problem by going to basically a barter system using this new cash.
The introduction of a lot of (invisible) pickpockets/tax collectors would keep the wealthy players in the poor house.
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fable2
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The introduction of a lot of (invisible) pickpockets/tax collectors would keep the wealthy players in the poor house.
And have them out for blood, unless 1) they could see the pickpocketing, 2) had a chance of escaping, and 3) could develop a skill or buy items to avoid it.
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if the pickpockets had lets say a 50 % chance of succeding and after pickpocketing you they have to run to a certain spot before they disapear but at least the PC would get a chance to catch them depending on how loaded with weight they are and how fast they have become, i really like the pickpocket idea my compliments to those who suggested it
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"I wonder if these bite?" Last words of a dead noob
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will thi stuff be released anytime soon?
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I really liked half of it , and I loved the rest of it . But I would like to offer some ideas if I may .
Make the shop keepers have more monie . Maybe just double the monie of a randome list of 70% of the mechants and let the other 30% of the merchants have 3 , 5 , 7 times the amount thay origionaly had , but maybe look around there store or shack to see that thay are not poor , if thay are , the effert would be useless .
This may not fit into your plugin but give most of the people you bye potions and scrolls from a replenishing supply of potions and scrolls so your not at a dead end .
And also , I just whanted to say this one to get it off my chest pay no atention , but give half the people that you fight , maybe higher level adventurers , give them something like 789 to 2640 so you will be gaining wealth as you kill high lvl characters , what a concept .
Ok thanks for working on this Im shure ill get it
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Mars Volta " This Apparatus Must Be Unearth " is a good song to listen to when your killing some Fire Daedroth , The Creature is like the song ...... Oh yeah ....... I like it !
See my , "hopefully larg soon" , Screenshot collection HERE .
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I'm a noob, but I had an idea about how to fix the realism issue regarding the inaccessable chests.
Simply lay the items out, but make them incredibly difficult to steal. The techniques should vary from area to area. A Hlaalu type merchant would most likely have some very well equiped guards around, restrictions on any sort of magic that might conceal you, etc. A Telvanni might settle for a simple, trapped chest that is ungodly hard to untrap, fires on target (if possible, maybe put it in a small room and pump up the area if not) and causes, I dunno, instant death or a 2k pound burden that lasts long enough for the shopkeep to summon a monster and have you killed. And so on and so forth. An excellent theif should be able to steal the items, but only a truly excellent one. That would, to me, add as much fun to the game as the balanced economy.
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I really liked half of it , and I loved the rest of it . But I would like to offer some ideas if I may .
Make the shop keepers have more monie . Maybe just double the monie of a randome list of 70% of the mechants and let the other 30% of the merchants have 3 , 5 , 7 times the amount thay origionaly had , but maybe look around there store or shack to see that thay are not poor , if thay are , the effert would be useless .
This may not fit into your plugin but give most of the people you bye potions and scrolls from a replenishing supply of potions and scrolls so your not at a dead end .
And also , I just whanted to say this one to get it off my chest pay no atention , but give half the people that you fight , maybe higher level adventurers , give them something like 789 to 2640 so you will be gaining wealth as you kill high lvl characters , what a concept .
Ok thanks for working on this Im shure ill get it
wouldnt all that just put more money into an already bloated econamoy? and btw, I like the idea posted right above mine about the ungodly difficult to steal thing.
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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fable2
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wouldnt all that just put more money into an already bloated econamoy? and btw, I like the idea posted right above mine about the ungodly difficult to steal thing.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who reacted to that post and thought, "What in the world...?" It does the exact opposite of one of the main intended effects of this thread topic.
On other matters, I agree: make shoplifting only a very high-end skill possibility. Make Telekinesis much more likely to fail, and increase the magicka cost threefold. Lower the rising curve of quality items found in levelled chests, etc, as the PC gains levels. Send the mudcrab on a long ocean voyage.
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are you saying DOWN WITH MUDCRAB AND THE CREEP-ER ?
i dont care, just curoius
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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are you saying DOWN WITH MUDCRAB AND THE CREEP-ER ?
i dont care, just curoius
The Creeper doesn't bother me, since his funds are limited and he lends a touch of originality to the NPCs, who (thanks to terribly repetitive dialog) are frequently bland and colorless. But the mudcrab...? He's a money multiplier. Set Mark to him, go out, kill stuff, grab goodies, recall to him, sell, heal up, go out, repeat as needed.
That's my opinion. If you disagree, that's fine. But I think anyone would have to admit the mudcrab makes it too easy to push items into the economy and pull out drakes. It's a cheese tip that everyone's included in their guides since Vivec was a tiny godlet in diapers.
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Quote:
are you saying DOWN WITH MUDCRAB AND THE CREEP-ER ?
i dont care, just curoius
DOWN WITH THE MUDCRAB, it makes gameplay cheap, and ruins the RPG, i dont understand why certain programmers do things like this to every game
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"I wonder if these bite?" Last words of a dead noob
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To go with my post above. I just think its a little cheasy that when ever you do find something that is worth 20000 gold the merchant has only 6000 or less to barter with . I do agree that you should still have the merchants have a good mercintile skill so if you whent with my idea "just give the very poor merchants a bit more monie", and the good mecintile skill for the merchants , you could sell allot more stuff and I think the game would look nicer as well . Since you are giving the merchants more expensive items that would make sence I think . The only fally that I can see is where would the merchants end up putting all this stuff . But hay I just think Morrowind's economy should be a bit more plentifull , "Im tired of being stuck on an Island where no one has any monie but a creeper and a mud crab " but maybe thats just me.
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Mars Volta " This Apparatus Must Be Unearth " is a good song to listen to when your killing some Fire Daedroth , The Creature is like the song ...... Oh yeah ....... I like it !
See my , "hopefully larg soon" , Screenshot collection HERE .
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Disciple
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To go with my post above. I just think its a little cheasy that when ever you do find something that is worth 20000 gold the merchant has only 6000 or less to barter with .
The definition of cheesy is to take advantage in a game of programming "holes" left by the developers to make tons of money (or other resources) and render yourself almost godlike. So it's far from being cheesy to be unable to sell all your goods for their supposed remarkable prices.
I just take the most expensive items and either keep 'em, or sell 'em for whatever I can get from a merchant with a lot of drakes, taking the rest in trade. Then I slowly sell the lower-priced items over time throughout the land. I still do well, but I figure I'll never get what those extraordinary items I sell are worth--after all, they're artifacts. And just as people know who sell antique jewelry to pawnshops in reallife, you'll never get more than 25% of their worth, if that. The market won't allow it.
But the easiest way to deal with all this is simply to lower the price of all goods above a certain cost by an increasingly drastic curve. And raise costs on all other goods, particularly of better quality.
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as far as creeper and mudcrab are concerned, i was being serious up there, I REALLY DONT CARE. I only use creeper for big ticket items, and ive never even seen the mudcrab, but in response to cris, the said 20000 gold items will not be nearly as plentiful in the balance mod, therefore if you want to collect them, it might be the only one in the game for you to find. And I still go with my post above, that only will bloat the economy more.
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But hay I just think Morrowind's economy should be a bit more plentifull , "Im tired of being stuck on an Island where no one has any monie but a creeper and a mud crab " but maybe thats just me.
judging by that this mod is not for you.
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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Disciple
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Quite so. Chris Ogden, I'm not trying to dis you. Check out Morrowind Summit and look in their tweaking mods section--there's at least one mod I've seen there that increases the money carried by *all* Morrowind merchants up to 100,000 drakes, each. Not my kind of thing, but hey, if you buy the game, what you do with it is your own business. Enjoy!
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Ok . Sorrie about that I miss undrstood the thread . I just get a bit exeited about this game , And the Plugins . Thanks for the info .
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Mars Volta " This Apparatus Must Be Unearth " is a good song to listen to when your killing some Fire Daedroth , The Creature is like the song ...... Oh yeah ....... I like it !
See my , "hopefully larg soon" , Screenshot collection HERE .
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fable2
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Disciple
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Ok . Sorrie about that I miss undrstood the thread . I just get a bit exeited about this game , And the Plugins . Thanks for the info .
Perfectly understandable. It's a game that excites interest, doesn't it? And the mods improve it beyond measure.
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what would be cool is like if the merchants didn't keep the really rare and valuable items in their store. like if you bought like an ebony or deadric weapon from them they would have to go somewhere like a vault or something to get it and in a few days you would go back to their shop and they would give it to you since ebony and daedric is some of the strongest stuff in the game it would be kept in a VERY safe place so that it couldnt be stolen.
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I have some thoughts on various ways to fix the money problem. The first, and most simplest, is a SIR. Simply say that you cannot sell anything, ever. The only coin you will ever have then is what's paid you for missions, plus the handful that monsters carry. This then solves the problem of overpriced items, mercantile bug, mud/creep, and more. Unfortunately, it requires the player to give up a fair bit of realism, which I think will damper the game for most.
Failing this, here are some other options.
1) Artifacts are meant to be priceless. The devs wanted them to be so valuable that you could never get their full worth, yet as we have seen, players have worked around that. Exploiting this allows a player to become 100,000 richer from one item.
To solve this, make all high ticket items have a value of 0. Daedric, ebony, Lord's Mail, filled soul gems, and so on all have a value of 0. Maybe Morrs (people of Morrowind) are superstitious about daedric items and will never buy them. Maybe they think they're cursed. Maybe they don't want to be found with the Lord's mail, knowing it's an instant death sentence. An ingame explanation can easily be found, and removes one of the major sources of wealth.
2) Kill Mudcrab/Creeper. They are obviously easter eggs, not meant to be part of the "real" game. How many gamers actually found these guys on their own, and not from a netguide somewhere? They are a big factor in breaking wealth, and MUST be part of any fix attempt.
3) Increase the Mercantile/speechcraft skills of all merchants. I don't know exactly how they work, but apparently merchants with low skills allow the player to make more money from things. Many gamers have reported being able to buy all a merchant's goods for 200, then selling them right back for 300. That's ridiculous.
How can any merchant stay in business like this? This is their life and livlihood; they should be masters at this like the player is a master at combat. I would say something like 90 or 100 in their skills. Players should only make a tiny fraction off of sold goods and only over time will they show any appreciable gain. They should expect to pay much more for something than it's worth when buying. PCs should NEVER be able to buy a good for less than it's worth, or sell one for more.
3) Increase the cost of services. Silt and boat can be raised somewhat, but mage guild teleport needs to go up a lot, imo... x10, or even x100. Instantaneous transport is a VERY valuable thing, and one should expect to pay through the nose for it. Consider Tusamircil(?) as a guide.
Repairing items should go up, and other things like beds, healing, training, as well.
4) Eliminate ALL magic items from random treasure lists, as well as any even semi-valuable item. Magic is supposed to be rare and wonderful. As someone else pointed out, why would an npc charge at you with a rusty dagger and rags, while right behind him is a chest with plate and a magic sword?
Anyone with two brain cells is going to keep anything remotely valuable on their person, or give it to an ally. PCs should have to fight for any valuable they get, and this means taking it off a dead npc or monster, not finding it lying around, unguarded. If it's unguarded, why hasn't somebody else snapped it up after all these years?
5) increase the cost of magic items. Buying even a potion should be an expensive act.
These are some things that I think will go a long way towards balancing the inequity of wealth. As a final tip, increase the money the Duke wants to become a landholder. He is essentially making you a baron, and 5000 is a very cheap price for that, imo.
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I do not think that anyone here will disagree that the MW economy is unbalanced by the fact that the PLAYER has too much money and gets it too easily. Instead of coming up with all sorts of work-arounds such as special merchants, zero priced magic items, etc., would it not just make more sense (and require a lot less work) to just cut off the player's main source of money? Why not just give all merchants 1 gold and give the Creeper and Mudcrab zero. Problem solved. Think about it. If you walk into a Wal-Mart and offered the manager a pile of clothes that you bought from his competitor, or stole, or got of dead bodies, what do you think he would say to you? You want realism, that's realism. Stores do not buy stuff off the street. Okay, pawnbrokers do, but they are not going to give you much money are they?
Now the player is the main source of money in the game and if he builds up a good amount of it, that cash will not be from the merchants. You'll quickly notice that there are no huge piles of gold just sitting around. If the player manages to come up with the cash to pay for that stronghold, they can feel proud that they earned it.
This also breaks a few other loopholes that involve too much cash - super trainers, excessive enchanter usage, etc.
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BUMP
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I do not think that anyone here will disagree that the MW economy is unbalanced by the fact that the PLAYER has too much money and gets it too easily. Instead of coming up with all sorts of work-arounds such as special merchants, zero priced magic items, etc., would it not just make more sense (and require a lot less work) to just cut off the player's main source of money? Why not just give all merchants 1 gold and give the Creeper and Mudcrab zero. Problem solved. Think about it. If you walk into a Wal-Mart and offered the manager a pile of clothes that you bought from his competitor, or stole, or got of dead bodies, what do you think he would say to you? You want realism, that's realism. Stores do not buy stuff off the street. Okay, pawnbrokers do, but they are not going to give you much money are they?
Thats true but you're taking some things for granted. Walmart has a nationwide shipping/distribution network, tens of thousands of employees, and a computerized perpetual inventory system all working in cohesion to put item X in store Y at any given point in time. In the context of Morrowinds game world, it makes sense for a weapon merchant to buy an ebony sword of far greater quality than the steel crap he can produce, under the assumption that he could sell it later for a profit.
Your solution would work though, and address weapon plugins that add uber l00t to leveled lists.
About enchantment, would it be possible to make magic items not recharge at all, like Daggerfall? That means you have to plug soulgems into them which could be bought at considerable expense. That kills two birds with one stone. I brought this up a long time ago and was told its not possible.
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Kirel
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Quote:
I do not think that anyone here will disagree that the MW economy is unbalanced by the fact that the PLAYER has too much money and gets it too easily. Instead of coming up with all sorts of work-arounds such as special merchants, zero priced magic items, etc., would it not just make more sense (and require a lot less work) to just cut off the player's main source of money? Why not just give all merchants 1 gold and give the Creeper and Mudcrab zero. Problem solved. Think about it. If you walk into a Wal-Mart and offered the manager a pile of clothes that you bought from his competitor, or stole, or got of dead bodies, what do you think he would say to you? You want realism, that's realism. Stores do not buy stuff off the street. Okay, pawnbrokers do, but they are not going to give you much money are they?
Now the player is the main source of money in the game and if he builds up a good amount of it, that cash will not be from the merchants. You'll quickly notice that there are no huge piles of gold just sitting around. If the player manages to come up with the cash to pay for that stronghold, they can feel proud that they earned it.
This also breaks a few other loopholes that involve too much cash - super trainers, excessive enchanter usage, etc.
I dig this idea! There should still be places to sell your stuff (moderately) expensive stuff, but make them hard to find, like fences for thieves or something. It should be bloody difficult to offload a sackfull of ebony or dwemer artifacts, and no one should have enough cash for daedric (sp?) weapons.
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In the context of Morrowinds game world, it makes sense for a weapon merchant to buy an ebony sword of far greater quality than the steel crap he can produce, under the assumption that he could sell it later for a profit.
This always presumes that the economy of small towns could afford to pay such exorbitant prices. Put it into a 'real world' context. Say, for example, I had a bar of gold worth £20,000. I go to my local small-town pawnbrokers and try to pawn it for cash. It's highly unlikely that the pawnbroker is going to have that kind of money lying about. So I go to my local small-town jewellers and try to sell it there. Same problem - although they might be willing to exchange said gold bar for some jewellery.
The only place that I could reasonably expect to offload the gold bar for anything like its true worth would be in a large city with an equivalently large economy. Most likely I'd have to travel to Manchester, Leeds or even London to find anyone willing to part with the money I want.
OK, so this is oversimplifying things, but the principle remains the same. Your small town smith who bashes out iron daggers for a living won't have anything like the capital to pay out for a beautifully crafted ebony sword. The Fighter's Guild might just have enough to buy the odd glass dagger. The Imperial Legion smith in Ebonheart similarly. However, only in Vivec would you expect to be able to sell something so valuable, and then you'd probably have to settle for maybe half the item's worth.
Regards,
Pauly
TheLys Admin-thingy
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A gentleman and a scholar of fine art ~ Galley, about yours truly
TheLys Morrowind Mods
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I have started playing with a plug-in that adds lots of pickpockets to the game. It occurred to me after running into a few of them, that this might address the broken ecomony problem.
Here's the idea:
Give the Creeper and Mudcrab a pickpocket script. The player goes there, sells off all the really expensive potions that they made with +1 billion intelligence and gets all the money that the merchant has. They turn around and walk away only to find they only have 3 gold left! Now add a Khajiit and a Bosmer who just stand beside the merchant looking innocent. The player kills one and discovers no gold. The player kills the other and to his horror discovers that the pickpocket is the merchant. The player can sell all sorts of stuff to these two merchants, but in the end, they are just giving the stuff away for free. And this would help explain how those merchants got those huge piles of coin (from the walking PIGGY bank).
This removes the player's access to insane amounts of gold, therefore the power training, super enchanting, etc. are much more controlled. It would be easier to implement than making all magic items extremely rare finds or tweaking other merchants so that they won't buy stuff for a higher price than they sell at. And if the player gets too greedy, they could simply add a sales tax (minor pickpocket script).
Good idea or really bad idea that will just make players mad?
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I never use creeper and mudcrab anyway, but the economy is still completely broken. You'd have to do a similar thing to every merchant with, say, 1000 gold or more.
Plus have random pickpockets in busy towns too.
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This always presumes that the economy of small towns could afford to pay such exorbitant prices. Put it into a 'real world' context. Say, for example, I had a bar of gold worth £20,000. I go to my local small-town pawnbrokers and try to pawn it for cash. It's highly unlikely that the pawnbroker is going to have that kind of money lying about. So I go to my local small-town jewellers and try to sell it there. Same problem - although they might be willing to exchange said gold bar for some jewellery.
Exactly. I stated as much in a previous state on Morrowind economy. In realworld terms, you wouldn't expect a pawnbroker to pay the worth of the Koh'i'noor diamond, if someone showed up in their shop with that fabled gem one day. Who would have the money to buy it, even assuming the pawnbroker could afford such a thing? The market would be tiny--assuming the pawnbroker even knew where to look. And since it would be very likely that such a stone was looted from somebody else's collection, or a dead body, or a tomb, the peril of having it on the premises would also decrease the price.
Such a pawnbroker might make an offer of 25% of value at best, perhaps 10% at worst, depending on location. Of course, in Morrowind you logically should be able to use the Thieves Guild as a fence (assuming you're a member), but then the TG would likely take a cut for its services quite as large as any savings you might get from making a higher percentage off the item.
As your reputation for "finding" expensive artifacts grows, I'd suspect attacks on your person and any location where you keep goods would, as well. One possible way to cut back on the PC's drake stash would be to make them the target of pickpockets, and have their homes looted. The PC could be encouraged to use a bank mod to store gold and items, but without any interest and with a very hefty vault fee. Just an idea.
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OK, I'll admit that I haven't read the entire thread which is going to take a while but I've been working on a couple of training mods which I think might be of interest here. The first modifies training so that after you have paid for your training you can no longer train with that trainer until you have increased your skill by a certain amount depending on your skill level. Takes longer before you can retrain at higher levels. The mod should be supercompatible with any other training mods out there since it doesn't actually add a script to any npc, but runs attached to an activator in the same cell. The reason I suspect no-one has done this before is that as I quickly found out you need a unique script for each trainer. This is very tedious to implement so I gave up very soon after starting. However, I recently found that MWEdit has an automated script template function which makes it rather trivial. Should have a version up and running soon now for anyone that wants to test it out.
The other mod I'm working on came from a suggestion in another thread whereby the skillraise books should either have to be purchased or stolen before you can read them. This has been quite sneaky to implement to get around the default activation of books where you automatically read them, but I'm getting close I think.
Yes you can just make training more expensive, but IMHO it's an inelegant solution. This way you can be as rich as you like, but money can't buy you ability. That only comes with hard work - just like in reality :-)
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The other mod I'm working on came from a suggestion in another thread whereby the skillraise books should either have to be purchased or stolen before you can read them.
Hopefully, theft will not be used, or it will be implemented in such a way as to make it an option only for a high level character. As it is, theft can net just about anyone a huge range of expensive goods pretty early in the game. The chance of successful theft of a book should be very, very slim, to encourage what we all want to do: find new money sinks to make the economy more responsive and the PC less flush.
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I used that logic with my personal mechant tweak mod. Mudcrab and Creeper have been replaced with one decently wealthy merchant each in Balmora, Vivec, and Sadrith Mora, balanced with very high mercantile and speechcraft skills.
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One very nice thing that you could do with this mod is actually make a Visible economy, Such as caravans leaving balmora and Suran for port cities, then loading the items onto ship and send em off into the ocean, and have em come back with new stuff, and send it to cities. That might be for a different mod though.....
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"Karma; what goes around, goes around and around." Cory, Boy Meets World
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