Limited gold for merchants

[Sacred_Path]

I don't know about you guys but so far conditioning hasn't made me unaware that I'm grinding when I'm grinding. Also I never play a packrat unless the game forces me to do so. Seems like I'm not Pavlov's dog after all.

 

We shouldn't confuse behaviour people tend to rely on with conditioning; for example, people nowadays tend to rely on teleporting in RPGs, to the point where no mainstream developer would dare offering a game where you have to walk/ ride everywhere without fast travel.

Add to this (laziness) that a lot of players seem to enjoy imbalance and loopholes in the system when it comes to RPGs. The prevalent opinion seems to be, "if I want to be challenged I'd play an RTS, an online shooter or an MMO, not a single player RPG". This makes lots of saleable junk basically a necessity, just like overpowered loot and unlimited gold on merchants.

 

That said, P:E is a niche product and I'm venturing a wild guess that its audience is inclined to give better/ more balanced mechanics a chance. The knack simply(?) seems to be to create a cohesive experience. If players find that all magic items are potentially useful to everyone, they won't feel the urgent need to sell them. If you don't require players to grind up gold so they can buy the latest villain-squashing gear at the merchant's, it's not going to offend most people that they can't sell all of their junk. The player can be more easily funneled down the "right" path if he feels that what he's doing isn't suboptimal, even if you give him the chance to potentially game the system.

[Ffordesoon]

@Sacred_Path:

 

That's how I feel. I think the actual number of dedicated min/maxers is relatively small; most people who use exploits don't do so on purpose. They stumble into them while they're messing around with the systems, and assume that if it's in the game, it's supposed to be there. Thus, they use it.

 

I can only think of a few times I've deliberately "gamed the game" to get an advantage, and they were all time-consuming efforts that I undertook because there were inherent flaws in the design.

 

In Skyrim, for example, I used the Iron Dagger exploit to level up my Smithing quickly because I was tired of having the materials for better armor taking up useless space in my inventory. I couldn't do anything with them, because the best materials were by and large rather difficult to come by (randomized mineral drops suuuuuck), I had no choice but to keep the stuff somewhere. I could have put the junk in my storage chest in Breezehome or whatever, but it annoyed me that I had all this junk I couldn't use stashed away in there. And if I sold the stuff, A) I wouldn't have it to use anymore, and B) I wouldn't be able to name all my armor, which meant sorting it would be a pain.

 

There were a bunch of other reasons, too, like the level scaling (which was admittedly better than Oblivion's by a wide, wide margin, but still resulted in some annoying quirks) and the mysteriously ineffective lower-level armor (I don't mean it was simply not as good as high-level armor, but that the armor is mysteriously ineffective against some random foes for reasons it's impossible to know unless you look it up on the internet, thus driving you to brute-force your way through encounters by using exploits to get higher-level armor). I was also playing on 360, so I couldn't use any mods to solve the problem either.

 

Yes, I deliberately exploited the broken leveling mechanic to my advantage, but I did so because there wasn't a kosher way to go about solving my problem. It's kind of like piracy in that way.

 

I can think of several fairly simple solutions to the problem. No randomized mineral drops, for one. For another, they could have let me give the materials to a blacksmith with the required skills to craft a suit of armor I could name myself for the same price as a standard one. That would get rid of the materials I gathered and give me the same result as crafting without forcing me to level up in smithing to buy good armor.

 

But all of that is beside the point, said point being that I wouldn't have used the exploit in the first place if the game hadn't driven me to it through its inconsistent and sloppily executed mechanics. Trust me, I played "the right way" for a long, long time before I gave in. If I'd been able to see what the hell I was doing wrong, at the least, I wouldn't have exploited the game in the first place.

[Schuesseled]

Mind-twisting idea: craftsmen want to sell their own goods, and have no use for the stinky rags you pulled of that dead bandit, even a pawnshop may only promise you a 2% discount for your next purchase in exchange for that crap. Don't base player income on selling loot, and we need no street peddlers with a bottomless purse, and we also don't need to go back to the dungeon to fetch the rest of the junk that was to heavy to carry. Two problems solved with one simple solution.

 

Although there is some logic to that, any user of ebay could tell you that there will be a buyer for every piece of crap that's in your house. You might not get anywhere near it's actual value but you could certainly flog everything down at the market.

 

What i would like to see for the game, is an economy where some items are junk and have the same value everywhere, but other loot could be considered a specialist item, and along with being more valuable in general would also be a lot more valuable to the right person, all you have to do is do some adventuring and find them. If these "collectors" were randomised it would also make the game replayable in this sense, and also prevent the usage of guides which would no doubt kinda spoil the whole thing.

[Lephys]

Although there is some logic to that, any user of ebay could tell you that there will be a buyer for every piece of crap that's in your house. You might not get anywhere near it's actual value but you could certainly flog everything down at the market.

 

What i would like to see for the game, is an economy where some items are junk and have the same value everywhere, but other loot could be considered a specialist item, and along with being more valuable in general would also be a lot more valuable to the right person, all you have to do is do some adventuring and find them. If these "collectors" were randomised it would also make the game replayable in this sense, and also prevent the usage of guides which would no doubt kinda spoil the whole thing.

What if there were actual markets/bazaars/squares in mid-to-large-sized towns where these collector-type folk set up at stalls and bought/bartered things, with different ones on different days/at different times that you visited? This way, if you found such an aspect of the economy interesting, you could loot broken time pieces and tarnished jewelry and other knickknacks, and they'd be worth at least something to the right people (and might even provide more than simple monetary value, like "quest" content/triggered-happenings, or introduction to a new faction or different people or new information/relationships, etc.). I think it would be prudent, though, to give some indication that it wouldn't have value at "normal" shops. Maybe an actual "knickknacks" category or something in the inventory system. *shrug*

[JFSOCC]

What if you allowed the player to gather up lots of armour and clothes. and then at the bazaar they find that only the rag merchant cares to give a copper per piece for it? That would discourage a player to loot every last piece of armour very quickly, I imagine.

[Lephys]

What if you allowed the player to gather up lots of armour and clothes. and then at the bazaar they find that only the rag merchant cares to give a copper per piece for it? That would discourage a player to loot every last piece of armour very quickly, I imagine.

That's kind of what I was intending. The ebay reference made me think of it. People who gather up specific types of items and salvage them into like-new and/or unique items. People who repair things, then resell them. People who simply collect things, etc. You might find someone who'll give you a copper per old article of clothing or armor, or you MIGHT find someone who'll give you a decent bit for each, or just for a certain number of them, or maybe they'll just barter and give you some unique, MacGuyvered up piece of clothing or armor that they made, or some other knickknack that you can't find via looting, that someone ELSE at the bazaar/market is looking for, and will pay you for (in money or potentially even other stuff.) Or, like I said... sometimes, maybe it just starts a quest (some lost item, or someone in the midst of a situation whom you wouldn't have met if not for the market transaction, and/or some new and useful bit of information for your trouble, etc.).

 

Loot can easily be converted into many things other than money. But, the bazaar/market thing establishes an organized system/mechanic for the majority of junk/knicknacks you find, rather than just having nothing but random people all over the world HAPPEN to want to buy random things from you. Plus, it makes sense in the lore for such types of interested parties to congregate in a market of some sort.