Merchant Gold

[Lephys]

^ Oh yeah. That's kind of what I'm getting at. Even if it's not specifically to simulate the economy, or prevent its breaking, etc, if the game were designed a different way, then you'd just do different stuff, is all. But I mean, there's plenty of stuff you can't do in the game. You can't stop and pull clumps of grass out of the ground and put them into your inventory. Why? Because there's no reason to.

 

That's the thing about loot. "You can pick that stuff up in real life" doesn't justify the capability to have your characters loot everything. There has to be a reason for it in the game. And when the only reason for it is "to use or sell," you can only use up to 6 sets of any one weapon/armor, so unless all the enemies in the realm only drop 6 sets of armor, the only other purpose for it is to sell. And if the only purpose for loot is to sell it, and you can't drop it on the ground out of your infinistash, then it doesn't make much sense to "simulate the economy" by arbitrarily tossing in merchant gold limitations into an otherwise not-at-all-simulated economy.

 

However it's done, the options for using your loot, in whatever capacity, need to match up to the options for looting in the first place.

 

Although...

I cant drop it (right?), and Im sure as hell not going to run around stashing stuff in containers, so SHOW ME THE MONEY.

... it would be pretty hilarious if you stashed some swords in a hollow stump just outside of town, only to come back later and see a child running around in the streets with a longsword, promptly being chased by a parent screaming "Billy! Where did you get that?!". "I found it while playing in the forest! ^_^"

 

Haha.

Edited February 2, 2015 by Lephys

[LadyCrimson]

Interesting that so many don't like vendor gold limits. I mean, I understand it...it often doesn't work as well as it sounds in concept. I sort of liked the way it worked in the original Divine Divinity, but it had a barter system to go along with it. It was still clunky and yeah you'd end up sometimes not being able to unload stuff.

 

But sometimes the management aspect adds an element of gameplay interest, for me, if it's something more than just a number limit in the vendor window, that is. Still, it's not a feature I "must have" or likely will even really notice its absence. Heh.

[TheisEjsing]

The fact of the matter is that vendor gold limits aren't realistic in any way. Every game that has vendor gold limits fails to implement it correctly. 

 

1) The game always fail to reflect a living world. The vendor only sells to and buys from the player. Noone else ever shops with any vendor in the game. Their gold limit is only applying to you. Or they suddenly have 5000 gold, every time 5 days has past. How is that in any way realistic? 

 

2) Their item stock is always static. If you sell them stuff, either they will keep those items forever, or they won't have any of them one second after you sold them. They always have the same items, in every game, every single time you visit the shop. 

So please refrain from the realism argument. 

Edited February 3, 2015 by TheisEjsing

[Cluas]

Gold limits can be good, but it depends on the way it is implemented. If the vendor have a large amount of gold, and I can sell 'most' of my stuff, then it is a cool function. But if a vendor can't buy enough of my stuff, it gets annoying, the Skyrim/tes is a good example of how NOT to do it. 

 

So I'm happy it's gone...

 

I would say IE games did it good, without having the gold limits. Not especially realistic, but for me it worked. I best remember Kuldahar, where I had to sell armor to Conlan (the blacksmith), only Oswald would buy potions, and if I wanted to sell my scrolls, I had to go to the tower and meet Orrick.... Don't know about realism, but it worked for me : )

[Jarmo]

1) The game always fail to reflect a living world. The vendor only sells to and buys from the player. Noone else ever shops with any vendor in the game. Their gold limit is only applying to you. Or they suddenly have 5000 gold, every time 5 days has past. How is that in any way realistic? 

 

2) Their item stock is always static. If you sell them stuff, either they will keep those items forever, or they won't have any of them one second after you sold them. They always have the same items, in every game, every single time you visit the shop. 

 

Don't remember which game it was, might have been an NWN module.

But there was a game... heck.. was it actually Fallout New Vegas?

 

Anyway.. where vendor inventory varies.

So there's this nice item he happens to have stocked, but it's not going to stay there forever.

So if you want that item, you better scrape up the gold right now, might not find the item again.

 

 

And lots of games have had huge amounts of loot you just leave there.

Because hauling in leather rags (1 GP/apiece) starts to seem a waste of effort,

when you also occasionally happen upon a gold necklace (1000 GP/apiece).

 

I games like Skyrim, I usually have a mental rule of only picking up stuff worth 50GP/pound, or so, depending on my current wealth.

 

But if it's as easy as hitting a "pick up everything, auto label as crap" button and then hitting "sell everything labeled as crap" when at merchants,

I can't see any reason why I wouldn't just take everything.

[Hassat Hunter]

Actually Divinity: Original Sin (now that I have been recalled about it) has a variable item stock, vendor gold restock (random amount) per level you gain.

It might not be completely realistic, but it gets close enough for your 2 points.

 

Yeah, just picking up everything and then unshelling them is extremely boring... as I have recently been remembered by Torchlight II. Even the pet going to town couldn't save it from being super-stale. And I really fear the same would be here with infinite stash (worse than a limited grid)+enemies drop everything they wear+sellers having infinite gold.

 

I recently read some Kickstarters back, and one of them (might be one or two old?) mentioned stuff being too expensive in gold. That was probably before enemies drop everything on them. So they changed one thing to addapt to lower gold amounts, and now they stuff more gold at the player?

That doesn't look good to me...

[Lephys]

The fact of the matter is that vendor gold limits aren't realistic in any way. Every game that has vendor gold limits fails to implement it correctly. 

 

1) The game always fail to reflect a living world. The vendor only sells to and buys from the player. Noone else ever shops with any vendor in the game. Their gold limit is only applying to you. Or they suddenly have 5000 gold, every time 5 days has past. How is that in any way realistic? 

 

2) Their item stock is always static. If you sell them stuff, either they will keep those items forever, or they won't have any of them one second after you sold them. They always have the same items, in every game, every single time you visit the shop. 

 

So please refrain from the realism argument.

That's the thing, though, about "the realism" argument. The purpose of "realism" is to serve as a foundation upon which to build interesting game mechanics. It is not to simulate for simulation's sake. So, the realism argument, I dare say, isn't done right very often. Because "do this one thing because it's a realistic individual thing" doesn't make much sense.

 

But, in the game, a good use of realism is to simulate some aspect of economical relationship between, essentially, what the player can do to affect things, and how merchants will change accordingly. There are a ton of things wrong with the typical setup.

 

For one thing, why do you pick up a sword, and know EXACTLY what its base value is? "Oh, I shouldn't take that dwarven relic I've never seen in my life, because, according to my weird selective omniscience, it's only worth 50 gold but weighs 20lbs. u_u..."

 

Whether inadvertently or not, most games now -- inventory/looting systems and merchant systems -- are built around "loot = sell things for gold." Like, that's just one big aspect of the game. A convoluted money-looting system. Why? purely because it's realistic for swords and tattered rags to drop, and it's technically realistic that, if someone DID want to buy some tattered rags and old swords, they'd give you approximately X gold for them. Stuff like that. But, if you built the game around "Hey, if you wanna take the time to figure out what's valuable and what isn't, and figure out when people will actually buy what from you, and at decent prices or crappy prices, then go you!", then it'd be "realistic." You could still loot everything in the universe, and go back to town and run around all day trying to sell it to people and/or figure out its exact value (what you're actually going to get for it in munnies at a given time). But, nothing would be forcing you to do that, or even really encouraging you to do that.

 

You could even represent an appraisal-type skill. Plenty of games have done it. Just so that you don't horde everything purely because you don't know what might be valuable and what might not without meta-knowledge. But, as for merchants and gold fluctuations, etc, you could do a lot of more general things. Such as... give them infinite gold, but they'll never pay more than a certain amount for any given thing. A relatively simple thing to do, though, would be to to have the consequences of your actions/situation outcomes actually affect merchants in an area.

 

*shrug*. All of it comes with pros and cons, though. But, to "do it right," you have to look at all the factors, and all the things you CAN do, and build a coherent, actually-fun-and-supportive-of-the-gameplay system out of those options. Sure, some things will be simulated, but others will be very much unrealistic. Because a full-on trade simulator, while kind of neat in its own way, isn't really fun or supportive of a fantasy RPG game. It's always going to have aspects that accomplish nothing beyond hindering the playing of the game, purely because the overall goal of the game is not "simulate the world exactly."

[Sedrefilos]

I'll use the classic argument: not infinite merchant gold is not the IE way

Seriously, I prefere infinite merchant gold for this game.

[Stun]

I'll use the classic argument: not infinite merchant gold is not the IE way

Seriously, I prefere infinite merchant gold for this game.

Yep, or to put it another way, an infinity engine successor should not try and fix what wasn't broken in the infinity engine games.

 

Lets look at the whole picture.

 

The IE games (for simplicity sake, lets stick with the BG series for now) featured merchants with infinite gold. The result was both a positive and a negative. The positive was that there was no hassle. One stop at one merchant was all you needed to clear out your party's inventory of all the junk you hoarded. The negative was that in this system you ended up swimming in gold by the end of the game.

 

Yeah, ok so what's wrong with that? Well, I suppose there's some people out there who insist that it's much more fun to be broke, so their solution is to create a system (a mini-game, really) where merchants can't afford to buy your stuff all at once and therefore you have to "work for it". By "work", what they mean is 1) being forced to visit every merchant of every town in the game after every adventure session; and then 2)probably having to wait a certain amount of time for their money to replenish so you can do it all over again. <----This is their proposal in action. This is their idea of a "fun alternative". And the real punchline: if you confront them on it, they will insist that their system is "more realistic" (as if we often find ourselves running from store to store to sell stuff in real life. Sure.)

 

I don't know where these freaks came from, but I do know that their viewpoints have won the genre over. The TES games have limited merchant gold. NWN2 has limited merchant gold. D:OS has limited merchant gold. And a crap ton of other games that are too numerous to mention have it too. I'm glad Obsidian has come to their senses on this issue and scrapped it for PoE. The game is going to be more fun as a result.

[Lephys]

Yep, or to put it another way, an infinity engine successor should not try and fix what wasn't broken in the infinity engine games.

Agreed. But, on the other hand, the very concept of improvement should not be the enemy of a "spiritual successor." Not all changes need be fixes for broken things.

 

Again, though, I'm just putting that out there in tandem. This is not a "and therefore, the opposite of the rest of your post is true and good, u_u" implication. To put it simply, I don't think the sheer idea of maybe doing it differently from the IE games is bad. Just, if you can't find a good way to do it differently, definitely do it the same.

[Stun]

For one thing, why do you pick up a sword, and know EXACTLY what its base value is?

While this is peripheral to the subject at hand, it's a really good point. And something that no one ever talks about.

 

Unless the game has mercantile skills/feats and the party who finds that sword has someone in it who took those skills/feats, they shouldn't know what the base value is. Thus the game shouldn't make that information instantly available in the item description. In my pen and paper days, my DM wouldn't even tell us if that sword was magical until we 1) tested it out; 2) cast divination spells on it; or 3) took it to an appraiser.

[Lephys]

In my pen and paper days, my DM wouldn't even tell us if that sword was magical until we 1) tested it out; 2) cast divination spells on it; or 3) took it to an appraiser.

Ours, too. Sometimes, he'd even let us assume something was magical, but it turned out it wasn't. Or technically it "was," but only in the sense that someone had placed a dummy enchantment on it that made it seem magical (i.e. "Oooooh, it's glowing a bit! OBVIOUSLY it's magical!").

 

But, yeah, it's always just assumed in these games that you NEED to know the value of things, so that you know whether or not to pick them up (because of your usually-limited inventory), so that you can maximize your profits when you go sell them to merchants who will always buy them, so that you can get money and buy things, because how else would you get money?

 

I mean, it works in a game like Diablo, built around looting. Not everyone's cup of tea, but, for what it is, it works. But, in games like PoE, I don't get why all that's just assumed from the get-go. Then, a single factor like "Hey, in spite of all that, let's maybe limit merchants' gold, for realism!" gets toyed with? *shrug*

[dorkboy]

It's not as if the IE games never had you going trading all over town. Some things you had to sell to the blacksmith, temple, tavern, etc. (Not too familiar with how it worked in BG 2, though.)

 

But when there are only a few places to trade I think it makes more sense to give them infinite gold - unlike, say, the original Fallouts, where you could barter (shotgun shells and a gecko pelt for stimpacks and 15 gold) with pretty much everyone and their grandmother. Can't say I prefer one system over the other (I liked both) - but I definitely prefer either over TES Oblivion's half assed semi-limited-but-not-really vendor gold solution. 

 

In the end the result is, as far as I can see, invariably the same - sooner or later the PC ends up filthy rich without anything to spend it all on.

[Lephys]

In the end the result is, as far as I can see, invariably the same - sooner or later the PC ends up filthy rich without anything to spend it all on.

Exactly, and I think that's a bigger problem than "do vendors have realistic amounts of gold in this game designed around the player obviously selling everything he finds, conveniently, for plenty of cash monies" ever was. Why does found-loot need to be a constant, reliable source of revenue in the first place? I mean, the stronghold management is optional, and it's going to supply money, right? Why not looting pawning?

[Hassat Hunter]

 

Yep, or to put it another way, an infinity engine successor should not try and fix what wasn't broken in the infinity engine games.

Agreed. But, on the other hand, the very concept of improvement should not be the enemy of a "spiritual successor." Not all changes need be fixes for broken things.

 

Again, though, I'm just putting that out there in tandem. This is not a "and therefore, the opposite of the rest of your post is true and good, u_u" implication. To put it simply, I don't think the sheer idea of maybe doing it differently from the IE games is bad. Just, if you can't find a good way to do it differently, definitely do it the same.

 

 

And some things are broken to some, while others are perfectly fine with it. See: The Combat XP discussion. Some are just fiiiiiine with diplomacy giving 500XP while murdering a village gives 50.000XP, and that apparently is *not a problem*.

I disagree.

 

Also in the IE-games your loot was limited by weight AND limited slots, preventing you from picking up all 10GP armors unless you're massochistic. Considering there's no weight NOR limited slot system in PoE, the comparrison already has been turned into moot, since it's already apples and eggs. A system isn't seperate that just tweaking one thing doesn't affect others, and things working in IE may or may not work on PoE dependant on other systems changed.

 

Hence, the limiting factor in IE was weight and space. Not having those anymore a replacement in PoE could be limited gold from vendors. You don't even NEED to worry about your weight or slots as you do in an action RPG or Divinity:Original Sin. So just holding onto stuff till the next vendor is no problem at ALL whatsoever.

I personally see an issue with that already, but maybe that's just me. Just letting it go rampant, looting everything and selling off 5000 items each time you visit a vendor just seems like overkill to me, and will definitely function to bring the game down more than vendor gold ever could IMO.

You need *some* reigns to keep an infinite loot system working, or we just end up with what KOTOR2 had. A gigantic list of items you carry, gold/credits being worthless amongst easily getting lots of it. And that's with just 0-1 drop per enemy, here they intend to make everything one wears drop...

[Jarmo]

 

For one thing, why do you pick up a sword, and know EXACTLY what its base value is?

While this is peripheral to the subject at hand, it's a really good point. And something that no one ever talks about.

Unless the game has mercantile skills/feats and the party who finds that sword has someone in it who took those skills/feats, they shouldn't know what the base value is.  

 

Good point and something I for one haven't given much thought.

But yeah, a lot of games have something like appraise/barter/trade/whatever skill,

and it's usually a dump stat to the tune of max 10% discount at stores, when you're swimming in gold anyway.

 

Would be much better if you'd only get vague, or downright wrong info of item value.

And if you don't know the value of an item, the trader is not going to pay much either.

 

So you could get 5000 GP's for a diamond encrusted tiara, from a big town jeweler, if you knew it's value exactly,

but only 50 GP from a village pawn shop if you thought it's a brass bauble with glass ornaments.

[Stun]

Hence, the limiting factor in IE was weight and space. Not having those anymore a replacement in PoE could be limited gold from vendors. You don't even NEED to worry about your weight or slots as you do in an action RPG or Divinity:Original Sin. So just holding onto stuff till the next vendor is no problem at ALL whatsoever.

That's kinda missing the point. Having to waste playtime by running from one vender to the next, to the next, to the next (and sometimes having to then wait an X number of days for those venders to replenish their merchant gold supply) means you're not actually playing the friggin game. You're not adventuring. You're not questing. You're not exploring. Instead, you're just doing busy work.

 

And the rebuttal of "well, you wouldn't have to sell your stuff since the stash is weightless/bottomless!" doesn't work either since.... YES you do. This is one of those games with a major money sink. We have been given some pretty definite details about the Stronghold and they ALL point to you needing every penny you can scrounge.... and that's in addition to the standard needs of a 6 person party (shopping for gear) So no. Limited merchant gold would do nothing in a game like this but turn the whole experience into a banal grind.

 

Again, I'm glad Obsidian saw the light.

Edited February 4, 2015 by Stun

[Hassat Hunter]

I've seen a lot of moneysinks in games, and pretty much all of them are petty, meaningless or more annoying than the moneygathering clutch.

As much as I want to believe that the Stronghold is the sollution to everything, I moreso suspect;

 

1) You get way too much money so upgrading everything isn't a problem anyhow.

2) Artifically extreme high prices making the 'sell 5000 armors' a necessity you need to keep doing on and on and on since they expect you to raise so much money from that.

 

EDIT:

A giant moneysink isn't the sollution to gathering too much loot and gaining too much gold. In the end you usually just end up with 2 annoying systems.

Edited February 4, 2015 by Hassat Hunter

[BrainMuncher]

Adjusting the amount of gold that vendors have available to buy stuff from you is functionally equivalent to simply adjusting the value that your items sell for, except that the latter is less annoying from a gameplay perspective.

Also functionally equivalent:

- adjusting the price of things the player pays for

- adjusting the amount of available loot

- etc.

 

There are so many knobs you can tweak to affect player wealth and scarcity that it seems silly to choose the only one that introduces annoying busywork.

 

 

Just because vendors have infinite money doesn't mean you'll be swimming in gold. It's only one part of the equation. C'mon people I know you're smarter than this.

[Stun]

As much as I want to believe that the Stronghold is the sollution to everything...

You're still missing the point.

 

Solution to what, exactly? Being wealthy? Explain to us why it's bad design or a "problem", in a fantasy RPG, to have lots of money. This is not Sim City. "making money!" is not what the game is about. It's about questing, and leveling and fighting and exploring. Imposing a tedious merchant mini-game on the player serves no purpose but to distract the player from those goals. Again, if I'm running around the world doing nothing but trying to find people that can buy all the junk I've got in my inventory, then I'm not questing, leveling, fighting or exploring. instead, I'm simply engaged in a tedious merchant minigame. A pointless one that does not add an iota of fun to the experience.

Edited February 4, 2015 by Stun

[Jarmo]

It would be interesting, maybe refreshing to see an RPG without merchants and money.

But I guess the expectation of XP and money for mission accomplished is too deeply entrenched.

 

Too much wealth means you can buy whatever the merchants have to offer.

At that point, isn't having money in the first place something that's keeping you from adventuring?

Why not eliminate money and have everybody just give you everything you want?

[Valsuelm]

It would be interesting, maybe refreshing to see an RPG without merchants and money.

But I guess the expectation of XP and money for mission accomplished is too deeply entrenched.

 

Too much wealth means you can buy whatever the merchants have to offer.

At that point, isn't having money in the first place something that's keeping you from adventuring?

Why not eliminate money and have everybody just give you everything you want?

 

A communist RPG.

 

 

 

Seriously though. This is PoE. A bunch of us backed it based on the idea that this game was going to be much like the infinity engine games. Drastic changes from that model are generally not going to be welcome. Leave it for another game.

 

[Lephys]

Too much wealth means you can buy whatever the merchants have to offer.

This. But then, along the lines of what BrainMuncher was saying, nothing says everything needs to be available as soon as you have the money for it. Even if you could start the game with infinite gold, if the first village you come to has a modest array of leather armors, then, *gasp*, you can adequately outfit yourself with decent protection!

 

And yeah, at a certain point, it's more realistic for some city to have a boatload of goods, ranging all the way up to the highest quality stuff, if you've got the coin. But, as is a big theme in this thread, realism that only serves itself isn't very useful.

 

It'd be more realistic if every time you got a big sword gash, it became gangrenous and you had to amputate it. Or, if you took three arrows, you just bled internally until you died. But, that doesn't support very fun gameplay without the entire rest of the game being designed around not ever getting hit by arrows.

 

Meanwhile, we utilize aspects of realism to determine things like "Hey, a dagger has less reach than a halberd, and a faster attack speed." Doesn't mean we make sure that dagger attacks and halberd attacks work exactly like they do in reality. No, but differing attack speeds and weapon reach provide fun, tactical options in combat. Hence, realism FTW. Not because realism. Because fun gameplay.

 

Limited merchant gold isn't inherently bad. It's just bad if all it does is make merchants not have unrealistically unlimited gold. Realistically, sometimes you wouldn't necessarily be able to find a merchant who would buy something, regardless of how much gold they had, because they didn't think they could sell it, etc. So, even limited gold doesn't make sense if you can just go find another merchant who isn't running on empty.

[rjshae]

 

In the end the result is, as far as I can see, invariably the same - sooner or later the PC ends up filthy rich without anything to spend it all on.

Exactly, and I think that's a bigger problem than "do vendors have realistic amounts of gold in this game designed around the player obviously selling everything he finds, conveniently, for plenty of cash monies" ever was. Why does found-loot need to be a constant, reliable source of revenue in the first place? I mean, the stronghold management is optional, and it's going to supply money, right? Why not looting pawning?

 

Perhaps because this type of game is placed in a medieval epoch and there really isn't another source of significant funding for peasantry? I mean, the possibility of loot was often a strong motivation for peasants to join a military campaign. We can't really relate because we live in an age of relative plenty compared to the middle ages, and so we have different motivations.

[Stun]

Too much wealth means you can buy whatever the merchants have to offer.

It would be more accurate to say that too much wealth by the end of the game means that you can buy anything your party wants from the merchant stock. Yes, yes. Horrible design, I know, but I prefer it that way. Sue me.

 

But to answer your question: sure. At some point in an any decent RPG, too much shopping hinders adventuring, which is why I don't advocate a system where the game's best items are found in shops.

Edited February 4, 2015 by Stun