Less annoying selling experience

[Ferryt]

Guardianl, the mod to which you linked simply changes the rate at which Mercantile increases with experience by tweaking an .ini file unless you add an additional plugin. So, it really doesn't deal with the issue of how many items are sold in a batch. It's intended to be modular, so this is a feature, and not something to gripe about, incidentally. The following is copied directly from the .ini file which comes with the plugin (Transaction-based_Mercantile_advancement-14304.zip).

 

• ; Mercantile advancement is normally based on the total quantity of items
  ; bought or sold. This mod changes it to be determined by the total value of
  ; the exchanged items. Base values are used, not the actual sale price.

 

As you can see, this doesn't solve the issue, either, and simply changes experience from being based upon number of transactions to the value of transactions.

 

csgators, I've looked at "Living Economy" and while I like its configurability, it doesn't solve my issue, either. This is copied from it's "progress.ini" file:

 

* The player now has the facility to increase his Mercantile skill based NOT ONLY on the quantity of the transactions, but on the size of the transactions. The burden of needing to sell items individually to achieve significant progress is now lightened.

 

I have some further issues with this mod. First of all, it's abandoned. The author hasn't responded to any questions or bug reports for three years, and it seems to have some serious issues, at least for some people, including a conflict with the official Thieves Den DLC. To further complicate matters, the description of the mod doesn't agree with what is actually offered. It mentions the following "Additional Optional ESPs":

 

• Living Economy (No Barter Chatter)
  Living Economy (Shivering Isles)
  Cutthroat Merchants

 

The only files actually offered for download are:

 

• Living_Economy-4432.rar
  LivingEconomy-3_70-4432.rar
  LivingEconomy-3_70-withmissingCutthroatMerchants-4432.rar

 

All of these were uploaded on the same day, so other than the Cutthroat Merchants mod, it's sort of hard to tell whether or not the other two files are actually the ones mentioned in the description for SI compatibility and "No Barter Chatter". It turns out that the "3_70" file is the SI-compatible one, and all of them include a sub-directory with the "No Barter Chatter" option. You can't tell this from the description, though. My judgment in cases like this is two thumbs down, based solely upon omissions in documentation like this. Still, this is a pretty good economy mod, in spite of its shortcomings, and I'm still evaluating it.

 

I think a much better alternative might be Enhanced Economy. The author, TheNiceOne, is still around and still supporting this mod, which was last updated just this month, and it seems to do most of what "Living Economy" does (and much more), has a sophisticated omod installer, allowing the user to tweak everything at install time, and the latest version no longer requires installation of the beta version 20 of OBSE (which is a definite plus for those people hesitant to run beta versions).

[Telyn]

Guardian, it wasn't Tejon's Progress. It was a mod that affected only the selling of multiple items to a merchant as far as I remember. I really wish I had downloaded it at the time so I could just look at the name and post a link. I was looking for something entirely different and it came up in a search. I've been plowing through the likely categories today trying to find it again, but no luck yet. I have a bad feeling it might be in a large category like Misc. I didn't try it, so I don't even know if it works. I do know it purported to do that. I'll find it, but it might take some time if I can't figure out what search keyword I used. Times like this I wish I had a photographic memory.

 

Ferryt, thanks for posting the link to Enhanced Economy. That one looks very interesting, and configurable.

[Ferryt]

You're welcome, Telyn. That economy overhaul mod looks, to me, to be the best of all that are out there. I've contacted its author to see if my idea can be, somehow, implemented within it.

[theNiceOne]

Enhanced Economy does indeed have a feature to do something about this. When enabled, you will get the same experience from selling 100 arrows one by one, 100 arrows in one sale, or one item worth 100 gold. This feature is completely compatible with progess (change the leveling speed of Mercatile in Progress and it will affect the amount of experience gained).

 

Living Economy is a great mod and the main inspiration for Enhanced Economy, but has some bugs and has been abandonded a long time ago. Enhanced Economy does everything LE does (except the possibility of increased merchant investment) and has lots of other features, is much more compatible with other mods (including overhauls like OOO or MMM), and is easily configurable through the omod installation script or ini file.

[Guardianl]

To all I realize it doesn't fix your request. I have confirmed that as well.

I simply stated your request, simply does not exist yet!

Until it's made so far this will have to do for now...

 

So once again I reconfirm my words what I said earlier...

 

For the record:

I also have issue how the current system works and wish it was different.

Thanks to these modders it's better than vanilla!

So once again for the record until somebody makes it these options.

Perhaps enhanced economy & Progress you can combine the two will have to do...

Edited February 12, 2011 by Guardianl

[Guardianl]

Hey theniceone nice of you to drop by! no pun intended

Perhaps you can add some features to this chap request?

 

Also is progress needed with your plug-in? What is the difference?

Also maybe I have misread I see you offer player need to pay taxes for their home.

But I don't see where you can rent your house to npc. There are abundant houses on this site.

I think most would rather use them than vanilla. Will you add this feature?

I have seen a mod where you can rent your homes to an npc. But I can't remember what it's called

[theNiceOne]

Hey theniceone nice of you to drop by! no pun intended

Perhaps you can add some features to this chap request?

I try to reduce the time I spend on modding (in order to have time to start playing again), but I am open for request that makes sense and not too hard to add.

 

Also is progress needed with your plug-in? What is the difference?

Progress is a mod that lets you have complete and easy control of how fast you gain experience for each individual skill. I use it myself because I think levelup goes too fast in general, and that some skills levels way too fast (alchemy is the worst), while some levels a bit too slow, so I use Progress to control this.

 

Enhanced Economy's mercantile leveling feature lets you control how many skill "uses" you get for selling something for 100 gold - while Progress controls how much experience one skill "use" is worth, so they work nicely together. Progress also happens to have a seperate esp file that works similar to EE's mercantile leveling feature, so you can choose which one you like best.

 

Also maybe I have misread I see you offer player need to pay taxes for their home.

But I don't see where you can rent your house to npc. There are abundant houses on this site.

I think most would rather use them than vanilla. Will you add this feature?

I have seen a mod where you can rent your homes to an npc. But I can't remember what it's called

I have considered adding such a feature, but not sure I think it is worth the effort. When you come so far that you can consider starting to rent out houses, you probably have so much gold that you don't need the rent anyway...

[Guardianl]

True on the last part. but as I use T.I.E.

There many mods out there including player homes where you need to buy stuff to expand it or rebuilt cities. Not sure if paying your companion/army xx cash exist.

But that would drain one cash flow especialy in the beginning.

Though you can add rent for NPC home there should be a feature where there is maintenace cost if you own something. nothing stay 100% forever

[Ferryt]

Thanks for taking the time to stop by and read this discussion, theNiceOne. It's a pleasure to see modders taking an active interest in threads, here, which touch upon their mods.

 

Let me explain a little something. I used to never much worry about Mercantile. It's always been one of my minor skills. I "liberate" stuff and sell it to get the money I need, which generally isn't a whole lot, since I don't really buy many things. I find that items which are quest awards and which turn up as loot are usually as good, if not better, than the stuff you can buy in the stores, anyway. However, with my current character I'm getting even more into the total immersion scene and felt that some sort of economic overhaul mod was one of the things I've been missing in the past.

 

After looking at those that convert the cost of items you sell into a lump sum and award experience based upon that I started wondering just how this affects skill advancement, relative to the vanilla gamesystem, which was something I didn't want to do, at least until I tested out how things "felt" to me. In vanilla Oblivion you get 0.4 experience points toward your Mercantile skill on every sell transaction and on every spell purchase. Note, that "transaction" can be one of something or a million of something. It doesn't matter. You still get 0.4 experience points for it.

 

The various mods I examined, including Enhanced Economy, attempt to get around this issue by making experience dependent upon the value of a transaction, rather than the number of items. So, if I get "x" experience points for selling 100 arrows for 100 Gold, my question is, does that 100 Gold translate into 0.4 * 100 arrows = 40 experience points that I would get if I sold the arrows one-at-a-time in an unmodded game? If it doesn't, then the mod is fiddling with the leveling system, which is what I didn't want to happen. And if it does, then the whole thing falls apart when I sell a single item for 100 Gold and get 40 experience points instead of the vanilla 0.4. This is my issue with virtually every mod out there that uses this technique. They only parallel the vanilla game in the special transaction instance where experience awarded is precisely the same as 0.4 * ItemCount, and this is going to happen only very rarely.

 

What a mod needs to do to be fully compliant with the vanilla experience system is to go ahead and sell items for their full, combined value, but when assigning experience for the transaction they have to count the number of items sold, multiply that by 0.4 and, I would suppose, subtract 0.4 to account for the single sale to the merchant, and apply that as the experience point gain for the transaction. I haven't looked into any of the scripts in detail, yet, but I rather doubt many modders would take that approach because from the description of their mods they seem intent upon making experience a function of the value of a transaction. This doesn't account for the fact that I can sell a gazillion of something for the same price as I can sell one of something else and I get the same experience for it. If I'm wrong about this, theNiceOne, and yours can, indeed, calculate experience points like my suggestion, then it's precisely what I've been looking for. However, your comment, above ("When enabled, you will get the same experience from selling 100 arrows one by one, 100 arrows in one sale, or one item worth 100 gold.") leads me to believe that this isn't the case. At this point, I'd have to ask this question. Precisely how much experience is one Gold worth in your system? I could dig into your scripting to find out, I'm sure, but you can probably answer this question more quickly and easily than I can.

[theNiceOne]

What a mod needs to do to be fully compliant with the vanilla experience system is to go ahead and sell items for their full, combined value, but when assigning experience for the transaction they have to count the number of items sold, multiply that by 0.4 and, I would suppose, subtract 0.4 to account for the single sale to the merchant, and apply that as the experience point gain for the transaction. I haven't looked into any of the scripts in detail, yet, but I rather doubt many modders would take that approach because from the description of their mods they seem intent upon making experience a function of the value of a transaction.

Correct. EE's mercantile leveling goes completely away from counting the number, and only cares for the amount of gold. If you want a mod that counts the number of items, you must disable this feature in EE and look elsewhere.

 

At this point, I'd have to ask this question. Precisely how much experience is one Gold worth in your system? I could dig into your scripting to find out, I'm sure, but you can probably answer this question more quickly and easily than I can.

The trademark of my mods, is that all such things are configurable in the mod's ini file, so let me first quote the relevant section in EE's ini file:

; ================== Settings to control value-based mercantile leveling =====================

; Set mercantile leveling mode:
; 0: disabled
; 1: Each transaction will count as at least one skill use
; 2: Skill gain is dependent on transaction value only, so sale of a low-value item will count as a fraction of a skill use
set tnoEE.mercSkillMode to 0

; Set how fast you will gain skill uses when selling items
; When selling an item, the number of skill uses will be: Gold received / (mercSkillSellModifier * current sell percentage)
; In mercSkillMode this will be rounded up to the nearest whole skill use (at least 1)
set tnoEE.mercSkillSellModifier to 2.0

; Set how fast you will gain skill uses when buying items
; When buying an item, the number of skill uses will be: Gold paid / (mercSkillBuyModifier * current buy percentage)
; Set to 0 in order to disable (only gain skill uses when selling)
set tnoEE.mercSkillBuyModifier to 2.0

mercSkillSellModifier is important. It defines how many skill uses you get by selling things. Note that one skill use is the 0.4 value you mention (but it can be changed to something else than 0.4 if you use Progress or another level rate mod). If you sell something worth 100 gold to a merchant that gives you 70% of the base value, the skill uses gained, is 70 / (2*70) = 2 skill uses - or 0.8 experience. In other words, mercSkillSellModifier tells how many sales (with vanilla system), an item worth 100 gold equals.

 

So 1 gold is worth 2 / 100 = 0.02 skill uses, or 0.02 * 0.4 = 0.008 experience, with the default settings. This value is simply what I consider a value that will hopefully make you gain experience in about the same speed as with vanilla - but completely without the hassle of selling items one by one - and also without the (IMHO) illogical idea that selling a quiver with 100 arrows give you more experience than selling a sword worth the same.