Less annoying selling experience

[Ferryt]

I don't even know if it's possible, but I'm going to throw this out for the real modders to chew on, since it's way beyond my understanding of how to force Oblivion to act in ways that seem reasonable to me. It's related to one of my major pet peeves about this game -- the ridiculously slow rate of speed at which the Mercantile skill improves, itself related to the absurd way that Bethesda implemented the selling of items.

 

To set the stage, every transaction with a merchant counts towards experience in Mercantile. It doesn't matter whether that transaction is 100 arrows at one gold each or a single piece of armor at 100 gold -- they count the same. The game, of course, encourages you to sell things in groups, but doesn't count individual items in a group as separate transactions.

 

Frankly, I'm getting dismayed with the time I spend just mousing through the menu when I have twenty of something to sell and I'm trying to boost my Mercantile skill. Not only does this involve multiple, repetitive mouse clicks, but I have to manipulate a slider bar, as well. I can easily spend over an hour real time just selling stuff to a merchant after a dungeon crawl. It's bad enough that a merchant's incessant, banal chattering annoys the fluff out of me.

 

Searching for solutions, I've found nothing, so far, that I really like. One mod gives you ten sacks in your inventory, of which one is a "sell sack". You put stuff you want to sell into that sack and then sell the sack to the merchant. Unfortunately, upon examining the script that does this, it turns out that the mod "cheats" by simply transferring the stuff from a remote container (where the sack's contents are really stored) directly into the merchant's inventory or merchant chest. It applies the total value of those contents to the sack and then sells the sack to the merchant. Convenient, but, now the entire take from a hard days' work in the bowls of Cyrodiil only counts as a single transaction. Not a solution.

 

Someone else has written a mod that attempts to circumvent this by making cost of a transaction be the deciding factor, regardless of how many individual items is involved. Better, but how this meshes with the original idea of selling things one at a time with the vanilla criteria on how much experience you get is anyone's guess.

 

Finally, someone else has created a bag you carry in your inventory that automagically turns loot into gold -- at a price that appears to be a more-or-less arbitrary function of your own Mercantile skill, so that even with a skill level of 100 you'll never get the full value of merchandise. On the bright side, you get experience for every single item in the bag. I guess you pay for the convenience of bypassing merchants completely. I looked at the scripting for that mod to see if I could get some inspiration as to how to implement this for a PC to merchant transaction, but nothing there really seemed to address this issue. It would be almost trivial to modify one of the scripts to give full value for the merchandise, but I love the role-playing aspect of Oblivion and to my knowledge the more you deal with a merchant the better his disposition is toward you. Again ... not the solution I'm looking for.

 

Bottom line ... is it even possible to create a mod which will, somehow, automate the selling of items one-by-one to a merchant without fiddling with the existing criteria for experience gained per transaction? If so, can anyone do this?

[MarkInMKUK]

A couple of thoughts...

 

Firstly - there's a mod that shuts the darn merchants up someplace - that may save SOME of your sanity :whistling:

 

If you are going to rework the trading to add realism, you may need to consider building in an annoyance factor - if someone came to me and insisted on selling 150 arrows, all identical, at 1 gold each, as 150 separate transactions, guess how my disposition would be at the end of trading. :wallbash:

 

Groups of like objects should probably count as one transaction, i.e. three identical chain mail greaves should sell as one transaction, for one entry on the mercantile alteration. However, if they are at different levels of repair, each would need assessing separately so that'd be three transactions.

 

Personally I find the whole trading system VERY cumbersome - much preferred the Morrowind "stack 'em up and sell 'em all" approach, but something which still dynamically adjusted your income / expenditure as your mercantile rating changed would be excellent.

[Guardianl]

You may want to look here.

Progress by:tejon

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14304

[Ferryt]

Thanks, Guardianl, but that's not quite what I'm looking for. I don't want to fiddle with the game balance. I want to bypass this absurd example of game mechanics.

 

MarkInMKUK, I remember coming across that mod you mentioned, but I can't find it, now. I'll probably have to do a search on "merchant" in the description field and wade through tons of mods, but I'm sure it's here on this site. I'm actually in agreement with you, but you don't quite understand where I'm coming from. It's not the physical act of selling 200 arrows one-by-one -- it's the fact that the game doesn't account for the fact that you still had to persuade the merchant to buy all those arrows, whether you're selling them one at a time or all at once. Every single item he purchases from you should count toward your experience in selling things. So, yes, you should be able to pick those three shields and sell them all at once, but they should count as three transactions and not as one. This is where the gamesystem falls on its face. This is just as it would be in real life. A merchant isn't going to just buy a box of clothing without examining every single article individually, so, essentially, you are selling each outfit to him one-at-a-time, even though he pays you a lump sum for the whole bunch.

 

Then we have an unusual glitch in the game which further complicates things. I always repair all weapons and armor I sell (trying to work on my Armorer skill). However, the game still recognizes two items that used to be 85% as separate from three items that were 100% when you got them, even though they're all at 100%, now. You have no choice but to sell the two groups separately because the game refuses to regroup them together as a five-pack! It's little things like this that should be picked up in even casual beta-testing that has me convinced there was very little testing of this game in actual play before it was released.

[Guardianl]

Please do put the mod here if you find it.

But I have to disagree with you regarding a merchant seeing each item as a separate transaction. If he did that he bookkeeper would flip and say: Couldn’t you sell the whole bunch and just say in the receipt 150 arrows?

Also it's known the bigger bulk you buy, the cheaper the item becomes. If you have a large sale more people will flock to you to buy. This is real live mechanic.

 

But I somewhat understand what you mean. This is sadly related to game engine the dumming down of the game to support the console. The console would have a sissy fit if you sold loads at the same time hanging the game for a while which in fact it's busy. Then continuing the game. Sadly console gamers would see this as a bug which it's not.... No mods exist what you wish to be in the mod. I believe the link I added is as good as its get. Perhaps it can be expanded upon or something new...

[Ferryt]

I'm with you 100%. You just don't quite understand what I'm trying to say. I'm not talking about the merchant individually taking each arrow from you and handing you a gold coin, over and over and over. I'm talking about you having to convince the merchant to buy 100 of them, as opposed to, say just the 20 he actually wants. I've done selling ... and buying ... so I know how this works in the Real World. What I'm talking about, here, is a flawed game system which forces Mercantile to advance at an artificially-slow rate -- or subjects the player to a tedium of carpal syndrome inducing mouse-clicking. In real life, were someone to bring me a box of clothing for me to buy you can bet that I'm going to examine each one for fear of the seller trying to hide something not worth buying near the middle of the stack. If its a bunch of small, nearly identical objects, sure -- hand me an armful and I'll count them and then multiply by the cost of each to determine how much I'm paying you, but you still need to convince me to buy that many. That's where counting each item as an individual transaction for the purposes of gaining experience for skill advancement comes in. It's a purely game-thing, not in any way related to real merchants in real stores in real life.

 

You may be right, though. Unfortunately, the mod to which you directed me uses total cost of a transaction as the criterion and ignores number of items completely. I may have to try to do this one, myself, since I've now got a vague notion of how it can be done. I just have no idea how to take into consideration the pure role-playing aspect of becoming a merchant's favorite customer by selling and buying frequently at his establishment. As a merchant I'd certainly be more inclined to like someone who dropped in every day for thirty days and bought five bucks worth of stuff, as opposed to someone who only shows up once a month and buys 150 bucks worth of stuff. Oh, well ... one issue at a time, I guess.

[Guardianl]

I know what you mean and I agree totally the bargain should be like come on I give you 100 buy it! And I have searched high and low and this is the best I saw I'm afraid.

I think increasing the merchant money helps as well. There are also several economy mods. I have to wade through it again. As I recall wasn't too fond of them...

Sadly people forget Oblivion was built for the console rather PC. And as said console will always be inferior to Pc

[Telyn]

I know I have seen a mod here which changes mercantile so that if you sell a group of items, each one counts as a transaction. I sort of made a mental note of it at the time, but I will have to dig around to find it. Will post when I locate it.

[Guardianl]

I know I have seen a mod here which changes mercantile so that if you sell a group of items, each one counts as a transaction. I sort of made a mental note of it at the time, but I will have to dig around to find it. Will post when I locate it.

Uhm did you check my link I posted here?

Because I think that is the mod your talking about.

If not I'm curious.

[csgators]

Living Economy does what you want to an extent, it also adds a lot of other cool features.

* 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.

Edited February 12, 2011 by csgators