Selling high value items

[Unitedite]

I'm really confused about merchants in Oblivion. For a long time I've been saving up the high value items that I've found on quests etc while waiting to find a merchant with enough gold to buy them. Finally I got bored and had a look on uesp at the list of all the merchants in the game. I was amazed to see that apparently noone has more than 1,200 gold for trades?

 

This seems ridiculous to me. What's the point in having items worth four or five thousand gold when you can only sell them for a third of their value?

 

What's the easiest way to get around this? Is there something I can type in the console to get n gold (and then throw the item away)? Are there any simple, lightweight mods that alter merchants' gold levels (I can't download large files and don't particuarly want to get into the complexities of modding right now)?

[alex2avs]

for console : player.additem 000000f <xxxxxxx> - adds xxxxxx gold

[somerandomsheepthathops]

There are a few mods that increase the gold merchants have; Like this one: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=28102.

 

Or, there are console commands like player.additem f <value of the item that you want gone>.

[Unitedite]

Thanks for the help guys. I also found the console comand SetBarterGold # which very helpful.

 

Does noone else find it very strange that the game is so limited in this way? It renders the value of a lot of in-game items utterly meaningless.

[MarkInMKUK]

It's actually a good touch for realism - limitless gold is unlikely in real life. Why would you expect a "normal" trader to be able to buy, instantly, a super-duper-ultra-power-magic-sword-with-bells-on, when normally they only buy rusty iron bows and the like.

 

If you max your Mercantile skill, you get a bonus amount of gold to each merchant, so it's a bit of an incentive to do that too. However, I agree that at least one or two merchants SHOULD be able to buy high value items, even if only one a day or one per restock of gold. There are assorted mods which revamp the whole way trading works - I personally use Enhanced Economy which lets you fiddle all sorts of values to make merchants have more or less gold at different times, etc.

Edited May 6, 2011 by MarkInMKUK

[okappa]

Yeah, I liked Fallout's system a lot more, where merchants accumulated gold from the purchases you made and lost it from buying your items -- you could basically hold on to valuable items as "credit" to help with huge purchases.

 

I think Living Economy tries to follow that system, but it doesn't really do a great job as the merchants start with a lot less money (and, since there are no guns in this game, you tend to spend less money anyway by not buying ammo and stimpacks and such.)

Edited May 6, 2011 by okappa

[David Brasher]

Morrowind and Fallout have better bartering systems than Oblivion. The Oblivion system is pretty stupid. In Oblivion the merchant has hundreds of thousands of Septims in his or her pockets (but which cannot be pickpocketed) but the merchant has a strict rule that he or she will never pay more than 1800 gold for an item, no matter how much it is worth. I like how in the other games merchants run out of money after buying stuff from you. Bartering is pretty cool too. You try to sell a 50,000 Drake item and you end up giving it to the merchant in exchange for everything else in the store's inventory and you can hardly carry off all that stuff.