Real money -> more immersive gameplay

[DecalMirror]

Some time ago I came up with an idea how to make more immersive gameworld to Oblivion.

 

Around and after level 10 the PC carries much more money than richest NPCs earn in his lifetime. Is it realistic that a light weight thief/mage can carry hundreds of thousands gold coins like a credit card? The amount of money should be limited with gold's weight. The weight should be comparable to other cold items in game.

 

Then you should be able to store it somehow. I thought there could be some cash automates within the chapels: the priests will happily store your gold. Of course they take a small percentage amount of the gold for a fee every week/month. The banks should be universal: if you store your money in IC, you can take it from Anvil. Also it should be possible to drop money, like any other items. Is that possible to make even with OBSE?

 

The amount you can carry is determined by your strength and the cost for putting and taking money from banks is determined by personality. The storing fee would change from 5% to 40% or so.

 

 

So, what you like my idea? And sorry about my spelling errors.

[samroski]

For realism I suppose a bank mod can be fine tuned to get exactly what you want. I believe that with the bank mod I use (Bank of Cyrodill) traders in all the cities offer bank services. What more would you want? Cash machines/credit cards would not be realistic in Cyrodill. For realism banks should give you interest and not charge a fee.

[DecalMirror]

The main point was to make money something concrete rather than just some abstract meaningless numbers. It really should have weight or something other to limit the amount that can be carried. Otherwise the bank mods are pointless to use when you can carry all the gold and more.

 

And talk about realism. I don't know a single real-life bank that lets you keep your money in them for free. There's ALWAYS a small fee for keeping bank accounts. So it should be in the world of Oblivion also.

[samroski]

I agree- there should ideally be weight of the gold- so you HAVE to deposit/store it- I would gladly install such a mod- maybe it is there already??

 

Banks do charge a small fee for services- but generally the interest much exceeds the fee (depends ofcourse on the type of account- and the amount of money depsoited. Current accounts are not good for interest whereas saving accounts are better- I once had an account where I was getting about 7% interest- which was great- but it did not last...)

[ninja_lord666]

Try this, take a coin, a quarter, for instance, and place this one coin on a scale. What does it weight? 3, 4, 5.67 grams? Now, following this equation (1 ounce = 28.349523 grams), you get that 5.67 grams = <about> .2 ounces. Now, following this second equation (1 pound = 16 ounces), you get .2 ounces = .0125 pounds. In game, the lowest unit of weight is .1 pounds. If you round .0125 to .1, you get an weight thats way too high (8 times higher, in fact). That's not realistic, not in the least. If coins weighed .1 pounds, we wouldn't have coins. That means, that rounding .0125 down to 0 is more accurate, and, thusly, more realistic.

 

As for the bank, people get paid to store their money there, not the other way around. That's how banks work; they pay people to keep their money safe, then loan it out to other people from whom the bankers get paid. That's how interest works. It accumulates on stored money and loaned money. Stored money is an asset of the person(s) or business, therefore the more interest it accumulates, the more that person(s) or business has. Loaned money is a liability, so the higher the amount of said liability, the more the person(s) or business owes the bank. There is no such thing as negative interest. As such, it's realistic for the player to be paid to store his/her money in a bank, because that's how it is in real life; that's exactly how it is in real life.

 

Although you are dreadfully wrong about those two things, I do agree that we should be able to drop our money. I loved being able to decorate my house with piles of money in Morrowind; I want to do that in Oblivion, too! :D

[Abramul]

If the one shipped with the collector's edition is representative, septims are quite a bit bigger than quarters.

 

If the .1 unit limitation is from the engine rather than the interface, it wouldn't be particularly difficult to add or remove appropriately weighted money pouches to the player.

[bben46]

I found my 'septum coin', but not my small scale to weigh it. I also once used a mod called 'Gold Coin Bagger' that allowed you to drop your coins and make different sized piles. but it slowed down my game to a crawl. FPS went from about 30 to less than 1 in a small room when I dropped 2 piles of 2500 coins. Great idea, too bad it didn't work like I had hoped.

 

Re Ninja Lord. if you think you are not paying to keep your money in the bank, that is just what the bankers want you to believe. They take your money and invest it for rates up around 15%, then pay you 2 to 3% for the privilege. They get to keep the rest as their fee for keeping your money for you. Who did you think paid for those huge bank buildings? This is not to knock the banks. They are performing a valuable service. I just wish they would give us a percentage of what they make on our money instead of a flat rate. At least we get that 2% when the banker only gets 5% as well as when he gets 20%. That's just the way business works.

[DecalMirror]

Try this, take a coin, a quarter, for instance, and place this one coin on a scale. What does it weight? 3, 4, 5.67 grams? Now, following this equation (1 ounce = 28.349523 grams), you get that 5.67 grams = <about> .2 ounces. Now, following this second equation (1 pound = 16 ounces), you get .2 ounces = .0125 pounds. In game, the lowest unit of weight is .1 pounds. If you round .0125 to .1, you get an weight thats way too high (8 times higher, in fact). That's not realistic, not in the least. If coins weighed .1 pounds, we wouldn't have coins. That means, that rounding .0125 down to 0 is more accurate, and, thusly, more realistic.

 

What I've understood, the weight can be almost anything and the game only rounds that with no decimals. Am I right?

 

Anyway, if I am, theres no problems to make those .0125 pound coins. The weight is just shown as 0.1 pounds. Besides, isn't those septims made of gold? And gold is pretty heavy? Check the reference below.

 

From Wikipedia

"...only one size of coin was made, containing one troy ounce (31.1035 g) of gold."

[ninja_lord666]

Ok, but even still, if you make each septim a troy ounce, you bet a total of .0625 pounds. I guess you could round that to .1, but then, if you have absolutely nothing in your inventory, and have 100 strength, you'll carry a maximum of 5000 gold. Now, make room for equipment, let's say glass armour and longsword (80.5), your gold goes down to 4195. You do need room for loot, though, or you'll never make more money. We need at least 300 pound for loot, leaving room for only 1195 gold. Face it, if gold was weighted, it'd become worthless, literally. One gold piece weighs .1 pounds and is worth one gold; one ring weights .1 pounds and is worth anywhere from 5-200 gold (Vanilla). Personally, I'd rather carry around 100 pounds of rings than 100 pounds of gold, it's worth more. Also, there's the fact that a gold nugget weighs .25 pounds and is worth 25 gold (Vanilla). Now, if you take .35, and divide that by 2.5, you get .1 pounds, the same as a gold coin, but 25/2.5 = 10, 10 times more than a gold coin. How can raw gold be worth more than processed gold? One dollar costs two cents to make, but is worth one hundred cents; that's how it works. Are you telling me the Empire losses 9 gold every time they make one? The only way you can make it make sense is if a gold nugget is worth either one or two gold (more likely one), but that implies that gold is completely worthless, and that just doesn't make sense. Gold is one of the most valuable things in the entire world (I'm sure things like uranium or helium-3 are worth more). That said, it makes no sense for gold to weigh .1 pounds, as it would completely destroy Tamriel's economy in a matter of days.

[hoots7]

Re Ninja Lord. if you think you are not paying to keep your money in the bank, that is just what the bankers want you to believe. They take your money and invest it for rates up around 15%, then pay you 2 to 3% for the privilege. They get to keep the rest as their fee for keeping your money for you. Who did you think paid for those huge bank buildings? This is not to knock the banks. They are performing a valuable service. I just wish they would give us a percentage of what they make on our money instead of a flat rate. At least we get that 2% when the banker only gets 5% as well as when he gets 20%. That's just the way business works.

OK technically you are correct, banks do attribute a cost to you for the service they provide but if you maintain your banks minimum balance (it is basically what the bank considers a break even point for them) you never have to pay it. No one in their right mind would open a bank account & not plan to keep at least the minimum balance, (so that is one of the factors you may consider when shopping for a bank) you would be loosing money.

 

Now back to the issue of dropping money:

We know gold coins can be in the game we see them laying on tables & other places all the time.

We also know using the console command we can add or remove money from the player.

So the challenge seems to be a way of deleting gold from the player than placing that same amount in the Oblivion world.

Seems like a script is in order here (or 2).

One that would drop individual coins and another that would drop a bag with the coins inside.