Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Gold exploits...

Amusingly enough, there's already a couple of new gold exploits in the game now that a major one has been hotfixed out.

The folks using these exploits seem to think it's a time saver and generally fair enough in a single player game. From what I can gather, based on numerous comments I've heard and read, they don't believe it's appropriate to patch out these exploits. The argument being: "If you don't like it, don't use it."

I can't say I don't understand the sentiment. After all, who's being hurt? No one. But then I wonder, how far does this train of thought take us? We currently have a trade and barter option when we deal with the vendor. Why not just have a "for free" option as well? Don't like it, don't use it.

What about having a special attack on every weapon that always hits and immediately destroys the target? Don't like it, don't use it.

While I understand and accept that different people have fun in different ways, what it comes down to for me is that I don't want to play a game like that. The whole mentality seems to undermine everything I find enjoyable about the experience.

But it comes back to this: if I don't like it, why can't I just not use it? It's a difficult question to answer.

There's something about having an emergency "easy" button that cheapens the journey. Even if I don't use it, knowing it's there acts as a sort of a crutch for me. I always know the option exists, so that inevitably effects my playstyle. There's less pressure. There's more temptation.

Even if I don't want to use the exploit it remains a temptation. The impact is undeniable to me because it exists for me.

As such, I advocate for patching out all of the exploits.

You don't understand why people use gold/barter exploits for the exact same reason that i will literally never understand people wanting to hike their difficulty up and then use personal limiting rules to make it even harder. I had a new barter exploit figured out a few hours after the update. Larian can try to patch individual exploits out, but the base exploit is regarding the barter code and how it interacts with multi-item select within containers, which will have to be re-done if they want to stop barter exploits entirely.

I've had this exact same same conversation from the other side when my friend asked me how to activate the cheat console in an old rpg, then proceeded to just cheat their way through the game. I didn't understand how that could be fun for them, but in the end it was a single player game, so it really didn't affect me at all.

If there was literally a story-mode option for "roll 20", then I probably would have used it in one of my games already. We're playing the game in different ways to get different things out of it. Neither of us is doing it wrong because it's a single player game and what we do in our private games have no impact on each other.

And, my dissatisfaction with Larian patching said barter exploits has a lot more to do with me being upset about the continuing lack of patches to fix the performance issues, broken quests, sounds not working, and events that just never seem to fire properly, rather than just being annoyed at them patching barter exploits.

Honestly, I don't understand the idea behind using gold exploits.

Like, I'm not a loot goblin, I don't abuse pickpocketing, I don't force vendor restocks...

Yet I still end up with more gold than I can ever use. I can buy literally every item in the game and still have tons of gold left over.

So why would anyone need to make MORE gold?

I mean, unless they're so hilariously bad at the game that they need to buy literally thousands of potions, what's are they using all this gold for?

As far as balance in a single player game goes, my opinion is that;

Anything that goes against the developers design should be patched. This includes both exploits as well as imbalances within the game.

Since even though there's the "It's a single player game, it doesn't hurt anyone" argument, the core philosophy is that players should experience things as the developers intended, someone shouldn't have to go out of their way to avoid unintended interactions.

It's called a gold exploit, but the point is not actually about making gold, it's about getting items. The method I used to use ended up giving lots of gold to the vendor, without increasing my own at all, basically tricking the game into thinking I had paid for an item. You don't actually need very much gold at all, nor is it really that useful.

And... I AM a loot goblin, I force restocks to grab alchemy supplies to fuel my potion addiction. Once the unique items are gone they don't restock, so it's just supplies after the first grab.

EDIT: also, there is one reason to hoard a lot of gold, and it's so you can reverse-pickpocket 30k gold onto an enemy and then smack it with Blood Money. This eats the gold. Fun times.

Still, it's easy enough to buy every single magical item in the game and still be swimming with gold without doing any exploits.

Which is what my point was. Gold in the game is overabundant to the point of making any actual attempts to capitalize on it seem redundant, let alone trying to actually exploit it.

Like, even without being a loot goblin, I'm usually sitting with 10k+ gold, plus about 30k gold worth of junk that no vendor has any gold left to trade with me in my inventory (Unless I specifically want to force resets just to sell my crap)... Alongside 100's of potions and elixirs and scrolls that I'm saving for "Later"...

I'm amused by the exploits, but I think the existence of Honor Mode invalidates the idea of 'for convenience' exploits, since we clearly have a hardcore mode that's meant to be hardcore and not just for personal bragging rights. And they're not quite funny enough for me to want to preserve them (a la skyrim's thievery via placing kettles on the witnesses's heads.)

But the amount of gold you have to spare is super dependent on your avatar character's charisma. My two most recent playthroughs were a bardlock and a rogue, and the rogue was barely scraping along until Act 3, having to let several items of interest go in Act 1, while the bardlock had money flowing out of his every orifice. The difference in the buy/sell rates is huge. I mean, I eventually started bringing Wyll along to all of my major transactions, but I suspect most players are like myself in that they either forget to minmax or, for a significant while, don't realize what and why they're missing out.

I don't even know what that exploit from the title is, but my latest PT with patch 6 seems to get me quite a bit LESS gold than the previous one in patch 4 and 5. In my 2nd PT, I couldn't spend all my gold also. But this last PT is quite different. I can't buy all the armor I want without scraping every coin and going back and forth to camp to collect sellable stuff that I looted but couldn't carry.

The price is adjusted based on the persuasion score of the character who started the interaction with the vendor. The price is also different based on the difficulty level.

You can also lower the price by offering the vendor gifts to raise their attitude. The amount of gold you need to increase the vendor's attitude toward you is dependent on your level. The higher your level, the more gold you have to offer as a gift.

The highest price possible would be if your character had a charisma of 8 and you were playing initially on Honour Mode difficulty, but then you changed the difficulty to custom and increased the price multiplier from the custom screen. In that case, it would use the base increase for Honour Mode and then raise it even more with the custom multiplier. Playing that way gets costly real quick. Decisions have to be made early on.

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The exploits are things like selling a vendor a backpack. Then you open the backpack from the vendor's inventory and move all the vendor's items into that backpack. Then you open a backpack from your inventory. Then you slide all of the vendor's items from their backpack into your backpack, but don't slide the stuff into the slots. Instead, slide the stuff onto the picture of the backpack you see at the top of the open backpack.

All of the vendor's items will appear in your backpack for free. Exploit. Everything's basically free.

I knew about the trade modifiers, but my PT2 PC was a bard/warlock and my PT3 PC is a bard/ranger/wizard. So both have high charisma. In both PT's , I give some credit to the vendors in ch1 to improve relations, because there are only 2 of them , basically. Later, especially ch3, there are so many it would be too expensive to do that. And both PT's were also done on the same standard difficulty mode. Yet the difference in the amount of gold I can gather now, compared to the prevuous run, is quite significant. I can only explain this by a modification in patch 6 compared with patch 4 & 5. (PT2 started with patch 4 and switched to patch 5 in the lower city. PT3 is all in ptch 6 from the beginning)

It's crazy how people discover weird exploits like that. I don't like that kind of stuff also, it 's a fun-spoiler for me. I'll just scrape and beg and play some tunes in the street to get some extra gold.

They don’t bother me at all to each his own so long as it’s not affecting my game experience why should I care what others do?

Also agree with them spending time fixing issues like this when other bugs should have priority.