Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback A point about trading and its current issues.

Mate, you were scoffing at all of us for criticising the lighting changes on another thread, even going so far as to suggest Larian had contrived to produce a ‘special letter’ that mocked its fanbase for criticising the game.

In the same week, they released a call for Act 2 and 3 testers, specifically asking for feedback ‘negative or postive’ (it’s on the page).

Like any business-savvy studio, they’re less about the folks who are licking their scrotums and more about the folk who challenge their ideas.

Why the hardcore defence of everything they do – why the stoic chest-thumping when anyone remotely suggests all isn’t quite well with BG3? Are you in love with an inanimate object?

The sheer vehement personal offence you take to any kind of BG3 criticism can’t be healthy, pal. The longer you spend on these forums, the more you’re going to be exposed to that. If it’s giving you panic attacks, and you even have to go insulting people by calling them socially impaired because of it, the problem is you, not anyone else. It’s a ‘suggestions and feedback’ area in the forums: suggestions = criticism. Which can legitimately take the form of a complaint. Most times it does, in fact, since people tend to focus on the negative first over the positive.

Why aggravate yourself further by reading an entire forum dedicated to the thing you apparently seem to deplore? Dude’s his own worst enemy.

My comment addresses not only your suggestion, but also the current system. It's not difficult to understand, and it shouldn't take a wall of text to explain. Brevity. Try it.


It was clearly a personal insult, attacking me as if I were trying to be clever, but failing because I am not clever. First, you misunderstood my post, and then you responded with venom, simply because you're shadowboxing some imaginary version of me.

Obviously, you don't like me, and that taints your responses to my posts. Which is tiring.


More insults.


lol, your entire attitude is antagonistic and boorish. But I thank you for your advice on how to behave at parties.

DoS 2 really needs the vendor approval system because of how fast all of your gear becomes obsolete, sending you back to the vendor for an extended trading/upgrade session.

It can’t really be called an exploit if it was intentionally coded into the game, but it still feels that way since it’s never actually explained. Thing is, I think that’s a design decision rather than oversight.

There are a bunch of systems DoS 2 never bothers explaining; rather, it expects players to mess around and find out. The upsides are a simplified experience for new players, the joy of discovery for intermediates and a more satisfying game for veterans. The downside is building an entire system and possibly letting it go unnoticed. BG3 doesn’t have that downside, as the trading system was ported as is.

I can attest to the upside. My initial ignorance was bliss, as I could focus my attention on more important matters. When I tried maxing out a vendor’s approval, I was thrilled to obtain more goodies than expected. Since then, I’ve been looting a lot less because I know how to get the most value from it.

None of this excuses the inventory issue. As was mentioned above and a million times elswhere on the forum, switching characters during a sale shouldn’t change the items’ prices.

If a charismatic bard can seduce a vendor by handing them a bunch of free daggers one by one (so that each approval bump impacts the value of the next gift), why can’t the bard point to their friends and say “they’re with me”?

See? As I said, you don't understand the (suggested) system you are commenting on.

You made your mental imagine of how it would work, automatically assumed the least charitable scenario possible and ran away with it.
No one AT ANY POINT implied that JUST having high charisma would be enough to get a maximized discount.

A higher starting charisma would presumedly net to the player few additional percentage points, as a baseline to build over with reputation and accomplishments (i.e. doing the merchant a favor with a quest, etc).
Or maybe charisma may just net a greater gain of reputation/attitude points over time (i.e. every reputation point would be multiplied for a factor derived by your charisma. Like 1 reputation point at 10 CHA would become 1.8 reputation points at CHA 18 and so on).

But the funniest thing is that even assuming the worst case scenario, as you already did, you'd be WRONG anyway, because even a system where prices were fixed according to a character's charisma and that would be the end of it, would STILL be an improvement in stability and usability over the current one where prices fluctuate wildly in the most gimmicky way, and the only pre-requirement to get maxed reputation is gifting some pocket change to the merchant upfront, turning him instantly in your "best friend for life".

And none of this addresses the issue of having to do the little inventory dance between characters to maximize profits, anyway.

I see where you're coming from, but I don't really agree. I think a lot of what you're talking about is just business as usual. Giving discounts to repeat customers is probably the biggest thing, and then there's the angle where the merchant makes like they're giving a discount to get the customer feeling special.

That said, I do acknowledge that, in general, not many people want to do favors for folks who are downright rude. But I think that's a special circumstance that goes beyond the basic boundaries of charisma.

Anyway. It's a game, and I accept it for what it is. If I wanted to get closer to reality, then I'd have to start questioning why these small merchants are buying hundreds of pounds of weapons and bones and skulls and endless cups and jewelry, too.

Just how many daggers and suits of leather armor can the halfling druid afford to buy? And why would he buy that many to begin with? Does he have a market for this stuff?

Aaron lives right next to goblins. I’m sure they’d like their stuff back, even for a fee.

As for the vendor approval flavor, I picture it the opposite as Crimsonrider. I see all vendors as crooks to be beaten at their own game. I can see the both the real price and what they’re charging. They’re no angels.

Having high charisma means being able to defuse the predatory vendor tactics, while low charisma chumps get the extended warranty.

So, you're not doing anything to gain access to these merchants? What's your secret? Last I checked, we're working pretty solidly on our party rep by actually gaining entry into the Grove. I chose to not comment on this because I figured you'd "get it", but obviously, I have given you too much credit. Under your system, you've already got your foot in the door for those discounts, and improved selling prices, but I suspect that you already know this, and that that's the idea. Under the current system, you have to give a little to get a little, under your system, you can sell everything you pick up for a profit, instead of bartering away some of it to get those discounts/bonuses.

Inventory management has been a thing since cRPGs have been a thing, it's part of the game. We had it in all of the BG games, and in all of the IWD games, in all of the NWN games, hell, we even have it in MMOs. You can solve this "dilemma" on your own, by simply looting with the character you want doing the selling. If you're picking up everything that isn't nailed down, then yes, you're going to have to have to move some of that inventory over to other characters, and back at a shop. Guess what, no matter what, you're going to be doing that because encumbrance is a thing. Yes, making it a party wide deal would help things, but the problem is that for you this is a package deal, and the rest of your package doesn't do anything to combat what you've stated the problem is, an influx of money. In fact, it creates more of an influx, in items that are no longer bartered off for influence with the merchant, since they can now just be sold. How is that going to combat this influx of money?

POINT OF ORDER

Doesn't [individual character] Charisma already factor into the merchant prices? I'm seeing claims that Tuco's system would ADD this functionality, but if it's already in the game...

What the hell are you even rambling about?
Aside for the fact that YEAH, it's almost like a natural salesman with innate charisma would be inherently better at manipulating other people... DO you realize that you are having a seizure about the charisma thing when it was IN NO FUCKING WAY a cornerstone of the system I suggested?
In fact, you could ditch charisma entirely and not a single point I made would change.
You know what? You could ditch REPUTATION entirely and same would go, because NOTHING I suggested was intrinsically tied to a single value.

But even putting that aside, it's beyond me how it keeps going over your head again and again the fact that even all these alleged flaws you are pointing would STILL run circles about the ridiculous system currently in place.
In fact, that "absurd system where charisma would give charisma-based classes a marginal edge with prices from the get go" is EXACTLY what BG 1 and 2 made use of. THAT as the baseline, then the party reputation growing on a scale from 1 to 20 on top of it.
And guess what? For all its limits and its simplicity It didn't take 15 seconds of bribing the trader to max it out.

WOAH, NO SHIT???
Maybe precisely because these are games that tend to become inherently "inventory-heavy" a developer should put some effort in making an UI that doesn't actively antagonize the player with bad quality of life features.
FOR EXAMPLE, guess what? We could implement a system that spare the players from having to move dozens of objects at any given time from one inventory to another only to leverage that "Attitude" bonus that only one of our party members is supposed to make use of.

There are another half dozen aspects of BG3 inventory management that could be made significantly better and more streamlined without sacrificing any of the mechanical depth, for the record, but what about starting somewhere instead of conceding that "Inventory management is usually a messy job and we should do nothing about it".

Jesus Christ, this has to be most short-sighed suggestion in the thread so far. We are in a limbo between "Thank you Captain Obvious" and "Are you actually trolling me?".

Do you realize we are talking about a game that constantly throws at you hundreds of items, most of which actively beneficial to collect for use or to sell, and that we have weight limits, too?
Also, are you even aware that most players if they don't want to be overwhelmed with the chaos in their bags tend to sort items in some way, right? "I'll give this type of items to this character, and that to the other one".
OF COURSE players will tend to start collecting most of the stuff on the character doing the trading (which is usually but not necessarily your MC) but at some point you'll have to start moving stuff around or crawling like a sloth. Or leaving money down.

But we aren't even talking about "expanding the inventory" or "removing weight limits" or anything of that sort, so the amount of items collected in the end is irrelevant. No. We were discussion the idea of sparing the players the ADDITIONAL busywork of juggling between bags item they already collected.

No matter what" my hairy ass. Can an excuse get any more pathetic? You are basically saying that there's no point in making inventory management smoother because at some point you'll hit limits anyway. Which is laughable.
So since no matter what we will hit encumbrance limits we may as well cut it in half? Have no inventory at all? Make the UI to pass items around a textual parser? Any other masochistic suggestion?

BUT nothing. You could stop there.
It would help things SO it would make an aspect of the game better. Period.
You didn't sign some contract that made you the mandatory devil's advocate defending any shitty feature, so stop acting as if you did.
You are debating against things just for the sake of it, without making a single legitimate point about why any of the suggestions would be for the worse.

Hilariously enough BOTH your claims are completely wrong.
Incidentally NO, this is NOT a "package deal" for me at all.
In fact, you seem to be the only one who's hellbent about focusing the discussion on the Charisma thing, a side note no one really gave a damn about aside from you.
Which seems to be your signature style across discussions, given the other one few days ago where you went on a tangent about controllers that no one really cared about.

No, it doesn't. Factually. You can't even legitimate this type of claim in any way. Stop making shit up and then repeating it over and over as if it made any sense to begin with.
With the system I suggested the players would
- have less discounts overall on the things they purchase
- sell things for less because and they would be paid less for the ones they sell...

So that would "create more of an influx" of money HOW? It doesn't make any sense.
No that it really matters, anyway, since fighting inflation wasn't really a main goal, but it's against any logic. So ANOTHER case of you going on a tangent over a side note.

As far as I can tell, different characters have different values of attitude according to what you did with previous transactions, but I didn't notice anything about charisma altering the base values.

Not that it would matter, anyway, because once again the issue is NOT what type of value or stat you exactly pick as reference, as much as...

- how gradually you scale it over time
- how stable or volatile that value would turn out to be.
- more than anything: equalizing that chosen value across the entire party in one way or another, either with a "Party reputation" (or equivalent variable) OR by giving the player the option to choose who starts the transaction with the trader (i.e. the "face" of your party) and then using their values while selling across the inventories of all companios.

It does, but it's not the main focus. You have to actually sacrifice stuff to the altar of favor, bartering, to get substantial discounts. As opposed to making it a key focus for the discounts which means that if you've done the bare minimum to get in to the grove, for example, you're on your way to that goal, and don't have to sacrifice anything to get it.

???
You have to gift to any merchant the equivalent of 150-200 coins at most. Either in gold or more frequently in items.
That's less than what you are going to save on the purchase of a single +1 item in some cases.

How insanely profitable this little trick is even on the short term, for virtually no upfront cost, is precisely its most glaring flaw.
Even when reselling crap, there are transactions where you are going to make up to 500-600 more on a single trade only because you did this first.

How can anyone argue with a straight face that this isn't something trivially easy to exploit, I have no idea.

This is solid advice, you should follow it.


Hey, check it out, both of the things you said didn't factor into your suggestion, all pulled from the original post on the first page... Gee, I wonder where I could have come up such an oddball idea? Oh, I read your post.

"MAYBE" means exactly that it was a throw-away suggestion and not a cornerstone of the whole idea. It was even followed by a "AND/OR" to suggest an alternative or complementary system.

Language, how does it work?

But what's even more interesting to me isn't that you are misunderstanding the importance of a secondary detail as the major point of contention, no.
What's hilarious is that you are basically arguing that IF it was implemented in the stupidest, clumsiest possible way it could be almost as bad as what we have now.

Yeah, if you went out of your way to make it inexplicably bad it would suck. Shocking.
Example: at no point I ever even ATTEMPTED to put down some value about how impactful charisma could be in the equation, but somehow you already decided that it would be so bad that it would make the whole economy collapse.
When in reality for what it matter every single extra point of charisma could just add a 1% discount (OR EVEN LESS) and be almost uninfluential in the grand scheme of things.

For someone who habitually LOVES to nitpick on single sentences you are singularly AWFUL at understanding the stuff you insist on commenting on
Not to mention your other habit of filling the gaps with your imagination and running away with it.

This thread is a mess. @robertthebard, what is your actual argument/desire here, besides arguing with Tuco?

Do you dislike volatility in merchant prices, and you think that the game needs to remove ALL variations in merchant prices? (In your own words, "Getting better prices with merchants is, at the end of the day, getting better prices with merchants" which you seem to think of as "exploits.")

Or do you want players to still be able to easily influence merchant prices, and think that there's no point to removing the bribe mechanic because Cha or Reputation-based merchant prices is already an exploit (In your words, "if [players] run with 'highest charisma' or total party charisma can exploited on the very first visit to the merchant"), so Larian might as well leave in the bribe exploit too?

Or do you want players to actually have to sacrifice something meaningful in order to get better prices? And think that any cheap way of doing so is an exploit?
- If so, BG3's current implementation sucks. You sacrifice a pittance and get much better prices forever. I'd call that an exploit. Do you have a suggestion of what would be a good cost?

I throw my support behind any attempt at market realism in an RPG.

I prefer the pittance to "let us keep all the stuff we would have had to donate in order fight inflation in the game". They could remove the entire system, because with or w/out merchant favor, our characters are, just as in all of these games, going to wind up filthy rich. However, when you have to waffle from "do this" to "I never said do this" to "but, I said "maybe" do this", there's something off. It really starts to sound a lot more like "do anything but what Larian decided to do" than anything that's good for the game.

For me, I messed with the system the first time I saw it in game but haven't gone back to it since. Why bother? Whether there's a method to jockey for better prices or not, I already know that, by the end of the game, I'm going to be able to buy anything I want, most likely. I know this because in every SP RPG I've ever played this has been the case. What I didn't ever think was that "hey, if I can keep all this stuff I had to give away, I'll prevent inflation in game". More stuff to actually sell means more money coming into the game, not less. They could remove it completely, and I would be unaffected. It's not that I see this as an exploit, it's just that I see it as pointless. I already know I'm going to be rich, what's the rush? However, removing a mechanic that removes currency from the game in order to fight excess currency in game, one of the stated goals of this "system", isn't going to do that. If it's not going to perform one of it's stated goals, what's the point of dedicating time to implementing it?

The actual point of "at the end of the day, getting better prices with merchants is getting better prices with merchants" is that it doesn't matter how that's achieved, it's the same thing. Saying "but my way is better, because x" doesn't change the basic premise. If the problem is inflation, changing how that occurs doesn't fix it, it just changes how it happens. Depending on how it's implemented, it could also accelerate the process. However, when one bases their responses on the actual content of the OP and gets met with "stop making shit up"? Yeah, not much in the way of value, unless all I'm looking for is "anything but what Larian did".

I feel like you are trolling me and possibly even other users, at this point.
You are purposefully wasting everyone's time and arguing for the sake of arguing, probably without even having any attachment to the current system you are so rabidly defending.


well, we weren't really discussing a system to combat THAT problem, so this is fairly irrelevant.
And to be clear, sure, we COULD address that, too. But that's an entirely different issue, more tied to the specific fine tuning of the numbers involved that on the trading UI or subsystems acting as foundations.

What's off here is your SPECTACULAR inability to keep up with the conversation, understand context and refraining from going off on unhinged tangents over secondary details, that you are for some reason imagining implemented in the clumsiest possible way.

Actual suggestion made: "We could have a system made in this way, and then have this (fairly secondary) value could scale according to a variable X or Y or a combination of both".
Your take: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!! X would be a disaster. IF we did this in the stupidest possible way it would break everything and do more harm than good"

...Ok? No one is *really* advocating for the stupid, broken and poorly implemented method you are imagining, though.

Yeah, it's pretty damn obvious you aren't really familiar with ANY of the things you are attempting to argue over and you are doing it just for the sake of it.


Putting aside reading comprehension, are you by any chance incredibly BAD at math, too?
Because if you have a system where gifting the equivalent of X nets you increased profits amounting up to to X*10 on the SINGLE TRANSACTION (let alone in the long term) of course you are going to end up with more and more money piling up over time.
And this is even ignoring that I already stressed a half dozen times how "fighting inflation" isn't really the design goal being chased, here.


There isn't a single correct statement in this sentence, because:
- the current system does NOT "remove currency from the game" (quite the opposite, it gives back way more than the initial investment required to benefit from it".
- "Fighting excess currency" was never the goal. I just commented that it would happen (to a limited extent) as a collateral.


I have no idea why you seem to be the only one who keeps FAILING at understanding what the two ACTUAL design goals are, despise the fact that I listed both of them in the opening post:
- removing a gimmicky exploits that allow the player to maximize attitude with any trader in seconds and at virtually no meaningful cost (also making one of the TWO trading systems currently implemented inherently worse in the process)
- removing some unnecessary "inventory juggling", helping the game in an area where it is already a slog even by the standards of this genre (inventory management).

I wish we could finally move on from this circus act of me explaining to you the same thing over and over and you failing to understand it repeatedly and moving the same objections I already addressed multiple times.
Still I have the feeling it's not going to happen and you'll be back with a tirade about the imaginary dangers of your fictional take on the system suggested.

Or, I could do what I already did when met with "responding to things I actually posted is making shit up" and just read past your posts.

Well, you do you and keep being wrong about almost everything and missing every point with alarming regularity, I guess.
Keep trying to score your "GOTCHA" without addressing a single time any of the actual points I made.

Now, for anyone else that is here to ACTUALLY discuss the topic at hand and isn't irrationally invested in turning this discussion into an ideological battle to "prove me wrong no matter what", let's witness some practical example:



This is a clip I recorded minutes ago.
It's me talking with a merchant I never interacted before in this patch, checking how much money I'm going to make selling him junk, THEN maximizing his attitude by literally gifting him a couple of trash items for the total value of 200 coins (give or take) and then witnessing an increased profit of 1500 gold coins while trying to resell the same exact ten items.

For the record, as anyone can easily spot I had plenty more to sell and I could have made this even more blatant, but I think anyone should get the point: you can offset the "loss" of your initial donation like nothing and start profiting from it immediately, even on a single transaction with just a handful of items.

Now, aside for the fact that this system is simply bad for a half dozen of other reasons, I have no idea of how anyone could argue with a straight face that it's better at "fighting inflation".