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

As many of you may be aware, the game currently offers two different trading UI switchable on a toggle: trade and barter.

Now, in the past months I happen to read people preferring one or the other, but here's the thing: from a viewpoint of pure convenience it's a no contest. Barter is significantly superior.
The reason is simple: with barter you can gift things to traders to increase their "attitude" toward the player. Usually all it takes is gifting items or gold for a total value of 120-200 gold coins to get a maxed out attitude, which translates in getting SIGNIFICANTLY better prices, both when you are selling stuff and when you are buying.

If this wasn't already gimmicky and exploitable enough, there's another side issue: attitude is on a character-basis rather than party-wide.
What this means in practical terms is that not only you are offered a cheap trick to maximize your profits, but to leverage it at its most, you have a mechanic that actively encourages the player to deal with additional "inventory busywork" (in a game that already has it in spades) by constantly juggling items from a character inventory to the other.
It also makes the possibility to switch between characters in the trading screen basically self-harm, since if you are not buying and selling with your most "beloved" party member you are implicitly leaving on the table a shitload of money.

My suggestion in the end is rather simple and consists of two main point, neither of which particularly complex to implement:
- remove this cheap way to manipulate prices with gifts.
- implement a less volatile system of "price fluctuation" and make it PARTY-WIDE rather than single-character-focused, maybe determined by your party's average charisma and/or reputation with the faction/merchant you are dealing with.

Advantages of these changes:
- it removes the temptation to exploit the system by removing the exploit.
It makes the option to switch between characters while trading something sensible to do and even advisable rather than an exercise in financial masochism.
- it somewhat helps to keep "gold inflation" at bay.

So, you want to replace a system that gets you better prices with merchants with a different system that gets you better prices with merchants...

I want to replace a volatile system based on leveraging a blatant meta-game exploit with a more stable and coherent one, that scales reasonably. Yes.

So, like group approval raising from repeat business?

The specific value to use is a bit beyond the point. It could be based on your overall reputation as heroes, your relationship with the faction, your AVERAGE charisma value as a basic standard, eventually it could take into account a little discount on top basic prices because you did a quest for the trader, etc.
Eventually you could get even temporary bonuses on top, like using Charm and Friend, that come with short-term benefits at a long-term price (your reputation with the merchant will plummet after he's freed from the enchantment). But this mostly is already in place.

The point is: it should be mostly a background thing and not something you should be able manipulate so easily with so little effort.

And it should be party-based, simply because otherwise it's going to actively encourage all that annoying juggling of items from one inventory to the other.
Have you ever realized that if you switch to a different companion while trading prices can change significantly? While this could make somewhat sense in abstract, what it does is making the tabbing between companions non advisable. The most efficient strategy when dealing with a trader is to open the group inventory, pack your "charismatic leader" like a mule and sell or buy everything with him.
Not hard to achieve by any mean, but time-consuming, annoying and very "meta-gamey".

I agree with every observation made, and with the conclusion that having seperate prices for party members encourages players to face the tedium of inventory management.

I’ve come to enjoy getting good reputations from vendors, though, because it entails less pointless looting.

+1

And for the record if anyone thinks that "party-based reputation" is too much work to implement, I have even the simpler variant:

- let the prices be decided by the companion that starts the trading, regardless of which companion's inventory we switch to, during the process".

There, done.

+1

The bribing traders thing is silly, gamey, and too easy. Let our Charisma (you know, the D&D stat that governs the attitudes people have toward you), and maybe our reputation (save the tieflings? +20% value for sold goods to merchants in the grove) govern traders' attitudes.

The fact that prices change depending on which character is selected just makes things more tedious, especially in multiplayer. It essentially turns one player into the trade-bot, which is annoying for everyone.

Both of the above combined is just blegh.

The same "exploit" exists. Getting better prices with merchants is, at the end of the day, getting better prices with merchants. It doesn't matter if it's party reputation, or gifts, or choosing a specific character to do the trading. All are "meta" ways to get better prices. The only thing that I see that changes is that you don't have to give up any items/gold as gifts, thus adding more stuff to the pool of stuff you can sell, thus adding to inflation. It doesn't solve anything, it just moves the goal posts to something else. What makes me believe this? I have two save files running right now in Fallout 4 where my characters are extremely rich. I'm not able to bribe them with gifts, or to use charm to influence their prices, and they're capped at how much money they have to purchase what I may be trying to sell, and yet, I can still amass tons of money in game, even if I ignore perk magazines that increase my selling price and decrease my prices when I try to purchase from them.

The point being that, even if this system was removed entirely, currency inflation is going to happen. It's going to happen with what's currently in game, and it's going to happen with everything you've suggested, so nothing will change, regardless, and players that are wise to how these systems work are still going to be able to "exploit" them. So how is changing it from bartering for better prices to using the character with the best charisma to get better prices going to improve anything? What makes you think that players that are willing to "exploit" one meta system won't "exploit" a different meta system?

I don't know a single store that gives better prices to my likable friend than they do to my sour faced friend.

+1 to the OP.
The current system is very annoying and juggling inventory between characters is not fun.
Now the prizes depend on your charisma and how much the merchant likes you (which depends on how much you give him/her for free).
Plus prizes are also better when casting guidance on your char.

The same prizes for every char and prizes only dependent on the reputation your group has with this faction would be better.

There are other exploits I find annoying:
- NPC drop everything you ever sold to them (but not their own goods) when you kill them.
This encourages players to kill every NPC before you move on.
- Merchant inventory and gold is limited and gets refilled every time you rest.
This encourages rest spamming to sell or buy stuff.
- If you exploit all this stuff (which is not complicated but annoying) money is a non issue in this game.
Grab everything you can, give it for free until you have max reputation, and then very soon all of your chars will have magic equipment, some unique items and as many potions, scrolls and arrows as they like.

It was like this in DOS1+2 too and there I found it annoying as well.

On the other side I really liked items in BG1.
You started with junk and finding your first magic weapon fealt importent because suddenly you are able to damage some enemies at all.
Unique equipment felt really great because it was rare.

It absolutely does.
I'm sorry you can't grasp why even after a detailed explanation, but that's just your problem.

What changes is that one system is prone to be highly volatile and can be maxed out in seconds with little or no effort and the other is not, as the changes in "attitude" would be gradual over time and progress.
Not even remotely true. In fact the opposite of the truth, since not getting higher resell value and lower prices out of nothing with 15 seconds of "work" would PREVENT excessive inflation (and you would accumulate less money over time and be more careful of spending them in general).
My condolences, but it's absolutely irrelevant. We aren't addressing economy issues in FO4 now, so the comparison out of nowhere makes no meaningful point.

Your point is questionable at best. If nothing else because no one suggested a miracle cure against inflation, and "containing inflation" wasn't even the design goal of the suggested change.
I just remarked on a side note that it would ALSO help marginally in that area.

Did you genuinely fail to understand every single one of the points previously made or are you just pretending for the sake of arguing?

Let me try again: I don't give a shit on how the prices are adjusted, exactly, or according to what value, exactly, as long as it's not a highly volatile system that ENCOURAGES INVENTORY JUGGLING between several characters.


Yeah, I'm sure it sounded like a clever comeback in your head. Somehow.

ADDENDUM

Just to be clear, as far as I'm concerned if they removed the current system entirely and replaced it with nothing more than just FIXED PRICES for everyone, it would still be an improvement and something preferable to what we have currently.

The system I suggested above (in both variants) is simply meant to be something that would maintain the same design goals of the current system (having reputation and likability affecting prices) but...

- with less room for blatant exploitation
- less incentives to spend even more time juggling items from one bag to the other

Actually, your system, if we run with "highest charisma" or total party charisma can exploited on the very first visit to the merchant.

Only because you don't really understand what's being suggested, frankly.

I make a comment that says I don't think it makes sense to give discounts based on charisma.

You respond with something personal and insulting. Curiously, what is wrong with you? Seriously, what is your problem? Do you lack social graces in every situation or just online?

Which is something that is already in the game now, in one shape or the other.

The game ALREADY gives different prices to different characters on the basis of their likability. Did this detail go over your head, somehow?
The difference is that "likability" now is not based on charisma AND/OR reputation, but on "This guy gifted me some pocket change, which means we are best friends for life and I'm going to give him huge discounts until the end of time".

The two things my suggestions are supposed to address are the high volatility of the system and unnecessary UI busywork, I'm not questioning the core principle because I simply don't care about it.
As I said I'd take a "Just basic prices for everyone and that's it" over what we have currently in the game.


I remarked that the joke wasn't particularly funny nor it made a meaningful point. Not sure where's the insult.

...But since we are on it, my problem, frankly speaking, is a low tolerance for smartasses that try to gratuitously antagonize and ridicule others without even having a legitimate argument to make in the process.

If that's your definition of "social graces", don't be surprised if you aren't treated like the hottest thing at every party you go.

Just to be clear, I want to stress that just because I dislike your way to argue things (and I'm sure the feeling is mutual) it doesn't mean I wouldn't recognize if you made a compelling argument about a feature.
But hey, you didn't.


Both BG1 and 2 (but especially 2) had several "end game" items on sale from relatively early in the game if you visited the notable shops early on. It's just that the player wouldn't be able to afford them for a while (and the skill check required to steal some of them was insanely high, as it should be with the value involved).

Incidentally, both BG1 and 2 had exactly a very basic form of what I'm suggesting here: you could get discounts as your party reputation grew over time and some additional extra point of discount with high charisma characters.

Actually it makes a lot of sense and is realistically accurate to the real world. I do not know how many here have been to actual market places or bazaars, but these are specific places in the cities for villagers and farmers who live in the country-side to come sell their natural grown food or other thingies. I've been to plenty in Croatia, Czech Republic and Sweden.

Such people are extremely friendly and will give you a discount just for having an interesting conversation or for being nice. And if you are a regular, such lovely people will give you permanent discounts and even give you extra of their product, because they're eager to sell it.

In the game, every merchant I've seen so far fits this exact type, either refugees or small merchants just wanting to sell their stock. So I agree that things should be party-wide, it would be a good change. But Barter I find completely realistic and immersive. These are small merchants in the middle of nowhere, makes sense to barter and gain discounts.

The problem is that I understand it all too well. Your easily exploited system isn't any better than what we have now, and, in fact, could be worse. I mean, it's not like anyone's going to roll up a bard, sorc or warlock with max charisma, right? Wait, of course they will. Surely nobody would then take Wyll with them, to get that extra charisma boost for better prices, right? Wait, of course they will. At least, under the current system, we have to give something to get something, instead of just taking really high primary stats on a charisma based character, and getting discounts right out of the gate, on top of being able to just sell all the stuff we might have bartered to obtain those discounts. Wait, that doesn't do anything to prevent an influx of gold into the game, while, on the other hand, bartering items and gold off for favor will. Not that it's going to make a lot of difference either way, as I said, games that don't have this kind of system still wind up with extremely rich characters. So your system will not only not solve this "problem", it will, instead, exacerbate it, because items that may have been bartered off will instead just be sold, adding even more gold to the game.

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".

Why is that a bad thing? Loot less, play more!

Because it's gimmicky.
Sure, it's convenient for the player, but not everything that's convenient is better for the game.
In this case this "trick" actively encourages the leverage of a cheap exploit for profit, while also making the other alternate trading system currently included as a "viable option" in the game intrinsically worse in comparison.

And while I usually try to not appeal to "realism" when we are talking mechanics, a degree of verisimilitude remains relevant.
So it's hard to ignore how the current system makes no damn sense in general. No merchant would ever give you discounts piling up in the THOUSANDS because even if you were complete strangers minutes before, you introduced yourself giving a wink and putting a fifty dollars bill in their hand.

If I understand your point here, it’s that it would be more convenient for players if all enemies had only 1 hp, but it would make the game way worse.

I agree that obstacles are good when they’re in the service of fun. But nothing about the inventory system is fun; I’ll take any ounce of convenience I can get.

Yeah, the trade system works weirdly with approval compared to the barter system. I tried using trade for a while, and the only time approval goes up is if you run the vendor out of gold. Having both trade and barter is a mess.

I’ve got no good answer there. It sort of makes more sense under the trade system, where you need to sell them over a thousand gold’s worth of junk in order to start making headway in their approval. If someone gave me a grand’s worth of great deals and then a free leather armor, I’d give them a juicy rebate the next time around.

+1

I disliked this system in DOS II and was sorry to see it reappear here.

+1 to the OP.

There's nothing fun about inventory management like this - neither mechanically or narratively (in fact, it makes no logical game world sense) - so it should be done away with.

Pricing should be fixed by the charisma of the PC that stalks to the trader, and at best then modified by a fixed party reputation system based on game events like quests, etc.

1.) "The" problem isn't inflation. There are multiple possible problems:
- gifting a merchant a small trinket to get vastly increased wealth is gimmicky and unimmersive.
- giving the player too much money kind of defeats the purpose of money. If the player can buy everything, why even have money and merchants?
- the fact that merchant prices are per-character encourages unnecessary inventory management. And Larian's UI for inventory is already not the best...
I'm sure more.

2.) I suppose getting more money from merchants leads to inflation, if by "inflation" you mean the vast accumulation of wealth by the PC. I'd call this "getting rich" since the value of a single gp isn't decreasing. But this can be addressed independently of merchant prices. Larian could keep the current reputation-dependent system and just decrease the total amount of treasure found in the game or the base amount merchants will pay for it. Or they could remove the current system and not do anything else. Or a combination of the two knobs.

In my "ideal" system,
- The wealth given to the player over the course of the game isn't enough that they can buy everything. At every level, players still have to make decisions about which equipment they'll buy.
- A Charismatic party who takes time to help all those in need might have ~10-20% better merchant prices than a selfish/un-charismatic party. Of importance is that neither of these price changes feels gimmicky or unimmersive. Charisma is a significant cost (loss of other ability points) and can't be trivially changed during the game. And Reputation increases would come from the completion of significant quests so it feels earned.
- The merchant system is set up to limit the tediousness of inventory management and shuffling between characters. Same prices for all party members satisfies this.

Like I said previously, they could remove it completely, and I would be unaffected, because other than looking at it the first time I used a merchant, I haven't touched it. Our characters are going to be rich, regardless of whether it's right now, or a bit later. Nothing proposed here would change that. I have already acknowledged that a party based system would be great, but with what was proposed in the OP, which didn't exist, if you ask the OP, the only thing that changed was the way you could amass that quick wealth, and I provided a method for exactly how that would work. So, if I were going to make this proposal, I'd have done something like this:

1. Remove Barter.
2. Make it so that the Face, the person who talks to the merchant, controls the prices, and let everyone sell their items in one interaction at that price.

Clean, and simple.

Another problem that could have been avoided if they had used baldurs gate as insperation instead of divinity

So, basically the same stuff that was already suggested, except you had to be the one stomping your feet and making a scene before conceding that it would be an improvement.




Not to mention that "removing the barter system" doesn't really address the core of the issue in itself and it's a textbook case of "throwing the baby with the bathwater", because the undesirable part isn't the bartering in itself, but how easy it makes to to manipulate prices with the "gifting exploit" it comes attached to.

This is starting to get hilarious. I'd be willing to bet that I could get you to believe that your OP was the worst idea ever, if I just quoted it and posted a +1.

The baby: Letting the face control the merchant prices.
The bath water: A "gimmicky" system that allows you to get rich quick.
The irony: Posting that this gimmicky system is problematic and then claiming that removing it is "throwing the baby out with the bath water"...

Aaand you are missing the point and focusing on the irrelevant thing again.

The baby you are throwing away is the bartering system, the "bathwater" (or toxic waste, more properly) is the manipulation of attitude with gifts, which is the real problem.

Also, not sure how pointing that you repeated basically one of the suggestions I made before would equate to "claiming my own suggestion is the worst idea ever".

P.S. And yeah, it IS getting hilarious (and somewhat sad at the same time), but not for the reasons you seem to think.

No, it's hilarious for exactly the reason I think:

You: Maybe try Y.
Me: That won't work, because X.
You: I never said that, stop making shit up.
Me: Provides actual quote where you did say that.
You: But I said Maybe.

Do you understand what a suggestion is? Even if you remove maybe, putting something forward is a suggestion, which is one possible way that something can be addressed. Just because you use a qualifier like maybe doesn't mean you didn't suggest it. Just because someone chooses to comment on that doesn't mean they're making shit up. Now you're arguing that using part of your idea for a much simpler way to prevent buying favor is arguing for the irrelevant. Have you asked to have this thread locked yet, because you're now, by your own admission, arguing the irrelevant. Because my little suggestion, that could be done in two lines, instead of a verbose wall of text, accomplishes exactly what you're trying to accomplish, removes the ability to buy merchant favor, and eliminates the need to micromanage your inventory. If doing these things is irrelevant, then this thread is pointless, because that was the whole point, right?

Congratulations? You just played yourself.

+1

You are awful at summarizing things and spectacularly consistent on missing the point every single time.
But thankfully I'm not the only one who noticed, given that two different forum users contacted me to remark what boils down to "What the hell is that guy even going on about?".

Let's go with a recap.
Not because I'm deluding myself thinking you would ACTUALLY GET IT this time, but for the sake of making things clearer for the onlookers, who probably lose focus few pages ago being tired of this squabble going in circles.

- I pointed two main problems in the current system (trivially easy manipulation of prices and incentive to excessive inventory juggling)
- proposed SIMPLE and effective solutions to both (remove the first and/or replace with a less volatile alternative, neutralize the second with party wide reputation OR the possibility to choose a Face influencing the price even when switching between separate inventories)
- the first one came with a couple of possible options (Charisma marginally affecting prices, a reputation system, a combination of both) and a *side note* on additional but not intended benefits (*partially* offsetting the runaway accumulation of wealth).
- You went on endless tirades about one of these possible options (the Charisma-based thing) AND on that side note about accumulation of wealth, as if if any of that was the main point, and kept putting it at the center of the discussion.
- EDIT: let's not forget that you also attempted to use the argument "It may be broken but I don't use it, so it doesn't matter" at least a couple of times, for some reason.

That aside, you are also omitting in your summary that your long-winded rebuttal about the thing that "wouldn't work" in my suggestions "because of X" doesn't even make any legitimate point and it's built entirely on your *wrong* assumption of what the actual suggestion was, so it's not like you scored a big catch even there, you are just making a wrong assumption *and* focusing on it for all the wrong reasons.

Then there's your second gripe about how "inflation of monetary influx would get even worse with my system", which is entirely based on... Well, you being awfully bad at math, apparently.
Because according to you being unable to manipulate prices on a whim and get huge discounts from the get go would result in... The player making even more money and breaking the economy, somehow..?

Your suggestion solves the problem by unnecessarily removing a system in its entirety (Bartering) just to remove a secondary aspect of it (gifting pittance to raise attitude) rather than replacing it with an more-or-less equivalent but better one, which is was my proposal was all about.
Something that admittedly would still be a marginal improvement over what we have now, but far from the brilliant best case scenario you seem to think it is (if nothing else because I DO favor the Bartering window to the Trading one, especially as long as we won't have a buyback option for miss-clicks).

I also kept it simple, since by inclination I'm extremely wary of over-complicated and over-designed systems, so if you really have all these issues keeping up with my "wall of text" (which is made clear by how easily you lose focus in most conversations) that's frankly your problem.
No doubt my English could use some work, but for how rough it is I never particularly struggled to get the point across, when dealing with people in good faith that made a genuine effort toward it.

Eh. no, I didn't.
But I'm also tired of playing with you.
Feel free to ignore the thread if it makes you so irrationally mad, without asking for a lock and ruining things for others who are actually trying to make the game better, rather than just flaming other users out of personal grudges.

Can you two both just stop cluttering the thread with bickering, please?

I genuinely wish I could move on with the topic (and have more people contribute to it) without having to spend most of the time in it fending off feral assaults at the strawman.

This 'exploit' is really about a few things, but really, it doesn't unlock any real gameplay 'fun' - shuffle around inventory until you can sell everything for the best price. I can't rob a store owner while using my most charismatic character to distract them, while the thief works their magic either, so no gameplay fun there.

I don't mind attitude as a metric for determining price, but they trade with everyone, even characters they clearly don't want to sell to (Githyanki gets terrible prices). It also seems weird there is nothing you can do to positively influence the vendors (or any character you can trade with) and build better attitude, not even completing quests or saving the grove changes characters attitude scores. You'd think saving a characters life would bring their attitude to 100 straight up. Nope. Still 50. Oh, but accidently interact with the wrong item or attempt to hide in the open by miss-clicking... attitude drops significantly.

Put simply: Give NPC trader 200 gold. 100 attitude somehow makes them think they should then instantly give you their entire gold stash and every rare item they have for a couple of basic weapons, armor, pointless rings etc. So every NPC has the intelligence of a rock. That's the issue I have.

D&D is a roleplaying game and even NPCs have stats. You shouldn't be able to easily influence a high intelligence/charisma trader to 100 attitude just by throwing gold at them, or free items or whatever. They'd see through you trying to manipulate them.

Well, yeah, the problem was never that an attitude system exists, but how it works and how easy it is to manipulate.

______________

The second problem I talk about is a bit different and it's mostly about quality of life more than game logic. If we have a charismatic "face" dealing with the merchant and bringing the prices down, let this just be the refence point across the entire merchant UI, even when we swap to a different character.
Don't force us to juggle needlessly with the inventory and pack the guy like a mule because selling with everyone else gives you substantially worse prices.

There is even more than one way to go about it.

You can either:
- make it so that any transition is managed according to the stats of the guy starting the conversation
- straight up use the best value in our party regardless of who talks first
- make it an average value between party members (a bit of an extra step, but on the other hand it would be a simplification that takes into account that the same party may include, say, the charismatic and beloved paladin and the despised rogue drow).

+1 to making prices be determined by the character that first initiates dialogue with the vendor.

I’d not bother manipulating merchant’s attitude with gold unless money were tighter than it is in EA, but while I have nothing against it in principle, from what people have said here attitude increases do sound too cheap to buy.

Well, you don't need to guess about that, I posted the clip showing it off clearly before, but here it is again:



On one single transaction I got a net gain of 1500+ gold barely by gifting to a merchant starting with neutral attitude a total value of 200 gold of generic trash. Magically we were buddies for life and he was willing to shower me in money.
I'd say that YES, it's a bit too cheap to manipulate.

And yes, it doesn't really make much of a difference here in EA, but its impact will only grow over time in the final game if not addressed now.

Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that I was in any doubt that buying attitude improvements was too cheap, only that my knowledge that it is is based on testimony and evidence here rather than my own experience.

I’m not a huge fan of the mechanism, and wasn’t one of buying reputation by donating to temples in the first games either. But if it’s kept then at the very least it seems there should be a steep sliding scale, where paying to bring negative attitude up to neutral (for example as compensation to restore merchant attitude after trying to steal from or near them) might cost what it does now, but raising attitude above neutral becomes progressively and then prohibitively more expensive.

Oh, I'm not mad about what you said, no need to apologize.

I just wanted to make clear that I wasn't speculating about the "potential risks of the system being easy to bend".
It already is and I submitted some clear evidence of it.

I'm going to GRAVEDIG this thread just to point the good and the bad:

On a positive note, the exploit highlighted in this thread has been fixed (I think it was already in patch 9 and not even at release).
- You can't gain approval from vendors by gifting pittance.
- Once the conversation starts, you can swap companions and the price of things remains the same regardless.

On a less positive note, the Attitude system is now almost completely vestigial. It doesn't change over time during transactions, it doesn't improve (or worsen) doing quests that benefit (or harm) the vendor and to "bribe" the vendor requires more than 10X as much (it went from being 200 gold on average to requiring 3-4000 gold to maximize their attitude.

It's better than it used to be (by the virtue of being simply less easily exploitable), but it feels like a missed chance to have a relatively simple but meaningful subsystem.
It's... puzzling to save a vendor's life three time in a row and then having the ungrateful bastard sporting proudly a 0 attitude in the trading window.

The only exception I found to this scenario was a single case in Moonrise Tower where passing a persuasion check with the Bugbear vendor swapped him from being borderline antagonistic to the player to being your biggest fan and gave you instant 100 Attitude... Which ALSO sound incredibly ham-fisted as far as implementations go.

I mostly stick with one trading style and just ignore the other, because once you notice how easy it is to game prices, it stops feeling like a real decision and more like busywork. I don’t enjoy swapping items between characters just to squeeze a few extra coins out; it breaks immersion and slows the pace. I’d rather have prices feel stable and tied to the group as a whole, so I can trade with whoever is nearby and move on. Less micro-management usually means better gameplay flow.