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.
Last edited by Tuco; 15/07/22 04:57 PM.
