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 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".