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

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.