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

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.