I like the idea, A LOT. But, your formula is broken. The Dealer offered me 320 for 10 jouneyman's hammers, I clicked accept, and he refused. So this doesn't always work. I did not change the barter from what he offered. Just to be clear.
I'm sorry about that. I've been kinda worried about a bug like this popping up. I actually spent like a lot of time trying to test the exact rounding logic of the base game, and I thought I had things figured out, and I did test, but it seems like I got it wrong somewhere.
Could you help me troubleshoot your problem? Like I tried selling 10 journeyman's hammer rn, and I had no problem, so there's probably something with your character I haven't accounted for. I'd like to try to recreate your problem. Just would need you to answer a few questions and maybe supply your MWSE log.
If not, I might just push a fix that brute forces any tiny errors by adding a small margin of error of like 1 or 2 septims, but I kinda would also like to figure out what's wrong.
When I have very low Personality and Mercantile numbers (25 and 5), I get lots of errors where the auto-calculated number won't work. The margin of error isn't just 1-2 septims, either, some have been small errors like that, others are 50-100 off.
I hope this mod will still get some attention, I don't think there's anything quite like it that's been worked on in the last few years. I also have this bug where I cannot buy from the merchant's default given price almost every time. I thought it was a feature!
I appreciate how it's kept my level 15 and 25 characters fairly poor (just barely broke 7k with my level 15, and 10k for my level 25), but I can haggle very, very little even with high personality and 50 mercantile skill. Maybe 5 points for ~100 septim exchanges, and maybe a few dozen to 100 for exchanges in the thousands of septims. I think 100 is the highest I ever got, while selling a 10k item for around 2000, I was able to get 100 septims more. (This is from what I can remember in recent memory.)
Overall good direction with restriction on doing money of thin air, but your haggle mechanic is kinda ruining rpg element "this also means players are much more free to ignore this mechanic without losing an enormous amount of economic potential, if they don't enjoy engaging with it". So as reward for your investment. If you choose to play with or without it - will dramatically change your life in morrowind. With your vision - its irrelevant, you will get there, just a little bit slower, cause you will get exp without haggling. Also, haggling for extra 3% profit is redicilous from time consuming standpoint. Everithing, except unability to sell higher than buying, should be optional.
Force base stats is overkill and should be optional. Otherwise you are ruining the game for not abusers(which is your core TA or at least it should be).
I'm kinda busy with the next version, but I'll take another look at the haggling margins. I can see if I can tune them a bit, to be a little more satisfying. I can't promise I'll be able to make big changes, though. I'll try to explain why below.
Regarding everything else, you can disable the base stats option, as well as basically every other feature of this mod, including the haggling revamp. I understand that not everything in this mod will be to everyone's taste, so it has something like 30+ enable/disable and adjustment options. You can adjust a few of the mod's formulae from within the MCM too, including haggling. I actually considered leaving the base stats option off by default, but I didn't think it was that common to use boosting spells for trading, and I figured players who wanted to could disable the option.
Advancement without haggling is also not just a little bit slower. It's about 10x slower. In practical terms, players will get incremental progress out of it, but I don't think a player who doesn't haggle will catch up to a player who does, barring a fairly long playthrough. -90% XP is still a big deal. I mostly changed it from being ~50x slower in the vanilla game to ~10x slower. This kinda lets merchant types get a small amount of progress on transactions where they choose to ignore haggling, but more importantly, this also lets characters who aren't really focusing on mercantile get some levels of mercantile, particularly lower levels. I wanted this mod to mesh well with a variety of playstyles and roleplay types. This minimum XP value can also be tweaked separately from regular haggling XP, if you feel it's too high. Like you could set it to 1/5th of its default value, to get vanilla'ish behavior.
And if I had to pick a target audience, I would say it's people who value roleplay, not abusers. That's how I play. My frustration with how the base game interacted with my roleplay is actually why I made this mod.
Like I do kinda get what you mean about 3% (though I will say that haggle margins are more like 3-20% of your initial price, depending on your skill and the merchant's skill, with 3% being only the lower end), and I also felt it was a little low sometimes. But I actually decided on these numbers after a lot of testing and with a lot of things to consider, and I can try to explain why I went the way I did.
The reason I felt compelled to redo haggling is because the base haggling mechanic completely ruined the feeling of roleplaying as a merchant-type character for me. Base haggling starts to become broken before you even hit 50 mercantile (and this is with aggressive but reasonable offers, which don't require spam clicks), so if I only put in a cap which prevents buying above sales price, that itself would remove any sense of roleplay or progress. You'd hit the cap early in the game, meaning every character who haggles will become a homogenous perfect merchant. You'd just set every haggle offer against every merchant to within 1% of base price (or whatever the chosen cap is) and be done.
I did try softer solutions, like a scaling mercantile boost (similar but different from the one in the mod now) to make merchants a bit tougher when they haggled. This helped a lot at earlier levels, but then it just fell apart again not long after that. It didn't even forestall the point where haggling became broken by much. Like unless I set merchant stats VERY high (to the point where their stats no longer make roleplay sense to me, on top of being very disruptive to prices before haggling), I couldn't really solve this problem with the base equation. Some mods do this, but I don't really like that solution.
And once I started rebuilding it from scratch, I realized this wasn't a simple thing. I wanted people to have a sense of progression throughout the entire 0->100 Mercantile range, so I had some limit on how much of a margin I could give people. Like to give an example, if I gave people a margin of 30%, I would need to add a cap again, and you'd start to hit that cap at like 50'ish mercantile/personality/luck, against lower-skilled merchants. You'd start to lose your feeling of progress not that far into the game, so if you want to roleplay as somebody who is slowly becoming a master merchant, that gets taken from you if you use the base equation with a hard cap. Kinda in that same vein, once you work from the point that sell prices cannot exceed buy prices, setting base price as the center point, that introduces an issue with any inversely-scaling mechanic like my revamped haggling. You have to keep your haggle margins low enough so that, when you factor in everything (base price changes from mercantile AND haggling), you're not moving backwards or standing still as you gain skill.
That's like one part of roleplaying: the feeling that your choices and character (and by extension, stats and progress) matter. Another part is also like the roleplay consistency of the world, meaning the actions of NPC's need to make sense too. It may not be satisfying from a progression sense, but I actually think it makes perfect roleplay sense for merchants to not give you a very big margin from haggling when you're already close to the base price. Remember that they need to make a profit too, and they have expenses beyond their goods like rent and taxes, so buying at 99% and selling at 101% is probably still unprofitable for them. Even like highly-efficient modern businesses which have modern logistics and deal in enormous volumes of low margin items (like supermarket chains) need like 2-3% profit per item. Most stores in Morrowind probably need way more margin than that.
So like factoring in all of the above issues, and also not wanting to change base prices, and also not wanting to change the base price formula from the MCP, I kinda had a lot of constraints to work within.
Pretty interested in trying this out, but will it cause any issues if I install mid game, and then uninstall, continuing the save if this wasn't my cup of tea? I assume "no" since it's LUA. And that it wouldn't be a problem uninstalling Harder Barter/installing yours mid game?
Sometimes you need to play something for several hours & save instances before you know you like it yanno. Thanks for all your work and consideration!
Hey I'm currently thinking about switching from Abot's "Smart Merchants" mod to your mod, just to try it out and see if it suits me better. One thing I wonder about is if the new mechanics affect Trainer NPCs as well as normal merchants. That is one of the features I found Abot's "Smart Merchants" mod does but I'm unsure if this mod does it as well.
There is also some other stuff like configurable disposition changes for successful bartering or bribing that abot's mod does but those can be configures via a GMST as well. It might even be possible to use abot's mod alongside yours since abot allows to toggle off certain features via MCM I think.
Anyway, any info about the mechanics of this mod affecting Trainer NPCs as well would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a bunch! And also thank you for working on this mod, it seems very well designed and well-thought-out!
Hey. Thanks for checking it out! And yeah, Abot's mod seems pretty great. There are a lot of good mods of this type, honestly.
My mod currently does not touch trainers. It wouldn't be that hard to expand this mod to affect like services, but I sorta didn't want to touch anything without like knowing exactly what kind of changes I want. I kinda have a rough idea of what I might do with training prices, but I'd really need to like experiment and playtest for a while.
Can I ask like what you specifically think is not good about training prices as they are now? And what you'd like to see? Like even a super rough answer is useful, since it gives me an idea of like what to look for.
I'm open to requests. I'm definitely not done with this mod, and I've already got some fairly big things planned for the next version, so I'm not opposed to adding more.
Oh, i just like to increase training prices in general. Even though i play with harder economy mods and btb game improvements, which lowers the price of many overpriced items, i like additional money dumps so to speak. So i generally raise the prices of trainers and repair services. Other small tweaks to the trainers are already covered in other mods (like a failure chance for training for example or adjustments for how long a training session takes). I also like to increase the prices for traveling services as well (again as a money dump). The only thing that bothers me about that is when i increase the traveling cost it is inconsistent with abot's scenic traveling mods (abot's boats, silt strider, gondoliers). I wish there was a mwse mod that automatically syncs abot scenic travel costs to whatever increased cost one sets for normal travel. Not sure if that is something that is possible tho. Maybe somewhat comes up with something one day :).
Thanks for taking your time to get back to me. I appreciate that!
Fair enough. Those sound like some potentially good ideas. I'll definitely look into that. Like think about that and experiment in-game a bit and see what I think. Just can't make any promises that it will come soon.
The next thing I wanted to focus on was restocking, which is kinda the big priority since it's the last really economy-breaking thing I haven't addressed. I've got my own kinda strong ideas on how restocking should be handled, but it takes me a while to figure out new code. Other services and mod compatibility are kinda on my list after that, so idk if/when I'll get to them.
sounds like a good plan. again from the description this seems to be very well thought out and i appreciate that. one more thing. Do you (or anyone else who might want to chime in here) know if your mod plays well with the mod "Buying Game" by VitruvianGuar. As far as i can tell so far "Buying Game" doesn't drastically reduce selling profits but i'm not sure if there is other overlap or incompatibility one should be aware of.
ok did some testing myself and it my results indicate that "Smarter Harder Barter" overwrites any price modifier from "Buying Game" sadly. So even if there is no hard incompatibility, you lose out on "Buying Game's" regional price modifiers for example or modifier for supply and demand.
Would it be possible to merge this with HardTrade? Unfortunately, this mod doesn't work when HardTrade is also enabled. It'd be a perfect economy blend for me.
I'm not sure. I haven't used that mod. After playtesting mine, I decided I needed to make some big changes, so I've been working on a fairly big overhaul of this mod (all of the new stuff will have the option to be toggled, if you don't want it). After that, I might look into compatibility.
The overhauled version might also eliminate the need for additional mods, as one of the things I'm aiming to do is eliminate the big exploits in the vanilla barter system? The new version will have a fairly big but still hopefully vanilla-friendly change to how sales prices are calculated, a scaling buff to NPC mercantile scores to make them less pushovers, and a complete overhaul to what barter attempts are accepted (as this becomes a huge exploit past certain levels of mercantile skill). I've already finished the first two things, and I'm trying to hammer down the last one rn.
If you could get specific about features or types of features you'd like me to add, or exploits/gameplay issues you'd like to see tweaked or rebalanced, I can try to work those in.
22 comments
Could you help me troubleshoot your problem? Like I tried selling 10 journeyman's hammer rn, and I had no problem, so there's probably something with your character I haven't accounted for. I'd like to try to recreate your problem. Just would need you to answer a few questions and maybe supply your MWSE log.
If not, I might just push a fix that brute forces any tiny errors by adding a small margin of error of like 1 or 2 septims, but I kinda would also like to figure out what's wrong.
I appreciate how it's kept my level 15 and 25 characters fairly poor (just barely broke 7k with my level 15, and 10k for my level 25), but I can haggle very, very little even with high personality and 50 mercantile skill. Maybe 5 points for ~100 septim exchanges, and maybe a few dozen to 100 for exchanges in the thousands of septims. I think 100 is the highest I ever got, while selling a 10k item for around 2000, I was able to get 100 septims more. (This is from what I can remember in recent memory.)
Force base stats is overkill and should be optional. Otherwise you are ruining the game for not abusers(which is your core TA or at least it should be).
Regarding everything else, you can disable the base stats option, as well as basically every other feature of this mod, including the haggling revamp. I understand that not everything in this mod will be to everyone's taste, so it has something like 30+ enable/disable and adjustment options. You can adjust a few of the mod's formulae from within the MCM too, including haggling. I actually considered leaving the base stats option off by default, but I didn't think it was that common to use boosting spells for trading, and I figured players who wanted to could disable the option.
Advancement without haggling is also not just a little bit slower. It's about 10x slower. In practical terms, players will get incremental progress out of it, but I don't think a player who doesn't haggle will catch up to a player who does, barring a fairly long playthrough. -90% XP is still a big deal. I mostly changed it from being ~50x slower in the vanilla game to ~10x slower. This kinda lets merchant types get a small amount of progress on transactions where they choose to ignore haggling, but more importantly, this also lets characters who aren't really focusing on mercantile get some levels of mercantile, particularly lower levels. I wanted this mod to mesh well with a variety of playstyles and roleplay types. This minimum XP value can also be tweaked separately from regular haggling XP, if you feel it's too high. Like you could set it to 1/5th of its default value, to get vanilla'ish behavior.
And if I had to pick a target audience, I would say it's people who value roleplay, not abusers. That's how I play. My frustration with how the base game interacted with my roleplay is actually why I made this mod.
Like I do kinda get what you mean about 3% (though I will say that haggle margins are more like 3-20% of your initial price, depending on your skill and the merchant's skill, with 3% being only the lower end), and I also felt it was a little low sometimes. But I actually decided on these numbers after a lot of testing and with a lot of things to consider, and I can try to explain why I went the way I did.
The reason I felt compelled to redo haggling is because the base haggling mechanic completely ruined the feeling of roleplaying as a merchant-type character for me. Base haggling starts to become broken before you even hit 50 mercantile (and this is with aggressive but reasonable offers, which don't require spam clicks), so if I only put in a cap which prevents buying above sales price, that itself would remove any sense of roleplay or progress. You'd hit the cap early in the game, meaning every character who haggles will become a homogenous perfect merchant. You'd just set every haggle offer against every merchant to within 1% of base price (or whatever the chosen cap is) and be done.
I did try softer solutions, like a scaling mercantile boost (similar but different from the one in the mod now) to make merchants a bit tougher when they haggled. This helped a lot at earlier levels, but then it just fell apart again not long after that. It didn't even forestall the point where haggling became broken by much. Like unless I set merchant stats VERY high (to the point where their stats no longer make roleplay sense to me, on top of being very disruptive to prices before haggling), I couldn't really solve this problem with the base equation. Some mods do this, but I don't really like that solution.
And once I started rebuilding it from scratch, I realized this wasn't a simple thing. I wanted people to have a sense of progression throughout the entire 0->100 Mercantile range, so I had some limit on how much of a margin I could give people. Like to give an example, if I gave people a margin of 30%, I would need to add a cap again, and you'd start to hit that cap at like 50'ish mercantile/personality/luck, against lower-skilled merchants. You'd start to lose your feeling of progress not that far into the game, so if you want to roleplay as somebody who is slowly becoming a master merchant, that gets taken from you if you use the base equation with a hard cap. Kinda in that same vein, once you work from the point that sell prices cannot exceed buy prices, setting base price as the center point, that introduces an issue with any inversely-scaling mechanic like my revamped haggling. You have to keep your haggle margins low enough so that, when you factor in everything (base price changes from mercantile AND haggling), you're not moving backwards or standing still as you gain skill.
That's like one part of roleplaying: the feeling that your choices and character (and by extension, stats and progress) matter. Another part is also like the roleplay consistency of the world, meaning the actions of NPC's need to make sense too. It may not be satisfying from a progression sense, but I actually think it makes perfect roleplay sense for merchants to not give you a very big margin from haggling when you're already close to the base price. Remember that they need to make a profit too, and they have expenses beyond their goods like rent and taxes, so buying at 99% and selling at 101% is probably still unprofitable for them. Even like highly-efficient modern businesses which have modern logistics and deal in enormous volumes of low margin items (like supermarket chains) need like 2-3% profit per item. Most stores in Morrowind probably need way more margin than that.
So like factoring in all of the above issues, and also not wanting to change base prices, and also not wanting to change the base price formula from the MCP, I kinda had a lot of constraints to work within.
Sometimes you need to play something for several hours & save instances before you know you like it yanno. Thanks for all your work and consideration!
There is also some other stuff like configurable disposition changes for successful bartering or bribing that abot's mod does but those can be configures via a GMST as well. It might even be possible to use abot's mod alongside yours since abot allows to toggle off certain features via MCM I think.
Anyway, any info about the mechanics of this mod affecting Trainer NPCs as well would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a bunch! And also thank you for working on this mod, it seems very well designed and well-thought-out!
My mod currently does not touch trainers. It wouldn't be that hard to expand this mod to affect like services, but I sorta didn't want to touch anything without like knowing exactly what kind of changes I want. I kinda have a rough idea of what I might do with training prices, but I'd really need to like experiment and playtest for a while.
Can I ask like what you specifically think is not good about training prices as they are now? And what you'd like to see? Like even a super rough answer is useful, since it gives me an idea of like what to look for.
I'm open to requests. I'm definitely not done with this mod, and I've already got some fairly big things planned for the next version, so I'm not opposed to adding more.
I also like to increase the prices for traveling services as well (again as a money dump). The only thing that bothers me about that is when i increase the traveling cost it is inconsistent with abot's scenic traveling mods (abot's boats, silt strider, gondoliers). I wish there was a mwse mod that automatically syncs abot scenic travel costs to whatever increased cost one sets for normal travel. Not sure if that is something that is possible tho. Maybe somewhat comes up with something one day :).
Thanks for taking your time to get back to me. I appreciate that!
The next thing I wanted to focus on was restocking, which is kinda the big priority since it's the last really economy-breaking thing I haven't addressed. I've got my own kinda strong ideas on how restocking should be handled, but it takes me a while to figure out new code. Other services and mod compatibility are kinda on my list after that, so idk if/when I'll get to them.
The overhauled version might also eliminate the need for additional mods, as one of the things I'm aiming to do is eliminate the big exploits in the vanilla barter system? The new version will have a fairly big but still hopefully vanilla-friendly change to how sales prices are calculated, a scaling buff to NPC mercantile scores to make them less pushovers, and a complete overhaul to what barter attempts are accepted (as this becomes a huge exploit past certain levels of mercantile skill). I've already finished the first two things, and I'm trying to hammer down the last one rn.
If you could get specific about features or types of features you'd like me to add, or exploits/gameplay issues you'd like to see tweaked or rebalanced, I can try to work those in.