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About this mod
Reduces the economy-breaking discounts provided by some merchants and fixes multiple bugs and inconsistencies related to barter modifiers. True to vanilla intentions.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
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Translations
- Ukrainian
- Changelogs
- Donations
Description
Several merchants in the vanilla game offer barter modifiers when trading with them (positive and negative) when certain criteria are met. These are mainly related to reputation. The way these modifiers work is that they apply a flat increase or decrease to your Barter skill whenever you trade with the merchant.
However, many merchants provide relatively extreme discounts for very little effort. This can essentially wipe out any difficulty added by mods such as Harder Barter Faster Stronger, as you can often end up trading with a very high equivalent barter skill without realising it. It doesn't help that the reputation system is quite obtuse and that most merchants don't in any way inform the player that a barter modifier is in effect. Some of the information on the wiki is also incorrect.
The four most eggregious cases of unbalanced discounts are:
- Cliff Briscoe offers a 25 point bonus just for talking to his hotel waifu. It may not sound like much, but this bonus essentially moves you a quarter of the way along the Barter skill scale with no strings attached. Considering Novac is where a lot of early-game caps are made (due to the proximity of the REPCONN Test Site), this one bonus has a significant effect on the course of the game.
- Doctor Usanagi provides a 95 point discount for simply being Liked by the Followers of the Apocolypse. This means that, with very little effort, you can buy and sell with her at near base value.
- Julie Farkas similarly has extreme discounts for positive reputation. Follower reputation is very easy to earn by doing local Freeside quests or just donating medical supplies.
- Chet can offer a 75 point bonus for having mixed reputation with Goodsprings. Most players will miss this because the reputation system heavily incentivises never getting infamy. However, if you were to deliberately try and get this bonus, it is very easy to achieve and provides a far greater discount than any other merchant until Doctor Usanagi.
Comparing these numbers to Fallout 3, almost all barter bonuses in that game ranged between 10 and 20, and were harder to achieve in some cases. That is much more reasonable (essentially 1-2 whole level-ups investing only in Barter skill points).
What this Mod Does:
The purpose of this mod is to significantly reduce and equalise barter discounts to more reasonable levels, whilst maintaining the vanilla intention.
It also fixes a significant number of inconsistencies relating to when the bonuses are available, particularly when reputation is involved. These errors occur because the function that the game uses to interpret reputation does so on three linear scales (positive, negative, and mixed). However, the way reputation actually works is on a two-dimensional matrix, with fame and imfamy being the axes. This results in some strange things in vanilla, such as:
- Merchants who don't like negative reputation actually giving better prices in some instances if you gain more imfamy, and vice versa.
- Merchants marking up their prices if your reputation is mixed, but then for some reason providing normal prices if your reputation is negative.
- Julie Farkas also has multiple flat-out errors in the script used to calculate her barter bonuses, that are not addressed by YUP (yet). This includes checking the positive karma scale instead of the negative karma scale, etc.
Full Change List:
Spoiler:
Trudy
Chet
Doctor Usanagi:
Cpl. William Farber
These changes correct an inconsistency where Farber would trade with no penalty if you had low negative reputation despite mixed reputations incurring a -50 penalty.
Dr. Kemp
These changes correct an inconsistency where Dr. Kemp would trade with no penalty if you had low negative reputation despite mixed reputations incurring a -50 penalty.
Additionally, fixed a minor bug where you would be able to get a discount the first time attempting to barter with Kemp after retrieving Morales' corpse, despite having a reputation that would cause a markup or deny service.
Lacey
This fixes an error where Lacey would give normal prices if your reputation was negative but a markup if you had mixed reputation. Consequently, increasing your fame would have resulted in worse prices.
Quartermaster Mayes
(No Changes.)
Sgt. Daniel Contreras
(Same as for Lacey.)
Mr. Holdout
Mr. Holdout somewhat schizophrenically favours negative reputation with The Strip faction, but also offers an even higher discount for mixed reputation, which requires you to earn more fame. In the course of earning fame, he will begin offering a lower discount until you reach Wild Child. Despite this, he would also offer random pockets of normal prices as a side effect of the linear reputation function used in the dialogue conditions. The latter problem has been fixed, but the former problem cannot be fully resolved without some extraneous conditions work. His discounts now make a bit more sense at least.
Street Vendor
These changes fix cases where increasing your karma makes the deals worse.
White Glove Bartender
Gourmand Food Supplier
Gomorrah Bartenders
Jack
Johnson Nash
Cliff Briscoe
Ada Straus
Julie Farkas
Julie's discounts were actually set up in a logical way, by applying a multiplier to the numerical reputation ranks. The discount has just been divided by three for the positive side of the barter bonuses.
Fixed the incorrect negative reputation markups, as the function was accidentally checking positive reputation.
Fixed the fact that the discount/markup variable is not correctly set to zero if you move into the mixed reputation region where no markup or discount should be applied.
Great Khan Armorer
This progression didn't make much sense in vanilla, and it still doesn't, but the insane discounts have been lowered at least.
Knight Torres
Mick and Ralph
Show
Trudy
- Accepted: 75 -> 15
- Liked: 75 -> 15
- Idolized: 75 -> 15
Chet
- Mixed: 75 -> 15
- Unpredictable: 75 -> 15
- Wild Child: 75 -> 15
- Run Goodsprings Run Completed: 50 -> 10
Doctor Usanagi:
- Good-Natured Rascal: 95 -> 15
- Accepted: 95 -> 15
- Liked: 95 -> 15
- Idolized: 95 -> 15
Cpl. William Farber
- Dark Hero or Soft Hearted Devil: 0 -> -50
- Sneering Punk: 0 -> -50
- Merciful Thug: 0 -> -50
These changes correct an inconsistency where Farber would trade with no penalty if you had low negative reputation despite mixed reputations incurring a -50 penalty.
Dr. Kemp
- Dark Hero or Soft Hearted Devil: 0 -> -50
- Sneering Punk: 0 -> -50
- Merciful Thug: 0 -> -50
These changes correct an inconsistency where Dr. Kemp would trade with no penalty if you had low negative reputation despite mixed reputations incurring a -50 penalty.
Additionally, fixed a minor bug where you would be able to get a discount the first time attempting to barter with Kemp after retrieving Morales' corpse, despite having a reputation that would cause a markup or deny service.
Lacey
- Sneering Punk: 0 -> -50
- Merciful Thug: 0 -> -50
- Shunned: 0 -> -50
- Hated: 0 -> -50
- Vilified: 0 -> -50
This fixes an error where Lacey would give normal prices if your reputation was negative but a markup if you had mixed reputation. Consequently, increasing your fame would have resulted in worse prices.
Quartermaster Mayes
(No Changes.)
Sgt. Daniel Contreras
(Same as for Lacey.)
Mr. Holdout
- Dark Hero or Soft Hearted Devil: 0 -> 15
- Mixed: 40 -> 10
- Unpredictable: 40 -> 10
- Wild Child: 85 -> 25
- Smiling Troublemaker: 0 -> -20
- Sneering Punk: 0 -> 10
- Merciful Thug: 40 -> 10
- Shunned: 40 -> 10
- Hated: 80 -> 20
- Vilified: 80 -> 20
Mr. Holdout somewhat schizophrenically favours negative reputation with The Strip faction, but also offers an even higher discount for mixed reputation, which requires you to earn more fame. In the course of earning fame, he will begin offering a lower discount until you reach Wild Child. Despite this, he would also offer random pockets of normal prices as a side effect of the linear reputation function used in the dialogue conditions. The latter problem has been fixed, but the former problem cannot be fully resolved without some extraneous conditions work. His discounts now make a bit more sense at least.
Street Vendor
- Dark Hero or Soft Hearted Devil: 0 -> -40
- Wild Child: -80 -> -40
- Sneering Punk: 0 -> -80
These changes fix cases where increasing your karma makes the deals worse.
White Glove Bartender
- Member of the White Glove Society: 75 -> 15
Gourmand Food Supplier
- Framed Heck Gunderson in Beyond the Beef: 50 -> 20
Gomorrah Bartenders
- 80 -> 20 (there is no condition on this discount)
Jack
- Dark Hero or Soft Hearted Devil: 65 -> 5
- Mixed: 70 -> 10
- Unpredictable: 75 -> 15
- Wild Child: 80 -> 20
Johnson Nash
- Myers appointed as Sheriff during My Kind of Town: 75 -> 15
Cliff Briscoe
- Liked: 30 -> 15
- Idolized: 30 -> 15
- Hated: 35 -> 20
- Vilified: 35 -> 20
- Jeanie's Recommendation: 25 -> 10
Ada Straus
- Dark Hero or Soft Hearted Devil: 10 -> 5
- Mixed: 15 -> 10
- Unpredictable: 20 -> 15
- Wild Child: 25 -> 20
Julie Farkas
- Smiling Troublemaker: 20 -> 7
- Good-Natured Rascal: 30 -> 10
- Accepted: 40 -> 13
- Liked: 50 -> 17
- Idolized: 60 -> 20
Julie's discounts were actually set up in a logical way, by applying a multiplier to the numerical reputation ranks. The discount has just been divided by three for the positive side of the barter bonuses.
Fixed the incorrect negative reputation markups, as the function was accidentally checking positive reputation.
Fixed the fact that the discount/markup variable is not correctly set to zero if you move into the mixed reputation region where no markup or discount should be applied.
Great Khan Armorer
- Good-Natured Rascal: 85 -> 20
- Accepted: 80 -> 15
- Liked: 75 -> 10
- Idolized: 75 -> 10
This progression didn't make much sense in vanilla, and it still doesn't, but the insane discounts have been lowered at least.
Knight Torres
- Smiling Troublemaker: 15 -> 5
- Good-Natured Rascal: 20 -> 10
- Accepted: 25 -> 10
- Liked: 30 -> 15
- Idolized: 35 -> 20
Mick and Ralph
- Dark Hero or Soft Hearted Devil: 10 -> 5
- Mixed: 15 -> 10
- Unpredictable: 20 -> 15
- Wild Child: 25 -> 20
Installation
This mod requires the following:
Install with you mod manager or manually add to the data folder.
This mod requires the english, all-DLC version of YUP as multiple changes had to be carried forward due to how YUP implements some merchant fixes. This means that translating the mod to use a different language version of YUP might be a bit tricky.
Uninstallation
This mod can be safety uninstalled at any time and will have no permanent effects on your game. Just delete the file and you're good to go.
Compatibility
This mod edits the dialogue topics used to launch the barter menus, as this is where the barter bonuses are specified. Any changes from YUP are carried forward, but it will conflict with other mods that edit these same topics (shouldn't be many).
There is a patch for the Westide Reputation mod, which makes the discounts added by that mod match the new balanced discounts.
My Mods
I spend a lot of time creating and supporting my mods, so any donations are gratefully received.