Dont get me wrong I love the kill cams but and there is a but I would rather have a working economy. I would like it if all the NPC characters didn't have magic pots of replenishing money but rather they had to earn it by fair means or foul. Surly it cant be that hard to code them to have things like a basic need for food and a need to earn money to buy that food with.

Kill cams are easier to implement in a short time, since they are already there for the melee, I think implementing the economy will be a lot of work.

Devs dont like work I should know Iv worked with a few the least input for the biggest $$$ return is the general rule. Kill cams are flashy and look good in adds the only way to get them to do something like add an economy is by the sheer number of requests for it.

Most players wouldn't even notice the change. For those who did, it would be cosmetic, with little if any effect on gameplay. It would be too much work for too little gain, even without factoring in $$$.

I believe that's where Bethesda is heading with their "radiant" thing, they're just not there yet.

Actually I agree your character would have to be given a need to eat sleep and drink to have a noticeable effect.That could get a little tedious for some but from an RPG point of view wouldnt a living breathing world give more immersion ?. Wouldnt it be better if a blacksmith could only make steel weapons if he could secure a supply of the needed materials. What if a mine becoming full of spiders interrupted that supply then when you clear it the supply starts up again. wouldnt those kind of things have a real effect on the world that your character exists in ?.

Programming a real economy in a world like that is tougher than it looks. You mean like supply, demand, transport, income, etc.? It's not an easy task.

Not easy maybe but ones things for sure if we dont ask for it will never get it.

OR, the change would be very noticeable....then there would be tons of forum posts about how horrible the economy changes are!

Ever noticed that other games don't give their merchants a limited supply of money?

It would actually be insanely hard to code those things into the game, and it could result in shopkeepers wandering around aimlessly, unable to buy or sell anything while they go around chasing gold. The game is based around a semi-realistic system, which assumes that shopkeepers do business while you're not around, replenishing their funds and changing their stock.

These are the types of economy things I'd like to see:

Occasionally a delivery is waylaid and you're asked to find where it was hijacked and deal with the robbers.

Negotiating business deals to expand the trade of certain merchants (example: doing negotiating a trade between blacksmiths and orc stronghold for upgraded orc weapons and armors)

Increased chance of getting rare items in most shops after doing the East Empire Trading Company quest and a 10% discount in Imperial controlled settlements.

A real economy would be really hard, however:

What would work for me and shouldn't be as hard as a real economy would be:

Regional vendor lists - merchants in Riften sell other goods than merchants in Whiterun and goods that are found in the vicinity of the city would have a lower price than goods commonly found in other areas - this should be the easiest fix as the mod Economics of Skyrim already adds this in a way and you only need to add vendor and pricing lists for every region instead of the whole of Skyrim

Vendor lists don't reset all together, only some items are removed over time, others are added and the valuedifference is added/substracted from a vendors money (this could be made purely random) - this is a harder to implement fix in my opinion, but it should be possible

The amount of goods and money merchants in a city have is dependand on the work force in the city - My dream is that the workforce is divided into different categories, therefore, if you e.g. kill Nazeem less food is available, if you kill Hod/Faendal less goods which require wood. But it would be enough if they just keep track of the amount of NPCs alive in a city and if it drops, all merchants loose a bit of money and goods.

In my opinion this are three changes, which wouldn't add a real economic system, but would give us the illusion of one.

This would probably be too large of a change to patch in. IMO a full economy simulation wouldn't be worth it, but rather something event or trigger based. Meaning something like "if this farm is operating, the shop sells food and the NPCs have it.", but it wouldn't have to depend on individual NPCs buying it from the store or selling it. That would be a ton of background calculations for the game to keep track of that the players would only notice the difference if it breaks down and goes wrong in unintentional ways, which could happen pretty easily.

Economic conditions would also need dialogue and something for the player to interact with. If I visit a shop and the merchant says "I can't sell X because a dragon burned down the Y and we need Z to repair it", it would give me something to do, but if the only way I can tell if something happened is that the merchant always has 0 gold in their inventory, people would probably just think the game is bugged or something.

We manipulate the economy in this game. We manipulate the end results, not the process.

In a game there are two main ways to manipulate the economy. Either increase the amount of resources and the means of production along with job growth to support the increased activity. In other words, Sim City or one of the RTS types of games. However, even then, the net effect of improving the economy is people have more money to spend or resources to use. The problem with manipulating the resources and conditions is that is quite complicated and is a game in and of itself. Some RTS games have moved from this aspect just because it can get so tedious and complex.

In this game, we get a better economy by just investing in the shops. This gets us around the mechanics of riding herd on the factors that go into an economic system. Which can be fun, but is not a core part of the TES experience. Shops have more money to spend, which is what you would expect in an area with an improved economy. So, we can manipulate the economy in this game. We can also get the shop keepers to do different types of business than they would normally do, another sign of a better economy. Businesses expand when economic conditions improve or are expected to improve, again, we manipulate the economy.

There is an economy on my theif character, it's called role-playing.

Are any of these instances of economy manipulation available outside taking perks in the speech tree?

becaus if they put in a working economy ppl would whine about it be to hard to get money, and than beth fail in their quest of dumbing down the game

This^. It's already tedious enough selling the stuff you loot. Last night I did the quest where you go to Northwatch tower and kill gads of Thalmor. It took me and a follower two trips to bring back all the glass and elven weaponry and armor we looted from the place. By the time I'm done improving and enchanting that stuff, it's going to take close to an in-game week to sell it all.

If you had to wait for weeks to sell off stuff to merchants who only have like 100 gold, the game would be unplayable. As it stands, I probably spend more time between quests selling stuff than I do on actual quests.

A real economy doesn't sound to hard. Heck the game Mount and Blade: Warband, made by an Indie developer did it fairly decent. For instance say you have a horse with a cart of goods being transported from Riften to Whiterun and that cart gets attacked by bandits. Whiteruns economy should take a hit leaving less goods to be sold while Riftens economy should hit with less money to offer travelers. It could be useful in terms of if you are a storm cloak and attack a cart in transit to Solitude that was maybe transporting weapons it should hinder troop supplies etc. A lot to work on I guess it could be more complex since this is of course not an indie game .

EDIT: How ever they fix it if they even do I just think it is A) way to easy to obtain money in this game way to fast. The only way to limit your income is if you put in limitations of "don't pick up x y and z" while you loot corpses. Because as it stands after 50-60 hours in I have over 60k gold and all I do is keep selling stuff with ever having to dump money anywhere. I see their skill training as a gold dump however I just find that a cheap way to level in this game.

I don't think so. I'm sure there are mods but... It's one of the choices in the game. Do you spend perks in the Speech tree when your character's getting waxed in every battle because they're doing little damage and their armor skill is low? Or do you look at it more long term and think that if I invest several perks now, it'll make the game easier down the road. I invest perks into the $ areas of the Speech Tree when nothing else is really pressing. It happens once about 4-5 levels. So come level 30, I'm getting decent money for my average loot. Of course you could say those would have been better spent on something else, but the game is about offering choices.

Yeah, there's entire games based just around simulating that.


While, yes, it would be nice for some people to have a more in-depth economy - and nice for the game to actually have the "you can destroy an economy" features that they mentioned before....... personally, all I look for is the ability to sell the loot I find. Anything that makes this harder (like if, say, the shops just run out of cash for long periods of time; or if they refused to buy stuff because they already had some), would be annoying to me.
(sure, some "economic sim" would be nice for the people who care about that, but whatever system they put in shouldn't screw over the people who aren't interested in an econ sim. Just like it would be annoying if the system put in for people who like Stealth gameplay messed up the other players' Combat gameplay.)

I understand this completely as well as agree. Maybe i'm just playing this game wrong but what do we need to spend our gold on exactly? Most loot we find can be used so no need to really purchase a weapon etc from a vendor. Potions and food are so plentiful no need to purchase those goods. So far the only things I really "buy" are the houses as well as their respective upgrades. Next to that i'v really bought nothing. Once again maybe for me to enjoy this game as an economical standpoint would be to put my own self limitations on when I actually loot corpses. Sitting on a pile of cash is cool and all for a bit however not having anything to spend it on kind of takes the point away. I'm almost at a point where I am done with looting things just because I don't need the gold and it would just take more time to sell it off.

Yeah, I've mentioned in some of the "need more gold sinks" threads.... I don't really buy much in TES games. I like to be self-sufficient and use things I find. So, I've never really felt the need for things to spend the money on - I just see my gold total as a sort of "you're doing well!" score. Doesn't stop me from looting at all. But, yeah, I know I'm somewhat in the minority there.

Bethesda should make a better economy for their next game, for example be able to affect a town's economy by killing their workers, or robbing their transport ships/carriages...but for that to happen all the resources should actually be in the game world from the beginning, not created on the go... or at least they could come as "imports" but once they appear on the map, they should always be visible (full carriages and boats on the roads/rivers) and completely manipulable by the player.

Maybe removing the 5 training sessions per level limit? I mean, that is a HUGE gold sink when skills get to be level 50+