Morrowind talk:Mercantile

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[edit] Mercantile Bug

Thanks for getting more verification on that bug. I discovered this by chance. I am playing on Xbox, GOTY edition. Was seriously getting miffed that my most friendly merchants were only offering me 1/4 of the price, and the max i could barter an item to was just under half. As I had bartered with that enchanter and her disposition had dropped to about 55, she offered 10300 for that ebony sword. more then double then before. I could then barter it up to about 15k, a vast improvement. I have since tried this with many merchants, all at disposition 100 at start. Hope this helps, let me know if you need more details.

The exception seems to be the master trainer at Zainab camp, he works as intended. Higher disposition, higher prices for your goods. ^{—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Benould (talk • contribs).}

From what I remember (and I'm going several years into my memory banks here), there is a 'sweet spot' that is some combination of disposition and mercantile skill, at which you will get the best prices off a merchant. It may be something as simple as (their disposition + your mercantile skill) = 100, with anything over or under 100 reducing the buying price/increasing the selling price. A possible reason it doesn't happen with the master trainer is that he is not set to 'auto-calc' his stats - this setting seems to have more effect than the obvious, at any rate. --Gaebrial 03:13, 15 February 2008 (EST)

This is rediculous. With Disposition at 100 and Mercantile at 100, my buying and selling price both appear to be around 1/8 of the normal price. --Brf 00:35, 30 May 2008 (EDT)

If your mercantile skill is at 100 you should be getting full price, every time. Do you mean personality? Have you used the Haggle function correctly? –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 00:57, 30 May 2008 (EDT)

This late in the game, my Mercantile, Personality, and Disposition are all 100. The more I think about it, I think I know what is going on... As your Mercantile and Disposition increase, the merchants' selling price goes down and buying price goes up. At some point, the selling price would be lower than the buying price and the player could buy and sell the same item over-and-over and make a profit. The game developers realized this and put in a bug-fix to keep the vendor-buy price lower than the vendor-sell price. As I said, the prices I am seeing are about 1/8 the items' values, therefore my vendors will not give me more than that 1/8 when I am selling something. --Brf 07:50, 30 May 2008 (EDT)

I found the discussion I remembered about the bug - it's not so much an issue with the mercantile skill itself as with the skill levels of the merchants. Fortunately, Ronin archived the discussion from the old ES boards at Mythic Mods. --Gaebrial 10:19, 30 May 2008 (EDT)

Cool. That discussion confirms my conclusion. --Brf 18:54, 30 May 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Fatigue and other factors

There is another factor in this which depends on your fatigue. Try this for yourselves - when Mercantile and disposition are maxed, jump around until your fatigue is empty, and you will find that you can sell items for much higher prices.

It may be that Mercantile, as well as increasing the maximum difference you can barter for, also decreases the base price (regardless of whether you are buying or selling). Reducing disposition or your own fatigue counteracts this by increasing the base price and reducing the margin you can barter for, resulting in an overall better sale.

Can someone experiment with combining fatigue loss and disposition loss? ^{—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 78.86.148.216 (talk • contribs).}

I know from experience that extremely low fatigue has some marked results on many things, among them disposition. Your clothing, if you're out-of-breath, diseases etc. play into the "first impression" you make on a NPC. It may be hard to quantify by how much, without excessive testing, but if you do have some results, please post them. I'll do a few searches and see what I can come up with. --Benould^•T•C 18:16, 16 May 2008 (EDT)