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Morrowind talk:Mercantile

Mercantile BugEdit

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. — Unsigned comment by Benould (talkcontribs)

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? –RpehTCE 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)

Fatigue and other factorsEdit

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? — Unsigned comment by 78.86.148.216 (talk) at 11:08 on 16 May 2008

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. --BenouldTC 18:16, 16 May 2008 (EDT)

low dollar itemsEdit

I have found that you can't successfully haggle items at or below $10 and if you have high dollar stuff and low dollar stuff it will downgrade the haggle price. So sell all low dollar stuff by themselves or with other low dollar stuff — Unsigned comment by Mrp8196 (talkcontribs) at 21:04 on 6 March 2009

bargainingEdit

How do u ask for a lower or higher price? — Unsigned comment by 68.186.235.110 (talk) at 22:27 on 27 May 2009

Increasing MercantileEdit

The increase values you get in your Mercantile skill apparently is not a fixed value at 0.3 per successful bargain, like the article says. It seems to be a variable value depending a lot on the percentage of the original value offered by the NPC you were able to cut off on your buys/add to your sales.

For example, I've found that a very fast way to level your Mercantile skill is by (I'm getting illustrative here) selling/buying iron arrows 9 at a time at Dralasa Nithryon. At disposition 100 and starting from Mercantile 10, she'd offer me 6 gold when I tried to selling 9 iron arrows (worth 1 gold each). By successfully attempting to sell those for 7 gold, I got a 20 points increase towards my Mercantile skill. Likewise, when attempting to buy 9 arrows from her, I was offered a 6 gold deal. By bargaining down to 5 gold, I got a 23 point increase towards Mercantile.

So, this is a nice way to increase your Mercantile and make 'free' money (albeit a slow one for the later).

I'll attempt to get to a formula before doing any actual edits to the original article. Comments and assistance are always welcome.

Zhan 14:08, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

After some testing, I've found that the maximum increase is approximately 30 pts when dealing with merchants of average disposition. This is when raising base Mercantile skill from 99 to 100, and occurs if you can get the best possible bargains, i.e. selling 1 gp for 100 gp. This can be easily done by fortifying your Mercantile skill to 400 or above. In other words, it only took 4 bargains to get that final level of Mercantile. I'll add this figure to the page, along with an explanatory note.FrozenWolf150 (talk) 19:01, 16 February 2013 (GMT)

Fortify Mercantile - free moneyEdit

With a mercantile skill fortified to over 800 (even for just one second), I find I can sell items with any value for all the gold a merchant has. Most of my testing has been with the tribunal merchants, selling single alchemy ingrediants or common clothes for all 1000-10000 merchant gold. — Unsigned comment by 69.132.31.129 (talk) at 08:08 on 5 January 2010

The actual minimum skill level seems to be somewhere between 400 and 500 to get this to work. I typically use +500 and it works every single time. However, when I had it at +300, there was a chance it would fail. I'm not sure of the precise skill level necessary for a 100% success rate. FrozenWolf150 (talk) 11:03, 27 January 2013 (GMT)

FormulaEdit

If someone could provide a formula on how mercantile works with bartering, it would be useful to see by what percentage you can increase prices depending on your mercantile. Been testing a little bit and it seems that for every ten points of mercantile I can increase prices by 5 percent safely. — Unsigned comment by 69.169.148.48 (talk) on 14 April 2010

As far as I'm aware, all formulae on the site have been obtained by trial and error. If you want to add such a formula through your own trial and error, that would be great! rpeh •TCE 20:40, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
I found that by having my mercantile skill level 15 levels lower than the merchant's, I maximize the sale price offered for anything I sell. I tested this with different levels (50-35, 40-25, 30-15, 20-5, 10-0) and found it to be consistent. I didn't factor in differences in disposition, fatigue, or personality (all were kept at max).75.152.210.173 07:38, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
That is pretty consistent with what I have experienced. I have been keeping my Mercantile reasonably low, since my Disposition tends to be high in the later parts of the game. By "maximum disposition", I assume you mean your disposition was 100. What I have experienced is that once your disposition+mercantile-NPCmerc is over 100 or so, that your selling prices go down. You are saying that the decrease starts at 85. --Brf 12:10, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

No haggling, no skill gain?Edit

Is that right? If you don't haggle, you don't gain skill? Helper Unknown 11:42, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Nope, that's not true. Does it say that on the site somewhere? rpeh •TCE 11:57, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Oh, sorry, I see how my question seems to be asking if something written is correct. Its not written anywhere, I'm just wondering if that's true. Helper Unknown 13:37, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
I believe that is true. If you do not haggle, your Mercantile will not change. --Brf 14:22, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
I can't check it right now, but I'm fairly sure that I've had a mercantile increase when buying/selling, and I almost never haggle. rpeh •TCE 14:58, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
You get a disposition increase, but no Mercantile. When I play, I try to keep my mercantile as low as possible, so I can still get a good price selling stuff later in the game, when disposition is high. --Brf 15:32, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

MercEdit

I've noticed, in the Morrowind:Merchants section, there is a column labeled "Merc" which I'm guessing lists each merchant's own Mercantile skill level. Does the merchant's mercantile proficiency affect the player's ability to buy low and/or sell high, or does this simply indicate which NPCs train the skill? I've just recently come into possession of the Platinum Hits edition and, in so being, am a new player. I play via the Xbox, if that changes anything. 76.106.245.213 22:01, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes. The player's buying price is based on the difference (plus or minus) between his skill and the merchant's. His selling price is too, until the selling price would be higher than the buying. — Unsigned comment by Brf (talkcontribs) at 00:44 on 19 March 2011
Thank you. 76.106.245.213 23:29, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
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