Price Balance

INTRODUCTION

Everyone knows that Morrowind economy is a mess. You get rich way too fast, finding expensive items becomes irrelevant at some point because there is nowhere to spend so much money. Things collect dust on your house floor because the last thing you want is getting through a chore of selling 120000 Daedric Dai-katana in Balmora to merchants with 2000 septims, buying and reselling, resting and repeating. Traveling to drunken mudcrab or taking a trip to Mournhold for the 100 time just to sell some stuff from the last dungeon starts to get unbearable. Sometimes it takes as long as doing a quest, raiding some tombs or helping a pilgrim on his way to the shrine, which for me is more fun than shopping.

I have tried different economy mods, but could not find the one that will satisfy me completely. They either change stuff too much, make the game too hardcore or make service providers demigods that offer 2 hours of training for the price of a house. Not even mentioning that every little trader with 100 septims in his pouch has the skills of grandmaster in mercantile and speechcraft. This seems unrealistic to me. What is even worse – they rarely solve the problem of selling expensive items, and even if they do (by increasing the gold of merchants, for example) they also must kind of increase the price of services, which will lead to unrealistic situations when NPC will ask huge amount of money for the basic things. Because if they don’t do it very soon you will have so much septims that you can buy the whole Vvardenfell without blinking an eye, which brings us to the starting point.

WHAT IT DOES

Instead of messing with NPC skills, barter gold or service cost I’ve decided to smooth the price curve of expensive items. They cost too much. Items and sets that cost more than 2000 septims now have their price decreased proportionally, so you will have easier time selling most of the expensive stuff you will find in your adventures. Unique magical items can differ from 1. 1 times less to 10 times less, depending on the initial value. For example, Umbra Sword now costs 10 times less, but Warlock's Ring costs 5. 3 times less. I have kept the original price progression, meaning that Umbra Sword still costs more than Warlock’s Ring, and made sure that items that were cheaper than others are still cheaper after dividing the original cost by different values. Armor sets and weapon materials follow their own formulas. For example, daedric armor is divided by 10, while adamantium is divided by 5 and orcish by 4. It is made so that new prices fit the overall picture better, and since generic armor and weapons are encountered more often than unique items their price should reflect that.

Since prices of expensive armor, weapon and clothing shrink, some other prices, like Bittercup, begged for a change in order to fit the new system, so I’ve changed them too. While I was there, I deci