Economics

[Deeza]

We have a lot of new collectable items in our mod, and we should devote a certain amount of time to deciding how much they should be worth. Remember that to most of Tamriel, Black Marsh is an unexplored and extremely exotic region, so that even animal products from there are likely to be very valuable to outsiders.

For a real-world comparison, in the Middle Ages when contact with the Arctic was poor, a single Narwhal tusk from the islands off Scandanavia and Greenland (often sold as Unicorn horn) could cost up to 10,000 gold pieces in the luxury markets of Mecca and other Arab cities (I've just been reading an excellent book on the "unicorn trade" across the centuries that inspired me to think about this sort of thing).

So, for example, if the player were to be fortunate enough to defeat a Swamp Leviathan, its teeth would certainly fetch a very high price if they were to take it back to Cyrodiil. Rare artefacts and books from the Marsh would also be valuable.

So what has already been done in this area for the BM items, and what still remains to be done?

[Ibsen's Ghost]

We could certainly use a stronger system of economics. We have a lot of shops in our interior claims but without clear costings for items then it may prove tricky to implement. I believe that I already gave many of the items prices as I introduced them to the CS but it would help to have someone go through these and check the prices in order to make sure that everything is appropriate.

Also, despite marking some of the newer items as 'rare' within the CS, some items need to be marked in this way to make sure that quest rewards and other rare stuff doesn't turn up cheaply elsewhere. If we go one-by-one through weapons, armours, miscellaneous items, ingredients etc. then this can be quite easily done. After each one (weapons, for example) then a template claim can be created that represents the typical way that a weapons seller (in our example) would be set up. Therefore, future claimants of weapon-seller interiors can use it as a guideline.

There are other tasks that might have an impact here. For example, similar to this task, I've been meaning to assign the correct properties to flora for some time now and we would need to have this in place before deciding the prices. Likewise, we could probably benefit from having levelled weapons....although this is only likely to affect NPC enemies and not have an impact on bought weapons AFAIK.