Vendor prices and charisma/faction?

Do both charisma and faction affect the prices a vendor will buy or sell to you for? I always thought charisma affected the price, and faction affected whether the vendor would even trade with you. But, after buying Tinkerer's Bag from Marfen Binkdirple, I started wondering. I always thought that the absolute best price you could get a Tinkerer's Bag from him was 5250pp (give or take a few gold pieces), however he only charged me 5101pp (something like that) with my charisma at 135. Just checked Allaclone and looks like it can even be as low as 5000pp? Or, maybe that's what he will buy it back for? Anyway, I believe I am Apprehensive to those gnomes, so I probably should've used sneak to get to Indifferent... never occurred to me.

So, question is, does faction affect price also? Or only charisma (provided you are Apprehensive or better... I know Dubious just gets you insulted when you try to deal with those guys)? Same question, does Ally get you an even better price? Assuming same charisma number?

 

Check out this article... I don't know if it is exactly the same for us, but it's a good read.

http://www.eqtraders.com/articles/article_page.php?article=g190&menustr=070000000000

In essence, with high faction and 104 charisma, you're getting best prices. Lower faction or more popular vendor, you can need as high as a 132 charisma. This doesn't take into account greedy merchants, of course, who always charge more.

Someone here probably knows more than this, but it's a start.

 

Apprehensively I think costs more. Indifferent and above is the same

Charisma at 135 is the cap anything beyond this doesn't do anything on indifferent vendors.

I think you can drop Tink bag to 5050ish.

 

I don't know about buying, but I know from selling with my ogre SK in Oggok that my junk sells for better prices with ally or warmly faction than in PoK, and that is with an abysmal CHA score (like, below 50 IIRC).

On fine steel, its about half a pp (5gp) when selling to ogre vendors with ally/warm faction versus PoK vendors.

Its about the same on my wife's high elf character when she occasionally sells in Felwithe to vendors with ally/warm faction, and even though her CHA is higher, she gets about the same difference between Felwithe and PoK vendors as my SK does.

 

Vendors in OT should pay horrible prices, and sell for higher. No matter your faction and cha, you always pay a premium in OT.

 

I believe Shady Swashbuckler in EC tunnel had some pretty messed up business ethics too... he was truly "shady". Might want to be sure he is as dishonest as he should be

 

Based on this, it would make perfect sense that charisma may have an effect at the higher faction ranges. Not sure how to put it into words, but it sounds like if you have low charisma, but higher faction, you'll get better pricing than slightly lower faction and the same charisma. Similar to a cap of sorts: high charisma can only help you so much, and low charisma can only hurt you a certain amount... but it may all be relative to whatever your faction is between Apprehensive and Ally. Guess one way to say it would be: 50 charisma and Ally might get you similar pricing to 130 charisma and Apprehensive.

 

Where does this come from? EQLive?

If I'm understanding it correctly - merchants would gradually start charging more and paying less as items were bought and sold from them - I don't think it happened on Al'Kabor. Certainly, it didn't happen to me when I raised JC (a process that involved buying and selling the same items to the same two merchants hundreds of times), and I can't find any evidence of it happening in Zorblak's tradeskill logs, either.

 

Interesting!

I don't remember it, and I can't turn up any evidence of it in the logs I've got. For example, Zorblak has a log in which he sells 432 items to the two JC merchants in PoK (as well as buying the 860+ items needed to make those 432 pieces of jewelry) over the course of a couple sessions, and neither buying nor selling prices change at all in that time.

Come to think of it, I've also bought bags and bags of spell reagents over the years - pearls, peridots, and the like - and I don't think I've ever seen those prices vary an iota unless a character had low CHA. A stack of peridots costs exactly 210 plat, always.

That isn't to say I couldn't have missed this mechanic, especially if it only happened at low CHA. Has anyone got an AK log in which vendor prices get steeper as items are bought and sold?

 

Never heard of such a thing, and as with RW have come to rely on exact pricing.

 

That's pretty interesting. I don't recall that on PC live during this time frame either, but I suppose they could have removed it at some point before I noticed it. I used to shop at a couple of those merchants outlined in the article a lot back then.

 

This was never a thing on live. I played until just past LoY.

 

Yeah, I do remember vendor greed in OT, as well.

 

I thought at one time, they would quit buying stuff too, once you sold them so many.

 

Oh yea. I definitely remember certain greedy vendors like the ogre in Freeport or whatever but nothing like items losing value etc. always was a fixed price.

 

items were always fixed price

some vendors had worse buying/selling prices, but they were always fixed

i've never experienced nor heard of prices changing over time

implying that of course player faction/charisma remained constant

 

Echoing the fixed prices and there were certain greedy merchants (shady, OT merchants, Merchant Nildar in Kelethin) that buy at half and sell at double.

 

Boomba the Big was greedy if I recall correctly.

 

Most of the vendors near the gate were.

The guy at the gate in Qeynos also was greedy.

 

Exactly what I recall. Certain vendors were notoriously unscrupulous; but never heard of item values changing over time (unless it was related to faction and/or charisma).

 

I always assumed that those guys were like the "convenience" store concept... because it's easier to get to without parking issues and long lines, milk is gonna cost you $5/gallon instead of the $3/gallon you'd pay at the big grocery store. If you didn't have to run far or go out of your way, the vendor paid you less for your items and sold his/her items for more. That would explain Boomba, Shady, Ping.... any of those guys that were near fighting/looting areas.

 

So is the "other merchants will become increasingly greedy" currently active? And is that with just notoriously greedy merchants or all merchants?