Commercial punishment doesn't belong to the difficulty settings

[Minarai]

Hello dear game developers,

     I have to ask you to remove or make optional "items you sell cost less (50%,25%)" setting from "choose your difficulty" menu. It just forces players to invest more into Mercantile instead of trying other, more essential and interesting builds.75 (Spoiler alert!) is enough points for Mercantile. This artificial difficulty is just unnecessary, we are spending more than 50% of the game time doing shopping rounds already instead of questing and having action. Now we have to scrape for money and be less of hero and even more of a trader. The game already looks like a merchant simulator.
So I beg of you don't take the thrill of action and character building from the Dominating difficulty with this setting.

Thank you for your time.

[Shredded Cheddar]

I agree, I think this should be optional or at the very least a less harsh penalty like 75, 50  instead of 50, 25.

It's pretty disheartening when you start a new game, choose the pistol option, and then when you try to sell it you can't even afford a trash quality sledgehammer.

[Faeren]

While I've not bothered with Dominating, at 50% sale value you can still make money pretty easily, for one, resist the temptation to carry every single thing you find back to a merchant, take the things with the highest weight to value ratio. For example, metal  armors and sledgehammers might have a good sale value, but if you divide it by their weight it doesn't work out very well, stuff like electronic and psionic parts that can be worth a few thousand but have a weight of 0.1 or so are optimal. Anything that isn't worth hauling just render down into repair kits for fixing up guns and armor to sell and for selling directly to merchants that buy repair kits, you'll generally want to sell armor repair kits the most as you tend to need less off them, and armor generally has a worse weight to value ratio.

You'll maybe be making 70-80% of the money you would by hauling absolutely everything this way, but the time saved makes up for it. You can maybe haul everything up until you return the Armadillo circuit board, but doing it throughout the game is just going to make you miserable.

In regards to the suggestion though, it would be good if difficulty was customizable, with each option such as health, healing item penalty and cooldowns, enemy numbers, etc being individually modifiable. I find the healing penalty kind of silly when you can see enemies you're fighting getting the full amount while you get half.

[Minarai]

Man, you don't know what you're talking about and I'm not trying to start a fight. What mercantilism allowed you without that setting is to carry nothing or almost nothing and just buy components, craft items and sell them for profit. Now it doesn't work, now you need to whether cripple you PC and invest tons in Mercantile to offset the penalty or haul tons of stuff to get pocket change in return. Try selling crafted stuff in Dominating mode to really feel the burn. That just eats time and adds nothing to the gameplay. The mathematic is like this:

Normal         what you sell = [1/2 What you buy (for components)]/[1 (for crafted items;depends on the item)]

Hard            waht you sell =[1/4 What you buy (for components)]/[1/2 (for crafted items;depends on the item)]

Dominating    what you sell=[1/8 What you buy (for components)]/[1/4 (for crafted items;depends on the item)]

Mercantile 50 only adds 1/4 to the selling price. Are we playing an RPG or a Master Accountant?

[TheAverageGortsby]

There's plenty of money on Dominating, as long as you're careful with it.  If you craft, check out Disassemble - it's worth a tremendous lot of money.  If you need money, find a way to free up one feat slot.  Disassemble will pay for your house.

It might not be possible to farm Super Steel on Dominating, but you'll find you can afford 6-8 plates and a fully-loaded house.  That should be enough.

[Minarai]

You are protecting the "path of the trader". Now you're forced to the life of poverty and feats you don't need. You no longer can make money by crafting only by hauling stuff and disassembling it for certain merchants. Make disassemble not a feat but a blueprint you can buy or quest for. About feats, I feel like there's not enough of them I don't want to sacrifice even one. Make like one additional feat every 5  levels or something. Right now this setting is bad. Make it optional or remove it.

[TheAverageGortsby]

You are protecting the "path of the trader". Now you're forced to the life of poverty and feats you don't need. You no longer can make money by crafting only by hauling stuff and disassembling it for certain merchants.

If you can't free up one feat from your build, you've lost focus on your build completely.  No build requires 14 feats to work optimally.  Most builds only need 6-8.  Beyond that you're just tweaking and setting up preferences.  And besides, even with 3 Strength and no Pack Rathound, you can carry all the loot in the game; you don't need to waste a single crowbar, rathound leather, or metal plate if you don't want to.  Also, as long as you aren't buying things you don't need, the quest rewards will give you plenty of money to keep your ammo&consumable inventory topped up.

DOMINATING difficulty doesn't say "this difficulty is only hard during combat".  Part of the game difficulty is the economy.  Cutting the sell value of items is a really good way to remove the "buy your way to victory" approach which is very viable on the other three difficulty levels.  It sounds like you want to play on the highest difficulty level, but not have the difficulty.  You should expect the hardest setting to require you to make tough choices and sacrifices.

[Minarai]

DOMINATING difficulty doesn't say "this difficulty is only hard during combat".  Part of the game difficulty is the economy.  Cutting the sell value of items is a really good way to remove the "buy your way to victory" approach which is very viable on the other three difficulty levels.  It sounds like you want to play on the highest difficulty level, but not have the difficulty.  You should expect the hardest setting to require you to make tough choices and sacrifices.

You know what? I actually agree with you. The first time "dominating" appeared I thought the Island, where you first meet Azuridae Goliathus and are constantly attacked by the mind apparition, was impossible. But now I think it's super easy. I should welcome the new challenge instead of clinging to my comfort zone. Try to solve the problem instead of whining about it.

Thanks everyone.

[Styg]

Custom difficulty (where you get to adjust various difficulty factors for different aspects of the game) is not something I'm against in principle so that might happen at some point, but for now I'm content with how the difficulty settings is affecting the resource management, especially in the early game.