Doc_Thunder

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Just like in real life. The rich would continue to do the things that made them rich and the poor would continue to do the things that made them poor.

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This.

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In CoH, we don't have gold to back up our currency, but we have recipes and salvage. I think the generation of recipes and salvages needs to catch up with the influence generation. And the "destruction" of influence has to catch up with the consumption of recipes and salvages as well (after using recipes and salvages once, they are consumed, but influence can have a longer lifetime). If things can go to some sort of equilibrium, then the influence cap can be tweaked to make trading more convenient. I think the dev can figure it out, they have all the numbers in their hands.

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The contribution of recipes and salvage to influence generation (by vendoring said items) would, I think, be rather small in comparison to inf earned by regular play. Also, while deleting a recipe or piece of salvage instead of selling to a vendor does not increase the amount of inf available, it also does not reduce it. So I don't see that recipes and salvage provide any sort of significant effect on the overall supply of influence.

In the current CoH system, I feel that prices will attain an equilibrium - but this will require a large portion of the population to start running up against the hard-cap of 2 billion influence. Hopefully, the value of influence will then not drop to the point that profit-making on sales become pointless - because if that happens then anyone wanting a recipe or salvage will have to rely on the good graces of others to bother posting anything.

Recipes and salvage are an excellent way of redistributing influence between characters, which will help to stabilize prices by allowing more characters to approach the inf cap faster. If anything, the inf cap should probably be lowered to stabilize prices sooner rather than later (not very ebil I know, good thing I haven't been given a members card yet or it might get revoked!)

I'll leave the debate of whether it technically 'can' or not to others.

My 2inf on the 'should', is that it should not.

The 2 billion ceiling is what will ultimately prevent the perceived value of influence from falling to zero. The effect of the hard cap on the amount of inf that an individual character can hold is similar to the effect that the availability of gold had on the US$, back when the ol' greenback was tied to it, i.e. there is only so much currency that can be made available for use at any one time.

IMO - without some type of hard cap, and without very tight controls on the amount of money present within a system, the value of any currency will eventually trend towards zero.