FourSpeed

It's really story based for each character. Without a story reason to age, they
basically don't age (in my mind).

I have a few that are very long lived to begin with (a Tolkienesque Tree Ent,
a Dragon, and an incarnation of an ancient Hopi Indian legend). The current
timeline is a mere blip for them.

I have a broad age range of other toons from a school kid, to an aging grandmother,
and while their current age is pertinent, they don't really continue to get older
in real time.

My original main is probably the only one who has aged within the context of the
game.

Having been in the Cities since I-1, he's seen a lot, and over the years has
evolved his focus from solo PvE hero to a brief PvP career, to retirement with
an adopted (from the Shadow Shard) teenage daughter (a Grav/FF troller), and
back again to PvE hero as he gradually responds to a calling from the Well of Furies.

Apart from him though, most of my other toons remain at their current ages.


Regards,
4

And, following the results of others, I'll doubt you'll see much in the way of
actual offers here, but hey, knock yourself out.

If folks are so unimaginative to think of decent toon names themselves, and if
they're stupid enough to think these are worth anything at all, they deserve
what they get. "Fools and their inf..."


GL with that,
4

I'm mostly in this camp as well.

As a self-proclaimed poster child for frankenslotting most of my toons get
their shinies in the late 20's (typically L27/L28).

I only have two alts that have more than a single purple in them, and neither
of those are warshades...

I too, will also echo the sentiments of some others here - given that I have
20B+ already, and with the way I slot my toons, I need moar moneh??? Meh...

The only *active* marketeer I have these days is Granny, and she's only doing
that to chip into the 88's furnace now and then...

As an intellectual marketing project I'm quite interested in how this turns out, and
what pricing effects it has, but I don't feel inclined to leap on the bandwagon myself.


Regards,
4


PS> FWIW, I did cash in a few 3% procs at mkt value over the weekend.
I'm not sure prices will squeeze as much as TD believes, but I won't be
surprised if high-end prices drop somewhat (50% ???)

Crap. Forgot that one... Mine get it also...

4

Yep. You're correct. A single character can only have 2 Billion in cash on-hand.

However, you can "store" cash in market slots. How? Simple. Make bids on
stuff that doesn't actually exist (L53 IO's for instance) or bid on things that
won't actually fill... A 100 Million bid on a 2B 3% IO is not very likely to ever
fill... Bid on a 10-stack and you've nicely stored an extra Billion on your toon.

Using these techniques, it's very easy to store billions on a single toon.

Using alts, it's easy to store 100's of billions across your account.

(Pro Tip: if you're storing cash on alts, get them to level 10 first so they can
use gleemail to shuffle it around wherever you need it).

As for using Gleemail to store stuff? Simple advice: Don't. Historically, it's been
fairly unreliable for that -- use it to transfer stuff. Only store things there you
won't care about if you lose it.

Items selling for 2B+. The current way to do that these days is typically through
gleemail.

So, for example, you want a 3B item that I'm willing to sell you.

You gleemail me 999,999,999. I claim it, and store it away in bids.
We do this twice more.
Then I gleemail you the item. Done.

Of course that entails some trust on both parties parts.

Optionally, there are several well known, well respected folks on the forums here
who will act as brokers for these sorts of transactions.

The seller would send them the IO, and you, the buyer would send them the
inf. In-turn, they'd send you the IO, and the buyer the cash.

It's customary to pay the broker a fee for their time and reputation (typically
1 or 2% of sale price), although some brokers may help for free.

Hope that answers your questions.


Regards,
4

As a quick add-on based on today's update, it looks like 30% of the respondants
control 88% of the reported wealth (in the Survey data).

If that trend held for the general population (all caveats understood), the
back-of-the-napkin calculation would come out to ~614 Trillion, again, a very
plausible number to me.

@mauk:
Interesting hypothesis. I don't think I'd rank RMT'ers that high, simply because
I think there are higher volumes of "normal players" that run AE, TFs/Trials,
and "accepted" farms than there are RMT-specific Farmers (ie. I think there
are a lot of folks who "farm" but relatively few who are RMT'ers).

Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to guage the numbers of those
various groups accurately. <shrug>


Regards,
4

...and, after all I did for you in the Crazy 88's too... Ingrate!

The issue I have with this is the real data.

Of 123 Accounts, 5 of them were over 100B right there, and like you, I also
can think of several posters who may fit that category, but didn't represent in
the thread (TopDoc, Arcanaville, Werner, macskull for instance).

Additionally, several of the "oldtime" marketeers that haven't posted in awhile
(Smurphy, dave_p and several others I can't recall atm) may also be in that category.

Further, while I fully concede that the Forum Marketers are definitely in the higher
tiers, to assume that nobody else in the unspoken masses, have not reached
such wealth seems to be pretty shortsighted if not denigrating.

Given that we can think of a dozen or more folks off the top of our heads, who
may qualify, I don't think it's that much of a stretch to find a few hundred or more
in that unspoken pool of 99500 (or so) accounts. For me, I think that is the
surprise. I believe there are more top-enders than we previously thought (all
"leetness" pushed aside)

One thing that may mitigate it (though I hope the math offset it) is the way
inf/category was assigned. If you're in the 10-50B group, it counted for 30B per
acct, for instance.

That's very probably an overstatement of wealth. Hopefully that is offset somewhat
by using the minimum of 100B (rather than some guesstimated average) for the
A group.

To a degree, I agree. But to offset that thinking (which I think we are somewhat
pleasurably guilty of) consider this thought.

How representative is the Porsche Club's get-togethers compared to all Porsches
sold? How likely is it that only they keep their cars sparkling and shiny?

In other words, we expect that from them, but it doesn't preclude "outsiders"
from the same.

Anybody on the web can read the Forums, and seriously, *anyone* could make
billions in the game pretty easily. The data gathered does not say whether
they actually have, but it certainly is suggestive that the number could be distinctly
higher than we may have thought.

This is the kicker to me. As rampant as altitis is in the game, 400 hrs is easily
achieved, even by fairly casual players, and I'm certain that most of us have
that much time on several individual toons by themselves.

With all the ways they've added to make even more inf, I believe it's very difficult
indeed for active players to remain in the lower wealth categories at all, and
while the big-hitter categories are pretty dominant to the total, thousands of
folks in the C & D/E category are significant contributors to the total also (~40%).

The real problem, of course, is the complete lack of data on population and
income, which forces us to rely on the income distribution curve to estimate.

After this research though, I'm much more likely to believe that there's a lot
more inf in-game than we imagined previously... YMMV of course.


Regards,
4

WARNING! This is going to be a lengthy post (even for me ) covering my analysis
of data gathered from the Informal Survey thread from 10 days ago.

tl;dr version.

A good estimate? No. We have nowhere near enough data to guess anything
that is remotely accurate with any reasonable confidence. Being aware of the
caveats of extremely small sample size, any conclusions here are purely speculative,
albeit loosely based on some trends that did appear noteworthy to me in the data.

Are those trends real? No idea. But, they're at least suggestive.

Based on a 100K account population (a number which is also highly speculative in
itself), I'd estimate an amount roughly between 400 Trillion and 2 Quadrillion (a 5X
span from low to high). 1 Quadrillion might be plausible (depending on the actual
number of game accounts).

More on that below...

-------------------------------------------

As of today's update in the survey thread, there were 123 accounts represented,
with a total holdings of roughly 2.24 Trillion inf on-hand.

Assuming folks were honestly estimating in good faith (I believe they were),
the following facts come out of that thread.

32.5% of the respondants (40 Accts) had 10B+ on their accounts.
69% (85 Accts) had 1B or more (consolidating categories D&E - as explained
in that thread).

Average inf based on that data is: 18,192,682,927 / account.

Now, for a metric crapton of speculation

Game Population: No idea what it is. Every chart I've ever seen is around 100K.
Given that they don't purge accounts, and new accounts are now free, this is
as useful as any other number for speculative discussion.

Active/Stale Accounts: Again, we've no idea what that ratio is. That said, it's not
as big a concern given the presumption that all accounts have some inf that
hasn't been deleted, and could come into play the minute its owner logs in these days.

Forum Bias: I've little doubt believing that forumites in general are more successful
in-game than the average player. But how much so? 10X? 100X? I have no idea.

Clearly from the reported data, however, Forumites in general have a *lot* of
inf in-game.

From that, I'd think using them as representative of the entire population would give
us a maximum amount for the upper limit of inf. Also, from the actual data, it can't
be less than what was reported, and since very few people did report, it's obviously
orders of magnitude higher than 2.24 Trillion.

Simple Math: If I simply multiply the Average above by Population, I come up with
an upper limit of roughly 1.82 Quadrillion for 100K accounts - Yikes!

Analysis of Categories: As previously mentioned, consider Categories D & E as one
(all in D - 1B-10B) for this discussion point. That gives us the following distribution
from the forum data:
If those trends held and represented the entire population, the upper limit I'd
expect would be ~1.84 Quadrillion inf across 100K accounts.

Some interesting trends (to me) were the data was fairly symmetrical around Category D/E,
and each category further away from there had roughly half the hits of the closer category.

So, how about a more conservative estimate?

Well, assuming the game's population as a whole is less wealthy, we can shift the
distribution a full category to the right (ie. an inf shift factor of 10X for the most part)
and adjust the largest category (F) so everything adds to 100. We get this result:
That shift would give us a result of ~883 Trillion, which is still much higher than anything
we estimated earlier in this thread.

Can we shift the categories further right? Since we're speculating, why not?

Adjusted to 100 (again, using largest category), we get a result of ~431 Trillion.

Can we adjust further right? Honestly, I don't think so. Looking at those categories,
we could easily argue that anyone in I is a totally stripped account, or simply
an unplayed one (ie. someone who maybe tried the tutorial and AP and then
left).

Category H will surely be hit by an account with just a single alt played a reasonable
time - It takes ~20M for an alt's 1-50 career to slot SO's, and even in I1 days,
an L50 usually had SO's and few million to spare. That by itself easily puts an active,
single toon account, at the top of Category H, and very possibly into G.

Even without an L50, it's certainly not too much of a reach to think an account
with a handful of mid-range alts would also reach this category fairly easily.

Given minimum earning rates of 1M/hr for even substandard L50 AT's, it's a pretty
good bet that most players with a non-PL'd 50 is in Category G, and folks with several
alts or a few L50's have a real good chance of hitting F - especially if we realize
that cashing in 2 A-merits and selling a LotG 7.5% would put them into Category F
all by itself.

So, I doubt the player base at large is fully two entire categories poorer than
our Forum group.

How about the distribution? Certainly some of those percentages could vary,
but this distribution looks reasonable - in several financial disciplines, particularly
income, the data has a log-normal distribution, and such a distribution, when put
on a log scale (loosely what our categories did for us automatically), the resulting
distribution is also normal.
Consequently, I wouldn't expect large percentage shifts, and I'd still expect
them to be symmetrical around one of our categories.

Based on the points mentioned above, I seriously doubt that G, H, I would be the
mean.

Finally, even cutting the population in half as Fulmens mentioned earlier, puts
a loose floor minimum of ~200 Trillion for a base 50K players. To be sure, the
*actual* game's population would be a large factor in the total inf calculation,
but sadly, that is a datapoint that remains elusive.


While the Survey thread is probably nearly dead after 10 days (it was on pg 2
when I looked this morning), I do tend to think the data we did get makes a
pretty suggestive case for there being a LOT more inf in-game than we may
have thought previously.

In the absence of enough data to pin it down more closely, I find it quite possible
that there might be anywhere from 400 Trillion - 2 Quadrillion currently in-game.

Wow!

Two weeks ago, I'd have thought that crazy, but today, I wouldn't be too surprised
to think there might be roughly 1 Quadrillion inf in-game, assuming ~100K accounts.

How much is *actually* in-game? No real idea. This is just my guess...
Hopefully, it's an educated guess based on some real data, but still a guess.


Regards,
4


PS> I'll keep an eye on the Survey for the next few days, but I doubt we'll get
much more data than we've already seen. <shrug>

PPS> Given my conclusion of ~1Q / 100K accts, that would mean I'd estimate
total inf = 10B * Accts (as a quick and loose, ok very loose ballpark number)
for any arbitrary number of accounts currently

Definitely not.

Basically, that would skew the statistics with more (needless) variation.
The smallest logical unit (that could hold inf) is the account, and that's the
granularity you'd want for this.

Your proprosal could tally inf/person, which might be interesting, but it adds another
(unhelpful) source of variation that we cannot guage - # of accts. What percentage
of the population only has 1? 2? 3? Does only one person use it/them, or do
other people (family?) use them. In short, it adds no additional info value for us,
(although NCsoft Marketing might be more interested in that than me), but throws
a *lot* more uncertainty into any numbers we'd get.

Additionally, anyone can mail inf to anyone, so while I'd agree that multi-account
holders may well consolidate their holdings, that's much less of a concern if we're
tallying at the account level rather than the person level.

Unfortunately, it looks like interest in this thread has waned (since it was on pg 2),
and 123 accts isn't even representative of the forum population, let alone the
game's population.

In terms of total inf in-game, there's not enough data here to even guessimate
a value any at accuracy better than "orders of magnitude"

In any case, thanks to the folks that *did* contribute, as I do think there are
some points of interest in the data.

I'd certainly welcome more data, and I'll continue to update the thread to reflect
any more that comes in.


Regards,
4


PS> Shadow Ravenwolf - did you mean you have two accounts (both C), or
a total of C if you add together (which, due to the discussion above, I would
only count as a single C)?

Absolutely!

Thanks for chiming in. The more the merrier and all the more interesting.


Cheers,
4

So, what's going on with Category E?

Well, I'd prefer more data (8 obs is a miniscule sample), but I feel reasonably
comfortable that there are two key factors, one data related, and another player
related that are leading to this.

Again, caveat this with "small sample size" - this is very preliminary guesswork
at the moment.

While I disagree with your second point, I think you're right about point #1.
That's to say, the old market forum phrase "Your first billion is the hardest"
seems to be true.

Basically, I think it's relatively hard to hit 1B through a simple lucky drop or two.

From a player perspective, by 1B, I think they've probably passed the basic
market learning curve, at least to the point where they know they can actually
make inf using the market (even if only to sell), and they're willing to proactively
do so. Possibly, they've also gained enough confidence to begin to dabble with
some of the safer strategies and/or cashing in merits through the market.

At that point, the difference between 1B and 2B is fairly small, and mostly just
a matter of time. There may also be some additional motivation at that stage
to actually try to inf-cap a toon, again shortening time between 1B & 2B.


From a data perspective, excluding the endpoints, the categories are a factor
of 10 higher than the previous one. This was intentional on my part.

There are two exceptions; category B, which was a simple nod to the way inf
is estimated for a category in the spreadsheet. The intent was to lessen over-estimating
inf in the largest categories.

The other is Category E. I specifically wanted to see if there was anything
interesting around the 1B mark (in the other thread, it's in the 100M+ category).

Consequently, the comparative range of E is very, very small, and the fact that
there is a distinct (so far) notch there, implies to me that it behaves like it should
probably be folded into Category D (keeping the 10X ratios ie. 1B - 9.9B).

Also, glancing at categories C & F show similar magnitudes to each other (again,
so far) which also lends some support to the idea that there appears to be nothing
special about 1B vs 2B.


As said, I'd really like to see more data and see if those trends hold up.



Regards,
4

I can relate - I put 20B into the 88's (and enjoyed it). With that, and my bins,
I'd definitely be in B, but C is what's on hand atm.

I admit that I was expecting a different distribution from the forum group, so, what
is showing up is a bit of a surprise. I did however, expect a standard distribution
across the entire player base.


Updated through this post: #100

Accounts: ~110 (a couple of you combined them)
Est. Inf: ~2.06 Trillion



C'mon folks. I know we have more than 110 accounts across the forum crowd!

Represent!


Cheers,
4

Well, hopefully, this data may shed some light on that idea. Interestingly enough,
(with all the caveats of sample size, representative samples etc.), what I'm
seeing in today's update is, at least, a factor of 10-15 higher than the guestimates
I used in the other thread (where I speculated ~90% under 2B).

Of course, it's 97 accounts, so this data ... and a dollar ... will buy you a soda.

Still, it is intriguing to see the percentages so far.


Regards,
4