Heraclea

It's like PvP in other ways. It's a playfield that includes emergent playstyles that can't always be predicted with a great deal of accuracy. Everything works different there, and not quite the way you'd expect it to.

Tell people that they'll get more on the market, and they might try (I know I did) selling SO drops on the market the same way they sell recipes, salvage, and inspirations. Does not work. Nobody buys them. Back when the market started, and before you could mail yourself inf, I had a level 47 Interrupt Duration TO that I'd use as a token. It was in the inventory of an old character that hadn't been played for an even longer time -- back when level 25+ TO drops were routine. It was like base salvage, a slice of game history.

I could use this enhancement for inf transfers because it became obvious that there is no market for SO drops on the market. It isn't immediately obvious why this is so. Most players still use some SOs, at least to patch in the holes until they can collect useful sets to be slotted. You'd expect to find them priced higher than vendor sell but lower than vendor buy prices. This kind of economic thinking doesn't take transaction costs into account: to buy SOs on the market, you'd have to go there, look them up, and confirm that you were paying less than you would from a vendor. The same way with selling them. Because players can't be feagued to do this, rather than just vendoring them, no trade in SOs ever really develops.

Did I mention that they were noobs?

Well, sort of. By my broad definition, anyone who wants to buy on the market has started playing the market minigame as well.

But it's called a "market", you say it, I say it. To the noob (and may there always be noobs among us. amen and alleluia) this suggests a shop not much different from an in game vendor. What they find instead will startle them.

The game is actually steeply costly if you buy and sell only to vendors. Until the market was added and I started selling stuff on it, it was difficult to keep a character's DO and SO enhancements out of the red. You'd play your level 50s a long time waiting for the buttons that could get your important stuff to level 53.

The progress from "Man, this stuff is expensive!" to "Some of those drops I got fetch a nice price" has to make a save against interruption, and often doesn't make it, particularly if you are under the startled debuff.

I'd just as soon see it go myself. We need gear scores here like we need damage parsing meters: not at all.

I use the market, but do not speculate, and still managed to get a billion inf on one character just to be able to say that I had done it. Soon as that was done, I spent it within the week. The long term value of inf is still trending down.

It does take a mental step that some people are slow to make, from seeing the shocking prices on the market, to the realization that some drop I got and will not use might command one of those shocking prices and make me the fortune I need to get started.

What is the value of the Gladiator 3% Def enhancement in other game terms? By my reckoning, it can now be purchased at a vendor for:

1,500,000,000 inf
1800 reward merits
30 days play time.

Alternatively, you can grind for it 60 days and buy it without the cash or reward merits, and this may be the easier path. But if people start spending 1,500,000,000 inf routinely for it, that would probably take a bite out of the inf glut.

I believe AAO had the RTTC duration for a short while on Test, and maybe for a week or two on Live, but this was fixed very quickly. The notion that AAO is weak persisted.

Given the kinds of characters I prefer to play, I sell most purple drops and very seldom slot them. Defense bonuses are generally more valuable to me than the sorts of bonuses that are on purple sets. For desirable purples they might consider slotting like melee attack or PBAoE attack sets, generally the inf one of them would bring is a higher priority than the set bonuses on them, so they get sold so I can afford yet another set of Kinetic Combats, which frequently exceed most purples in price. (Given the prices, it's generally more time efficient to purchase Kinetic Combat with merits than with inf, IME. I do occasionally buy some of the less expensive ones, and usually end up settling for the knockdown proc, which is useful for most of the characters slotting it. You only need four of them, and the set is weak apart from the bonuses, so frankenslotting is in order.)

The characters that use purple set bonuses get them from slotting things like confuse, immobilize, pet damage. (The good news is, you got a purple drop! The bad news is.....) As such my blasters and controllers have more purple sets than my mains do.

This is true, in a sense. On the other hand, this is less of a problem here than it is in games with "mains". Replayability and multiple approaches to the content are the reasons this game gives its players to keep playing. At a billion a pop, it will still take a while to purple out each of your 132 base potential characters. The time needed to do this probably exceeds the dev's best case expectations of subscription lifetimes.

In a real world economy, the devaluation of currency by inflation is somewhat less of a problem; you do as Zimbabwe did and just multiply by ten billion. If I lived in Zimbabwe, I'd vote for a rock for President myself:


Here, the devs have a firmer grasp on the throttle of the money supply. You also have artificial barriers like the two billion inf cap. That figure was probably set because it was imagined that it represented more inf than anyone would ever acquire. The fact that it's often exceeded by some players suggests that something has gone amiss. Some way needs to be found to start draining inf from the system in a way that makes players want to turn in inf, without penalizing players who did not play for inf before.

I haven't really changed my mind about moral economy, but at least for the purpose of this discussion that is irrelevant. I've tried to think this through in purely systemic and mathematical terms. I'm not here to preach at anybody today.

I continue to think that some new pegging point needs to be set to stabilize the value of inf in the game. One problem (the rest of the post I linked makes more reference to it) is that at some point, in all games, you tend to run out of things to buy. This was CoH's problem until i9. When you had finished equipping a character with SOs you were done with the build. Inf that the character earned could be cumbrously transferred to equip other characters, but that was all there was to do with it. After that, there was only Hami raiding, and any aftermarket for Hamidon loot was informal; there was no WW/BM then either.

That all changed with the inventions and the markets. There was now something to do with all that excess inf, so prices started off very high and stayed that way. Even with the invention system, there still comes a point where a character is "done" and has little left to spend on. And, the longer you play, the easier it is to avoid the game's inf sinks. Veterans don't pay for costume changes unless they want to. Converting inf to SG prestige is a bad deal, and can't be relied on as an inf sink forever even if it were worthwhile: bases, like characters, are complete at some point.

The devs have not chosen to stabilize the value of inf; their response to the devaluing of inf has been to introduce new tokens: non-transferrable currencies that enable goods to be acquired outside WW. First, there were Reward Merits, which bought all but purple and PvP recipes. Now there are the A-Merits, which buy what the Reward Merits couldn't. And there are Mission Architect tickets for salvage.

This baroque confusion of currencies might not be necessary if the value of inf were stabilized in the same way that R- and A-Merits are stable. Come hell or high water, you know that 250 R-Merits buys a Numina unique. 30 A-Merits gets the Gladiator 3% defense. A month of grinding on a single character and it's in the bank. Currently, 50 R-Merits plus 20mil inf can be turned into an A-Merit once a day; that's a start. I've done that once or twice, but not often, because it's rare that I accumulate 20mil in inf on any one character. I don't trust inf as a store of value, so I convert it ASAP into durable commodities.

That's why I suggested a vendor that sold any recipe, up to the Gladiator 3%, for a straight fee. That would provide the value of inf with a floor it could not fall through. Pointing out that the value of inf is pegged to SOs and small inspirations just underlines the problem. (150 for an Awaken? Three times the cost of the others? Daham, tha's esspensive!) The system problem that I see is that these old pegs for the value of influence just don't mean much in the game economy as it has developed after i9.

The real safety valve in the system was introduced with merits, and now A-merits, which provide alternative ways of grinding towards the shinies that otherwise could only be bought on the market with inf. That market was definitely showing signs of strain. Something was a bit out of whack if the market supply dries up because the market price is greater than the inf cap.

My suggestion would be to add a vendor that will sell ANY enhancement, crafted, for a billion a pop. That would peg the value of inf to goods at a minimum value, and remove inf from the system a billion at a time.

I wouldn't say that I ignored it. But if you are selling drops, at least by my way of thinking you are "playing the market minigame", which I do think is necessary to participate meaningfully and get anything good from it.

Yes - if you are participating in the market by selling your drops, you are playing the market minigame. It's only feasible to buy good stuff on the market if you sell good stuff there first.

You could, I suppose, grind enough inf through drops to get to the 2 billion price tag of some enhancements. That would take a while. I've IO'd characters under artificial constraints, like a fire tanker I built with defense set bonuses that I capped at 30, to run old line TFs with. A lot of that stuff had to be bought outright with merits, because of short supply of key buttons below the limit I had set.

Therefore, they both lived together in a hollow log.

Super Spelling! All your tells, chats, and forum posts will be spelled correctly and free from lolisms.

Well, that didn't last long.

I was not fond of JMS's Wonder Woman, either, although it was obvious that it was temporary. I was curious to see what he would do, but the story so far reads like an extended dream sequence; settings and characters fade in out of nowhere and vanish with the next scene change. The Superman book was better, although it had much the same feel, but here the feel was more or less explained by the premise. Superman would be interacting with a series of throwaway characters.

JMS is known for quitting books if he gets interference from editorial. I wonder what the real story is.

Because of this THE CAT SLIPPED AND FELL