Originally Posted by Rodion
I'm not sure how you know this. Back when AE was first released you might have been right. But now I see almost no one in the AE building. I rarely see any spam for people looking for AE teams.
But we can't really pass judgment on AE yet. First, you have to separate exploits of AE from non-exploits. Exploits are bugs, and unintentional. AE has been riddled with exploits up to this point. Eventually all the exploits of AE will be fixed.
In non-exploit AE missions you will actually get less XP/inf because your Patrol XP isn't used (except for debt). You don't get a mission XP/inf bonus. Also, custom mobs will often reward less XP than standard mobs because custom mobs at full XP are much harder to defeat than most standard mobs, so many authors use standard/standard, standard/hard, or hard/standard. I17 may hold some hope for improving that; we'll see when open beta starts.
Probably the biggest factor on inflation in the market is the ability to set team size to +2/x8 or higher when you run solo. This has nothing to do with AE. This allows characters built for massive AoE damage to rake in equally massive amounts of influence, and especially get more purple drops.
I think that at this time the majority of serious farmers are running their favorite regular content farms, and not AE: simply because they will get purple drops in those missions, and they can't get purples in AE. AE is also very inconvenient because of the ticket limits on maps. Most maps will hit the ticket limit at solo x8, and then there's the hard limit of 1500 in each mission. It's just too damned inconvenient.
So, all in all, I think the majority of farmers are currently running regular content farms. There have been spikes of AE activity when PLers find exploits. But these are being eliminated.
One thing AE has done is develop a ready (and quick) source of common and rare recipes that drop from mobs. The Bronze Roll is an extremely good way to use tickets, and I've sold hundreds on the market. This is a good thing for the market because it directly increases supply of these recipes, which reduces prices. If you want to get a Reactive Armor set, for example, run AE missions and get Bronze Rolls. You will eventually get one or two Reactive Armors and at the same time get dozens of other useful recipes that you can use or sell on the market at inflated prices. If market prices are too high, simply get drops and sell them on the market. Then you too will have too much inf.
Similarly, rare salvage often went for two, three or four million in the past. Now it's pretty much settled in between one and two million, perhaps because it's so easy for lowbies to make 540 tickets in AE and sell that rare salvage for a cool million on the market, or because farmers get so much rare salvage running at x8.
Common and uncommon salvage prices below level 40 have been spiking lately. This is probably due to three things: 1) Farmers are running all their missions at level 50, decreasing potential supply. 2) Farmers are raking in so much loot at +2/x8 that they don't bother to mess with penny-ante salvage anymore, and simply delete it to make room for rares. And 3) since farmers have so much loot, they don't consider spending 100K for a pneumatic piston to be a deal-breaker.
The only ones who can really answer where all the excess influence is coming from are the devs. But anecdotally, it sounds like not many players are using AE for much anymore. Except for the occasional exploit that's found, serious farmers are running regular content because that's where the purples (and the real money) are.
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