UberGuy

Consider this: some of us have more than enough shards for crafting our goodies. In fact, if you run a lot of TFs (which running them faster facilitates) you need less shards, because you don't have to spend shards creating components. Because this is how I plan and play, I have four level 50s with their very rare, and three of them have at least 30 shards left over. (I have five more 50s on their way to the very rare, and all of them also have more than enough shards.

Now, I certainly expect to need more shards, but I get shards from playing the game, and it looks like we've got at least several weeks before I20 lands. (I am expecting an open beta beyond just the Trial "sneak peeks", and regular betas usually take a couple of weeks at least.)

I really don't see this at all. They do not provide jobs. They do not employ other players, providing them with money which they spend on oter goods and services, which then keeps other players employed making those goods and providing those services. No one needs to do any of that - they just need to fight mobs and complete missions. The only consistent employer in this economy is the game itself. Logging in and fighting (or at least completing missions) are all one needs to do to earn income. You can earn extra income by getting other players to give you money for goods or services you produce, but it's critical to note that you don't need anyone to give you money in order to start that "business". You can get everything you need (inf, salvage and recipes) from playing the game.

At which point they cease to become active participants in the economy. In the real world, if you do this, you might starve, end up evicted from your residence, and (if you are fortunate) end up being cared for by the state. In this game, you might be logged out.

That is not at all like what a real world bank does. The RMT suppliers are actual players. Those that produce their own inf to sell make that using the same tools everyone else has - they defeat mobs. Banks do not print money unless they are the sovereign bank of a nation. Banks act as a multiplier on the available money supply through fractional reserve banking. This is subject to economic and governmental forces that RMT (or any farmers) in our game are not, because farmers print their own money. For example, no one can ever have a "run" on RMT services that could shutter them. Even if a farmer is shut down, the inf they already created and injected into the rest of the game (either on the market or via sale) is a real increase in the money supply, not the effective increase created by fractional reserve banking. There is no reserve ratio for the devs to change, and shutting down a RMT service does not contract the actual amount of money in circulation the way closing a bank collapses lending.

The bolded part is key. If they do not work profitably and reliably, then they will not play a functional role in the economy, because people will not trust in them and invest in them on a large scale.

No player in the game can earn interest by handing over their inf to an institution in this game. This is the point I was trying to make. Efforts have been made to create interest earning systems by players here in this forum, where money was entrusted to them by other players and they invested that money in the in-game market. However, there is no framework of accountability, and ultimately, little compelling reason to use this approach. Perhaps most importantly, it's a huge amount of work for the player(s) running the investment scheme. Given how easy it is for a market-savvy player to make a profit while going it alone on the market, what's the reason to put in that work?

Take a look at the missing roles for "government" that I mentioned. Key component of Keynesian economic policy is control of interest rates and deficit spending during economic downturns. There are no centrally managed interest rates, because there is no institutional lending. There cannot be a government deficit, because our "government" here does not collect taxes. Sure, the game consumes some of our money, such as market and tailor fees. Consumption of our money is not what taxes are - they provide the income to a real government. Keynes advocated that during economic downturns, governments spend more money than they were earning in tax income in order to stimulate job growth.

It's true that the "government" here gets people involved in the game, and possibly therefore the economy. (All players are not active market participants, and the market is the dominant economic channel by which money and goods change hands.) However, it does not do this through fiscal policy, because the government does not control either the real money supply, does not dictate a fractional reserve ratio (and there's no one doing it even if it did), and does not control a prime interest rate for lending via a sovereign bank.

A player or players still created that money. A player using RMT services does not create that inf whole cloth. RMT farmers, which are other players did.

Other than being against the rules for involving a trade that extends outside the game, getting a bunch of money from an RMT is little different than selling an IO on the market. Someone produced that inf.

Those increase supply of goods as well as demand for goods, unless they spend all their time in the AE and use their tickets poorly (or let them cap all the time).

These were both massive increases in the money supply, with little corresponding increase in supply of goods. Double XP may increase supply of goods by bringing in more players, but every player, new or old, earns double inf while generating the same rate of good supply.

Prices of purples went to levels they still have not seen since. Apocalypse pieces hit 800M. You could cap your inf in a couple of hours with that explot. Money flowed into the market like water from a burst dam. In line with the quantity theory of money, prices rose.

For all the reasons above, I disagree.

When viewed as a "market" in the economic sense, our market is very inefficient, and it lacks many of the driving forces that underpin a real world economy. Most fundamentally, our characters do not need to use the in-game market to play the game, whereas most people in the modern real world have to participate in the real world economy in order to survive. (Even if they act as a pure welfare drain, they are "participating" in the economy.) This makes classic supply and demand analysis more about understanding broad trends than trying to calculate exact equilibrium prices. More on-topic, though, supply and demand interact with availability of money to set actual prices.

Your post points out a lot of things that you think at least sort of look like institutions that I see as fundamental to a Keynesian approach to economics being employed. Keynes' theory of what happens in an economy was pretty complex, and that complexity was an outgrowth of the real complexity of real economies. I don't claim that understanding our economy here is trivial in absolute terms (or that I or anyone else has a comprehensive grasp of it), but I do think this economy is trivially simple when compared to a real world economy of the sort that Keynes was trying to model. Too many of the actors and institutions that Keynes was accounting for have no economically meaningful analog here. Just being able to point to something and say "hey, this sort of looks like one of those" doesn't mean it plays the same role in the game's economy. I believe you are putting forth the Keynesian model specifically to rebut the quantity theory, but for me to find that convincing, I think you'd have to do far more than just describe analogs for real world economic actors the way you did above. You'd have to show how they act in concert, and how a Keynesian activist policy would work to correct that economy when it's doing "bad" things.

Very little of the Keynesian economic model applies in this game. We do not have business, and cannot have unemployment. We do not have banks that lend to businesses or individuals. Our money supply is not expanded by fractional lending. We do not have speculation or interest rates, meaning we cannot have booms or busts in the classic sense. We have no government that can stimulate our in-game economy by creating employment, and since there are no banks and no interest rate, fiscal policy cannot affect inflation.

In this game, players produce the money themselves, with no reliance on others. The only place players obtain money they do not create themselves is on the market, where other people who create money spend it to obtain goods they want from other players. Everything spent on the market is discretionary. The only things affecting how much you are willing to spend on something are how much money you have, your own competing desire for other goods, and how fast you think you can make the money you spend back.

If you contend that there are other factors affecting what people are willing to spend, can you offer them, rather than simply asserting that the model above, which fits with the Quantity Theory of Money, does not apply?

Can you provide any evidence of this fact, other than that the capability for multiple builds actually exist? In my experience, multiple builds are excruciatingly rare, even among extremely hardcore players. (Hardcore in this sense referring to time spent playing, "min/max" proclivities, or both.) Edit: I should point out that I do believe there are reasons to think demand for IOs has increased. I suspect that Incarnate features have more people playing 50s, and seems to have raised general interest in at least a touch of investigation into what IOs can do for these characters they are already investing more time in. That would be compounded with your claim about dual/triple builds, however.

"My imaginary little world" is shared by a lot of other posters on this forum, and it has some pretty fair mileage behind it at explaining things that happened in the past and predicting things that had not yet happened. Of course, that doesn't mean it's without flaws. Can you lay out what your competing theory is, and how it explains past or present market behaviors, or what predictions you think it will give us that that are contrary to "mine"?

I'm very patient in discussions that don't turn into the other party attacking me, as opposed to my position .I'm not offended that someone disagrees with me.

In a closed system, where money flows in to (and away from) players at some some aggregate rate, that money supply rate will work with the demand pull and cost push to set what players will pay for goods. People pay based on how badly they want something and how much they can afford to spend, and rate at which money becomes available to them affects the latter.

If you suddenly double that money flow without changing anything else, you will increase those player-set prices, because players will find themselves with more money to spend.

We know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the money supply rate has increased. In just one example it explicitly doubled, with no other changes, for level 50 characters - those already supplying most of the money in the system. That was a direct increase in per foe reward. That doesn't include any indirect increases in how fast level 50 characters can defeat foes.

This is really trivial stuff. How can you claim it doesn't work that way?

Edit: By the way.

Perhaps you should consider that the failing is one of your reading comprehension, and not one of my presumption. Let me highlight the exact quote to which the above is your response.

Big, bold emphasis is mine. I dictated nothing. I offered a suggestion. I offered a suggestion trying to make clear that you're asking questions and discussing topics that are tangential to what has been said and discussed by almost everyone else in the thread. Does it make sense to you that you're going to get a clear, straightforward response to your new topic in a thread that's not about it? Especially when, in the contest of a thread in which people are discussing the term "(hyper)inflation" that you start trying to redefine it in a completely new way, different from those preceding it?

I can't make you do anything. I can try to convince you that doing something besides what you are doing is more useful. I could have dismissed your statements. I could have said you were wrong about prices, or why they were high, or whether things cost to much. I did none of those things. I only told you that discussing them here and attaching the term "inflation" to them was off topic and confusing, and suggested you avoid that by starting a separate thread to discuss them.

Given all that, I find it amusing that you accuse me of being defensive.

Or, you know, maybe I actually care about the topic, and want to explain why I think what you're saying is introducing confusion. Maybe the reason I use a lot of words to say what I am saying is because the heart of the matter is confusion over what's being discussed, and I am trying to be excruciatingly clear.

Which is a separate and distinct discussion from whether or not there is inflation, or hyperinflation. That's my point. You want to talk about price increases, but you cannot ignore real inflation in the game economy when talking about "reasonable" prices. If there is 10x as much money in the economy and prices go up by a factor of 10, do things cost too much? Hint: there's not enough information in that question to answer it, and yet that's what your assertions about prices try to do.

This thread wasn't ever about that. The OP in this thread asked if people thought there was hyperinflation. Nothing more, and nothing less. You want to discuss a distinct and separate topic, which is whether things cost too much. Inflation and "costs too much" are distinct topics, and talking about inflation, as much of this thread has done, does not address the question of "costs too much" at all. However, you cannot answer the question of "does it cost too much" specifically by looking at how prices change over time without accounting for inflation.

The topics are related, but not the same.

I suggest that if you want to discuss whether things cost too much, why, and what could be done about it, that you start a separate thread on it. Where necessary, people can refer to concepts in this thread if they want to discuss the effects of inflation on prices. (There's limited hard data to use as reference in this thread, but it's probably a decent reference for concepts.)

Semantics are how we determine what's being discussed. I assure you that the semantic definition of "inflation" is relevant in the context of this thread.

Your clarification tries to paint the topic of discussion (inflation in the wider game market economy) as nonexistent, and instead price increases being wholly the domain of marketeers manipulating prices. This blithely ignores the reality that, for any given amount of money moving through the economy, there is a limit to the price any manipulator can ask for something and expect anyone to actually buy it in any reasonable time scale.*

If that ceiling price is itself increasing, with all other things being equal (no new powersets, no nerfs, no new reasons to play at 50, etc.), that quite possibly indicates inflation, as I defined it based on those Wikipedia quotes.

* This applies even for things that sell for >2B inf off-market. You just have to transition to direct-to-consumer sales to transcend the 2B ceiling. However, I don't envy anyone taking on the task of trying to control the supply of something sold off-market by diverse individuals.

You seem to have a fundamental misconception that any time the price for something increases in an upwards direction, that is inflation. It is not.

In the real world, inflation can be caused by a couple of common things. One is an increase in the cost of producing commodity goods, like foodstuffs, fuel, etc. Because either everyone needs those goods (food), or everything they use or do depends on those goods to happen (fuel), that price is reflected in all other products and services. There is no equivalent to this in CoH, because nothing ever takes more resources to produce, and our characters will never starve. Increases in salvage prices might increase the price people ask for crafted IOs, but would never directly affect the price of recipes.

Another common source of inflation in the real world is monetary policy. For example, the classic example is for a government to print more money. This is the closest analog to what we have in CoH. There is no central banking authority controlling the money supply - we all create it by playing the game. The only thing counteracting the money we create is when we spend it on things that don't hand all of what we spent over to another player. Money sinks, like the 10% market fee.

Here's what Wikipedia says about real world inflation.

(Emphasis mine.)

Here is the Wikipedia definition of "economic growth"

(Again, emphasis mine.)

Translating that into our game, inflation is an increase in the amount of money in the economy that is greater than any corresponding increase in the amount of goods.

Someone flipping items never creates inf by doing so. Flippers drive the price of items towards what the market will sustain at a brisk transaction rate for the item in question - they try to find an optimized balance in price per transaction multiplied with transactions per time. If that price that a flipper can drive to is increasing over time then that is not creating inflation. It may be revealing changes in demand or supply caused by shifts in how people are playing the game. (Example: a new defense powerset comes out and people start buying more defense IO sets.) Or it may be revealing real market-wide inflation as I have described above.

Price increases and inflation are not the same thing. Inflation leads to price increases, but not all price increases are inflation.

This is never a source of inflation. Price increases are not the same as inflation. (In fact, flipping increases the amount of money destroyed per time relative to the amount created, making it a net, though possibly small, decrease in the ratio of money in the system to items.)

This worsens inflation if any of the money farmed while farming for items ever makes it to the market to buy something. That would be injecting money into the system but injecting zero goods for it to be spent on. Increasing the money supply without increasing the item supply is practically the textbook definition of inflation in this context.

Actually, you can't. Unlike with the vendor interface for Reward Merits, only rare set IOs are present in the Alignment Merit interface. Sets with no rare pieces are not present at all, and sets with a mix of rare and uncommon pieces have only the rares on offer.

Performance shifters were modified a couple of issues back, with no patch note, to grant 10% endurance and not just 10 endurance.

Yeah, as long as it does create the registry entries at the start, that should work fine. What I was describing is only required in the case that it waits till the download is complete to create the right registry entries.

As I think about how that would need to work in order to allow it to be completely stopped and existed and still resume later, I think your test will probably be successful.

Correct on both counts. The reason it seems "reverse" or anything like that is that the way the devs normally allow enhancers to fit in powers makes it seem like they must treat buffs and debuffs as different things, even though the game doesn't make that distinction. What's happening is that Hami-Os obey the non-IO set rules using the most permissive slotting a power takes. For example, for slotting purposes, Enzymes count as all of an endurance reducer, a defense debuff enhancer, and a toHit debuff enhancer. Since many defense powers accept endurance reducers, you can slip an Enzyme in there even though none of its other aspects apply. Then the fact that it acts as a defense buff/debuff boost, it applies that enhancement on +defense powers.

Last I checked, you can also do this with Centrioles and the few ranged +DR powers that also accept range enhancers. Very non-intuitively, damage resistance and damage are enhanced by the same boost attribute, so the damage enhancement in a Centriole enhances the +DR of the powers.

This is my philosophy as well.

In fact, these IOs are some of the only set IOs I give my characters as they level up. For me, full set bonus builds are something I worry about late in a character's career. Early on, however, I make a point of obtaining a Miracle and a Numina's unique specifically for the +recovery. While "expensive" (I am wealthy in just about every in-game resource so for me that's not an issue), they do a lot for boosting how fast you can chug along without having to stop and catch your breath. (The +regen pieces do that for your health bar, so they aren't to be overlooked. I just prioritize the recovery.) I could do the same thing with frankenslotting, and possibly better, but I can get just a few (admittedly expensive) IOs and leave the rest of my build SOs or common IOs until I am ready for a larger overhaul. I prefer that simplicity, so for me it's worth it.

Late game, I like to have characters who can do things that, well, they just otherwise wouldn't be able to do. Making your character very hard to run out of end enables a whole category of sustained burn activities, ranging from running more toggles to sustaining a high DPS attack chain for longer. No one needs to do stuff like that, but a lot of us get kicks out of it.

Since the current installer is run from a dedicated install directory, it uses that to determine where the game files it cares about are located. Since the new installer doesn't share an install directory like this, the only ways it can automatically find the installs are (a) to look in the system registry (almost certainly what it does on Windows) or (b) search all your hard drives. Option (b) would suck hardcore on my own system, as I have many hundreds of thousands of files.

They could let you point it at an install directory. That seems like a pretty decent compromise. If they don't do something like this, we're probably going to have to add registry hacks to the existing copy trick instructions, which is not pretty for non-technical users.

Cool. Then know that while I am no longer trying to correct any misunderstanding you might have, I still contend that your simplification actually included an incorrect statement that I felt it was important to point out. I think you did good in pointing out the 10% of normal (average) damage thing, but bad in explicitly referring to things having a 5% chance to hit. Simplifications are good, but it's important to not let them be misleading.

Sorry to beat the horse, though. Consider it a minor pet peeve of mine. I run into folks all the time who are all like "damnit, I am totally past the softcap and this +4 AV was sure hitting me a lot", because they're unclear that even at the soft cap a critter like that would have had something like a 10.5% chance to hit per attack (assuming no accuracy bonuses), which is like 7/4ths of the chance a +2 minion would have to hit them.

Apologies to the OP for the sustained threadjack.

Edit: I should have read Desmodos' posts 1st. I could have then just agreed with him.

Oh, yeah. Duh. Hm, do Broadsword wielding critters like Cimerorans get sword set bonuses? And then there's the lovely bow-wielding Wyvern mobs...

Yeah, but the point people are trying to make is that it's only like this when you focus on buying only the absolutely most valuable of the valuable things.

How many characters you could outfit using 50 Bil to have something like 50% global recharge and defense in the mid 20s to mid 30's to one position or L/S (assuming they get no defense in their powersets)? How about if you use a mix of Merits and cash to do it?

If I were to exclude purples and PvPOs, I don't have a single character that would cost me more than around 1.5B inf. 50B inf would outfit almost four times as many 50s as I have right now with builds like that.

Think about it. A couple of years back only people who either had a bunch of accounts or who were willing to ask for "padders" could readily set up a good money farm. Now, anybody who can take the heat can set up a farm. All the new people cranking out more cash find the game's ultra-rare goodies that more within reach. They're competing with you now. They're bidding against you on the market. Guess what? That drives up prices.

Of course some of these people are also producing more purples. But not all of them. Some of them are getting their inf in the AE. Some of them are playing TFs or story arcs that exemplar them down. Some of them are just hoovering up smaller wads of cash from the less prolific cash producers, selling lots of stuff for 5, 10 or 25M inf, then rolling that up into large single purchases.

We get it. The price of rare, expensive stuff has gone up a lot. Rare, expensive stuff is not "the market". It's just a part of it. No one's going to say the price on that stuff hasn't gone up a ton, and that inflation isn't (a big) part of that. But not only is inflation not the whole story, it can't meaningfully be described as "hyperinflation" except in the most pedantically mathematical ways for the reasons Obitus has mentioned - hyperinflation suggests extremely negative conditions that mean your whole economy is going to hell in a handbasket. That's not what's happening here.

If you want to build the equivalent of in-game bomb shelter stocked only with illiquid assets, that's you're prerogative. Personally, I'm going to continue to store my wealth in a diverse set of assets that include inf. So long as anyone is selling anything on the market, inf is useful. I can always use the market to liquidate an asset in some other form, but having cash on hand means I don't have to wait for the market to do that for me. After all, if I list something at "sell it nao" prices, I'm not getting an optimal return on my liquidation, so selling for a good price takes time. Keeping liquid cash on hand avoids having to wait - it's fuel for instant gratification. I can snatch up something that costs up to 2B inf on a whim. That's all I care about my inf allowing me to do. I don't care that next year it might be worth half as much as it is now, because I plan to earn (a lot) more.

OK, reading this I do wonder if there's something you're missing here.

I responded because you stated implicitly that everything had a 5% chance to hit you once you're at 45% (or higher defense), and that is incorrect. That's only true if they have both a 100% accuracy (total) and a 50% base hit chance, and anything that's not a +0 minion will have more than 100% total accuracy. The 5% number is incorrect without getting into toHit buffs.