The Whole Inf System (troublemaker question)

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I just nocied recently that you can buy Prestige with Inf. That seems like a pretty solid inf sink to me....

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The exchange rate is so atrocious not many folk are tempted by it.
Also, their price-slashing on base items and letting people earn inf and prestige at the higher levels instead of it being either/or mean less motivation to do it.

But yeah, we need more opportunities to 'destroy' inf along those lines.

The prestige:inf ratio seemed a lot worse to me when I couldn't make 50 million inf over a weekend in my spare time.

Maybe we should ask the base builders if they use it?

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Maybe we should ask the base builders if they use it?

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that's a fine idea!

Done!

I can't speak for everyone of course, but I lurk/reside in that forum quite a bit and I can only recall a couple of posters that have (or would) publicly admit to wasting Inf. that way!

AFAIK, There's only one person in the last 3-4 months that's come in and talked about converting a Pile of Inf into Prestige... I believe they converted 50 million Inf into 1 million Prestige

That conversion rate IS atrocious, Unless you're absolutely swimming in Inf - AND want to waste it all - (without knowing if/what they may or may not do with Bases in the future)!

Once you have a certain amount of prestige - you're pretty much set - as it is...

And that really depends on what you want out of a Base, Also makes a big difference if you're playing on Blue-side or Red-side & want Teleporters to all the zones.

You can fit them all in on Red-side on an 8x8 base and workshop, storage, medbay - if you have the SG Badge and enough Inf to buy the Supercomputer for Control, and a couple other hurdles you have to jump thru to make that all fit right.

On an 8x12 plot or larger = it's pretty easy Red-side, that's part of why/how people got into decorating their bases in all sorts of crazy ways.

Blue-side you need a bigger plot and a much bigger chunk of Prestige to get "everything" (that works and/or has a purpose atm) = mostly all the Teleporters/Beacons aad the Power & Control to run them.

If they ever figure out a way to do base raiding in a manner that doesn't suck - and give you a reason to have Base "Defenses" and maybe Raid Teleporters.
But there is A LOT of suck having your Base (and it's "stuff") destroyed, so much suckage - that most people wouldn't want to participate. That's (essentially) what they found out in internal testing - the last time when they tried to "Revamp Bases".
Nobody wants to face the prospect of permanently losing Prestige when an item is destroyed, or rather have to re-buy stuff with more "new" Prestige. There are several roadblocks to making the Defenses/Base Raiding work... Like, what happens to storage items in a fight, can they be destroyed? If so then what happens to the contents? or are storage items indestructible? are workshops off-limits? Would people choose not to participate (MOST LIKELY SO), or would people have more than one SG or VG with one base for Raiding and the other for storage? AS it stands that would require new bases & people would have to have multiple accounts or the "Raiding SG/VG's wouldn't be able to have any safe storage for IO's...

IDK, if they'll ever manage to make it fun - (to do it more than once)

Or maybe a way to use the "Mission Computer" to do anything beside that one SF Red-side - like having "missions" that are similar to NPC "ambushes" attack your Base or something along those lines it might be worth doing.

AND, Ironically the Price Reductions on Bases don't really help starting Groups that much you still need several hundred thousand (preferably a couple million) Prestige to get beyond the first few initial hurdles... Once you get beyond those hurdles, there's not much to do with prestige past a certain point except decorate and we found out the hard way that having more than 12,000 items in your Base can corrupt it.


[u]TL;DR version:[u]
If you want to flush TONS of Inf buying Prestige, Go right ahead - most of the Base-Builders will try not to laugh at you (at least to your face) about it.
Seriously, I doubt they would laugh, they might /facepalm and feel sorry for you though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville City of Heroes didn't fail, City of Heroes was killed. If a 747 dropped on your house, you'd say you were killed, not you failed to find a safer dwelling.

Couldn't agree more


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OK, I just have to say this...Influence (and Infamy) isn't created at the Market.

Someone, Somewhere, must defeat a mob to get the coin of the realm. THEN someone can buy whatever at the market.

So while the market is a great way to "make" money...it really just transfers money from one toon to another taking a 10% cut along the way.

Unless I'm totally confused and Toons are creating Influence some other way.

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There's a lot of really good talk in the Base thread about why people don't spend the inf on prestige. I'd say it's pretty conclusive that it's not the inf sink it could be. In fact, at this point I'd say that I'm not super psyched about the exchange rate and I don't know that I'd do it either. Perhaps if they dropped a zero and made it 50:1.

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So my questions:
1) Do you think that we have, truly, inflation? Most of the "middle class valuables" (Detonation Acc/Dam,
to pull an example out of the air) are about the same price they were a month after issue 9 hit.
Those may be priced at "round up to a nickel" levels, however. Recently I've seen people rounding
up to the nearest 100K for common IO's, and lots of them.

2) Do you think that inflation [should it exist] is a problem?

3) What tools are there for fighting inflation of this sort?

My answers are 1) Yes, and 2) Maybe.

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I replied earlier, and maybe I'm just a little dense this morning, but I'm still confused here.

Quoting the original questions, the first one asks if the current situation is "inflation".

I'm using definitions #2 & #3 from this link - what definitions are you folks using?

Standard inspirations, along with TO's/DO's/SO's and IO recipes (from the crafting table),
are all flat in terms of pricing. Many market sets/IO's/salvage are also (roughly) flat.

Over the same period, with level smoothing, easier mobs, more powerful enhancements,
the market, and AE tickets, the rate of earnings has actually increased.

Clearly, this is not "inflation" according to the listed definition. Even at best, only some
market-specific items are increasing, and only if that increase is a permanent trend and
it exceeds the present earning rates can we consider those specific items to be inflated.

What we have (overall) is an influence Surplus - Average per capita, the player base is
richer now than it has ever been. They're not carting wheelbarrows of cash to buy a SO -
it costs the same as it did years ago. They just have wheelbarrows of cash on hand
now to buy whatever they want.

As stated earlier, I have no issue with inf sinks if they're a creative and interesting part
of the game, but I don't see them as a "solution" for a problem.

So, the question I'm asking is:

What is problematic about a money surplus?


Regards,
4

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So 10% of every item price (or 20% if it was flipped) was destroyed. So every newly created infium [singular of inf] in the system was spent ten times before it got destroyed in market fees.

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nitpick from my physics knowledge...

Inf has a half-life of approximately 7 market transactions.

That's not going to average 10 transactions to remove it.


now what number do you want to use? I dunno. 7 transactions give you a 50% chance it's been removed from circulation. So to the first order, that's 14 transactions to an average guaranteed removal. 13 transactions is a 75% chance of removal using half-life as a measure, so you could use 17 cycles to "guaranteed" out of circulation. 22 cycles get you down to 10%, that says 24 total. I think you get close to an asymptote there, let's say 25 and if it's actually more that can be hand-waved away as money spent on other sinks like costumes and crafting.


What does all that mean? Well, the decay is slower than you account for. Is that saying the decay is too slow? Not sure. I'll leave that to you.

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As stated earlier, I have no issue with inf sinks if they're a creative and interesting part
of the game, but I don't see them as a "solution" for a problem.

So, the question I'm asking is:

What is problematic about a money surplus?


Regards,
4

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You make a great point, but you've failed to take your conclusions to the next step. The answer is obviously that we may have inflation on the things that aren't price-fixed: set IO recipes and salvage (and by corollary, anything that uses these items, i.e. crafted IOs). While these items aren't required one bit to enjoy the game and to prosper, most people find these items to be extremely desirable to the point of feeling that they need them.

Kudos for paring down the issue to the core. I think it's very important that people ignore the items you specified (for the reasons you specified) when making arguments on this issue. There is, however, definitely still the possibility of inflation on these items. Is it happening? Is it a problem? How can we control it? These are the questions asked in the OP and they're still valid, IMO.

D

One problem with inflation is that there's a 2 billion influence cap, which is less than is needed to IO out some toons these days. A simple solution to that is to just raise the cap, of course. Another problem is that it means your influence reserves dwindle in value over time. Yes, you could make some bets on which assets will appreciate, but it seems silly to me to have to tie up all of my influence in purples sitting in my base as a hedge against inflation. I'll do it if it gets bad enough, but most people won't. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, blah blah blah.

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One problem with inflation is that there's a 2 billion influence cap, which is less than is needed to IO out some toons these days. A simple solution to that is to just raise the cap, of course. Another problem is that it means your influence reserves dwindle in value over time. Yes, you could make some bets on which assets will appreciate, but it seems silly to me to have to tie up all of my influence in purples sitting in my base as a hedge against inflation. I'll do it if it gets bad enough, but most people won't. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, blah blah blah.

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The poor do not get poorer in this game. There are many mechanisms built-in to spread the wealth around: merit rewards, AE tickets, the market (!) etc. I made 100m inf in a week once I started trying.

And as you said, there's an inf cap...the rich CAN'T get richer, they can only distribute their surplus wealth to the poor.

So in actuality, what you said was the exact opposite...

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The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, blah blah blah.

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nonsense.

the market is excellent at spreading wealth around.

My experimental stalker has 30 million at level 30, doing nothing but selling drops and crafting the occasional IO recipe drop.

You don't need an economics degree to sell drops.

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but you've failed to take your conclusions to the next step. The answer is obviously
that we may have inflation on the things that aren't price-fixed: set IO recipes and salvage
(and by corollary, anything that uses these items, i.e. crafted IOs).

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Actually, I believe I did also raise that point. Only *some* things in the market have
rising prices while many things (common sets, common salvage) are returning to price
levels seen a few months ago, which are lower than recent prices in many cases.

The case I haven't seen reasonably presented yet is twofold: Items that are continually
(and permanently) trending upwards in price where the rate of that increase is *also*
higher than the rate of increase in income over corresponding time. Those cases would
represent inflation to me.

I'm not saying that cannot or does not exist, but I am saying I don't believe it is common
or widespread beyond a few specific items (or item categories - purples for instance).


Regards,
4

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The case I haven't seen reasonably presented yet is twofold: Items that are continually
(and permanently) trending upwards in price where the rate of that increase is *also*
higher than the rate of increase in income over corresponding time. Those cases would
represent inflation to me.

I'm not saying that cannot or does not exist, but I am saying I don't believe it is common
or widespread beyond a few specific items (or item categories - purples for instance).


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More thinking in public on my part here. . . pardon my rambling.

Clearly there's a surplus of inf and no price raise on "basic" stuff; you are right.

Here's what I've seen heroside, and these perceptions may be wrong. Throw in an "I believe" in every sentence in the next paragraph.

There has been a raise in what people are paying for common crafted IO's, and for uncommon salvage. There's been a raise on average for common salvage as well. There's been a lowering of the price for the most expensive rare salvage and there's been a raise of the price on "ordinary" rare salvage (Diamonds for instance.)

I THINK there's been a raise over the last two years in the prices for "frankenslottables" from the 50K range to the 150K range. I'm not sure about that one.

I KNOW there's been a raise over the last two years in many uniques. In some cases the raise is because people figured out "What it's good for." I bought Steadfast Def/Res recipes for 30K each at one point, to give a dramatic example. In others- like anti-KB IO's- I don't know if education alone is sufficient to explain the raise in prices. Karmas used to be 3 to 6 million; my feeling is that they are now 10 to 20 million, though I haven't checked lately.

I believe, but haven't proved, that the non-purple "high end stuff" is generally more expensive. And of course purples didn't exist at all.

So for the median transaction, I think the price has gone up a bit; my feeling is that the total amount of inf in the system has gone up by like a factor of 10.

The devil is in the details, of course.
I can come up with a situation where 99% of characters are making more and spending less and the inf supply is going down. Or the other way around.

A small number of transactions have a huge effect on the "total supply of inf." A set of level 50 SO's costs about five million inf; That's half the Wentworth's fee on a 100-million-inf recipe. If the purples go from 60 million to 120 million and nothing else changes, you're burning a lot of money in the high end while not actually effecting the lives of the mythical casual players.

On the other hand, if the price of common salvage goes from 5000 to 50,000 inf, and you have 200 pieces of common salvage in a level 50 build, you've just raised the price of that part of the build from 1 million inf to 10 million inf. That would cause massive stress to people who only HAVE 10 million inf, while the person who is purpling out the warshade won't even notice.

So I think there is some possible effect on "social mobility"- if the price of a starter set of IO's is going up considerably, that's going to effect how many people use them.

I have a feeling- maybe a worry is a better phrase-that most of the money spent by the high-end community stays in the high-end community and we're seeing less trickledown than we used to. Purples pretty much ONLY come from hardcore play, and I suspect that more inf is spent on purples than on everything else combined.

Inflation isn't, at least not right now, what I'm worried about. Stratification?

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but you've failed to take your conclusions to the next step. The answer is obviously
that we may have inflation on the things that aren't price-fixed: set IO recipes and salvage
(and by corollary, anything that uses these items, i.e. crafted IOs).

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Actually, I believe I did also raise that point. Only *some* things in the market have
rising prices while many things (common sets, common salvage) are returning to price
levels seen a few months ago, which are lower than recent prices in many cases.

The case I haven't seen reasonably presented yet is twofold: Items that are continually
(and permanently) trending upwards in price where the rate of that increase is *also*
higher than the rate of increase in income over corresponding time. Those cases would
represent inflation to me.

I'm not saying that cannot or does not exist, but I am saying I don't believe it is common
or widespread beyond a few specific items (or item categories - purples for instance).


Regards,
4

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Okay well fair enough. I admit I'm still VERY new to this game relative to most people in this forum. You have a much better view of how things have been trending over the years. But from my newcomer's eyes here's the biggest thing I see that effects prices:

People don't think for themselves enough when it comes to slotting. They read on the forum that they need to slot XYZ so they go buy XYZ. Thus XYZ price trends upwards. Sets that look perfectly awesome to me are going for really cheap, while sets that are good AND hyped in every guide on the forums are outrageous. I think that's causing prices to go up more than inflation, based on a lot of the discussion so far in this thread.

As far as prices increasing faster than income...I don't believe players have enough information to track income levels to the point where we can determine if that's the case. But unless they've introduced new content that introduces inf into the economy faster than before (have they?? I honestly don't know), we can probably assume that income is fixed. Thus any upward trend in prices OVERALL would seem to be indicative of inflation.

I think you're right tho that overall prices are trending upwards. See my example above for an explanation of why I think some prices are going up while others aren't. (Sorry for the out of order post...thinking out loud too. )

D

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And as you said, there's an inf cap...the rich CAN'T get richer, they can only distribute their surplus wealth to the poor.

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The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, blah blah blah.

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nonsense.

the market is excellent at spreading wealth around.

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I have plenty of alts, so the influence cap is merely an annoyance, not a requirement to spend. I do probably spend half of what I make. But like Fulmens, it does seem like a lot of it is going to the other rich – purples probably represent half of my expenses, and with few exceptions, I use level 50 set IOs.

I'm not sure if it's a problem, though. I'll agree that the market is excellent at spreading ENOUGH wealth around. My poor toons don't feel poor the way they used to before the market. I get tons of influence from drops. I can usually afford everything I want on them while leveling up and without transferring influence. I'm sure some people want more than I do while leveling, but I don't really have much sympathy for their distress. As I'm leveling, I could afford a Ferrari, but am perfectly satisfied with a Toyota. If people who can only afford a Toyota feel they need a Ferrari, well, the secrets of infinite influence are available on this very forum.

Im rich ingame.
I dont get the point here.
keep an eye on the market, another on
what are you doin' with your alt.
Solved.

You guys soud archaic to me.

(i dunno if this word is english even=)

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Im rich ingame.
I dont get the point here.
keep an eye on the market, another on
what are you doin' with your alt.
Solved.

You guys soud archaic to me.

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OK, back to basics:

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1) Do you think that we have, truly, inflation? Most of the "middle class valuables" (Detonation Acc/Dam, to pull an example out of the air) are about the same price they were a month after issue 9 hit. Those may be priced at "round up to a nickel" levels, however. Recently I've seen people rounding up to the nearest 100K for common IO's, and lots of them.

2) Do you think that inflation [should it exist] is a problem?

3) What tools are there for fighting inflation of this sort?

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I fail to see how your suggestion to “keep an eye on the market, another on what are you doin' with your alt” answers these questions or solves the mentioned problem (inflation, and presumably its ill effects).

If you were suggesting that marketeering was the way to avoid inflation's ill effects, that works just fine for the marketeers, but I don't think that's who we're worried about. Our concern is more global and less personal.

Anyway, since I seem to be falling more and more into this particular conversation, I'll give my opinions.

1) On the things I care most about (top end recipes), my impression is that we've had inflation. It seems like it would cost me twice as much influence or more to purple out a character now than when I started. For my low to mid level set IO crafting niches, prices move all over, and while I think the overall trend has been slightly upward, it's hard to say for sure. In contrast, rare arcane salvage seems to be and remain lower than it was in the beginning, but that's probably just because of the supply side changes.

2) If inflation exists at all, it seems like a problem, but only a small one. I just like fairly stable prices, and I would guess a lot of players are like me in this. I don't want to type an extra 0. I don't want the influence cap to force me to shift a lot of funds around to purple out a single character. And while I doubt it affects many people, I don't want to have to convert my influence to assets as a hedge against inflation. I don't see a barrier to entry in the inflation, in that my lowbies seem much better equipped than ever, even without transferring influence.

3) Make it easier and more desirable to destroy influence. Others have made some interesting suggestions. I can't think of anything to add.

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I have plenty of alts, so the influence cap is merely an annoyance, not a requirement to spend. I do probably spend half of what I make. But like Fulmens, it does seem like a lot of it is going to the other rich – purples probably represent half of my expenses, and with few exceptions, I use level 50 set IOs.

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anyone at any level can get as rich as they want via pure market games- being 50 does make it easier if you farm, but literally *anyone* can be "rich" if they care to.

Having a fat bankroll makes certain market games easier, but does nothing to make the "poor" any poorer.

Only the obtuse, mentally deficient or lazy are poor anymore.

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I have plenty of alts, so the influence cap is merely an annoyance, not a requirement to spend. I do probably spend half of what I make. But like Fulmens, it does seem like a lot of it is going to the other rich – purples probably represent half of my expenses, and with few exceptions, I use level 50 set IOs.

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anyone at any level can get as rich as they want via pure market games- being 50 does make it easier if you farm, but literally *anyone* can be "rich" if they care to.

Having a fat bankroll makes certain market games easier, but does nothing to make the "poor" any poorer.

Only the obtuse, mentally deficient or lazy are poor anymore.

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Actually, the market is so simple and takes so little time that I'm not sure lazy even counts. I consider myself quite lazy in that regard. There's also a class of people who dislike and won't play the market mini-game. The only problem is if those same people complain about not being able to afford the shinies. Heck, you can afford the shinies without playing the market. I purpled out my first toon before I started marketeering.

I agree that you can easily start from nothing. I proved it to myself starting over on a new server with 0 inf. Sell the two inspirations, a little arbitrage, a little recipe crafting, a lot of recipe crafting, and poof, far more influence than I could ever hope to spend on a bunch of new lowbies.

You seem to still be responding to my original "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, blah blah blah." That statement was in regard to inflation. I figure that the poor will have a small bankroll, and the rich a large one. I figure that in a rapid inflation environment, the rich would be smart enough to shift their influence into appreciating assets, while the poor (being "obtuse, mentally deficient or lazy") would simply watch their bankroll disappear. I don't think that's desirable for either party. Although only a minor inconvenience, I don't want to have to buy and hold assets against inflation. And I'm pretty sure the poor don't want to watch their meager bankrolls get devalued. But also on the original topic, I'm not convinced we have inflation at all, and if we do it doesn't seem to be serious, so this seems largely theorycraft rather than a practical concern.

It's also an amusing difference between CoX and the real world. Out in the real world, I believe inflation is commonly considered to have the opposite effect because inflation makes debt repayment easier, and the poor considered to have a higher debt to income ratio. I don't really buy it, though, because debt holders are smart enough to include anticipated inflation in their rates. So only unexpectedly high inflation would have that effect. Still, if you're poor, or more accurately if you have a high debt to income ratio (regardless of rich or poor), hope for unexpectedly high inflation. I may perhaps be looking at it too simplistically; I'm no economist.

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You seem to still be responding to my original "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, blah blah blah." That statement was in regard to inflation.

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ah, ok- misunderstood your thrust.

sorry.

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You seem to still be responding to my original "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, blah blah blah." That statement was in regard to inflation.

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ah, ok- misunderstood your thrust.

sorry.

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I probably wasn't very clear in that earlier post, as I don't think it was just you that didn't get what I was trying to say. No problem. Probably my poor Englishments.

Couple thoughts:

1) I've been away from the game since ~I10, just came back, and I would say that there has definitely been inflation, but only on the top-end goods (i.e. the ones people care about)

2) The answer is easy, econ 101. RAISE INTEREST RATES. If you want to decrease the velocity of money through the system, you just need to create an incentive to save it rather than spend it. If saved inf paid, let's say, 5% a month (you could toy with this to get it right, may need to start higher), then people would still have an incentive to sell drops, but there would be less incentive to buy drops (you could buy more later if you save your money, as long as the interest rate is higher than the inflation rate on the items you want). Same supply, less demand, lower prices.

Instead of 1 inf churning through the market, say, 15 times a month, it churns through 5 times a month. Less wealth created, less inflation.

And players will never protest it because any one individual is either better off (if you save) or as well off as before (if you continue to spend).

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More thinking in public on my part here. . . pardon my rambling.

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It's an interesting thread and discussion - thanks for musing aloud (so to speak, er, type).

I've only been back in-game since last June (having left around I7 timeframe), so that
limits my knowledge of baseline pricing to the past year, and I'll try to keep to that
scope.

Before that, however, in the absence of a refutation of the definitions, can we please
dispense with the term "inflation" for this discussion - that's *not* what we have here.

If Porsche raises the price of its Boxster line, I'm pretty sure "inflation" won't be bandied
about by the general public, when the cost of Saturns, Kia, SUVs, and whatnot are still
roughly what they were before (subject to RL "cost of living" increases which affect
everything over time).

What we're really talking about is market-specific goods, and largely just a subset of
what I would term the "luxury segment". With "store" items flat and the game balanced
about them, the staples and the buying power for them is undiminished. Caviar may be
spendier, but bread and butter aren't.

With regard to common IO's and common salvage, I'm not sure these are permanent
or fully clear trends yet. The past few issues (removal of base salvage, merits, tickets,
removal of tf random drops, ticket nerfs, and more) have had huge effects on market
pricing including some pretty wild swings (common salvage a 1M each at times).

I'm not sure we know if we're back at old EP's for those things yet, or whether new EP's
are firmly established. I know my common IO crafters did a "duck and cover" when
I14 came out, and I know that they're starting to go back to it again now and those
prices, while still a bit volatile, are much closer to what they were a few months ago.

I'm not sure that the same doesn't apply to most common sets as well. You also raise
an excellent point - more players are becoming increasingly aware of them. To that,
I'll add that I13 brought a *lot* of attention to sets, and more probably uniques - After
all the original published rationale for merits was to help the poor casual gamer get
that specific LotG that was out of his meager price range on the market.

Additionally, one might make the case that the AE has, or is, skewing game balance
a bit. On the whole, many of those missions appear more difficult (on average) than
the normal game content - this may be a contributor to a perceived need for IO's, given
AE's newness and popularity.

If so, that could also contribute to more demand, and hence, higher pricing for those items.
In the case of purples, there have been no additional means of supply (unlike Pool C's,
and set's), so, I don't rule out simple economics driving their pricing up (more awareness,
more demand, same limited supply, higher prices).

I'm intrigued by your idea of stratification, and I'd be interested in examining that further,
but I'm sure I've already written enough to glaze the eyes over, so I'll defer for now.

The last thing I do want to mention: @Stillhart

You're correct - we don't have a good handle on income rates so this is all speculation.

We can however, take a ballpark stab at it. It's often been said that an avg L50 can make
~1M / hr just playing the game normally. So, conservatively we can try to come up with
an average earning rate. I don't know what Level the average toon is, but let's cut that
rate 1/3 - call it 350K/hr.

Let's further say that the "average" player plays 3-4 hours /week ... call it 15 hrs / month.
That puts earning rate at 5.25M per month for the mythical average player (of course,
we can do that in an hour, but assume we're all mutants in here...)

Now, if we estimate the monthly subscription rate at 100K? 50K? 25K? - I don't know,
call it 50,000 players, we get a (very conservative imho) average of 262.5 Billion into
the game economy every single month. Personally, I'd guess it's quite a bit higher than
that, but we can call that a starting estimate. If only 1/2 of that hits the market, it's not
too surprising to me to see it hit the luxury segment in a significant way.


Regards,
4


PS> Are there no takers for my question: What's problematic about a money Surplus?