Farming and the Market
By
Blue Rabbit,
Posted on: 2009-05-05 10:42 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Precisely. Much like in real life, farmers work tirelessly for items which we buy with our money. We don't need to spend months growing crops (in this analogy, spend hours killing enemies)
While the farmers are the ones who grow crops tirelessly (kill enemies without stopping) so we can buy their crops (recipes/items) with our money we worked for in our own way (money from our job/infamy in the game)
if many anti-farmers had to farm their OWN purples, and actually experienced what it was like to endlessly kill enemies until a purple dropped for you, i guarantee they'd beg for farming to come back.
i don't support MA farming, as it offers no advantages other than to power level. but real time farming like Fury and Razor speak of in there posts which speak the truth an i agree with offers in the minority aloft of pros, all the fire/kins in PI are bringing in more goods for the increasing demand an thus the prices drop.
You guys know it's right.
Without farmers rare items would be in short supply an at sky high prices.
MA farming isn't for items though everyone is using it to PL an any items are a bonus to the players
if everyone farmed normal missions it would screw it up but in the minority it keeps prices retrospectively active.
i havnt been in game since monday are the changes in place?
*edited to make my point clearer
@Effy
Effy On Hot Sauce Fire/Cold Corr
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Effy Unleashed DP/EN Blaster 1st 50 @ Union
Careful not to confuse MA farming in my posts, and real-game-time farming using content by the way. In my posts, I refer to real-game-time for clarification.
Fury
The differences are irrelevant at this point; the benefits of farming are clear, while there are some obvious adverse effects (if purples become too common, they will lose all value)
However the devs have introduced this punishment system to punish farmers for it, to reduce the risk of players ruining what is essentially a player driven economy.
i disagree on that Razor, the difference matters MA farming is game breaking, Real time farming (as i assume its called by furys post) doesn't kill the game.
Let me break it down,
MA farming is mainly for tickets an XP, thankfully the tickets don't majorly effect the economy as of now, but everyone having 50s in under a day of game play is bad, it stops players having to leave Cap or Atlas an gives players every toon they could want too easily. plus the inf gained is excessive not major but excessive.
real time farming is hard to PL fast you need an amazing team not so easily excessable to the average joe bloggs unlike MA in which an team with any toons can farm effectively.
Real time farming cant be done by everyone you need specifics to PL properly to get anywhere near as fast as MA PL.
Farming on a global scale like current situations is bad very bad, in it's minority it's expectable an all players reap the rewards.
MA farming needs to be cut, half XP i say!
BTW in my posts i must sound pro farming when infact I'm not. i just understand that real time farming offers me benefits, as opposed to MA farming just screwing things up
@Effy
Effy On Hot Sauce Fire/Cold Corr
Effy On Hot Chilli Fire/Dark Corr
Effy On Heat FM/SD Before FoTM
Effy Unleashed DP/EN Blaster 1st 50 @ Union
'everyone having 50s in under a day of game play is bad, it stops players having to leave Cap or Atlas an gives players every toon they could want too easily. plus the inf gained is excessive not major but excessive.''
I can see how this would leave a big gap between new players, new characters and the level 50s, as everyone would be essentially a lowbie, or a very higbie (50).
I never said the devs shouldn't take action, i merely suggested a tyrannical punishment system would not solve the problem, and that farming is not exploiting. The 3 active topics i've been posting in the forum today i have only been arguing those 2 points.
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Much like in real life, farmers work tirelessly for items which we buy with our money.
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A bogus analogy doesn't help any. Unlike in real life, farmers also have an insatiable appetite for the equivalent of food. So do they increase the overall supply? I don't know and _neither do you_.
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THE LAST thing this game needs is MORE people quitting.
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This is a very familiar argument. It's so familiar, in fact, because I've heard it about every change made for the last four years. Curiously, however, the game still seems to have plenty of players and as far as anyone knows the subscription numbers are pretty flat.
But tell me this, if a dev' slaps a suspension/ban to a player for a fair chunk of time. Do you really think they'll stick around?
Fury
Not really sure farming is beneficial to the market in any way.
Sure, farming generates more recipes and more salvage. But who usually fixes the prices for rare salvage/recipes (not even talking about the purple sets) ?
Those who pick them. The same who also have far more inf than the casual-players. Those who decide that this Miracle Unique IO should be sold at 75M inf, based on the current amount of inf they can generate, farming. And who can afford it ? other players who generate as much inf.
So please, don't pretend farming is helping the casual-player to find what he wants in WW.
Farming help farmers.
Nothing new, though. It existed in Everquest, it will probably always exist whatever the MMOG.
Edit : typos
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It doesn't mean this at all.
Originally, when arcs were being marked as invalid (due to patches invalidating arcs and due to the bug where accessing missions from a server with a different language wrongly marked an arc as invalid) they did not appear on the search/browse listings. The same happened (and should still happen) if an arc is auto-pulled due to crossing the complaints threshold.
I'd imagine the same sort of system will be used with banned & locked arcs existing on the servers and taking up a space but being hidden from the public. So search will improve and appropriate content will be easier to find.
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If it doesn't, it needs to be fixed because a lot of the farm missions are still on the mission list, fully selectable but not playable. Pressing play and accepting produces no effect. If they're going to remove them, then remove them properly: get them off the MA list and leave it for the "appropriate" MA missions only.
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But have they taken the actions mentioned in Positron's post yet?
The currently visible but unavailable to play missions may just be arcs invalidated by changes in the patch (e.g. maps removed) and not ones blocked/removed due to being considered to contain exploits.
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Not really sure farming is beneficial to the market in any way.
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Well farming outside of the MA will generate a lot more recipes/salvage than the farmers themselves consume (because they have no control over what drops), so it helps the market in that way. Hence why there is always a glut of recipes at L50. And farmers are limited by market slots just like marketeers - they want to move those slots fast, so they won't be setting ridiculously high prices on most of the stuff that drops that they don't need themselves. Casual/average players are just as capable of setting ridiculously high prices - moreso perhaps, as they are probably more patient to wait longer for a sale, and more desperate to make lots of inf for the few good drops they do get (farmers and marketeers make their profit by sheer quantity of sales, not by wider profit margins).
Farming certainly puts more purples on the market, but the farmers are the biggest consumers of purples so I wouldn't like to say that the market for purples is worse or better for casual players with so many farmers around - probably a bit of both - worse for the purples everyone uses (attack sets), but better for purples in things like control sets - sets the farmers themselves may not use as much (Fire/Kins, Fire/Psis, Spines/Fires, Spines/Darks and SS/WPs have little use for Sleep and Confuse sets, etc).
Certainly the farmers have more buying power in terms of how much inf they have (probably exceeded only by the most prolific of marketeers), so they can certainly pay more than most "average/casual" players - the prices of high-end IOs will always be dictated by what the farmers/marketeers are willing to pay.
Where farming does benefit the market is in the sheer amount of yellow/orange recipes it adds to the market in sets that the farmers don't typically use themselves, but want to offload quickly (to free up their market slots so they can go back to farming) if there's value in doing so.
And most visibly farming benefits the market in the amount of cheap salvage dumped on it - you can see that, because when lots of farmers moved over to MA the salvage surplus on the market started to dry up and prices rose accordingly. MA farming does not drop purples or the huge surplus of salvage and recipes that normal farming does, and it lets MA farmers pick what their drops are - sure, it's still random rolls in most cases, but farmers do have more control over where their drops come from - even from level ranges other than at L50.
I think a certain amount of farming is unavoidable and beneficial in many areas - and the Devs would do well to cater to every playstyle - so eradicating farming is overly extreme, unrealistic and likely impossible without removing the economy altogether. Like the OP I just want to see farming moved out of the MA and back into normal missions - it helps stocks of purples (even if they are overpriced, at least they're available in quantity), it helps keep salvage prices down (which makes it easier/faster for casual players to make up IOs when they level), and it will increase the proportion of story-based arcs in the MA to non-story ones, making it easier for players to use the MA as the Devs intended - to find fun and new stories to experience.
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But tell me this, if a dev' slaps a suspension/ban to a player for a fair chunk of time. Do you really think they'll stick around?
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Possibly not, but so what? Players leave and players join every month. That doesn't mean the game has a problem with dwindling numbers, no matter how often Chicken Little says it does; and that doesn't mean that a trivial proportion of players leaving over some particular development will induce such a problem.
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Possibly not, but so what? Players leave and players join every month. That doesn't mean the game has a problem with dwindling numbers, no matter how often Chicken Little says it does; and that doesn't mean that a trivial proportion of players leaving over some particular development will induce such a problem.
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Yeah I bet we'd all be surprised how much churn there is every month between new players joining and other players leaving.
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Yeah I bet we'd all be surprised how much churn there is every month between new players joining and other players leaving.
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Apparently they retain about 90% of their playerbase, in terms of pure account numbers, which is about 140k at the last count. Can't remember where I read that 90% figure, but I think it was from a Posi post/interview.
For 'actual' numbers: "For NCSofts titles, the number I track is the monthly access number for each game as reported in the companys quarterly reports. According to their documents, this number is the number of unique users that log on at least once in the given month. <snip> For games like City of Heroes and Tabula Rasa, this number is probably somewhat less than the total number of active subscribers, unless NCSoft is just reporting the number of subscriptions in that field for those games."
Source. (CoH is the black line on the chart)
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Apparently they retain about 90% of their playerbase, in terms of pure account numbers, which is about 140k at the last count. Can't remember where I read that 90% figure, but I think it was from a Posi post/interview.
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I have heard retention is higher here than is usual in MMOs, and I can well believe it, though I don't recall a percentage being pinned on it, or how much faith we could put in it being more than PR /shrug
I used to use that MMOGchart website myself, but I'm not sure how accurate their numbers are, what with many of them being guesstimates or from industry insiders (who may have an axe to grind with their employer). Of course if you gain approximately the same number of new subscribers per month as you lose then that chart won't tell you much, even if the figures are accurate.
Just in general terms, I read a blog a while ago (can't seem to find it, now, unfortunately), where someone posted an economic study of the CoH market system, utilising economic theory to predict the outcome of certain events.
One interesting one was that merging the Hero and Villain markets would actually tend to drive prices up.
Anyway, all that aside: The upshot of it was that because the act of earning Inf is also the same act that creates goods (salvage and recipes), the CoH market prices will tend to rise over time - it's just the rate at which it happens that is affected by farmers. Farming accelerates the rate at which influence is created in the game world (and there are very few ways in which influence is removed once it is gained), and accelerates the overall trend of increasing prices.
The only way around this (apparently, and I'm paraphrasing, of course) is for artificial injection of goods onto the market (causing a market glut and therefore driving prices down) or to stabilise the amount of influence in the market by creating more of the so-called "influence-sinks".
Anyway, I think this is a fascinating subject, and I might go nerdy with it and start to actually study it.
The wisdom of Shadowe: Ghostraptor: The Shadowe is wise ...; FFM: Shadowe is no longer wise.
; Techbot_Alpha: Also, what Shadowe said. It seems he is still somewhat wise 
; Bull Throttle: Shadowe was unwise in this instance...; Rock_Powerfist: in this instance Shadowe is wise.; Techbot_Alpha: Shadowe is very wise *nods*; Zortel: *Quotable line about Shadowe being wise goes here.*
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Anyway, all that aside: The upshot of it was that because the act of earning Inf is also the same act that creates goods (salvage and recipes), the CoH market prices will tend to rise over time - it's just the rate at which it happens that is affected by farmers. Farming accelerates the rate at which influence is created in the game world (and there are very few ways in which influence is removed once it is gained), and accelerates the overall trend of increasing prices.
The only way around this (apparently, and I'm paraphrasing, of course) is for artificial injection of goods onto the market (causing a market glut and therefore driving prices down) or to stabilise the amount of influence in the market by creating more of the so-called "influence-sinks".
Anyway, I think this is a fascinating subject, and I might go nerdy with it and start to actually study it.
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Mudflation - it's pretty much unavoidable in MMOs with economy-based reward systems. I experienced rather extreme examples in EverQuest over the course of 3-4 expansions - the constant increases in gear power made previous loot almost worthless trash, but the constant influx of items and platinum/gold into the economy made the currency worth less and less. Then the gold farmers moved in and wrecked most of the economy so that you could barely afford anything except old trash (which wasn't good enough to let you do the newer content) without buying plat or farming it up.
The injection of goods can be done by increasing drop rates, but I can't see the Devs doing that tbh. They don't want everyone to have easy access to all IOs so we have things to strive for - just like HO'd-out builds were in the pre-I9 game, so purpled-out builds are now (and the PvP IOs I guess). ALthough purpled-out builds seem somewhat more attainable now than fully HO'd builds were before because of the market.
The worst thing about CoH's market economies is the fact the Devs have so much effect upon them - every issue recently has turned the prices upside down (I13's merits and I14's AE tickets especially) and you have to acclimatise yourself to the new prices all over again.
Maybe Paragon Studies need to hire an economist like EVE Online has 
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Mudflation - it's pretty much unavoidable in MMOs with economy-based reward systems. I experienced rather extreme examples in EverQuest over the course of 3-4 expansions - the constant increases in gear power made previous loot almost worthless trash, but the constant influx of items and platinum/gold into the economy made the currency worth less and less. Then the gold farmers moved in and wrecked most of the economy so that you could barely afford anything except old trash (which wasn't good enough to let you do the newer content) without buying plat or farming it up.
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Which doesn't quite happen in CoX PvE as there is nothing that requires the fattest loot to beat and old SOs haven't become worthless trash and should still see you able to make a good build.
The market is generally for things people want - not things that are needed to still play the game.
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Serious: To Save A Single World (#83744) * Marketing Opportunity (#83747)
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Which doesn't quite happen in CoX PvE as there is nothing that requires the fattest loot to beat and old SOs haven't become worthless trash and should still see you able to make a good build.
The market is generally for things people want - not things that are needed to still play the game.
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True, but I bet there's still a lot of CoH/V players who convince themselves they need IOs when really they just want them. Personally I know I'd find it hard to go back to SOs/DOs/TOs, having got used to characters that can still have lots of rchg and endrdx slotted despite not gimping themselves on acc and dam.
In quick succession, I believe some are being a bit quiet since theres a bat wavering above us. I like real-time non-MA farming, but I foresee that'll be within the policy too. Btw, those who believe that "farmers" upset the market, go look up the dictionary for what a farmer does and connect it to the game. They supply the stuff which you buy, the more that supplies then the less it becomes. Prices will sky-rocket. Purples un-obtainable, that is if normal farming is caught in the cluster-sh**. But here's a thought, there going nuts over PL and not farming. Think about this:
What if I got a 8man team of 50's to farm?
Fury