Inf flow through the system

I don't know if this is worth reading- it's me thinking as I go. It started with the idea that every inf generated by a farmer [or anyone else who plays the game] needs to be spent ten times in the market before it disappears in fees. So farming up 100 million actually generated a billion inf in sales. However, this is not true because farmers don't just generate cash. They generate recipes, salvage, and things that get sold at Wentworth's. So they're bringing inf into the system but they're also generating fees which remove inf from the system. Their profit is not 100% new money. Note the difference between "revenue" (the personal net worth of the player) and "generated money" (the increase in the amount of total money in the game.)

Here's a rough analysis - someone out there has probably done a better one, which I'd love to see. It's full of guesses and oversimplifications and rhetorical devices.

TopDoc's income from farming was something like "1/3 of money from inf and common recipes, 1/3 rare recipes/salvage, and 1/3 purple recipes." I don't remember the exact numbers, which would throw everything off of course, but if those are correct:

Let's take the case of 3 million inf per hour. 1 million inf comes from cash, or things that are profitable to sell to vendors [I can only think of generic recipes; anything else? ]This is the only inf that enters the game.

1 million inf comes from rare recipes and salvage, sold at Wentworth's. So 100K leaves the game that way.

1 million inf comes from purple drops, sold at Wentworth's. So 100K more leaves the game THAT way.

So out of 3 million inf that goes in the pocket of the farmer, 800K enters the game as "new money".

If we assume that 50% of items on the market are flipped for double the money, that's 1 million inf bought, and sold for 2 million. That's an additional 200K removed. 600K of new money.

If an average purple [this includes all the sleeps and so forth] is 50 million, as a guess, and takes 3 million of salvage, that's 53 million. Crafting cost is 600K, or very roughly 1% of purchase cost. So 10K removed.

If the average "worth keeping" recipe costs 10 million and is crafted for around 200K, that's 2% of the recipes. But the 1 million of "rare recipes and salvage" isn't all recipes. So maybe 1%. So another 10K removed.

So for every 3 million inf profit by farmers, somewhere around 500-600K is new money, still in the system after the farming is done.

If we double my assumption for "Average price of a purple":
the farmer gets 4 million in revenue.
The 100K in purple sales becomes 200K.
The 100K of "50% flip" becomes 150K.
The leftover inf goes from around 550K to around 400K .

We still have a whole lot of new money being generated by actual play. I was hoping that I could remove the inf that the farmer spent on goodies (4 million, spent at Wentworth's, is 400K and we come out almost even,) but I've already accounted for that; some OTHER player produced that, in their own hour of play, and what the farmer buys some other farmer sells.

Any ideas about this? Anything major I'm missing? Is this all just pointless?

Interesting thread.
You also get SO drops from farming, maybe 3-4 per run which comes to about 200,000 inf or so.

Those figures look about right. When I farm on my Plant/Psi Dominator I usually get two to three common recipes, a rare recipe or two and a yellow or two on top of any SOs. I get a purple once every two to three runs, which gets crafted and sold.

I'll lose about 500K-1,000,000 in crafting costs for the recipes (I stock salvage in my base or acquire it with tickets) and get a return of about five to twenty million off the market.

In truth, it's generally more profitable for me to do AE runs, turn the tickets into Pool A or the occasional Pool C and sell those afterwards. Of course, AE not generating purples pushes me to throw a round of farming in there as well...

This makes the AE represent an interesting inflationary force.

Currently, it's possible to create AE maps where you can fight large, large numbers or foes. I'm not talking about really exploitative things here, just big maps that can have lots of foes on them. Here's the thing: the way the game is set up now, you hit the ticket cap on these maps long, long before you clear all the mobs. If your goal for being on such a map is, say, XP, you're better off to just keep going rather than reset every time you reach the ticket cap (or 1/2 the ticket cap, the way you would if you were deeply interested in tickets/time).

If you do this, your pure inf generated starts to outweigh the potential in market fees you would generate selling ticket-generated drops.

Note too that this effect doesn't include any ticket spending behaviors that serve to reduce market interaction (and thus fees). For example, you can spend your tickets on direct purchases or rare or uncommon salvage, on common IO recipes. You can also convert literally dozens of random drop equivalent rolls into one shot at a pool C/D rare, the effects of which are hard for me to imagine how to quantify.

I'd probably say influence spent / gained at WWs is not new money in the game - someone else made that and transferred it to you in exchange for an item. Defeating mobs and selling to vendors is the only real way to generate influence that was not there before.

A person's personal revenue can skyrocket, but actual new influence generated is still pretty small on a single toon. Farmers who multi box are the ones that truly generate new influence in this game and raise the ceiling of personal wealth, though AE has moved the normal crowds into more influence generating content which I would have to think raised the floor on 'average' player wealth.

Assuming that players will get 1.5 million influence for a run of a mission and no drops in AE, if the mission is ran twice an hour that is 3 million new influence per toon, or 24 million per team per hour. That is probably a lieutenant farm, a boss farm is more likely to generate 4 million per toon per run and take longer on most teams so maybe only one run an hour. That would be 32 million per team per hour in new influence.

Either way, it would stand to reason that there is about 5-10 billion new influence generated daily. There is your inflation factor - not us ebil marketeers.

Lohenien- even the AE is not pure new money. Because even there, you're generating the max tickets, which will get turned into SOMETHING that gets sold on Wents.

Taking your 8-character AE run- I have no data points so I'm using your numbers - you'd generate "max" tickets. I think that's 1500 per run; someone please correct that number, because if it's right that's a fluke.

If we turn those tickets into rare salvage, making the huge simplification that "everything costs about the same, so there's a constant ticket-to-inf ratio" and we turn that rare salvage into inf at one salvage to 1 million inf (another simplification), we get 540 tickets: 1 million inf, or about 3 million inf per run per person. This burns 300,000 inf per run per person. 600K per person per hour, or 4.8 million for the team. So that 24 million of "new inf" is actually only 19 million; if you get a better deal for your tickets, it's considerably less. And if you do the boss run you burn about 2.4 million inf and make about 32 million.

So 80-90% "new money" instead of 20%. . . subject to better data, of course. (I think 540 merits of bronze rolls sells for probably a lot more than a million inf. )

@Fulmens: Interesting musings, although I'm not sure of the point or
direction you're going.

In any case, I'll add a thought here as well.

I think you may well be underestimating the first 1/3 of income
generation, and consequently "new money". I suspect it's distinctly
higher than that.

My rationale: L50 Farmer gets (off the top of my head) 5-10K influence for
simple minion/Lt kills. So, using an average of 7500, I come up with 133-
134 kills per million "new inf" straight up.

I don't know the time translation, but I'm betting a good farm toon on
the right map can burn 130+ mobs pretty quickly.

Now, the next piece is purely playstyle and mindset, but, consider:

* Lots of folks don't like the market (based on the bias we often read here).

* An L50 common IO recipe vends for 100K - a tray is a full million in "new money"
(if vended).

While we *marketeers* may craft, for a pure farmer (or market-hater) a
quick vending would be more normal than dealing with the overhead of
crafting just to eke out a few hundred K more influence.

From a farming perspective, I think they'd treat it much like Bronze Rolls -
ie. just vend unless one of the "good" ones drop. So, all of that is additional
"new money" with no fee "leakage" (if you will).

Under those conditions, for a farmer playstyle, I'd anticipate a much higher
percentage of "new money" generated than you may be estimating...


Regards,
4

Is the effect of people taking recipes and salvage placed at below vendor price on the market and vendoring them totally negligible?

I'm thinking that considering all items posted on WW as a loss to the economy only might not be accurate if you post a 5 inf and someone sells it to a vendor for 250. I know I start many of my characters out doing this for enough to buy some DOs and cheap IOs.

I don't think it is enough to alter your numbers in any meaningful way, but I figured I'd mention it.

Just throwing some numbers that could possibly help, 8 man spawn, lvl 54 bosses with 2 lvl 50's on the map was droppin ~75k a kill, approx 12 per mob. The map i ran yielded 146 mil on dxp, for 73 mil, pure new inf. I am sure that is the absolute max that can be earned by a 2 man team.

its an interesting idea, if you need some kind of numbers i can try to help if possible.

I've always wanted to post this but never really could One thing to keep in mind is the difference between a change in the money level and rampant unchecked inflation. I don't think I've seen anyone confuse the two but I've always wanted to post this The 10% fee keeps the second from occuring. Simply, players cannot/will not produce enough Inf to make each item cost 2 Billion and burn 200 million in fees.

An increase in Inf relative to items is one thing. That's like changing from Earth orbit to Saturn Orbit. There's just more Inf in the system. There's "rising prices" going from one position to the other but eventually it will stop.



Rampant inflation is another thing. That's more and more inf being produced and always existing. If there was no 10% fee this would occur. It's like a spiraling orbit always getting larger. There's no end.

New-to-me data!

I don't know if there have been significant changes since march in player behavior, and TopDoc is one of the top 1% most efficient farmers I imagine, but here's what I get out of the first post, if I'm reading it right (new boards = munged data format):

Cash and common IO recipes: 73 million + 29 million = 102 million.
Regular recipes, purple recipes and salvage ("Extra inf"): 384,174 million.

Fees on selling "Extra inf" at Wents: 38.4 million.
Inf introduced into system = 102 -38 = 64 million inf per (approximately) 486 million.

So 1 inf "new money" per 8 inf in the pocket of the farmer.

If we use my "flipping term" then we burn an extra 38 million and that 64 million becomes 26 million.

And we have a 5% expansion of the money supply, or 50 million inf per billion inf generated.

If we assume the same ratios without purples, we would get 102 million new inf, 142 million sold at Wents (+ 142 million flipped) and we'd get 102 -14.2 -14.2 = 74 million new inf per 244 million in the pocket of the farmer, or roughly 1 in 3.

Interesting.