Influence sinks - brainstorming thread

City of Heroes has an inflationary economy. It's a fact of life - with each passing day, the amount of influence present in the game outweighs the amount of goods, either from influence earned by defeating enemies or selling drops to stores {also removing said goods from the system}. There are positive and negative sides to this - the positive is that, with influence more readily on hand, it's that much easier to purchase goods or services with a fixed price, such as, well, anything sold by NPCs. However, the downside is that any economic resource becomes less valuable the more available it is, the prices goods are offered for by other players steadily go up. Money becomes less and less valuable and accumulating enough to match the rising prices becomes more and more difficult. Thus there emerges a need to remove influence from the system, one that is not currently matched by the presently available sinks, i.e.

Enhancement stores
Hero Corps Field Analysts
Inspiration vendors
Influence to prestige conversion
Auction house fees
Crafting fees

Thus, I present this thread to offer your solutions for the inexorable pressure of in-game inflation.

An open letter to NCsoft

Here are five ideas. Not all are practical, nor do I necessarily support. However, they are offered as a point of discussion.

1) It's been suggested, but raising the 'tax' on items in the markets would reduce inflation. I don't like the idea for personal reasons (I like making inf), but it would help.

2) The issue 16 difficulty slider will help a little bit as people begin tweaking it and changing difficulty. You will spend a small bit tweaking this at level 50 to your individual tastes.

3) If purchasing prestige was more appealing I'd be more inclined to do so. Right now the exchange rate is rather horrid, and I have no desire to really add any more prestige to my personal base. Lowering the cost of purchasing prestige would be nice.

4) Allowing invention enhancements to be reslottable would help increase supply by those that decide they don't like a particular build.

5) Reducing the influence earnings per kill would help quell influence creation. As we get drops and whatnot, we can sell those to make the majority of our income. Many players already do this, but it is still very easy to earn 5-10 million inf from kills alone in the course of normal gameplay.

Fulmens has done an analysis on the amount of inf bounght into the game by a non-AE farmer. It makes for an interesting read at least (scroll down and read his later posts as well since they include newer numbers).
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=185866

In regards to actual suggestions I think Tonality hit the main ones. However the only ones that would really work are 1 and 5. I don't think 2 and 3 will have much long term effect on the amount of influence in game (although 3 might help if base raiding comes back). I really don't see the devs implementing 4 just because it really goes against the whole enhancement system.

I think that 1 is the best option the problem is that increasing it to much slows down the market and leads to people selling off market for higher profits. It would also drive up the costs on crafted enhancements as the crafters pass the extra costs on to consumers. For sets this probably wouldn't be a huge issue but I think it would huts the common IO market.

5 would actually be my preference since it scales extremely well with the amount of farming being done (and encourages farmers to go after drops rather than inf which makes non-AE farming more attractive). The problem is that this has a strong potential to hurt the casual players who never use the market. To compensate I think that either an increase would be needed in the price that vendors pay for salvage and set IO recipes or a decrease in the store prices for TO/DO/SO enhancements (or both).

Hmm. The prestige purchases might actually be a very good idea. The system seems completely unused to the best of my knowledge, but on the other hand, prestige is always in demand.

Can someone run this by me - influence to prestige rate is dropped from 500:1 to 100:1. That means one point of prestige per every hundred influence given to the exchange office. That makes the system more appealing to use, influence is removed from the system, but prestige is introduced instead.

Prestige is in turn used for supergroup building and, to minute extent, maintenance. But the thing is - bases, for the most part, don't do anything. Yes, you can outfit them with teleport pads, hospitals and empowerment stations, but when all is said and done, they are both status symbols and a simple, yet powerful "cool factor". Everybody wants their own secret lair, and even if it has little practical use, the appeal of a sandbox environment can't be overstated - hell, look at the Sims.

On the other hand, the rate of prestige gain is fixed throughout all levels. You gain the same amount for a minion whether you're at Lv1 or Lv50, which means that there is always a shortage of prestige, thus fueling the perceived need. Want more prestige? Well, there's those five hundred million influence burning a hole in your pocket, what could it hurt to pimp out your secret crib? Bam. Prestige in, influence out, and that much closer to a balancing point between "money" and "stuff".

I dunno. Anyone see any major flaws with this idea?

An open letter to NCsoft

I am not fond of money sinks in MMOs. They tend to be priced well above the actual "value" of what is received when compared to the actual market. WoW is classic example of this, with money being spent every time you train, large amounts being expended on mounts, massive amounts being invested into guilds in the form of guild bank slots, 1000G just to unlock a second slot, increasing amounts spent for respecing, etc.

All of these are very effective money sinks, but they also make certain things difficult (or impossible) to attain for the casual player. I respect the fact that NC Soft has done all they can to make the game as fun and interesting for the casual player as it is for the addicts. I have no desire to see it turned into anything even resembling WoW.

That being said, one thing I have seen done is dynamic vendor pricing. It takes quite a bit of tweaking to get it right, but once it is done, it is quite effective in keeping the player market inflation in check.

A simple form of this would work like this. You go and you sell something to a vendor, the price of that item increases. You buy something from a vendor, and the price goes up slightly. This is especially handy if you allow the vendor a temporary "inventory". Say you sell a basic salvage to a vendor. The vendor then has 1 of that item to sell to someone else. You sell 10, and the vendor has a limited quantity of 10.

Now the temporary inventory would be vendor specific, however, the vendor pricing would be server-wide. This means you wouldn't be any better off selling 10 of the same salvage to 10 different vendors than you would be selling them all to one. This also ensures that it is impossible to create a situation where you can buy from one vendor and sell to another for a higher profit. The fact that this can already be done with the BM/WW is NOT the same thing. The BM/WW has a limited quantity of items available. Vendors (as they are now) have a bottomless supply.

A more complex method of the system would involve monitoring the flow of influence on a server. As the amount of influence in circulation increased, vendor pricing would increase, as it decreased, vendor prices would drop. This could even be done cross server, but this may unfairly hurt the servers with smaller populations.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".

Fulmens has done an analysis on the amount of inf bounght into the game by a non-AE farmer.

Yep, that's the first thread that popped up when I looked up "inflationary", and yeah, looks well written.

I don't see the idea of raising the market fees ending well - the primary purpose of the market seems to be the exchange of items between those who have them and those who want them, with influence simply being an intermediate facilitator and current fees being there to limit manipulations on behalf of the sellers {and an open market might work better, but that's a topic for another thread}. Cranking up the penalties for the market's use would just make it less used.

As for reducing influence gain from defeated enemies, it would cause major problems for casual players who don't want to play the market - I remember the pre-invention days where you were hard-pressed to even DO-out, let alone SO, and let me tell ya, it wasn't pretty.

An open letter to NCsoft

Garielle, keep in mind that most of the influence now goes through the markets in form of salvage and recipe trade, and with the fact that IOs never expire, there's that much less need to spend influence on replacing them. You can play well enough with store-bought enhancements, but the financial step between generic enhancements and IOs keeps growing.

Adeon, the point is the balance between perceived needs - you don't really need that IO, but you want it. You don't really need a teleport to Striga Isle, but you want it anyway. The difference is that, with the latter, money is taken out of the system, making what money remains in it that much more valuable. And yeah, the exact exchange rate might need some tweaking until it settles on a balance between "worth the cost" and "can't buy everything".

An open letter to NCsoft

Maybe tailor could sell some special auras and other costume pieces for some inf. and sixth costume slot for great influ/infamy.

Eh, that would only make it available to a select few. We need something constant.

An open letter to NCsoft

I would like to see 'fun' temp powers sold for inf.

Like.. I remember in EQ2 they had vet fireworks. I would love to see fun firework powers that could be bought for inf. They wouldn't exactly do anything in combat, but pretty lightshows.. like, 1000 inf for a small basic firework, 2500 for a medium 10,000 for a large fancy one.. you could buy them and they would stack.

I dont know about anyone else, but I would probably spend hundreds of k on these things, and just fire them off i AP for fun..

oops, I posted a new thread before I saw this one.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=187580

synopsis: inf degrades over time...

The exchange rate for prestige and indeed buying prestige at all is not a solution. While even large SGs in the beginning need large amounts of prestige to get going, once they are going to cost virtually nothing to run. I earn enough Prestige in one play session to cover my base's rent for a whole month (or three). That is with all but one of the total allowed storage items.

I am in effectively a single person SG (some friends who no longer play much still have alts in there).

To make inf > prestige an effective sink they'd need to add something to SGs to remove the prestige in larger amounts than it does currently. And while returning rent/base construction costs to what they were would do that to an extent then it would remove the ability of small SGs from making nice bases. Another point to remember is that items placed in a base (normal stuff) can be sold for the same cost.

I agree something needs to be done but I don't think Inf > Prestige exchange will make any difference regardless of the actual exchange rate.

If Player Apartments were implemented, and purchased/upgraded/maintained through $Inf (not Prestige), that could remove quite a bit from the system, couldn't it?

But actually I dont think inflation is so big problem. If you must pay more inf for recipe, you still get more inf from drops. So situation is about same.

I have a few of my own suggestions:

More purchasable temp powers: I'm thinking origin related (but not exclusive) ones that you can buy at enhancement stores, they should be very useful enough to encourage people to buy them regularly, keep the charges and times limited to keep them coming back and purchasing, and try to avoid making them game breakers.

Special paid transportation method: with scaling inf price as you level higher, basically, a special one-way teleport system like say in... Mercy and Galaxy city that would basically send you to any of the zones without level restriction. And to make it more appealing Redside, there could be multiple locations where you could be dropped off per-map.

Purchasable costume pieces: already mentioned and I support this.

Purchasable base items: on that train of thought, this might be nice too, especially, you know, they did something useful.

Badges: We have badges for gaining inf, let's have some badges for spending inf at places besides WW.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

I liked the system they had in Hellgate: London, where characters could pay gold into a pool, and when enough accumulated it applied a random server-wide buff for a fixed period of time to all characters online. Characters who donated especially generously had their names announced in-game, too, I think.

I don't know how well it would work in CoX, but it was definitely used by the players in Hellgate.

I don't think any of these suggestions accomplish anything other than removing some "sticker shock" feelings players get. Perhaps there will be a small affect on a small portion of the player base. However, most of these suggestions will not make it easier for players to obtain items. Most of these suggestions will not make more players have access to items.

(copy/paste)
One thing to keep in mind is the difference between a change in the money level and rampant unchecked inflation. 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. Prices in CoH will not continue to rise indefinitely.

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. This is what we have in game today. It may be a large change and it may still be changing 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. This does not occur in City of Heroes.



If sticker shock is really such a big deal they should simply knock off a digit on everything and round up. That will make all the numbers appear smaller. That's all that most of these suggestions accomplish.

Part of the problem is that the sheer number of currencies in used in the game has expanded over the past few issues, without in-game tethers in the forms of vendors, that result in wide discrepancies in their usefulness.

The price of almost all invention set recipes is pegged to one in-game currency: reward merits. No matter how crazy the AH prices get, I know that by saving merits I will be able to buy what I need outright.

The price of rare and uncommon salvage is pegged to another in-game currency: architect tickets. I always know how many tickets I will need to get any rare or uncommon salvage I require.

But the only thing that's pegged to the value of inf is SOs and generic IO recipes. I know I can always buy a SO with inf, or a generic IO recipe from the table, using inf. As a result of these pegs, generic IO recipes typically sell for below their purchase value at the AH, and most SOs sell very much below their purchase value.

The value of inf needs also to be pegged against common salvage and set IO recipes by allowing their purchase at ingame stores for a fixed price of influence. It is axiomatic that common salvage prices at the AH are grossly excessive to an extent that should not be countenanced, by anybody. If a piece of level 10 common 10-25 invention salvage sells for 5000 inf on the auction house, and a level 10 player gets 10 inf per minion defeated, this means that the player is going to have to defeat 500 minions to afford it. And most low level arcane salvage goes for well above that price. Current prices encourage RMT and the sort of play the devs consider improper.

<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison

Back to the intent of the thread, brainstorming inf sinks: one of the things I'd like to see in the game would be "prestige" costume pieces that are sold by the tailors but are expensive.

The problem with costumes is that there's a portion of the player population that feels they should be entitled to every costume piece and they'll strenuously object to costumes being attached to booster packs, vet rewards, TF completions, etc. And they'd throw a tizzy over high cost items available only from the tailor too.

Of course the bigger problem with costumes is that NCsoft has seen that players will part with real money for them in the form of microtransactions! While I'm sure they'd like to create more inf sinks, I'm sure that the thought of sacrificing real revenue to create an inf sink wouldn't sit too well with top management!