infamy/influence cap

Yep, but it was also created with the goal of providing a roughly parallel leveling experience to doing "standard" content. Remove XP from the missions and not only will it directly go back on the design goals set for it, but it'll also turn the MA into another ignored niche.

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Not to mention there is a game box on store shelves that states that it is possible to go 1-50 doing only architect content. If they make that not possible, then those boxes sitting on shelves are false advertising and NCsoft can be sued. Somehow, I don't think they want to open themselves up to that.

Again I say, taking XP out of the MA will have next to no impact on how those who have a clue farm. For the purposes of this example, "farmer" and "PLer" are not conducive. Farmers use the MA for tickets, inf and prestige, so a lack of XP will not impact their activities in the slightest. Taking XP out of the AE entirely will, however, create only two groups who still use the AE:

- Those who want non-canon distractions, RP fodder, etc
- Farmers

As for the MArc babies - is it annoying to get hit with a tell or see Broadcast hammered with questions about how the game works? Maybe. Then again, I'd argue that these people are trying to learn the game's "normal" content, even if it's somewhat out of order, and slamming them for PLing their characters instead of offering a hand only serves to drive them back into the AE, instead of further filling out PUG teams, SGs and the like. From their perspective, the AE was at least friendly and somewhat accommodating, where those outside of it are grumps who yell at and condemn them for wanting to know how to fly, or get to a specific zone. Everyone was new to this game at one point or another, and none of us came into it as vets. Personally, I think it's wonderful that we have so many new people around.

This seems like the point where I start getting the "How to play the game the 'right™' way" argument, but since that's entirely subjective, I won't get into that. Everyone has a slightly different 'right' way to play, and short of exploits, I don't see a wrong way.

Frankly, I don't see where any one player has a right to "force a casual player" to do anything. It's their money, they can play how they like.

I run a top 10 VG on Freedom helping people or showing the ropes about this game has never been an issue for me. I do also agree there is a difference between farming and PL'ing. It's the AE pl'ng that needs some help.

1-50 in AE almost means for the new casual player that they don't understand the game or how to play their shiny new unslotted 50. It has gotten so bad that on some teams I now see leaders checking badges and booting people off the team so it can run "efficient" so in turn it's off to the rtm'ers to buy inf to slot the shiny new 50.

That is how outside of AE game play when I dump my 60-80 salvage on the market (which I list for 1) I avg 2 mill for common and uncommon salvage. I don't even play the market anymore been there done that.

They "AE baby " if you will has what has destroyed the supply and demand ratio on the market driving prices so high that it is just way to easy for a more experienced gamer to make 2 bill inf in a very short time, thus the need to raise the cap.

This!

As long as anyone at or above the new cap would be allowed to keep what the currently have... they just couldn't spend it if they ever wanted to have 2 billion again.

Even higher than that. If you make two duplicate 2 billion bids for an item, they'll stack. Do this 10 times, to have a stack of ten 2 billion inf bids. Do this for 20 of your auction slots, then fill the last one with a 2 billion inf bid. Then, add in the 2 billion you have on hand, and you get the grand total of 404 billion.

And when someone reaches the 66 month badge, this will go up to 424 billion.

But if you place ten bids on the same item, you can't cancel just one of those ten. You cancel all ten at the same time, giving you 20 billion inf, which means 18 billion gets discarded because of the cap. Whether you put 2 or 10 or 20 billion into one auction house slot, you can only get 2 billion out.

All I'm seeing in this statement is unsupported opinion.

So moving it to the BM - Why would it do this any more than otherwise? Surely that's the preferred means of transferring them or do you mean RTM - in which case why not say so.

Surely doing so would increase communication rather than diminish it in any event as you would have some price history - albeit that it is a simple matter to artificially either raise or lower this (Probably expensive to do so for purples I'll grant)
Making brash statements to that effect with nothing to back them up doesn't help anyone.

From your statement you appear to be the one who doesn't understand how the BM works - you won't be able to bid higher than the cap as you need to hold the inf to bid it. With private sales you could go higher but most people aren't going to want to transfer those sums to the seller between multiple characters and run the risk of one or other party scamming.

As far as I'm aware the 2 billion INF cap has been in place since the beginning of the game. The cap on how much INF you can trade per trade has been increased twice. That started out at 9,999 INF, was raised to 99,999 INF then finally raised to 999,999,999 INF when the markets were established. But the overall cap of 2 billion has never changed.

The Leader badge (the badge for earning 2 billion INF from combat) has been around for many years as well. I suspect the Devs decided having a 2 billion INF cap and having the top INF badge go for 2 billion matched up well enough "round-number" wise to have both of those values remain the same for so long.

Well first off I never advocated lowering the 2 billion INF cap.
I'm one of the people who think its serving its purpose at its current value well enough as it is.

As to those people who are tricking the market in order to horde more than 2 billion INF I have no problem with that either. If anything that shows there's really no reason for the game to raise the 2 billion cap because there is a workaround for those few people who really want to do that.

There's always going to be a few top end farmers who manage to horde ungodly amounts of INF but fortunately the number of people doing that is very tiny and basically insignificant economically speaking. Raising the 2 billion cap for everyone would make inflation rise in general because that would enable/encourage far more people to join the 2+ billion club than exists now.

Basically 99.9% of the player population has no need to be able to horde more than 2 billion INF and the remaining 0.1% have a way to manipulate the market to manage it anyway. Why should the Devs change anything?

He means it would move to a black market (no caps) meaning trade between players outside of the normal WW/BM channels not The Black Market (with caps) the physical market in game for villians. If you have a price cap on the market then for any item where the natural sale price (i.e. the price it is now with no cap) is higher than the cap then the supply of them on the market will almost instantly drop. This is because there will be significantly more people willing to pay that price for them than there are items available. So for any player wanting to actually purchase one of these items they have the option of placing a capped bid on the market and waiting in line with large numbers of other users in the hope that someone will eventually list one or purchasing it off market (on the "black market" [no caps]). Purchasing on the black market will generally result in paying a higher price since it's harder to get competing bids.

You may wish to read the wikipedia article on Price Ceilings:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_ceiling

Oh, I know. The inf isn't actually *usable* after you put it in there. But the point of having that much inf isn't spending it.

Bingo. Right on the money, as it were. If the most expensive thing in the game can be bought in the CH for 100K, what's to stop me from buying all of them and selling them in a private channel or broadcast for 100M apiece? Installing an artificial price cap would only make things worse.

Absolutely right. And if there weren't enough complaints about 'market manipulators' (LOL), hoo boy, there'll be coming out of the woodwork when they can't get cheap items from the legitimate markets and balk at the prices (no caps) black marketeers charge.

they are also lowering if you have less than 18 powers. I dont find fighting overpowered mobs for mediocre rewards to be fun. I have a feeling many others feel the same way.

Not entirely true, you can also opt to set the mobs to hard or extreme in which case they will award full XP while having fewer than 18 powers.

That was the inf cap for trades that they've raised.

You can trade more than you can hold, in fact

Unless people start going "I'll sell a purple for five LotG sets" etc. There are ways around price caps like that.
Haxxors for profit

Only if you choose "Custom" power assignments. vs Standard/hard/Extreme.

As i only really do MA on my 50s (appart for HoF and devs choice) for tickets/rolls...and then only make missions with all 3 basic types...rather than boss/lt only spawns i'm happy with this...as the change to harder diff will make up for this...and as I only ever get prestige, inf and tickets it's not a worry...as long as I get 1500 tickets/30-45 min run when i'm bored i'll be happy. I only really do it on an alt after doing the orob to the full anyway.

This.

Something needs to be done to keep inflation in check. Right now the game is in hyperinflation mode. When this happens in real life (Germany during the 30s, Turkey and several other countries in the 90s) serious economic dislocations occur.

The cap is artificial and isn't a "solution" to hyperinflation. But raising it is the wrong answer -- inflation will continue to skyrocket unabated. If people have the time and inclination the price of purples will continue to rise to 5, 10 or 20 billion. The only thing that will stop it is the number of hours in the day that people have to farm influence. And if enough people are willing to buy influence from the spammers even that won't stop the inflation.

The devs are making changes in I16 to stop AE missions from giving exorbitant experience and infamy. In essence, they're forcing arc writers to structure the enemy groups in AE missions along the same lines as dev-created enemy groups: to get the same xp as dev mobs, you have to create mobs with the same rules that dev mobs are created.

Hyperinflation in the market is a bad thing. Like in real life, it can lead to a total economic collapse. For example, if the price of common salvage and uncommon recipes were to continue to soar into the tens of millions, and only dedicated farmers could afford to buy anything on the market, it could cause a major collapse of the subscriber base. If the majority of the player base believes they are completely locked out of the things they want, they'll leave the game. And that won't be good for farmers because a drastic collapse in subscriber numbers will mean no more improvements and new content, and the eventual death of the game.

Finally, increasing the cap would result in a lot of bugs. Remember how long it took to get numeric separators into all the places where influence/infamy was displayed? Using numbers greater than 2 billion may require using a special numeric type that's not directly supported in the programming language the game is written in. The bug would most likely manifest itself by some odd influence transaction that lopped off the top part of your influence. For example, if you had 23 billion influence and bought 10 billion from a spammer, a likely bug would result in you having only 1 billion after the transaction instead of 33 billion. Considering what you were doing, you'd be unlikely to report this bug and you'd just be out 32 billion.

Well first off I disagree that the game is in a state of hyperinflation, prices seem to be pretty stable at the moment. But in any case even if it was it wouldn't kill of the in game economy it would simply shift it to a barter system instead (possibly with some item becoming a de facto currency). The problem is that inf actually has very little inherent value since it's only uses are buying SOs, crafting IOs and paying the market tax so if inf prices on the market did go into hyperinflation people would simply trade directly with each other for items bypassing the market altogether.

A good example of a computer game where this happened is Diablo 2. Gold was basically worthless in the game so an unofficial economy sprang up that used a unique item called The Stone of Jordan as a form of currency.