Is buying prestinge wrong?

You can get Prestige by low level farming much, much faster than you'll ever get by buying it.

They really do need to fix that exchange rate. It's a relic out an outdated version of the game... but devs hate bases so what can ya do.

Nothing wrong with buying prestige with influence as long as the influence used is earned in the game. As soon as RMT comes into it, it becomes a problem.

Buying prestige is a huge boon to the small 1 or 2 person SGs that can't rack up prestige quickly, but CAN earn lots of influence, whether by farming, playing the market, or even a couple lucky drops that sell for a lot.

To sum up:

Buying prestige with influence: No problem
Buying influence with real money to fund it: Problem

In regards to the 50 billion estimate spent on buying that much prestige.

It's not uncommon anymore for a character to routinely have a billion influence or more. If the rival SG has several characters sitting on that much money it's feasible for them to grind part of that total, and spend influence on the rest.

I understand the suspicion of RMT being used to fund it, just pointing out that it IS possible to have that much influence across an entire SG without resorting to RMT.

I think you need to understand why the option is there in the first place and why the exchange rate is so high. First, a little history lesson. Prior to Issue 6, there was no such thing as Prestige and there were no SG bases. In fact, even after Issue 6 came out, if you didn't buy CoV, you couldn't enter SG bases, even on the Hero side. Since the invention system and market came even later, there was no way for high level heroes to spend their influence except passing it on to other people. As a result, there were many many heroes who had been amassing billions of infamy for years, quite literally.

While City of Villains (Issue 6) was still in beta, many heroes commented it would be nice if they could use some of their amassed fortune to help out their supergroup and get a nice base built up. After all, at that point, they still had nothing else to spend the money on.

With base raiding being active during the beta, this was, as you can imagine, met with some resistance from the red side, and rightfully so. Being able to convert influence to prestige would put the Heroes at a severe advantage in base raids. This would make it much more difficult for items of power to be stolen from blue side bases than from red side bases. Keep in mind, many of the Items of Power provided considerable boosts in accuracy, defense, damage, resistance, etc for any SG member running in SG mode. That means all of this translated into an upper hand in any and all PvP situations.

When they ultimately implemented the system, they decided to make the conversion rate high enough that any advantage would be minimal. That's why the conversion rate is 500 Inf = 1 Prestige.

Now, taking all that into consideration, I agree with the idea of buying prestige for influnce/infamy. It takes large chunks of Inf out of circulation which controls inflation. Yes, I know the market prices are high at the moment, but it would be worse if there were not money sinks like this. What I do have an issue with is people buying influence for cash. It's a vile practice, and those who buy or sell infamy should be banned from the game.

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".

Your competitors COULD have been using RMT. Or they could have one or two guys who are market-smart.

Pardon me while I sound like a big jerk:

I made, in six weeks, something like seven billion influence- mostly buy/craft/resell- starting with two billion. One person, one account.

I was not actually in the market for profit; I was attempting to remove 10 billion inf from the game. 10% fees, turning into prestige (matching other people's donations), and (small amounts) getting crafting badges.

Presumably if I'd been TRYING to make money, instead of trying to burn it in large quantities, I'd have made more than that.

An additional point: During the last double XP I sold over a hundred pieces of common salvage for over 900K each. I went out to the AE and got 120 pieces heroside and 120 pieces villainside and put em up for sale to see who was in that much of a hurry. "Lots of people", it turns out.

If you gave me twenty people and a month, I'd have a lot more than fifty billion, I can tell you that. (Especially if they were willing to PLAY as well.) And no Real Money would be harmed in the making of it.

I am thankful that you can convert inf to prestige. I was making a mess of my SGmates base with all my crafting and marketing, so I splintered off into a solo base, and if I hadn't be able to convert ~3 billion to prestige I would have a sad little base. I now have a big boy base with all the storage and t-porters ... and now get to complain about needing more salvage storage space

I don't think the conversion rate is too high, it just forces you to make a choice, how bad do you want base stuff Vs personal stuff ( or how long till you have it all)