GR Market Info from Hero-Con

This is an excellent point.

I'd be willing to wager that the factions have similar ratios of players at the inf cap, players who have a billion inf, players who have 500 million, etc etc.

The perceived monetary superiority of heroes is a function of a larger population, nothing else. If servers had their own markets Freedom would appear vastly wealthier than, say, Protector. And yet a shared market benefits both parties.

This is exactly the case, which makes the continued insistance on a seperate market assinine.

The only convincing arguments I've seen on this delved into some relatively sophisticated views of the two game sides as economies with different production efficiencies. For example, if villains as a population were less good at producing merits per-capita, they might then produce less per-capita pool C/D recipes. In a merged market, they would use their inf , (which they would not necessarily be less efficient at producing), and buy pool C/D recipes from heroes. If the villains didn't have anything they were better at producing than heroes, this would create a net flow of money out of the villain system and into the hero one, raising per-capita wealth of heroes compared to villains.

I have never felt that this particular example was especially likely to actually materialize, but I couldn't back that up with much evidence. However, in the modern environment, I feel these imbalanced flows are actually actively countered by the availability of shared TFs and things like the AE in the RWZ. More compelling for the future, though, is that in GR, villains (specifically, Rogues) will actually be able to team with heroes in pure hero content, if not initiate it themselves (still unclear). This will actually give villains many of (if not all of) the same per-capita market good production facilities that heroes have access to, and vice versa.

This makes me feel that these imbalanced flow scenarios are no longer significant barriers to merged markets.

Another point about merged markets that gets brought up is that the devs may fear it will turn out horribly, but they can't undo it once it's done. (By which they mean it would be a colossal PITA to undo that the dev's wouldn't want to try to do.)

While it might be true that unmerging the markets would be an unmanageable pain, that doesn't mean they can't merge them in a way that allows them to mitigate some major imbalanced trade scenario. They could introduce conversion rates between infamy and influence. If you create a net flow of infamy out of villains then you raise the conversion rate so that infamy is worth more influence. Villains then need to spend less inf to get pool C/D goods from heroes, and presumably you can approach some degree of equilibrium. You have to keep this sort of trade ratio's value updated, and that isn't necessarily trivial, but it does counter the argument that you are irrevocably screwed if you merge the market and it doesn't do what you want.

All good points.

Also, I'll add that any character can start with nothing, never get a reward merit, and load up on influence by flipping or crafting, working their way into incredibly profitable niches. I've been able to do this on several characters, so it's mystifying to me that heroes could somehow keep villains out.

Although, merging the markets would affect a lot of things, including available niches.

It isn't convincing to me and never has been, because it operates on the flawed premise that villians are disadvantaged at soloing.

It's been made fairly clear that drops (and therefore wealth generation) are better when soloing than when teamed.

There are no villian AT Primary/Secondary combinations that aren't capable of soloing at a decent speed (as a way of measuring; at or very near the mean amount of time for story arc completion as used to determine merit awards). The converse, however, is not true. There are several combinations on the hero side that either lack the raw damage out put (some controller and defender combinations) or the survivability (blasters having long activation times in the primary power set when not paired with a mitigation heavy secondary, notably, AR and Sonic) especially outside IO sets, to solo at speed.

Soloing's affect on drops doesn't factor in to merits and pool C/D drops, which is the one place I think this argument may have mattered. Because villain content is shorter, the variation from the median completion time tends to be smaller. Hero content, as long and obnoxious as it can be, actually offers more opportunities for shortcutting, meaning savvy players can often deviate more from the median time and earn more merits. This isn't always true, but I find it true a meaningful amount of the time.

There are also factors that reduce the amount of non-TF teaming on villains. Population is a big one, an the solo-friendly nature of the villain ATs reinforces it. This likely reduces the overall aggregate merit production rate, as a shared (and not divided) reward.

Only for Pool A, E or respecs.

However, I think this distinction becomes essentially moot in GR. A Rogue will be able to run hero content, with all it's opportunities for increased merit efficiency.

While all this may be true merits are not a "true" source of wealth because the "real" value of a pool C/D recipe is it's vendor value. That is all the real inf that is being created. Sure more inf can be transferred from one player to another by selling but the real wealth is generated by defeating mobs and vendoring Common IO recipes especially for a toon that has that particular recipe memorized and things like the SOs that drop. Every thing else is just transferring inf around with a 10% cut being eliminated per transaction.

When I did Cat's original 1 hour challenge on my 50's (which is where the majority of wealth is created) 25-33% of my total income in a 1 hour period was from vendoring things that I wasn't going to be using and the lion's share of that was common IO recipes.

The vendor value on goods is where inf is created. A good that is consumed has no real value in the terms of inf or wealth as it has been used up. (Think in the tems of food. Unspoiled unconsumed food has value. It's by product doesn't except as fertilizer.) At that point the IO that has been produced may have intrinsic value depending on what atribute it enhances or set bonuses it provides but it's "real" value in terms of influence when sold during a respec is usually much lower than the sum of it's parts. It's ability to generate wealth is then more difficult to determine.

New influence is only created when goods are sold to a vendor, mobs are defeated, or non-AE missions are completed. Anything else is simply transferring existing inf around.

In terms of actual wealth generation from soloing, villians have an advantage over several hero AT combinations and are on an equal footing with the rest.

In terms of merit generation it should be equivalent since merits are a time based reward.

If the vendoring of uncommon and rare recipes was a meaningful means of creating inf, I would agree. When a +0 minion produces nearly as much inf as vending an uncommon recipe, an even level LT produces more than vendoring a rare, and a vending common IO produces nearly 10x as much inf as vending a rare, I cannot possibly see the relevance of the tiny amount of inf created by people vending recipes (or salvage).

The radically immense preponderance of inf created in this game is created by the defeat of level 45+ mobs, vending of level 45+ common recipes, and completion of level 45+ missions. Everything else is like a snowball thrown into the antarctic wilderness. If, tomorrow, we lost the ability to vend uncommons, rares, and salvage at NPCs, I don't think the overall market effect would even be perceivable.

When we play this game, we generate two distinct categories of reward - currency (inf) and goods (recipes, salvage, and enhancements). The overwhelming majority of currency is created through mob defeats. Vending common recipes is a distant 2nd place. Completing missions is probably a more distant 3rd place for non farmers. Vending SO/DO/TOs is likely an outrageously distant 4th place.

Vending uncommon and common rares is almost certainly in last place taken across the playerbase. First, it's the smallest absolute reward per item vended, worse even than SOs. Second, the majority of goods are not vended, but likely sold on the market or deleted outright. (The currency generated by selling an uncommon or rare recipe is meaningless at nearly every level when compared to that generated by simply defeating foes, so it's common for ones that aren't worth selling on the market to simply be deleted.)

So, again, I just don't get why you talking about the intrinsic value of the recipes. No one I know plays the game worrying or even thinking about the NPC vendor value of uncommon or rare, recipes, or salvage. People generate gobs of currency every other way possible, then give it to one another in exchange those goods.

Let's say we have two sides, A and B. Both are equally capable of generating lots of inf by defeating mobs, etc., but side A is getting a recipe drop side B isn't but both sides want. Side B is going to send money to side A for those drops. That's going to increase the per-capita inf supply of side A. If that wealth actually spreads around it will eventually allowing side A to bid higher on that contested good. Side B will have to send more inf to side A to continue to outbid them.

Things only spread around evenly if both sides are producing the same per-capita rate of goods and the same per-capita rate of inf at roughly comparable rates.

Because it's so small, the "intrinsic" value of the drop is washed out by market sale prices of desirable goods. If there's anyone out there dumb enough to vend the this contested recipe, they're basically just reducing net supply of that good - the decrease in net inf supply is negligible.

Yes, and my example was about transferring inf around.

I think that, taken as a whole, heroes and villains are roughly equal when soloing in the hands of skilled players. I have no problem soloing any of my characters of any AT on either side. Strong farming builds definitely exist on both sides.

What's important, I think, is that any team good enough to overcome the time overhead of forming and managing the team, teaming is a superior total generation of inf/time, because of the team size bonuses. Because heroes have a larger player population and more team-centric ATs, these factors make them more likely to team than villains. Discussion of what percentage of those (more frequent) teams are actually good enough to come out ahead on inf/time is inevitably going to come down to anecdotal evidence, but I know the teams I play with definitely come out ahead. Of course, I avoid pugs like the plague.

I explained in my earlier post why the idea that merits are equal is false. Merits are equal on median. Median measurements are inherently resilient to outliers, and that was done on purpose. Broadly speaking, the more missions a piece of merit-granting content is, the more open it is to deviation from the median completion time. Hero-only content contains many, many more long arcs and TFs than villain side. This is often touted as an qualitative improvement in the villain content over old hero content, but it has this quantitative side effect on potential completion time. Moreover, if we grant that heroes are more likely to team than villains, they create more merits per unit time for this reason too, because each teammate is given the content's merit reward. They are also potentially more likely to run TFs, both because they have more options to choose from, and because they're more likely to form teams to start with.

Taken all together, at this time I believe heroes distinctly have more opportunities and to create merits which they multiply by larger team sizes. Net result, more merits per-capita, which means more pool C and D recipes per-capita.

Of course, based on what we think we know about Going Rogue, I think all of this will become a non-issue after GR's release, because those production opportunities will become available to anyone who crosses factions. It's possible that it could remain an issue if not enough villains do this, but based on what I'm reading of people's responses, that seems unlikely.

But what does that have to do with the imbalanced transfer scenario in a merged market?

The actual price of the goods in question is irrelevant as long as it's not so small it's washed out by the total inf production of the two economies.

The imbalanced transfer scenario isn't plausible. Everyone's an individual on the market, unless you form cartels - but then people playing villains are also playing heroes, so they could form cross-faction cartels as easily as intra-faction cartels.

What matters is each character's ability to produce influence or infamy and ability to use that to purchase products or turn those products into greater amounts of inf. Lesser or greater access to Pool C/D recipes is handy, but not required, and villains can go rogue to gain access to hero-side task forces.

That still doesn't explain what inherent/NPC value has to do with it.

Still, to address the implausibility... as long as the aggregate production levels are basically equitable, I agree that an imbalance won't happen, or will be to small to matter in the face of other factors. I suspect that while an imbalance does exist in the current markets, other forces are probably stronger, and we wouldn't notice the effect in general, or if we did it would take a very long time to be meaningful.

Remember, you're saying an imbalance is implausible in the vacuum of our existing market separation, where it cannot possibly happen. There are no working examples of it, because there can't be. However, I don't believe that it can't happen in a merged market. The possibility that it could is going to a barrier to merged markets for the devs* unless they either (a) introduce currency exchange rates or (b) eliminate the production imbalances - which I believe GR does.

Money spent on the market generally has some trickle-down redistribution to other people that also use the same market, up to the number of transactions it takes original money to be completely obliterated by fees. In an imbalanced trade scenario, more villain money moves from the villain production economy to the hero one than moves back. That extra flow to the hero side makes market-using heroes generally richer through the trickle down. (Some also trickles back to villains, but as a population they also reinvest that in more purchases from heroes, and so on.) If that proportion of imbalance is large enough, heroes will be able to increase their bids for goods they compete on, not specifically because they are competing with villains, but because each bidder has more money and they are competing with everyone else in the market. This bid creep due to increased inf reserves reinforces the imbalanced flow; prices on the contested goods rise, so villains also bid more, and more money flows to the hero side.

It's apparent that most players make their money by either simply defeating mobs or (if they listen to anyone in here) at least selling their drops. What marketeers here do in terms of concentrating wealth created elsewhere is not representative of the playerbase as a whole. After all, one of the major reasons it works is that only a limited number of people bother to do it.

As a heavy-duty drop supplier, I can tell you with significant confidence that, taken as a category of drops, pool C/D is the third-best thing you can sell to the market to transfer other people's inf to yourself, behind PvP IOs and purples in that order. All the evidence I know of suggests that neither marketeering, PvPing nor farming are mainstream playstyles for our playerbase, which leaves pool Cs as the next most likely source of major market income in terms of accessibility to the general playerbase.

Now, it's possible that the wealth transfers of the other two market price leaders (purples and PvPOs) would swamp any pool C/D imbalance. When this all was initially discussed, purples may not have even existed, and PvPOs definitely did not.

However, if we have a scenario where most of the villain players are not getting lots of purples, lots of PvPOs, or lots of pool C/D, then they must change their behavior to increase one of those or become marketeers. Most heroes also would not be getting lots of purples or PvPOs, but more heroes probably can readily produce pool C/D random rolls. Sure, there will be an elite "upper crust" of villain players who do produce purples, PvPOs, and even Pool C/D drops. They will be immensely wealthy, as similar players are on the hero side. But there will be more extreme gap between them and more "mundane" market users compared to hero side, where that same gap hero side would be better filled by people who run content for high-volume merits.

Agreed.

* Caveat - I have to admit I seriously doubt the devs have internally given this topic this sort of debate.