Is influence really that hard to come by?

Just asking, because I feel it comes in buckets. Just earlier today I got my elec/SD scrapper to 50. He ended up there with 724 merits and 90 hours of playtime with zero farming or powerleveling. Just regular playing with one of my RL friends I was level pacted to. I just don't see how people can complain about the lack of influence at 50...

Granted, our duo was quite powerful (elec/SD + emp/sonic) and we both have knowledge of the game. But still, this method is completely usable by anyone because we only started to get our hands into IOs in the early forties.

See, it's that "90 hours" thing that people don't want to put in, I think.

No, it definitely isn't hard to come by.

With a little knowledge and effort, you can literally get 100's of thousands
of influence in 30 mins or less (see the active thread on the topic in this
forum), and millions in a few hours.

The only players who are poor in this game are either:

1> Inexperienced (we're happy to give them the info to fix that)
2> The lazy
3> The clueless
4> The intentionally uncaring.

For types 2-4, we're happy to let them follow that playstyle unless
they complain about how difficult and unfair the market in the game
seems to them -- at that point, derision and entertainment usually ensue.


Cheers,
4

I assume that most people who feel an influence pinch either:

• Don't play a large number of hours / week.
• Don't play much of the time they do play on level 50 characters
• Don't make much use of the market as a "marketeer"
• Don't at least sell your drops intelligently

It must be easy to earn inf. If it weren't, things wouldn't be so expensive. If you don't feel poor, try purpling out your character, and then fill in the rest of your powers with PvP sets. Still feel rich?

Being rich or poor has nothing to do with how much money you have. It's all about how much stuff you want. If you want more stuff than you can afford, you're poor. As long as there is more stuff out there to want, some people will always feel poor.

I'm pretty sure that aspect of human nature is an important part of the MMO business model.

My estimate of a lot of play time is based on my own, which is probably 3 hours a day average on weekdays, and probably 6 hours both days on weekends. I'm a single guy with RL friends in game plus an in-game community of players I enjoy hanging with, so I find the time pretty easy to justify even if it's just to hang with buds.

Of course, I have tons of downtime where I don't try hard to earn money (or XP). But by playing what I feel is a fair bit, I do get more hard-core earning time in than someone with the same casual-to-hardcore time ratio who spends less time in game.

I don't find it difficult to make inf. My characters usually repay their investment back in full with normal gameplay and casual marketeering. Today, I probably made around 300 million without any serious effort while I hopped around playing various characters on different servers.

I just don't understand why some people pale at the thought of having an IO in every slot. It doesn't have to be expensive to do that.

I can see why some non-marketeers can get the impression that influence is hard to come by. For one thing, influence created from enemy defeats is basically insignificant, especially at low levels. Most influence gained is through vendoring common IO recipes, and these only start getting really valuable at the 40-50 range.

Levelling up, most of the recipes a player will get are at odd levels - and these don't sell well, if they do at all. Even if you are rolling tickets or merits, there are precious few reasons not to roll at maximum level. So someone who plays a lot of non-50 alts will feel poor vs who spends most of their time playing at level 50. The income from levelling from 1-50 will be dwarfed into insignificance by anything a level 50 can earn.

It used to be that you could still learn a lot through sales of rare salvage. Pre-i13, a platinum was about 5m apiece, which was a lot in an era where purples were 50m each. But AE has forced down the price of rare salvage as well.

A lot of rewards a player earns aren't in the form of influence. It's easy for a player to do a Posi, get 50 or so merits, and see that an Obliteration quad is 200 merits - not that much. Then see that she has 1m influence, and the same Obliteration quad is 40m on the market. It will never strike this hypothetical player that for 200 merits she could get an LotG +7.5 instead, which sells for 110m. So viewed this way, influence can seem deceptively hard to earn, and merit/ticket prices deceptively cheap.

In this game influence rains from the sky and merits grow on trees. But I think this is like the "servers feel dead" thing: the game can sometimes give a very convincing impression that it's not the case.

Like others said, is all weather or not you want the best for your toons. It also comes to What is best for you. I have 1 50 that is Purpled Out, use to be the one I played all of the time. Now it not as some of my others are stronger with the 500mil set Build I have in them. I will puple them out as I get the purples I want but I also know I tend to play lower lvl TF.

To borrow a quote from Monty Python: That's a fair cop, but I'd like to think that society is also to blame." (Right, we'll be arresting them too!)

I think the forums themselves exacerbate the issue. Look at what happens when someone asks for build help: Purples, multiple LotGs, etc. Gives a new player the impression that they are supposed to have such in every build on every character. Some people are good about asking for budget builds, and some people are good about offering them. But most budget builds get ridiculed when posted.

Also, poverty is a state of perception, not only based on what you want as Peter mentioned, but based on what the other guy is perceived to have. What they actually have and how they got it is too rarely a large part of that formula.

I'd just like to throw in two cents from a relatively new (been playing for about 4-5 months), casual player (probably 10-12 hrs of playtime a week, mostly weekends). This is the first MMO I've played in a LONG time where cash is not a BIG deal.
I'm not saying I'm rich (not even close), but this is the first MMO I've played where a casual player can make decent money. I think it's the combination of making good inf as you level and not NEEDING to immediately spend what you make on "good gear", so you can keep levelling at a decent pace.
I simply use the info on these forums. I spend less than 15 min per session to do some minor "marketeering", then just play. I've never felt underpowered or gimped (even tho I'm sure I am compared to some builds). I've never farmed inf (as I've had to do in just about every other MMO I've played). I just play. I now have a level 50 and he's not completely IO'ed (about 2/3 of the way there), but I'm working on it.
I'm not sure if complaints about lack of inf are due to lack of patience or knowledge, or if it's just complete laziness (or my absolute favorite, sense of entitlement) but it really shouldn't exist.

I think it all depends on what you want in game and how many hours you can play.

Couple examples:

If you want the purple builds, then yes, they are expensive and it's only going up. Can you get them? Depends on how much you play. 1 hour a day prolly wont cut it any time soon.

My wife ran a few farms while i was at work this week. (her own fire/kin and bm map) She went from 70mil to 930mil in like 4 days. NO MARKETEERING NEEDED. All she done was craft and sell her drops. (5 or 6 purples included) Although they were sleep, stun ones, she still made almost a billion inf in less than a week.

Now, is that alot? Not if you wanna go purp out a build but it's a ton if you just use really good sets to better your toons.

Depends on how you like to play, too. If you enjoy placing bids and reselling, go for it. If you feel like playing the toons you're trying to better, then go for it. Don't be fooled that one way is better than the other.

That's really another topic. Everyone plays to have their own kinda fun. Some peoples fun is just trying to make inf. Others like to just play the game. IMO, WW is a totally different game than CoH. Some run mishes, some farm solely. I fall into the farming category. I only play with the same 5 people. If they're not on, i farm. But i'm having fun doin it.

... yeah, we inherited our money.