Combine forms of currency!

AE Tickets, Merits, Vanguard Merits, and of course, Infamy/Influence all exist as forms of "currency" in this game. They're things you obtain, you spend them on stuff, blah blah... Now, of these four, Vanguard merits are the only ones that actually act unique: You get them only for Rikti and can only spend them on Rikti/Vanguard related stuff. Canes act as currency, too, but once again, they purchase unique items (and, more importantly, they can be traded for Inf)

AE Tickets, Merits, and Inf all do the same thing: You exchange them for goods which then wind up on the market. Except Tickets and Merits can't be traded. There's... really no need for this. My suggestion is pretty simple...

-Replace all merits with 500,000 Inf.
-Replace all Tix with 2,500 Inf.
-Leave shops as is, except change what you spend there. Merit rolls would cost 10,000,000 inf each. Rare salvage would cost 1,350,000, uncommon would cost 200,000, and common would cost 20,000 for random (Which is probably a lot, but I do believe 1350000 to be fair for rare, and our current system has the 8:540 ratio) And Miracle +Recovery would sell at the shop for 120,000,000. (Formerly 240 merits). In fact, all recipes could just be bought with cash. Note that /most/ would cost a significantly higher amount of Inf in shops than on the market (Miracle +Recovery is a special case, because nobody wants to sell them. This wouldn't really change the market value of anything that wasn't stupid expensive.)

I honestly don't see what's wrong with merits and tickets as they are now. I see no reason why they should be changed.

Plus, having a Hami raid being worth 26,500,000 inf a pop (for example) would only make things more expensive on the market, by my guess... not to mention trivializing things that can already be bought normally with inf. So this change would only really have the potential of making the game worse. We need ways to drain inf from the economy, not bloat it up.

Just a note - paying vendors for recipes rather than players does, in fact, drain inf from the economy.

The point here is that it WOULD drain the inf economy... Because it would allow you to spend Inf directly on IO recipes and salvage. I think you missed the crux of the argument which is
-All those things which can only be bought with tickets or Merits? Let's let them be buyable with inf.
-People would be spending huge chunks of Infamy to buy random recipes or specific recipies. Inf would be dumped into the system and recipe supplies would increase, causing a drop in market prices.

As far as trivializing things that can be bought normally with inf... Market trading aside, please, name some. Because Inspirations, Trainings, Dual Origins, and Single Origins are all I can really think of and all of those are already amazingly trivial.

No. The different forms of currency exist to encourage different activities. If you got rid of merits, fewer people would want to do TFs, since farming would be the efficient way of getting what you want. For a game where it's frequently difficult getting a team together for a TF anyway, removing some of the incentive to do the TF in the first place is not a good idea.

Not a good idea at all.

I understand the basis for this idea, but I would ask the OP to consider:

1) This would put far too much money in the hands of lowbies. An early 4 merit arc would now give 2 million inf. At the high levels this might not have a negative effect, but this would effectively eliminate inf as a limitation. At least right now, you do have to be a little savvy to earn that much in the early game.

2) Tokens like merits allow the devs to steer folks towards certain activities. If inf is the only reward, then for better or worse, people will learn to maximize earning that.

3) The Architect becomes even more broken!

Xaphan-
You do have a point in purples and PVP recipes going up in cost. They've been steadily on the rise for a while, and PVP recipes are a whole other can of worms. I do believe that both would need to be made easier to get, either via higher drop rate or a secondary method of getting them.

As for combining currency in other ways? Yeah, sure, whatever. Infamy/Influence just happens to have the biggest numbers and thus allows for the most variation in prices. I'd be just as happy with 200 merits as I'd be with 200,000,000 infamy, but it'd be impossible to deal with common salvage on a scale that small. My argument isn't: They're trivial, make them more trivial. My argument is: They weren't designed to be special, all the things that make them special were added in the past year. Why are we treating them like they're special?


Sharker, Whisper-
Please explain how giving more ways to spend infamy won't remove infamy from the system. Even getting more, the main problem with infamy right now is that there really aren't many good ways to spend it. Would you be opposed to allowing people to buy Salvage and Recipes with inf at all? Or are you just convinced that giving them more inf in addition to giving them more ways to spend it will result in them not spending any more than they already do?

Narf-
AE is already designed like that. You're saying you can simply solo an AE farm instead of getting merits, well... You can already use Tix on Gold rolls. 4000 Tix=20 merits. And tix can do a lot more. But people still run TFs. Why? Because on a good team, you get 20 merits faster than you get 4000 tix, and in the process of getting those 20 merits, you get all sorts of random drops. Your argument (People wouldn't run TFs if they could get the same rewards through AE) is proven invalid because people can already get the same rewards through AE.


Evil Gecko
-1) I actually thought of that, and it did occur to me as an issue, but then I remembered that most lowbies... don't actually have inf as a limitation. Yes, you need to be "a little savvy" but not very. I generally start lowbies by giving them a few million from one of my high-level characters. In the Winter Event, I had lowbies gather canes and sell them for upwards of 200,000 inf each. Now, of course, rewards could simply be scaled with level (have the 500,000 be the level 50 reward and have lower level missions give lower rewards), but I really don't think lowbies being unable to afford DOs and SOs adds to the game... It's just an easily-overcome annoyance.

-2) That is actually a valid point, but you need to remember that most people don't care how they get their cash, just that they get it. Because Tix and Merits eventually become Inf anyway (via becoming recipes or items, which then hit the market), people are already just looking to maximize inf. It's very rare for people to use merits to try and get a specific gold recipe, because the odds of rolling randomly are so low and saving up merits for most things is amazingly difficult. It takes five or six runs of the longest strike force redside to get anything worth anything in the current system. We've passed "encouraging players to run TFs" and reached "Forcing them to run TFs at the exclusion of everything else."


-3) If it puts AE back at "the only thing anyone's running" then the Devs lower the AE rewards. It's seemed to work so far: AE's still in use but it's not nearly as dominant as it was when the rewards were higher.

well capn, by adding infl/inf the way you would like to it would add a ton more infl/inf to the game thus causing prices to hit the 2 billion cap. this then leads to transactions being done off the market( in it's own little black market ) resulting in none of the infl/inf leaving the system. also as others have said, this will lead into people doing only one thing to earn all that infl/inf which means people aren't playing the other parts of the game. bad for the game.

the reasons why the rewards system is the way it is and should not be changed far outweighs any reason why they should be.

...Did the part of my post where I suggested rare recipes being sold for set amounts of inf not go through or something? I've seen multiple people suggest that there's no way for the inf to leave the system... If there is a store selling recipes, then the inf will leave the system when people pay for the recipes. The only things that would /possibly/ hit the cap in this method would be purples and PVP IOs, which I admit are real issues. PVP IOs especially are already over the 2 billion mark. I just don't think these issues would be insurmountable. Simple answers like "increase the drop rates" would fix it if they became truly prohibitive.

Too lazy to check right now, but is there a way to purchase specific salvage pieces with any alternate currency at the moment? I know there's the random rolls, but I'm not sure about specific pieces. If not, then I can see that being another problem...

Even if two pieces have the same chance of being dropped, the one that's more desired costs more because people are willing to spend more inf on it. So right now we have a situation where one piece of salvage costs 5 inf, and another costs 500,000 (which really put a pause in me trying to outfit my character quickly, let me tell you).

If you put more inf in the hands of the people, that just gets worse. Impatient people would be willing to pay more, and the average cost of that salvage may jump from 500,000 to 5,000,000 or even 50,000,000. So even if you end up saving a couple hundred million on some rare recipes because no one wants to bid above the store price... you might end up losing out on the salvage.


Unless you can buy specific pieces. In which case I wonder why the heck the ones I want are still so damned expensive...