Expanded enhancement tray

Is this some sort of opinion held out of spite against IOs or players that use them? I don't understand why anyone would make such a statement without some sort of troubled past with regard to the subject.

IMO, it's a system that is just poorly designed. It makes buying enhancements a pain. It makes respec'ing a pain. It makes normal teaming when you're accumulating drops a pain. And yet, you want to make it more painful? Because you're jaded? Is it so wrong to want to save your work in an RPG? Do other MMOs cause your gear to dissolve when you want to take it off? I just don't understand.

I would at least like to be able to store enhancements in that same salvage storage place. Or giving some kind of option to send respec'ed enhancements to the market.

Really? I thought their statement about enhancement slots involved accumulating drops, not respecs.

This board's search function is much, much easier to use than the old one, and more effective.

This concept comes up extremely regularly and there are multiple ongoing threads discussing ideas (unfortunately searching for them can be tricky as many threads in this community are poorly titled), which as previously said, all go against prior dev commentary.

To a degree. Ignoring for a second the mess that merits made with the mid level market, the glut of money created in large part by changes in the last few years does indeed provide a degree of protection for the most commonly sought after goods.

Those people with a ton of money just throw it around. It is extremely easy for a new character to make money now simply because common and uncommon salvage fluctuates a great deal. The people who have at ton of money don't want to spend time to save a few bucks so they freely spend far more than necessary on things that don't command high dollar amounts, and freely place goods on the market well below market value. This allows the poorer player to generate a lot of easy wealth by playing the market.

Sure, the poorer player can't dip into the 500 million purple pool, but most recipes and common/uncommon salvage (at least heroside at the levels available) is extremely cheap in relation to the amount of influence attainable.

The biggest reason purples and PVP recipes are so expensive is availability. The drop rates are rather low in relation to the number of people actively seeking to attain them. Much of this (in purples) is still an effect from the AE craze that created much of the situation the game economy is in today.

You know, I completely missed that when writing the post, D2 has just become the standard example I use of a player determined currency .


brophog02 covered this somewhat, but yeah the earning power of a level 50 is SIGNIFICANTLY higher than over characters. This is for a couple of reasons. First off is the obvious they do get more per kill. In addition level 50s still earn experience but this XP is converted into additional inf which almost doubles the inf they get per kill. Finally level 50 common recipes sell for about 100K each. So the earning power of level 50s is extremely high. Additionally people who play their 50s a lot (especially if they farm) are generally going to use that income to purchase high end recipes (purples and PvPs). This means that a portion of their income is effectively removed from the economy shielding prices on lower items a bit.

The problem with choosing a power and slotting it is that it is baked in, you're committed to it even though you may not be happy with it. In CO they allow you to backtrack to a large degree and test out your choices before committing.

The original system of respec automatically cashes in your excess SOs/DOs/TOs at fair market value, which is fine. But it gives nothing for Hamis or other special enhancements because they cannot be purchased, which strikes me as a pretty big kick in the pants. The original respec system hasn't kept up with the times...

No, it redeemed them at VENDOR value which is also what IOs and HOs are redeemed at. Obviously for IOs and HOS vendor value is significantly lower than market value but personally I think that's a good thing. Allowing them to be sold at the current market value would add an additional inflationary pressure to inf and it already seems to be rather inflationary.

Name a vendor that will sell/buy Hamis and you'd have an argument. This is what I am talking about:



See the unassigned where it says ZERO? I suppose you are right when the vendor value is significantly lower than market value...

My mistake, IOs are resold at the crafting (i.e. vendor) price I assumed HOs were the same. In any case the point still stands. Reselling them at the actual market rpice would be worse for the economy than allowing the player to keep every enhancement. Keeping all enhancements is a deflationary pressure that makes low value IOs vendor trash and selling them at market price is horribly inflationary.

I sure won't argue with these people who seem to understand economics way better than me, but Oh man do I sympathize when I see that picture with all the HOs! Other than the fact that I've never been able to figure out why someone would slot HOs. They don't give bonuses like IOs so are they really any good?

Influence sinks can be a good thing if they cause players to stay around long enough to get vested in a game for reasons other than just leveling up and getting cool new powers. Influence sinks are essentially time sinks, and time sinks are required to create loyal long-term subscribers.

If players get everything they want in one go, they may still miss seeing the vast majority of the game, and may not develop into long-term players.

For example, if you can buy everything you could possibly want immediately, you may well decide that the game is trivial and offers little variety. Depending on when that is, you may completely miss things such as the Rikti invasion, the Zombie Apocalypse and the holiday events. You may never go to zones such as Firebase Zulu (a zone that looks really cool, but whose potential has never been realized). You may never try out villains (or heroes). You may also not be around long enough to try more than one kind of character, and I think the wide variety of ATs and power sets is the primary draw of the game.

While this is kinda true (especially in games like WoW where there are gold sinks that offer things players actually want), the primary purpose of any currency sink is to remove currency from the economy and therefore maintain it's value. In CoH Inf has no inherent value, you can use it to buy SOs and it's needed for crafting IOs but those represent a very small portion of the things people want to buy. If you want to acquire set IOs or HOs the only way you can exchange Inf for them is to buy them from another player. Now consider that other player, what does he need the Inf for? Sure, he might use some of it to buy SOs or common IOs but the chances are that he is going to turn around and use it to buy a Set IO or an HO from a third player. Essentially Inf is only exchangeable for set IOs and HOs because the majority of the player base has decided that it is so meaning that players feel confident that if they sell something for Inf they can use that Inf to buy a different item that is of greater value to them.

Now what would happen if there were no Inf sinks in the game (in particular the transaction fee for the auction house since that is the primary one)? People would keep killing NPCs and so Inf would keep entering the economy. BUT very little Inf would leave circulation, obviously some would due to the remaining sinks or players quitting but in general it would keep on piling up. however, the rate at which players were generating usful items (set IOs and HOs) would remain the same. This would cause inflationary pressure since there is more Inf available and the same number of items to purchase with it. Eventually Inf would become useless as a medium of exchange between players simply because there was so much of it available that trying to use it to trade is pointless.