Where is the money coming from

Look here, if everyone who replies to you doesn't quite think what you are writing makes sense, it is tempting to assume they are all too stupid to understand it. But there is an alternative explanation, which is that it _doesn't_ make sense.

i was trying to raise a question about influence generation. I just was playing and enjoying how these post always seem to take off in a different direction even from the first reply.


My quest was to examine if the rates of influence generation could possibly account for the spike in prices of my marketing.

I have recived many different opinions and its kinda inconclusive actually. Many people give different and conflicting responses which i do find informative and even though contradictory they are still illuminating in different ways.


what we do not know we still cannot and that is whats the average influ generated bu the average of all players in a given month, and,that will sadly never be known so it is impossible to estimate what the effect of diminishing server pop (untill GR) vs. the increase in influ earning potential from recent updates( influ generation increases) actually is.

My hope was that some information could actually be had from a discussion but alas it has devolved into the usual cluster @#$! thats custom on the boards.


Thanks to all that have added comment to this thread and i hope some real information may be had at some point.

If anyone has actual information to input its appreciated but no one has.


All i can say is that i make about 50 mill a day from farming and i am earning about 300 mill a day from marketing i was trying to find out if this is indicative of others and who if anyone is actually making more so they can buy this stuff....


Remember earning influ only comes from killin stuff not marketing


I appreciate my customers at the marketplace i really do. However i was trying to find out whos affording this much for a panacea ora ragnarok etc....

OK, I lied, I'll bash my head on the wall some.

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Originally Posted by graystar_blaster I have recived many different opinions

Really? Because I've read the whole thread here and the opinions seem quite consistent. Don't tell me, the lurkers support you in email?

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that will sadly never be known so it is impossible to estimate what the effect of diminishing server pop (untill GR)

There are two obvious objections to this.

1) Is server population diminishing? I've been hearing that it is ever since I started playing in 2005. At that rate, I should be the only player left. Conclusion; people who assert without evidence that server population is diminishing are generally wrong.

2) Demand is proportional to server population too! There is no reason why a change in server population should increase or decrease prices.

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All i can say is that i make about 50 mill a day from farming and i am earning about 300 mill a day from marketing

So your 300 million a day from marketting consumes between 30 and 45 million in transaction fees. You yourself make up for that destruction of influence. Where's the problem?

It's not that all the influence is accumulating in your pockets. You can only make 350 million a day for six days before hitting the influence cap on one toon. It's curious you don't know that if you are making 350 million a day.

ETA "on one toon" to avoid nitpicking, but a more serious point is that almost no-one is going to accumulate billions of influence indefinitely without spending it. Why bother?

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Remember earning influ only comes from killin stuff not marketing

There's a peculiar kind of genius in both being blindingly obvious and wrong at the same time.

Firstly, we know. There is, I guarantee you, absolutely no-one posting in this thread who does not know that the market does not generate influence, and didn't know it before you pointed it out ad nauseam.

Secondly, you're wrong. Selling enhancements and recipes to the in-game shops also generates influence (as do mission/arc completion rewards, clicking glowies, and disposing of enhancements via respecs, but perhaps not in significant quantities, and probably something else I've missed.).

i feel no need to continue this thread as i dont feel the urge to try and explain my thoughts or the tells in game and emails i have recieved.


thanks for all your replies


it has been very informative.'


have a great day

Aw, don't go away and let this thread die. I was just starting to miss the inanity of the drive-by buffing thread, and this was filling that void so perfectly...

April 28 2008...

I think you don't get how the market works to concentrate wealth.

Lets make up a number. Let's say that averaged over all the players in a day that there are 1000 people an hour playing level 50s in active combat, each creating 3M inf/hour. Let's say that all the other people playing the game at all other levels account for as much inf creation as another 250 level 50s. So the equivalent of 1250 level 50s times 3M inf/hour is 3,750,000,000 inf/hour entering the economy.

Now, lets say I am selling something that I can sell for 2M inf. That's actually not much - it'd take an average level 50 40 mins to create that wealth from scratch, so for the price to be that low, let's assume what I'm selling is fairly common (maybe it's rare salvage). I can sell 5 of them a day, meaning I make 10M inf a day. Every four days, I have saved up 40M, which I use to buy something mildly expensive.

Now, above me in the food chain is the guy who's selling me the 40M items. He doesn't get them as fast as I get my 2M inf items, but he sells them for a lot more. He saves up the money he earns on them and periodically buys something that costs 250M. Above him in the food chain is whoever is selling those items, and so on and so on.

Now that example is overly simplistic, because it suggests that the only way to get things for selling on the market is to get them as drops. But it's not - you can use money to invest in purchases that you expect to sell for a profit. The more money you have, the more expensive an item you can invest in and the larger the profit margin you can usually expect.

The money is coming from all the people generating (in my example) 3.75B inf/hour. The market acts as a sort of pyramid system, funneling that wealth from the thousands of characters earning it a few million inf/hour to a few people who are earning billions per day. It's that much smaller population of extremely wealthy players who are throwing the money around you're seeing. Don't make the mistake of assuming that because you see multiple billion-plus inf sales a day that everyone out there is running around with multiple billions of inf. It's a much narrower segment of the market.