How to solve WW/BM Inflation

Re-read what I wrote. Your suggestion won't even solve the issue about storing influence. Influence can be stored via sales as well as bids.

Also, let me reiterate that simply reducing money supply won't do a thing for dropping prices. That's just wrong, and all you have to do is pick up a newspaper to see how "effective" such strategies have been in real economies.

You would like to be able to do these things? You certainly can already.

I'm not sure why you would want to wait until L50 to get IO's, though.
If you are naturally leveling up, you're getting Recipe and Salvage drops the whole way through, which you can craft as desired.
As an experiment, I've taken a few (solo) characters from L1-50 using the most simple (some would say lazy) form of Market use possible.
Dumping all unwanted recipe/salvage drops at "sell it now" lowball prices.
Vendoring enhancement drops.
Buying recipes/salvage as needed, sometimes at "buy it now" highball prices, and I'm still fully IO'd* at L49 with millions on hand.
No "marketeering", farming, flipping or anything complicated.

Note 1: These are solo characters, so drop rates vs teaming characters might be different. In my experience, the value of drops sold has far exceeded the value of $Inf directly dropped by mobs, often by a 7:1 or better ratio over the life of a character.
Note 2: Yes, I spent money on costumes.
Note 3: No, I didn't blow money on enhancements that are going to rot every time I ding and went with generic IO's until better things dropped.


(*While the sets used aren't the top of the line Purples and PvP sets, they aren't trash sets either.)

If the proverbial switch was flipped for current ingame foes of L51+ to drop these without notification going out in the patch notes?
Pure chaos as the Tax Shelters dissolved and investors had to scramble to pull thier funds from the market before the farmers could produce the supply.

But, it's not like they couldn't transfer thier wealth to another shelter. So it wouldn't really accomplish anything in the long run.
A few folks would have insta-wealth (most of them being those who have well-slotted L50's, so not the mythical "Casual Player").
A few folks would be upset that thier time/effort/Inf had been wasted.


For April Fool's Day the Dev's could throw phony data into the "Last 5" column to make it look like sales had gone through. No actual $Inf lost, but cause a panic.

Well, when you think that the problem exists in a single mechanism, then you're going to look for solutions to deal with said mechanism. You see the market exclusively as the BM/WW, so you're looking exclusively there for a solution.

The problem isn't actually with the BM/MM. The problem is that currency is created (via defeating enemies) substantially faster than currency is destroyed. The existing mechanisms that used to work to keep the economy somewhat in check (enhancements being destroyed via replacement, buying things from vendors, costume costs) didn't keep up with the vast increase in influence generation. Putting a cap on the amount of money you can hold simply serves to drive wealthy players away from actually using that currency for their transactions.

The real solution would be for some mechanisms to be added to specifically destroy money within the economy. Modern governments do this by simply printing less money and bringing more in. Video games do this by creating influence sinks. If the devs want to stem inflation and bring prices down, they need to add some vendor items that cost a boatload of money while providing some tangible non-combat benefit. Additional salvage/auction slots, temporary power mission teleports, and other nice but not necessary things all work quite well.

this won't work people are already tradin IOs for more then the influence/infamy cap

not to mention that the cap is there for a reason. not because someone chose that number but because that is the limit of a 32 bit system. in fact the cap is just over 2.1b but i think it was hard coded at 2b to keep any issues from happening.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Erm. I think you will find I have never even agreed there is hyper-inflation, (PVP IOs being the exception, they still haven't found their equilibrium) let alone whined about it.

The things I use all the time, doctored wounds, red fortunes, thunderstrikes and the like are pretty much on a par with where they have always been.

Levelling up, using the lower uncommons, they are still dirt cheap.
Hyper inflation in the market is simply NOT a given, sorry.

I find it amusing that the anti-market people come up with completely unworkable ideas that would end up hurting the casual player they are supposedly trying to represent. The ideas proposed by Steele wouldn't work anyways. That's not me talking but basic economic theory.

Untrue. The devs went ahead and changed costume drops and essentially made them worthless. That change was based on player feedback.

The devs have changed many things about the game that directly influenced the game. The new difficulty settings and the increase of influence made by level 50s are both things that have been put in due in part because of player testing and analysis.

Further, a number of additions have been put in by the devs to give players alternatives to the market. Reward merits was one such alternative. Unfortunately, reward merits didn't do what the devs intended and instead reduced the supply of many recipes and essentially gutted out the availability of many mid level recipes while increasing the supply of max level recipes. That was truly an example of the law of unintended consequences.

Ideas get shot down not because pro-market players are trying to protect the status quo but because the ideas aren't well thought out. When the devs implement new additions to the market, everyone wants the changes to have mostly positive effects without accompanying negative ones.

Don't you think it's a bit presumptuous for you to speak for the "common player"? Have you ever asked them whether or not they want the penalties you proposed or are you assuming this as their representative? Snow Globe, you normally post pretty reasonable stuff, but this crosses the line.

See above. Costume drop rates were increased in the past. Already assuming that something won't happen is the surest way to make sure it doesn't.

I have also been getting a larger number of common recipes. But at the same time I've been getting the same number of set recipes (and purples, when applicable). I'd say that the drop rate [b]was[/i] increased, for some things at least.

Too bad that it was something that was just vendored for scads of new Inf being added to the system. :/

The whole thread is quite enlightening on the topic of "Every single idea".

I'm not sure who you are referring to when you say "I find it somewhat amusing and sad that the people that are arguing against the idea are long time market people with an obvious bias for keeping the status quo." Most of the people I read opposing the idea in this thread have proposed alternative solutions to reduce prices or support various alternative solutions to the one proposed.

Generally speaking, people don't want to have to be economic majors to play a game or even have to take an economics course.

Yes, and I clearly remember people fighting that too. Maybe not the same people as now, but it was fought against by those at the top of the market.

Does this have anything to do with this thread except in the most tangential way? I know plenty of additions that players have asked for over the years have been done. Heck, a couple of mine were actually introduced in the past.

I think I see that as a missed opportunity by the developers to balance the sets values. Seriously how many snipe, immobilization, and sleep sets need to be dropped or made? Why do they drop more than other sets in certain pools? The drop rates and the merit costs are out of step with what people are actually using or can use.

From what I've seen since Issue 9 is that unless an idea attempts to address every single point (impossible as no one can agree on what is "essential"), any idea gets rejected. If it does try to be a unified method of change, it gets rejected as being "too broad". So what is the level a suggestion must achieve to get any kind of support?

Please note that "everyone needs to learn the market system" isn't really a feasible suggestion. The problem isn't even the RMTs selling Inf for money. The problem, as I see it, is that there are really no controls on the system. As we've seen in the AE system, players will bend any rule to do what they want until the developers set in to balance the system.

Actually, I'm speaking purely as myself. People are currently using a bug to exploit a loophole on the amount of Inf that can be held per character. Make no mistake, it isn't "working as intended" by allowing bidding on recipes that don't exist as drops. It doesn't matter one bit if people are using a black market that bypasses the auction houses. Without that exploit, the ability to ask for multiple times the Inf cap would be lessened. It wouldn't be eliminated, but it would be lessened.

Frankly I'm anticipating drastic changes to the market along the lines of the Issue 13 PVP changes. Sure it will tick a lot of people off, but it will take a shakeup of that magnitude to change the status quo.

Some of the costumes have stabilized, but not all. As to assuming that something won't happen will make sure that it doesn't, the same thing applies to doing nothing until a complete solution gets presented. The market now exists as a meta-game and until something (anything, really) gets changed, the problem will only intensify.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

In my experience there are stupid people on every side in every argument and every side, no matter how ludicrous, has people. I'd be more afraid if something was universally supported. Finding one crazy person to oppose a topic would make me feel quite reassured.

"Go hunt. Kill skulz." That's pretty much all the understanding one needs. That statement can be understood a different way as "Play the game. Shoot the bad guys. Find stuff. Sell what you find. Buy as much of what you want as you can."

This topic is being worked on and changed in at least minimal ways.

Yeah, unsanitized function calls decrease drop rate. Figures.

Those that frequent the market section fall into two camps, it seems: One group sees a problem that needs to be fixed, but can't agree on -what- is the solution. The other group is completely resistant to change, as it nets them more Ningis. The fact that no one has collected enough to make a Triganic Pu or that the banks will not deal with "fiddling small change" doesn't matter to them.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

In the case of the costumes, it wasn't just one crazy person. It was a bunch of people with one of two attitudes: Let the market be without restriction or the "I want to measure how well I can do by getting as much as possible out of the people that don't have as much time as I do" crowd.

I get the feeling that you are trying to tell me something different than the others here are saying. Perhaps because they know that I pretty much do your advice already.

Actually, Positron was presented with some drop tables well before Issue 13 with a bunch of tables showing how many sets vs how often a power is available. Snipe sets far outstripped the amount that could be slotted.

One would think that with all the data mining that they can do that they'd have better access to these figures than the players.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

No, but I think people who want to suggest changes to an existing game economy should have a basic understanding of how economics works.

Most suggestions for changes to the market come from people who apparently don't even have that basic understanding.

Regrettably not everywhere, and even those who do it don't all pay attention.

Huh. That's too bad.
There's certain skills that a person just really ought to have upon exiting school and entering the real world.

How to balance a checkbook, how to do CPR or apply basic first aid.
How to read a map. How to write a decent resume'.
That sort of thing.

Well, considering that even without using the market to store currency a player can potentially store 24 billion on each server just using their base slots no, I really don't think that it makes a difference, it just makes things more convenient. The percentage of players that have more than 2billion in excess Inf is very low. The percentage that have more than 24billion in excess inf is even lower, in fact I suspect that it's significantly less than 1% of the population.

My issue is that I don't consider it an exploit. I'm one of those players that have bids on level 53 recipes, and if I didn't use bids to store excess influence, I'll use sales or bank characters.

I'm not even sure what you're trying to accomplish by continuing to raise this point. It doesn't solve the issue you're trying to address: the high price of rare recipes.

And if the devs change it, I'll just use another method.