How to solve WW/BM Inflation

Why would you want to change it?

If something awesome drops to you, you have two choices.

Sell it and make bank...

or build it for yourself, and not have to buy it and build it later.

Hyperstrike, sweetie? As much as I agree with the majority of what you say in your posts, please cool it with the double posting. I know you've got a lot to say, but you're answering the same comments multiple times whenever anyone says it.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Ghost Pirate. I use Infamy. If you use Influence instead, just replace the word when you see it)

Alright, I've made a fair amount of money on the market using a simple, lazy method. I buy common salvage, craft common IOs, and then sell those crafted IOs at about a 100% markup. It's simple, it works, and because I've memorized everything buying from me is still cheaper than crafting things yourself. There's plenty of ways to make money on the market without resorting to extreme measures, but that's not the point here. I have never bought Infamy, I have one character who is "purpled out" and I have just under 2 billion infamy on another toon who is in the process of obtaining his purples. I've been playing for just over 18 months, and I'm not even remotely 'hardcore' into the marketing. Anyone who's been playing this game for longer than me has certainly had plenty of options to get all the purples they need without resorting to buying infamy.

There is money in the system. Telling people they can't bank it won't eliminate the money from the system (unless you wipe it all, in which case, wow, you will have a LOT of angry people on your hands), but it will force them to start trading in material goods of value other than influence. The official form of currency will be the Miracle +Recovery, and everyone will be trading those. Or something to this effect. Few suggestions people make to fix the market actually solve the problem NOT of "people individually have too much influence" but "there is too much influence in the system."

Assume for a moment, that through basic gameplay, One Jillion Infamy is added to the system every day from killing enemies and selling drops to stores. Yes, I know Jillion's not a real number.
Even assuming all this money goes through the market on bids, only 10% of it disappears back into the system. Now, on day two, another Jillion infamy is added, and 10% goes away... And so on and so on every day. After a month there's about Twenty Five Jillion more infamy in the system, because of the tiny rate it's depleting. Because of this, players all have more money, and all prices are raised accordingly. If 25 players play for 25 days and the money just moves back and forth between them, prices are going to be slightly higher each day than the day before.

Now, City of Heroes does have SOME places to spend infamy. It costs to craft, lots of characters need SOs, some spend weeks at the Tailor, and these are enough to keep the cost increase slow, but it's still there. The only way to eliminate high prices is for a way for infamy to leave the system. Players need the option to buy quality goods FROM THE GAME and not just from other players.

This is why I think AE Tickets are a bad idea. This is why I think merits are a bad idea. Infamy is hurting because the only solid worth they are backed by is level 50 SOs, and those aren't actually worth much at all. The only way inflation will be fixed will be for there to be additional, sizable infamy sinks and more reliable ways to use infamy to obtain what the market sells. My suggestion is let people use infamy to buy tickets and merits directly (or even do away with tickets and merits and put everything on an infamy system), because otherwise there's just going to be more and more and more infamy in the system driving prices up more and more.

In any event, there is absolutely no particular reason why the solution to this marketing debacle needs to be an overcomplicated fiasco.

Drop rates are, currently as of the time of this posting, very plainly broken. I don't kneejerk on topics of relevance, and my recent live testings of drop aquisitions between soloing a +0/x8 map versus 8-man teaming the same map were staggeringly telling.

We ran the same map 20 times, my team and I. And then I ran it 20 times solo.

Both times, I kept very specific count of all drops, and categorized them into Salvage (Common, Uncommon, Rare) and Recipes (Basic IO, Uncommon Set, Rare Set and Ultra-Rare Set).

The results:

Soloing--

Salvage -- Common: 118 pieces
Uncommon: 38 pieces
Rare: 7 pieces


Recipes -- Basic IO: 77 pieces
Uncommon Set: 26 pieces
Rare Set: 5 pieces
Ultra-Rare Set: 0 pieces


8-Player Team-

Salvage -- Common: 5 pieces
Uncommon: 1 piece
Rare: 0 pieces

Recipes -- Basic IO: 9 pieces
Uncommon Set: 1 piece
Rare Set: 0 pieces
Ultra-Rare Set: 0 pieces


20 runs per iteration. Soloing at +0/x8 and then 8-manning the same map (The Family map at the end of an Unai arc) at +0.

Repeat it yourself; it's quite repeatable, as any actual scientific affair is.


As for interpretation of this data, at the prelim, it seems very evident that teaming reduces drop rates. In the very near future, I will be testing this further with teams of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 in total (Actual players) just to see what the comparative results are.


This is not speculation, however; drop rates -are- reduced in teams. The variables in place governing the drop rate mechanics are not intimately known to me, but disparaging results like those I finished testing just yesterday are not likely to be the result of 'just bad luck in the engine's rolls'.

But do please repeat the experiment yourselves. Don't take my word for it.


Anyway, the ancillary consideration to which this data is relevant is that drop rates are quite likely not the crux of the problem. I don't know how long it's been true that they scale down the more people you have in your team, and it seems fairly self explanatory that it's probably been set up like that to diminish mega-farming's returns (A primary means of capital acquisition by inf-sellers), but that is aside of the fact that the solution to the problem of the markets themselves need not be complicated.

Cap the maximum listable prices. The Devs clearly don't want to do this, or they'd have done it already, but it would work and it would work -well-.

Yes, there'd be some screaming by those whose favorite flavor of profiteering-cheese had been moved, but frankly I think those sorts deserve to scream anyway.

Salvage max listing at 2 million, recipe max listing at 100 million, inf cap remains at 2 billion.

There's my proposed solution. Current drop rates, irrespective of the ancillary drop rate data I've begun and will continue to be collecting, shows results that are thus-far quite /favorable/ to the casual player.

Sure, it looks pretty unfriendly to teams, but that's another can of worms unto itself, and has likely been implemented in its fashion to curb another problem of the market, which I've half-ranted about in an above post that, most likely, will neither be tl;dr'd and ignored.

Just the same, drop rates ain't the issue in this specific context.

Market manipulation and viability of illegitimate acquisition of currency are.

So sayeth I.

The market is fine the way it is.
I honestly will be severely let down by the devs if they mess with it again... like they messed with wing drops.

They RUINED wing drops because of all the people who whined on the forums. I cant even honestly understand why WING DROPS are still in the recipes section of the game... They should have just stuck them in the tailor...

...Okay, time out, time out TIME OUT!


Do you people not understand that there is a "Black Market" other than the consignment house? People keep suggesting an infamy cap on sales, and, well... it will KILL the market. Because what it will do is encourage more people to use the Trade function to trade. Why is this bad? Because it takes extra effort, and when people use the Trade function, NO INFAMY LEAVES THE SYSTEM.

I understand you're all afraid because prices are high and you can't afford anything, but all you're going to do by capping the market is force more people to trade off market because, well, Hecatomb Damage/Recharge is ALWAYS going to be worth more than 100,000,000, even if inflation is cut. It's just that good. Unless the economy shrinks drastically, it will never drop low enough for sellin it for 100 million to be a good idea.



And to Umbral: Yeah, that works, too. I'm totally in favor of an influence sink, especially one that has an option for 10 million of "Summon Black Scorpion AV to pwn face."

I disagree with you on the concept of rewards for certain tasks. While Gold Recipes started like that originally, the addition of merits to story arcs and the fact that you can buy gold recipes at AE shows that now they're just sort of... there, but I've had this argument before, and it's no the point of the thread.

The point is: We agree that the answer is Infamy Sinks, NOT rearranging the market, correct?

I don't think a 1 billion infamy badge is a good idea, though. 1 billion is a lot of infamy to spend on a badge that doesn't do anything.

thought i would poke my head in here again. for everyone saying that it is marketeers causing inflation, shut your mouths and go ask what some of the people who don't use the market for anything other then buying pay for stuff. they pay an "IWANTITNAO" price. this is usually 2 times the going rate which has now just assured that the price will rise. now move on to the next person who is just like the first. same thing happens. only now everyone is bidding at the new price they see. whamo, it only takes 1-2 people to drive prices up and those people are the "IWANTITNAO" people, i.e.: impatient people.

after reading all these type of threads over the last almost 2 yrs on the forums and 3 yrs in game, i can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that it is the impatient people and the uneducated about the market people that cause the inflation. there is also the factor of adding things to the game that cause certain drops to be non exsistant, i.e.: the AE. the only way for a purple to drop in the AE is to do dev's choice and honorable mentions and guest author stuff. but the problem is, the AE isn't really being used for that. it is being used to run toons to 50 and generate infl/inf and tickets. tickets generate stuff, but they generate to much crap and not enough good stuff. with this mix and the number of 50's that have come to be since AE was introduced, you have alot of 50's running around that "need" to be io'd out. more demand for a smaller supply. guess what effect this has?

so let me say this again, all you people crying that it is marketeers causing inflation: SHUT THE **** UP and learn how to make the market work for you instead of you working against it.

<snip>

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Originally Posted by Uruare And also, yes, it is a market. Quite clearly so, as its full of shmucks, drips, two-dimensional cads and ethical sociopaths that do not realize they are playing a game and will win at any cost, especially when that cost is paid by others. Such as the multitudes of people that do not happen to be stockbrokers and have no real interest in playing City of Wallstreet. Funky little thing about that, y'know? I can play the market too. I've experimented with this flipping, I keep my own RL portfolio of stocks and I work in an industry in which markets, marketing data and data interpretation is, in fact, my job. Do ya -really think- I want to pay to play a game that reminds me of my /job/? Yes, that's quite personal and personally biased right there, but c'mon -on- man, /think/ here. Most of us (I presume; maybe I'm just delusional) play games like these to have fun. Lots of people have fun in rather different ways. Some by being all organizational and gung-ho and regulatory and charging around in massive SG's streamlined like para-military organizations, running 1000 TF's a month and Hami raids on the dot, on -every- dot, like clockwork. Some others, by toodling around, teaming when they can, yakking with people in /b and mostly just goofing off and fiddling with various builds. Yet -others- by getting amped up, build-tweaking, trying to find just the right configs of powers and IO's and stomping around in PVP zones. Yet -others- to jaw around and type a lot and roleplay. HOLY CRAP that's indicative of a lot of divergant interests! And every single one of them deserves, contingent upon the grounds set forth by the EULA and its authoring bodies, equal opportunities to enjoy "The Game Content".

How exactly do they *not* have equal opportunities to enjoy "the game content"?

You go on and on about folks with divergent interests and then villify and heap scorn upon one set of those divergent interests - hypocritical much?

Quote:

Now, call me greedy if you like (o'wait, you already did, lawl), but I think that one of the absolutely best ways to ensure that equal opportunity exists for everybody is to cater to the LEAST powergamey-grindy-farmy strata of the gaming population. Y'know, those mythical 'average gamers' that do reasonable amounts of some stuff and dabble in most of the rest. It's a broad pseudo-category, but it -is- a category largely defined by it's exclusion of extremes. The average gamer does not farm 12 hours a day, nor do they spend 80 hours a week logged in. They do not powerlevel from 1 to 50 in six hours, nor do they try to make the cover of Newsweek by refining their Wallstreet accumen in Wentworths or on the Black Market. So uh...yeah. I'm greedy because I'd like to level the playing field and ensure that the least obsessive (o'wait, did I go there?) denominator amongst the stratified playerbase can, within reasonable expenditure of time/effort/funds, experience all the game content.

Again - how are these players being denied their enjoyment?

I think I am likely one of those "average gamers" you champion. I take months to get a character to 50, and only have 2 level 50 characters after 5(!) years of playing. I play anywhere from 5 to 20 or so hours in a given week. My richest characters do not have more than 100 million inf each (thanks to some people who paid "buy it nao" prices for a Numina's here & there).

Yet somehow I manage to contain my disappointment at not having a purple'd-out Warshade (sarcasm, in case you couldn't tell).

I still manage to enjoy the game, playing thru missions and joing TF/SFs, getting drops and inf, and selling stuff either at a vendor or the Market depending on where gets me the best price.

Thank you for pointing out how deluded I have been these last few years and that I have clearly been cheated by these evil other players crushing my hopes and dreams. (more sarcasm, BTW).

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Who exactly am I ah...robbing, with that? Who's the greedy one, I wonder? Those like me that would happily artificially cap the market to maximize availability of its use, or those that fight rabidly to maintain their abilities to profit egregiously off it irrespective of what impact this has on mythological and irrelevant figures (Read: Everyone else). Think before you reply. You didn't once already, and it's tacky.

Meh. You speak as if "Greed" isn't a valid drive in a game setting. News Flash - it is for some people. And yes - you seem to be one of them, since your enjoyment of the game seems to be wrapped around having the brightest "shinies" and implies that you are incapable of enjoying it without their possession and use.

I really get tired of self-righteous people who come to the forums and claim to speak for me, especially when they attribute their own motives of greed to all "casual players".