How to solve WW/BM Inflation

I love how you've assumed that I'm a lazy beatnik that is only complaining because I want to have all the shinies without doing anything for them.

I make inf hand over fist farming, yo. I've experimented with flipping, but it A) reminds me too much of work (personal desire to avoid in Happy Funtime Environment) and B) seems really unfair to all the other players that don't happen to work in marketing.

Dude, you're really out to 'WIN IT' though, ain't ya. Does not, cannot and will not occur to you that I'm not crying because I'm inf-poor, hmm?

And yeah, I think it's immensely craptacular and lame to bring a shotguns to airsoft games, which is what market manipulation to capitalize on inf-buyer-established prices kinda reminds me of.

But then, I'm also given towards thinking that investing in Coca Cola is unethical as well.

Personal bias ftw.

Unfortunately, maybe for me, I've seen exactly how much farming it takes to purple out several toons, and I know firsthand that there are two other options besides farming your brains out for months straight to do it.

Play City of Wallstreet, or buy inf. And frankly, if you're not playing City of Wallstreet in the purple/pvp market, you're not one of them that's sustaining an unethical/illegal market.

If you are, then you deserve every speck of ridicule, as you sir are trafficking in the gold market's profits, which -very clearly does- damage the availability of certain saleable forms of game content for the majority of those that do not --

A) Farm like machines
B) Flip
C) Buy inf.

You're never gonna see a purple without buying it off the market or getting one dropped on you (unless you have awesome friends. Most friends are not that awesome.)

PVP IO's? LAWL! The farm cartels for those are hilarious. I got to talk to a few people that farm those; all they do all day is beat eachother up in one FFA arena match after another after the next while yakking on Vent about whatever. They tell me that they think they get better drop rates if they change up toons after each match and that they average about two to four recipes in a 4-5 hour stint.

That's how we /should/ go about generating wealth?

We /should/ farm like machines or toe some thin lines on exploiting mechanics?

Really?

If there were no farmers you people wouldnt have ANYTHING to buy from the market.

And the prices would be a **** ton higher than they are now.

Why? Because there would be no supply.

This idea would do nothing but inconvenience people. Instead of putting stored influence into non existent items we would just bid high amounts on items that sell for really high amounts.

For example pvp IOs that sell at the 1.5 - 2 billion mark. I can bid 1 billion or less on that and it may never fill thus my influence is stored.

This idea would do nothing to lower prices.

The only way to lower price at WW/BM is to increase supply to the point that all items may as well be free.

Alright Uruare, let me step in here... Again.

-You certainly sound like a lazy beatnik. Why do I say this? Because I am lazy as hell and and still manage to get enough money to buy these thing that you seem to think are impossible to get. I spend as much time RPing as I do running missions, and after 18 months I've got 4 50s; one purpled out, two completed with everything except the purples and PVP IOs, and one whose build is very much in progress. I refuse to believe that I, who is scheduled four nights a week (Plus every other thursday) for things that DON'T involve running around and farming in City, am making that much more money than the 'average' player of the game.

-Your only arguments seem to be involving PVP IOs and Purple recipes. You know, the rarest items in the game. Those are rare in order to be rewards for the people who do put effort forth. You're suggesting that these should be made easily accessible to everyone, but then you're destroying them. While I agree that PVP IOs need a more common drop rate, purples are there to be perfection. Purpled out characters are what the devs have (I know, I've seen Synapse's stats). Until Going Rogue comes out, there is /no way to be better than purpled out./ This means that if you insist on Purples becoming more accessible, it alienates the hardcore gamers by giving them nothing to work for. As I said, I consider myself an average gamer, and I like having purples as something special and rare. I get to do a little dance whenever one drops on me, and once, back before AE's purple inflation, I gave one away to a friend.


-All I do for profit on the market is sell my drops and Common IOs that I've crafted. That's it. It's pretty easy and pretty straightforward and I've got enough money to have a character who can solo 95% of an ITF spawned for 8 players (I can't solo Romulus because his sword is bigger than my fist.) It's not hard. Purples are obtainable if you play at all and more obtainable if you play more. PVP IOs are broken expensive, but that is the fault of a different system (the PVP system as a whole), NOT one involving the Consignment Houses.


-If you don't like a game that resembles your job, don't play it. Many people, apparently, do like a game that resembles your job. I have this video game I love called Harvest Moon, where you play a farmer, tend to crops, raise cows and chickens, get married, and have a kid. I'm not sure a farmer would have fun with it, but I do. Making suggestions like this based on personal preference is meaningless because others can simply respond "You don't like it? Well I do."


-INFLUENCE SINKS is what the game needs. I cannot stress that enough. This is Econ 101 here!


-As a side note about making people hold less infamy... The infamy cap of 2 billion isn't because the devs decided we shouldn't be allowed to have more. It's because they figured people probably wouldn't need more and two billion is just under the thirty two bit number limit. What does this mean? It means they didn't want to up the system used to count your cash to sixty four bits because they didn't see a need for it. The devs have never said they don't WANT people having that kind of money, they just don't feel like taking time out to change the code to let people have more.

You didn't even read my post, didja. I have worked for it, to reiterate.

I've worked for it and achieved it, thank you very much.

It took an incredibly stupid amount of farming to do it, but I did it!

Yeah, I could've played the market; I know how. I just -don't-, as /I/ personally see it as being A) too annoying on the personal end and B) too easy to wind up supporting the Gold Sellers doing it, which is a brand of unethical I won't sustain.

Are IO's needed? No, but then not much is. Just some SO's, really, and you can have a very effective toon that does just fine in most circumstances.

But riddle me this; why -should- purple IO's be so ridiculous and absurdly priced, when all those massively-priced IO's do nothing but encourage the masses to find the quickest and easiest ways to get them as they can?

Do you comprehend anything of human motivation? Do you know how powerful ego and desire are, -especially- when something is technically available and desirable, but only within reach if you A) Farm like a machine, B) Flip some serious mojo on the market or C) buy inf?

-Which do you think people are most likely to do-?

The gold selling market knows. They've made it easier than ever to buy yourself some fat piles of inf. Heck, buy two fat piles; buy twenty! Even people on a part-time-job budget can get in on the instant-bling action!

And they do.

And they're never going to stop until availability of those IO's comes into a more procurable domain. Or until buying inf becomes flat-out impossible or so expensive as to be prohibitive, but which do the Devs have direct control over?

The former. The latter, they're working on addressing, but -another- way to take the knees out of the inf market is...?

Kill the prices of purples and PVP IO's.

How could that be done?

Several ways, not all of which would be smart. But, some are doable.

Anyway, I've got better things to do with reiterate what I've already said.

Ciao.

Observations while reading the thread:

While I don't read dev minds and don't read the dev digest, I'd be EXTREMELY surprised if the devs INTENDED for there to be a hard cap on influence or bids. Rather, it is a simple artifact from the days, long before IOs, back when the game came out, when two billion influence was simply unheard of. Nobody would ever hit the cap, and it wouldn't make any difference if they did, because there was nothing to spend the influence on. If the devs could do it simply, I suspect they would have long since removed the price cap. I suspect that people "exploiting the level 53 recipe bug" aren't anything the devs care about, because the REAL bug is probably the influence cap itself.

Flippers normalize prices, not raise prices. They're putting in both a price floor and a price ceiling, and the more flippers you have competing in a niche, the closer those price floors and ceilings become, driving prices closer and closer to a stable equilibrium. Patient bidders WILL pay more as a result. If you're a patient bidder, then you'll be paying more. But you were getting a bargain before. Now you're just getting less of a bargain. But what I find strange is that most of the people who hate the flippers seem to be in the buy it now crowd. Impatient bidders will likely pay less on average due to flippers, since they're buying closer to the price ceiling, and flippers lower the price ceiling. (Because for some reason this seems to matter to people, I'm not a flipper, so I'm not trying to mislead people here in order to continue my ebil, flipping ways.)

Nobody needs to understand economics to play the game. Regular life skills of buying and selling goods are sufficient to use the market, and heck, you don't even need to use the market, so you don't even need regular life skills. When you DO need to understand economics is when you are proposing changes TO THE GAME ECONOMY ITSELF. In that case, expect the people who don't understand economics to be shot down by the people who do.

Generally speaking, I think better influence destruction like influence sinks are "the answer" to "the problem". "The problem" seems to be that influence generation is higher than influence destruction. Might be true. I remember a thread a while ago about influence sinks, and I bet it comes up quite often. I believe one of my proposals was a badge or costume that cost a billion influence. Your "billionaire" badge requires you to SPEND a billion, not just have a billion. Now, it won't do much overall, but I bet a lot of the marketeers would want a billionaire badge and costume. That'll be your new photo op instead of a monocle and cup of tea. Drop in the bucket, though. I don't remember my idea being shot down. Not all ideas are shot down.

You need to be very careful with influence sinks though. It has to be something good enough to tempt people out of their hard-earned influence, but NOT so good as to cause resentment from people that can't afford it. In particular, I think combat-useful powers are out. You want to appeal to people the way that most badges appeal to people - no tangible benefit, and yet they can be a serious motivation. Motivate people to destroy influence with the same fervor, and you're onto something.

I don't personally have a problem with raising drop rates on purples and PvP IOs to bring down those prices somewhat. Although I kind of like that there are items so rare that I only have the rarest of them on a single toon after playing since beta, I also wouldn't complain if supply was higher. However, from what I've gathered, it seems that the devs are happy with the current level of scarcity. I believe they intended them to be both ultra rare and useful. Useful and ultra rare items are going to be very, very expensive.

MMOs, in general, are designed as time sinks. An endless treadmill where you're always chasing the next shiny thing. The devs COULD make purples and PvP IOs as common as SOs. Buy any crafted IO in a store for 50,000 influence, say. But to me, and probably to a lot of players, the magic then disappears. The only reason Ferraris are interesting is because they're rare, exotic, better than your Camry. But if everyone drove Ferraris, they wouldn't be interesting. They wouldn't show up on schoolboy dream posters. I drive a ten-year-old Miata with a plain old naturally-aspirated engine. I've kept up with an even older Ferrari on a track until it spun out in front of me trying to stay ahead. Modern cars, modern tires, modern suspension, modern brakes - we're ALL driving Ferraris now - just old Ferraris. But nobody knows it, and nobody cares. The game would be like that too. If everyone had purples and PvP IOs, they wouldn't be special, it wouldn't be interesting, and you wouldn't have anything to strive for. And that, I think, is why MMOs tend to have shiny, rare loot for you to chase after endlessly. It keeps a lot of people playing that otherwise might not.

Price caps result in shortages and off-market activity. If you stay on market, you'll put in your price capped bid and WAIT. I don't know exactly what happens with equal bids for items, but I'm guessing they're handed out randomly. So you've simply entered into a lottery. So let's say we price cap everything at 100 million. You put your bid on the market for 100 million for the PvP +3% defense. Now you wait, along with the other four hundred people with the same bid. A few days later, someone for some reason posts their PvP +3% defense on the market instead of selling it off-market for billions. You have a one in four hundred chance of getting it. Frankly, you're just not going to get one. To get one, you'll have to move off market, where all the real buying and selling is being done. And you're going to have to outbid someone, or maybe know someone that has one and is willing to cut you a deal, or trade a bunch of Luck of the Gambler globals for it, or whatever. So you're still paying through the nose, but now you're paying through the nose AND it's really inconvenient, and takes much more specialized knowledge than just placing a bid in a market interface window. (Oh, and as CapnGeist pointed out, off-market trading removes no influence from the system, so actually increases inflation.)

Not a recommendation of mine, but really, the only way to apply a price cap without doing this is by introducing stores selling at specific prices. That is often recommended. If anyone can buy their PvP recipe from a store for a hundred million, then yes, you have an effective price cap. But what you DON'T have is the same level of scarcity that the devs seem to have intended. The store greatly increases supply. Well, if supply was the problem, why not simply increase the supply? Again, because the devs seem happy with the supply. But I would suggest that anyone that wants a price cap instead campaign for increased supply. I think that's the solution that will produce the effect you want, while price caps will have some very negative unintended consequences, while not making it any easier for you to get your shiny.

I think there can be a lot of legitimate disagreement on how easy it should be to get the shinies. The people who want to be able to afford the best stuff when they hit 50 without putting in additional hours aren't wrong. It's just what they WANT. How can you be wrong about what you want? In fact, you could easily make a MMO without the shinies, without that particular treadmill, and people might love it. That's what City of Heroes was before I9. Well, there were Hamios. Let's pretend those didn't exist, as there were certainly the same sorts of complaints about those. In any case, perfectly doable, reasonably popular. It's a niche for an MMO, and it caters to some players, perhaps a lot of players. Me, well, that's not the MMO that I want to play. It was fun for a while, then I was growing tired of it, then I9 grabbed my interest and the IO system has held my interest in this game ever since. Frankly, I'd prefer if it took MORE work to reach level 50, MORE work to get my shinies. Again, this is just what I WANT. I'm not wrong; it's just personal preference. I like having to put in a lot of time and effort to get what I want in a game. Before people go saying, "but it's a game! It should be fun!" That IS the fun for me. I LIKE spending those hours. I LIKE the process. And frankly, if you're playing an MMO, I suspect you like the process too, and the main disagreement is how long the process should continue before getting the rewards.

I have had quite a few friends that just handed me their purple drops.
Heck, that is not including my husband who has probably given me over 50 of his purple drops... while he was still able to fully purple several of his alts.

I have personally not needed to "buy" any purples for atleast the last 12 months.

I dunno. Just seems to me like, I want them more than you.
I do what it takes to get purples. Time Sacrifice? Well this game is a time sink.