Increase PVP IO Drop rate

What this game needs to fix the inflation issue is a big old money sink.

My suggestion: Allow us to purchase merits with inf. Something along the lines of 100k inf to one merit I think would remove an awful lot of the money from the system, and the prices of everything would drop.

No one will see any inflation relief until the holes are closed with regards to exploit leveling. Just remember that xp is closely related to inf in this game and the amount of xp and inf that you can generate today (usually via AE) has seriously flooded the game with cheap easily gained influence.

i14 1 to 50 in less than an hour.
Right now, 1 to 50 in 3 hours.

PvP IOs trading for such high value are a symptom of rampant inflation and not only high demand and low supply.

actually, the Starcraft 2 beta starts today, so I official have no opinion on Drop rates or IOs

And yet, he's telling the truth.

Please refrain from spouting argument from personal incredulity, it only makes those who know better immediately ignore you.

If you don't want to increase drop rates give an alternate supply.

[Psypunk]
Ideas (Shoot down/modifiy as you wish)

Siren's Call bounty system:

I used to love going to Siren's Call but really, there's no need anymore with maxed builds at 50 and RV being hopping.

Modify the Bouty System so that the 6,000 bounty (or whatever it is) for a SO is instead applied to a random roll for a PvPIO. If you want some PvPIOs to maintain their value, lock them out of the roll table.

Issues with this include killsteals, of course, and farming for them. The killsteal issue could be resolved by having a tab of the player performing the most attacks on the target getting the IOs. The farming issue is always going to be there. Farming happens now, it always will so not sure where to go with it. If you want to disincentivize farming you need a higher supply output.

PvP Merits:

The PvE Merit system is based on time for rewards. Applying this to PvP could be problematic because matches generally last 10 minutes (sudden death is largely ignored at the higher end) and time in zone doesn't necessarily equate to getting kills.

Make this a participation thing...if you're in an 8 v 8 match you get a Merit on completion. You can add extra Merits for getting the most kills or getting kills. To disincentivize kill farming, also think about getting Merits for good healing skills...if you AP someone back from a potential death, grant a Merit for that. The problem is, of course, you could set up a farm where someone would just spike a target like a petless MM and your Empath could just gather up the Merits, of course.

In an ideal world, both teams would get Merits. Give each team member 2-3 Merits for participating (per member, so 16-24 Merits per team per match) and add more Merits for kills, saves, etc.

Make the Merit vendors about equivalent to PvE. Unfortunately, the low pool of IOs here (let's be honest, there aren't recipes available at level ranges, JUST recipes) means you might have to set the roll cost fairly high. It doesn't make sense to have it be 20 Merits or something...

Say in our practices last night, one of the matches ended 18-11 or something. So that would be 3 Merits to each team member for playing. Give the Emps 2-4 Merits for making saves. Give the Blasters 2-4 Merits for kills. In the end you'd get 10-20 Merits in a match. The rapid accumulation of Merits means you'd need to make rolls around 40-50 merits each at least.

The zone problem is...people KS. Some people are really good at KSing. The game/power system ensures that DoT powers can kill off a target someone has been working so Merits could be hard to gauge then. You might want a lower Merit output in zone. Reward time in zone more...after a half hour out there you get 5 Merits. If you get kills you get 1 Merit or something...not sure what the best methodology to work this would be as I just zone for kicks and I rarely get kills myself.

(As an aside, cages would become somewhat lulzy as you might see people caging targets on low HP to prevent Merits from being awarded)

Of course, at this point you have to decide how rare you want stuff to be. Should PvPIOs be as rare as purples? Not in my humble opinion. Should they be rare? Sure. You shouldn't get them with every kill. It shouldn't take hundreds upon hundreds of kills either...

[/Psypunk]

TLDR:

The new system awards Merits automatically to PvPers in Arenas and to Zone PvPers. It tends to reward teaming more (a good thing imo) as team members get a set amount on match completion.

This would require some extra work on the Devs parts and of course some checks and balances, but you'd get more recipes into the system (hopefully) by players PvPing regularly and dumping excess in the Markets.

Even if you don't dump your excess, you still get more IOs generated overall.

So:

Merit vendors in Arenas and PvP hospitals/zone entrances.
Random Rolls at around 40-50 Merits each.
Weight rolls as needed/desired. Exlcude some recipes if needed, if you really want some recipes to be drop only.

People PvP, recipes generated, supply increases, profit?

There are a couple alternate solutions I'll touch on quickly. Bolded important parts.

First, the core problem. PvP is supposed to be balanced. The theory that is, I'm aware that it rarely is in practice. This was the philosophy behind the Issue 12 (?) changes. It didn't really work. When you required 3 power pools (2 travels + fitness) before, you now need 4 (2 travels, fitness, and phase, a build generally useless for PvE).

Incorporating loot into this, especially RARE loot, means that introductory PvP is even uglier. These recipes need to for kills AND defeats, so that high damage builds are not the only ones with a good chance of drops. Team Fortress 2 does this rather well I believe, for drops are awarded as a chance per set time interval, and is not tied to normal objectives which can be farmed or griefed (there's an interesting interview with Valve here). This method examines the average playtime of a player, and has a set rate interval, at which each interval the player has a chance to get an item. If you spend more time playing, more chances, but none of the needless grinding for achievements that plague other situations like XBox live. This I believe is not too unlike the method Castle commented on briefly about badges a long time ago which was scrapped in design. This has the added benefit of allowing players to get those rare recipes whether they spent 30 minutes getting base camped (it does happen) or off in a bout which may or may not even be balanced due to the problematic factor of faction numbers currently in the zone. The very fact that a character here has so many survival mechanics means that kills in PvP can be rare. As was mentioned earlier, higher skill means you get killed less, and if the other player is good as well, kill less. Less supply because people are getting smarter? No thanks.

edit: As the immediate problems of afking in a zone came to mind after I posted this, the simple solutions are A) remove all safe zones outside of a very small area outside the zoning portal, and/or B) make the logout timer much shorter (like 5 minutes) and override ALL other methods of preventing auto-logout.

Valve also releases gameplay statistics, something I believe this game could use. If nothing but scrappers and blasters are in a PvP zone, something's wrong. Having drops for getting defeated also makes it sort of a consolation prize of "Hey, thanks for playing!" rather than only awarding PvP IO's to the best and leanest, something of a design problem if you ask me. Yes, I'm aware that TF2 is nothing but team based PvP, but this sort of thing is interesting to the average person and not just the mathematician.

Inflation exists because there's no supply. Unlike a real economy, you cannot go and start a business to address shortage of something. You cannot craft a PvP IO recipe from a bunch of garbage salvage. These PvP recipes need to drop like inspirations, this is the only way to truly drive the prices down. Farmers are continuing to find better and leaner ways to farm as they twink out builds, optimize DPS and attacks, making their own missions even, and the 'inf generation' part of the game will do nothing but rise on the higher end. To draw an extended analogy, this is a little bit like the drug war in several countries: the only way to effectively combat prices is to offer a completely alternate, legitimate means by which to obtain the product, and at much, much lower prices than the competition. If Gladiator Armor +res's suddenly start dropping by the dozens, people won't continue paying the 3.6 billion inf currently required. Why would they?

Inf was a trivial commodity before IO's themselves came around and fostered a very different attitude in this game which I think was a very refreshing change compared to other games. I still remember my first month in this game back in 2005 when I started off in Atlas and was given 250k out of the blue by some level 50 because he was helping new players. I don't see that as much any more unfortunately, and maybe it's time to turn inf back into what it was before: just that, play money.

PVPIO farms yield between 1 and 20 recipes per 24 hours farmed.

Thats with 1 offensive AE character and 5 alts with self rez on auto getting killed over and over.

Drop rate seems pretty low to me considering thats like 500 kills a night.

That said.. people who farm PvPIOs can theoretically get between 25-100 recipes a week.

Also before people balk..

The people who can do this (not me, my wife would kill me) spend $15 x 5 ($75) a month. Its not exactly cheap.

-Kiri