Castle and the Market$

There is just too much influence being generated and not enough sinks for said inf. On top of that, people can just drop money for inf at RMters, making more influence come into the game (yes, the money was generated ingame...) as well.

The Dev's best recourse might be well to fill bids for the "bid holders" such as level 53 recipes, odd-levelled Hamis and so on, thus removing billions of influence from the game completely. That or block bids on nonexistant items.

In the end though, if the Devs really want to fix things they can, and quickly:

-Add an ingame store that sells ALL non-PvP Recipes at a set influence price. If the store sells Miracle procs at 20 mil, people will use that and, sadly, ignore the markets. Or as peterpeter (I believe) said, they can lower the Merit costs of recipes and random rolls and ticket costs of rolls to trivial amounts....or even allow us to pay influence for random rolls.

Actually, I'd love the ability to pay influence to vendors for random rolls...that would crank out [i]thousands[i] of new recipes into the system Or the devs could just flip the switch and drop hundreds of recipes into the market from a 'dummy account', removing inf by the millions (billions?) as well.

Either way, I look forward to whatever happens. If recipes crash, so be it. If an alternate supply is created, so be it. If inf sinks are created, so be it.

Bring on change.

If the goal is to lower prices, and if they are happy with the drop rates and the overall supply of goods, then the change would have to impact the supply of inf.

I doubt if they will delete inf. That would feel like they were robbing their own customers, and I don't think they'd want to do that. Maybe they would delete inf on inactive accounts, but that wouldn't have any immediate impact and it would be a significant change in policy for them. They could bring back the 60 day rule, but I hope they don't.

I think the best way to get rid of influence is to give people something to spend it on. Like Neuronia said, make it possible to convert inf to merits, AE tickets, vanguard merits, whatever. Add special prestige items that can be bought with silly amounts of influence that don't effect gameplay. Have an Inf Cap costume part that costs 2 bill inf. Have an "I've Got More Money Than Brains" badge that costs a fortune. Anything to make the inf go away.

Of course, that will only work if it's coupled with some nerfs that reduce the amount of inf coming into the game: reduce the amount of inf earned per defeat, and reduce the NPC value of IO recipes. Of course, they have to be careful to avoid a scenario where people are unable to afford SO's.

If I had to guess, I'd say that the devs miscalculated the value of high level common IO recipe drops. They're worth far more than SO's, and AFAIK most people sell them instead of use them because of the way crafting works.

I read Castle's other post in that thread, and I'll have to withdraw my previous assessment - Castle seems to have ruled out the possibility of more frequent drops. I guess he must be talking about the inf oversupply, but it's not exactly clear what he means by "horribly broken".

Gotta say, I don't like it when devs post little snippets which can be taken in many different ways - especially when it may just be the dev's opinion, rather than an indication of future direction.

Castle and Mod8 have opposing viewpoints on the influence cap. This is because there are multiple ways to look at the influence situation. The basic problem is players generate too much influence and have no place to spend it but the market. The secondary problem is the devs don't want their rewards to become trivial to get.

Because of the fact that the devs want somethings to be carrots ( this IS an MMO people!!!1!!1 omg) there will be haves and have nots. Even if the devs eliminate the level 51+ influence storage IO/recipes, players can still store more than that. As mod8 points out, it would just be a new annoyance and not a solution.

This game has been broken since original beta in various ways, and influence generation is one of them. The problem is it is too late to reduce influence gains without having huge backlash. It's also likely impossible to increase market fees at this point as that would create more of a real black market than we have now.

So the only things that seem reasonable to do would be to offer new influence sinks and fix the TF drop problem (see below). These things won't help PvP IOs, but they can help all the other items.

If pvp drop rates are broken then they should be fixed, but we need serious data on what the devs say they should be and exactly how they should work.

Having extra influence above 2 billion is not really a problem - the problem is lack of places to spend it which concentrates all of it on the rarest most coveted items.

*TF drop problem*
When they added merits they removed drops from the TF rewards and replaced them with merits. This murdered the supply of pool C recipes in their sleep and concentrated supply into max level ranges because now supply is not automatically generated and players can wait til X level to roll their random rolls or just get a given recipe at X level. This hurts the market and makes it unfriendly to lower level toons. Instead of removing supply and replacing it with merits they should have implemented that system better by adding merits on top of the random drop system.

Yesterday, redside alone, purple recipes and enhancements alone, just under 2 billion Infamy was destroyed (1.75 billion by my data collection). I suspect that volume of sales on the Black market is lower on Wednesday than most other days of the week.

I'll round off some numbers to make this simpler. Let's pretend that 2 Billion Infamy destroyed in this manner is average. There have been roughly 45 days since the new year.

In the year 2010, 90 Billion Infamy has been destroyed from purples alone.

This number does not include salvage, pvp recipes, luck of the gamblers and other Pool C recipes. Nor does it include the ENTIRE BLUESIDE MARKET.

Think about what Castle is saying: 90 Billion Infamy isn't enough being destroyed. Ninety Billion plus Salvage, Pool Cs, and the entire blueside market is not enough.

In my personal opinion, level 50 toons make too much Inf relative to other level characters. Others have mentioned similar opinions in this thread. I think level 50 toons should make more than other characters but not so much more that they render the earning of other toons nearly insignificant in comparison. Look at these tables for comparison purposes. Level 50 IOs sell for more than the other 8 tiers combined by a significant margin. Perhaps this margin should be reduced.

Further, there is some function that works something like this every time an enemy is defeated. I would like to reiterate that this is generally how it works and the idea is to convey the concept and not represent actual game code. (this is the part where "Nefarious Ken" whose name may be a synonym tells me I don't have my facts straight)

Non-level 50: Reward Inf X where X is that characters Inf value. Reward Experience Y amount where Y is that characters XP value.
Player is given X Inf and Y experience.

Level 50: Reward Inf X where X is that characters Inf value. Reward Inf X where X is that characters Inf value. (Perhaps this is really X + Y)
Player is given 2 * X Inf.

Perhaps instead of 2 * X the formula should be changed to 1.5 ... or 1.25... or 1.1

Perhaps they should change it to 0.75 ... etc.

Couple ideas to move things gradually down:

1) Ability to buy merits at a ridiculous rate- I suggest 2 million per merit or more. Something that people will complain about and not use. . . except for people who need just a merit or two more. Or people like me who are looking for juicy ways to burn inf. I think a million per merit is just not ENOUGH. Make it part of an April Fool's event. I dunno.

2) The "stop paying for the game, lose your Wentworth stuff after 2 months" option. This is a more conservative version of the old 60-day rule.

3) Lower the inf-to-prestige ratio to, say, 333 to 1. I think people will use it MORE if they get more out of it- perhaps as a blip until people adjust but I think the effect is there.

4) Lower the sellback price of level 50 common recipes. (Already mentioned but worth repeating.)

5) Expensive 1-shot goodies; consider a once-per-half-hour craftable item that recharges all your other powers instantly. How much would you pay for that? A million? Ten million? How much would someone having trouble with Lord Recluse pay for that? How about million-inf Tier 3 IO's, available for emergencies? One LRSF teamwipe could burn a hundred million inf on the spot.

6) 12.5% Wentfee (5% before, 7.5% after) on anything over 10 million inf. If you flip or crap something for double the price now- say, buy item + ingredients for 20 million and sell for 40- you're generating a total of 6 million of Wentfees. Under the new system you'd generate 7.5 million (the item and ingredients, individually, are under the limit) so, in theory, you'd only be able to spend inf 8 times instead of 10. Inf in the system should drop by 20% as a result. And people who are buying low are unaffected.

EDIT:

7) Guaranteed server transfer of inf at a 10% fee. Like using the market to do it, but without the possibility of screwing up and buying the wrong Level 29 Training Enhancement.

the devs should solicit us locals with their market questions, since we've consistently demonstrated a far finer grained understanding of its hows and whys.

I used to think they knew what was up with the market. But it's been clear for a while now that they just make random changes without thinking them through, then gape in confusion at the ensuing carnage.