Castle and the Market$

I notice the simple things haven't been mentioned. Taxation, storage fees for wentworths, vault storage fees, bin storage fees etc are all good ways to remove inf from the system without actually impacting most players.

Lets see

1. We could have an intangible* property tax, for inf stored in bids and such.

2. A tangible property tax for inf on the character below the cap and that could be progressive and bracketed.

3. A tangible property tax for items in sg bins and vault storage.

*technically all property in the game is intangible.

Good luck with those. In my experience, players of all "income strata" consider that sort of structure to be an unfair penalty applied to them, almost no matter how you spin it. Consider what happened with SG "rent" costs, which had this structure. Under the original system, your "rent" was based on how much prestige you had. (It was effectively a "prestige tax", not rent, since it had nothing to do with your actual SG base.)

I think it's much more likely to be given positive reception to offer them things to buy that they want (but presumably but don't have) than to charge them tax/rent on things they already have.

What ? I like inflation. I farm, it means the stuff I have in storage is more valuable and the drops I have become more valuable. Inflation is enjoyable for people who primarily produce goods.

I think you said, you run lots of speed tfs ? well its good for you. The merit is our final reserve currency inf inflation just makes your merits more valuable.

I am just observing that there are ways to take inf out of the system that aren't the equivalent of giving hookers dusted with coke to the people holding large stocks of inf.

I agree with A_F (First time for everything right?) if Money is going to get yanked out of the game by some mechanic, it needs to affect everyone. If I'm rich, and I know the government is going to yank cash out of my bank account (See North Korean government), Im going to do my best to hoard cash as liquid as I can.

Also, if Im rich, Im also going to try and put my cash into an asset that isn't likely to deflate (Currently that would probably be purples - unless they increase the supply) Just like I would convert cash-to gold or (as you would 3 years ago) Cash to Oil

Technically, inflation doesn't make anything more valuable. It only increases the figure in currency some other good can potentially be exchanged for. The good does not become more valuable; what's actually happening is that the currency is diluted and becomes worth less.

In the situation at hand, this is specifically undesirable. Ultimately, the only real source of inf in the game is defeating mobs and vendoring drops. Higher inf prices at the consignment house mean that more and more mobs will need to be defeated to meet those prices.

For players whose chief source of inf is defeating mobs, this gives rise to frustration. They see the time required to afford anything rising, and threatening to rise past the point where they feel it's worth trying. This is obviously bad, from the devs' perspective especially.

The only people who can afford the market prices are people who engage in marketeering themselves. And, as some market apologists will remind us, the market game is a kind of PvP: a boring kind, but PvP nevertheless. So you're forced to PvP if you ever want to get any of the loot other than your own drops.

Yes, BM/WW prices are too high. This is causing problems with the reward structure of the game. I am not sure that simply removing the ability to store inf beyond the cap would be productive. It would likely cause an inflationary panic as the few large inf holders tried to convert their stockpiles into harder goods. To be effective, that would have to be an unannounced change.

What's needed is to increase the number of worthwhile things that can be purchased with inf at high but fixed rates, to motivate people to remove more of it from the system.

1st defeating mobs produces inf +drops, all high prices do is increase the value of drops. If market prices are high for you to purchase other peoples drops they will be high for you to sell your drops.

So High Prices don't decrease your earnings they only change where your income will come from. If you want to vendor your drops (not recommended as I keep seeing in the tips that appear when I zone into missions) you will do badly. But vendoring that hamidon goo was never a good idea.

Two there is no need to add things to remove inf unless you want prices to go down.

First, the market removes inf continously and at some overall price point will reach an equilibria where the inf being generated is equal to the inf being removed by transaction fees, and crafting costs.

Second Most of the schemes presented overwhelmingly help people that have lots of inf stored, either on alts or in bids however. Inflation devalues their hoarded inf by forcing them to pay more for other peoples drops.

The need for more worthwhile things in the game is a separate issue. I would ask why are there so many narrow specialty recipes like confuses and sleeps and so few targeted AOE recipes ? Why are there so many crappy crappy recipes that are expensive to craft and whose sets give bonuses you don't want and a narrow concentration of a few recipes that are actually worth the effort ?

As for removing inf through purchasing items a very expensive store that takes inf, spits out salvage, recipes etc would probably be very welcome all around.

Of course that might upset people that play market volatility.

On the other hand, I see a lot of cases every day where people buy a crafted generic level 50 IO for 500,000 inf when I'm selling for 301,000 inf. They didn't try 400K; they won't miss the money.

I also have a long list of people who have turned hundreds of millions of inf into prestige, when I put prestige on sale. Some of them are just attracted by the sale, I'm sure, but some of them would do it for real.

The "cheap and frequent" has to be VERY frequent to make up for the "rare and expensive." If 1 million inf buys you a Magic Rock Of Big Surprise, vs. 50K for the same item, you need to sell twenty times as many MROBS at the lower price point. Otherwise you've just added an occasional cheap boost.

(I just noticed that there is NO inf cost for base empowerments. What's up with that?)

Can anyone think of more "price points" than these?

100K to 300K- what Tier 3 Awakens and Lucks often go for on weekends. This may be the top end of what people will pay for a consumable. There is an escape valve, as you can buy three tier 3 Accs and turn them into a wakie.

500K- what people easily pay for a generic level 50 IO. This is a "Buy once, use for a long time" decision, though.

1M- what a piece of common salvage goes for when there's only about four left, making people really angry. Note that they still buy. An addition to being a "use for a long time" decision, this is ALSO a "additional cost" price- they may have just bought a 20 million inf recipe to use it with.

Anyone who is defeating mobs is also getting drops. They can sell those drops on the market to get the cash for things that they actually want. The primary reason for having a market is so that when people get drops that can't (or don't want to) use they can exchange those for drops they actually want. If you only buy from the market without selling then you are essentially a parasite. You're injecting inf (demand) into the economy while removing supply without contributing any matching supply of your own.

EDIT: And before someone brings it up yes marketeers are parasites to however unlike people who only buy I like to think of us as suckerfish. Sure we're parasites but we provide a useful service to justify it

Inflationary psychology has been in full swing with my dealings with WW/BM for a good long time, and I don't see that changing in the near future. I try to minimize the amount of inf I carry, and characters that acquire a lot of it typically seek to convert that into hard goods as soon as they can to benefit other characters. I have only one character that holds more than 20M in inf routinely, and most will be holding less than 5M.

I do sell drops - or more likely, crafted IOs - that none of my characters need. But anything that might remotely be useful, I hold and make myself. My abiding belief is that if I let any worthwhile drops go, if ever I want another I will have to pay more in inf to get it than I got from selling it. So they stay in the bin.

No ****.

Cant see the forest through all these trees...

LOL-That might be a very interesting inf sink.

Careful. "They" in this case can't be generalized to the whole population, or they'd all be throwing 1M at it much more of the time. 1M is what someone or some select subset of the population pays. The rest of them turn into the 4000 bids you see pop up for the item, waiting for someone to list the item for the "practically free" prices they're used to.

The people who are paying an extra 200k for generic IOs are the people who are either already super rich or super confident they can replace that cash in no time flat. If this sort of thing is based on getting super rich people to throw away a pittance of their net wealth (or net wealth potenial), I don't think it's going to remove much total money.

Since the market does seem to be in a state of inflation then storing excess inf as enhancements makes sense. However, storing enhancements that you aren't using means that you are denying yourself access to enhancements that you could use now.

You say you're loathe to sell any enhancements that you might want in the future due to concerns that the price will go up. While that is a valid point you also need to consider that baring some drastic shift in the relative supply and demand of different enhancements the relative value of different enhancements doesn't change a lot. What this means is that if the cost to buy a particular enhancement increases in the future then it is extremely likely that the cost of the enhancements that you're getting as drops will also increase.

So if you're not using an enhancement then you're better off selling it and using that to buy enhancements you do want to use. Sure it's possible in the future that you'll end up buying it for more than you paid but so what? The enhancements that you get as drops then will also be worth more.

If you've got excess inf then storing it as enhancements makes sense (particularly if they are popular enhancements that are always likely to maintain their value). But if you're short on the Inf to buy enhancements that you want then storing enhancements you can't use is pretty pointless.

Are these two back to back posts that both point out how one is "An ebil marketeer solely speaking in self interest and only hoping to make more money and have more wealth than anyone else"? Also, are these two posts each referring to different sides in a compare and contrast?

In the original post Selling Merits for Inf is compared with reducing Inf rewards. The first quoted post explains how selling Merits for Inf benefits those who already have money. The second quoted post explains how reducing Inf awards rewards those who already have money. Virtually any idea that will combat inflation will benefit people who have money other than "take money directly from people who have money." That's pretty much a basic facet of "deflation" and "inflation".

The only reasonable conclusion, and only universal truth in the markets, is that Ebil Marketeers always win.

No matter what one does or says, one is always in support of Ebil Marketeers.

Cease thyne acts of greed. Bask in the glorious illumination of War Witch and allow though holy radiance to percolate through thyne life ichor. Grasp thyne Inf from the raised seat of avarice and cast it forth among the masses of Casual Players. Only through removal of thyne's own repository of wealth can knowledge be wrought and thus allow though to speaketh and acteth in a manner not born of the greed of Ebil.

FWIW in terms of the Market this is true.

But then I again I have been laughing like a maniac at getting bankers to "improve" the banking system* or lawyers to "Reform" the legal system.


Edit: The funny thing is banking has always been set up as a system where the banker can't lose, but somehow they managed to ????

Look at the prices for level 50 common IO's-the ones most people use- "power 10" or the equivalent. Defense, Acc, Damage, Rech, End Mod, End Red, Dam Res, Healing. Right now heroside they're all going for half a million except one, which is going for a million. Everyone's rounding off to the nearest 50K or 100K.

"Those are only level 47+ characters using those", you say. And you'd be right. Level 47+ characters have lots of money. LOTS of money. 2 billion a day is burnt on purples, by Chriffer's math. So 20 billion a day is spent on purples. Which is the price of 40,000 "half-million inf" IO's.

To put it another way, at 50K per item you'd have to sell 400,000 items a day to match the Purple drain. Which may be most of the total drain out of the system.

... That's a hell of a lot of inspirations.

Maybe I'm actually one of the few who think the market is seriously ****** up but can afford just about everything but there is something seriously wrong with the market and unfortunately there is not developer made solution for it.

Everyone who's buying crafted level 50 enhancements. We can't generalize any given item's buyer's market to the whole of the people you need to target. We don't know if that represents a decent fraction of the people playing 50s. What about the people that craft their own? The people that don't slot generics? The people that don't slot level 50s?

I understand that. I'm saying that the level 47+s you see doing that particular thing may not be anything like most of the level 47+s out there churning new inf into the economy. The solution has to target enough of them to have an effect on that whole production base.

All I'm saying is that if you target only rich-blooded players, I think you risk missing out on a big part of the money-generating and possibly money-hoarding part of the player base. And if that big part is too big, the measure won't do what you want it to.

That's a fun idea. Like a $10,000/plate charity dinner. Sadly, I think there would be too many people complaining that they can't afford it and that it isn't fair.

What about a lottery? Has that idea come up already? 10,000 people buy tickets for 10k inf each. That's 100,000,000 inf in the kitty, but the prize could be a mere 50,000,000 inf. The lottery tickets could be a fixed price item in WW. Of course, that might run into the online gambling restrictions.

What about reverse RMT? That might be a terrible idea - letting people buy subscription time for inf. I think Eve does that, don't they? The booster packs could be sold the same way.

The best idea I've heard yet is letting people use inf to buy billboard space using that advertising system we have. It's certainly not being used for actual advertising, and they originally said that player-made billboards could appear sometimes. It would be a great way to promote events and AE arcs and the like.

Higher crafting costs for purples would have an impact, but probably wouldn't spark too much outrage. Nobody wants to be nickel and dimed with little fees on everything, though.

I quite like the dummy account idea. As long as you don't mind adding extra IOs to the economy you could use system generated listings to destroy inf much faster than drops awarded to players do via market fees.

What if the market system generated listings for something desirable like the PvP IOs - say 5 per day. The winning bidders get the item and the system can destroy 100% of the inf. It might be best if it were something created for the purpose rather than existing IOs it just has to be something desirable to the top 1%. Something that gives an incremental power increase.

You could do the same if you wanted to have expensive one-shot temp powers but want to avoid the 'Too awesome to use' effect. You let the market decide what they're worth. Have the system generate 10,000 (say) listings per day and let the bidders decide what they're willing to pay.