Let Us Buy Recipes With Inf

As an Inf sink to fight inflation, we should be able to buy most recipes with Inf. You could use data mining to ensure that they're not good deals, but people would still use them.

As it is now, much of the game's inf is merely traded, not spent; making the things we buy now take more of our inf would mitigate this without requiring changes to existing setups. People getting shafted on Inf by using this system would probably appreciate its presence when they used it.

Example: Sting of the Manticore Dam/Int/Rech isn't available below level 50 blueside right now. They sell about 2-5 times per month in the high 40's, running 2-5 million Inf for a recipe and about 10 million Inf for an enhancement; I must wait for a while to have a chance of getting one of these, and when I do, another player gets most of the Inf. If I could buy one from a vendor for 15 million Inf (for example), I might do so, at which point I would have my recipe and that Inf would be gone. My current alternative to the wait is a forced merit purchase; by the time I earn that many merits, I'll have earned millions of Inf as well, driving inflation.

So very, very signed.

it would also be a way for poeple to purchase purples and other extremely hard to get recipies instead of spending a fortune on the market or weeks or even months farming to get the same recipe

I don't think the devs really care about influence sinks. They're more interested in time sinks, and providing ways to get highly desired items quickly runs counter to having players be long-term subscribers to the game.

If you really need the recipe, you have options:

• Run some TFs for the merits. If you find a good group it's not so time consuming. If you use the 20-merit random roll you may get lucky and get what you need. Otherwise you can sell things, or save up till you get enough to buy exactly what you want.
• Run AE missions for tickets. Use the tickets for Gold rolls. You might get lucky and get what you want. If not, you'll likely get something even more desirable that you'll be able to sell on the market.
• Use tickets for bronze rolls. Some of these sell for tens of millions and more. Use your earnings to get what you really want. This is actually very lucrative, and it doesn't take very long to get hundreds of tickets no matter what kind of character you're running.

Necrotech: If you're complaining about cost, you're missing my point. If a certain purple was costing you 300 million inf on the market, it would cost you 500-600 million inf from the vendor in my system.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rodion You're in the consumer mindset. Become a producer of desirable items and you may get what you want out by random chance, and if not you'll quickly earn enough to buy it.

No, I was thinking about inflation. The Devs consider inflation an issue, and I agree. I already can and do get the recipes I want. (I've slotted 11 Luck of the Gambler globals in the past 3 months, and sold 3 more beyond that, for example.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Forbin_Project Why pay the prices there when the recipes have a fixed price in a store

Because the prices at the store would cost twice as much (or more). You do realize that we can already buy basic IO recipes for influence at the Universities? Those basic IO recipes still sell like hotcakes on the market. (Heck, you can even flip some of them from the vendor--the margin isn't good, but people will often pay more on WW than the university charges you.)

How about a way to convert INF to Merits for rolls and recipies!

While I agree with this idea as a player, I don't think it will happen, or at least soon. Why?

They put the merits in.
They are the store.
They are the currency.

That said, if inflation goes too crazy they might do this. It sets a ceiling for prices, but the trick is this. With merits, the character themselves are the only ones that can earn...with influence, money transfer, both between characters, friends, and with gold farmers takes center stage.

Why? Impatient people look at the market, don't find what they want, so they simply beg their SG, or pay for the influence through a RMT'er. The guy with a bunch of high level characters can use those characters' resources to directly access stuff for a new alt in ways those of earlier level could not, and that circumvents a lot of the in-game's economy. As it is, recipes are tethered directly not just to your account, but your character that's being played, or by what other players who are playing receive. What is being proposed makes this far more amorphous...guy playing the market doesn't just fiddle with what's out there, he can directly create supply. Person playing a level 50 makes way more supply than mr. casual gamer playing his multiple level 20 alts. You get the idea.

I would love the ability to convert inf into merits and an alarmingly preventive ratio.

This means every time someone wants to complain about how the market works we can be all "Just convert your inf and it's yours" and then they would wine about cost and we could be all "You have the option of earning merits, buying merits or using the market" and they would be all "I don't like the market" and we say "then use option a or b and deal with the cost" and around and around we go every week in a nice planned cycle of complaints and snark!

It's way more effective then our current complaint cycle.

Merits as the proper currency is a joke. Merits were introduced, yes, but inf is still what we have most of and the only thing we're allowed to spend and trade. Merits are these crazy lottery tickets that we can use to win random prizes, or spend stupid amounts to ensure we get the good stuff. There are very few recipes that it's worth spending merits on because all merit prices are that high.

If a random merit roll is 20 merits, then one needs to assume that for every recipe worth MORE than 20 merits there is at least one worth less. This is true, but the cheapest for sale is still what, 150 merits? Consider those claw machines of 'a winner every time' but it's 25 cents a play and sometimes you just win a piece of penny candy. The current merit system says if you want to buy that piece of candy individually from the vendor, it's a dollar. Merits are still just random rewards. They're not currency, they're bonuses, and you can play a lot without getting any. I did most of the arc content on my main before merits were introduced, and so my only merit source is Flashbacks and Taskforces. Sure, I do these sometimes, but most of what I do is team with my friends. And because merits are non-transferable, if I want to use merits to get level 50 recipes for that character, I need to run arcs on my other characters and /wait until they're level 50./ So that character I have with over 200 merits can't spend them on my main optimally for another 15 levels.



Back to the point: Inf is the economy. Merits are not. We need to be able to spend inf on things. Putting things at "expensive" in vendors will not stem inflation in itself, but it will do the following things.

-Ensure that recipes are ALWAYS available. Certain recipes are incredibly rare, and I'm not talking about purples or PVP IOs here. I'm talking about gold and silver rolls below level 50. There's no serious farming at lower levels, and thus Kinetic Combat and Gaze of the Basilisk pieces rarely show up on the market, for example.

-Give a place for lots of inf to drain from the economy. Right now, inf decreases as it moves through the market, but at a much slower rate than it's being produced. Selling recipes for inf would give an option for sudden removal of inf from the system. This will, long term, help reduce inflation by preventing the devaluation of Inf.

-Put a price cap on some recipes on the market. This isn't as big a deal as the second issue, but it will prevent a few things from getting really stupid expensive. Price for recipes, of course, would vary based on how good they are and how hard they are to find the 'normal' way.



And as said: No purple or PVP IOs for this as those aren't currently accessible via the merit system. This isn't about getting IOs with no effort, this is about ensuring that there is enough supply to FILL the demand, even if expense means people still aren't buying, and it's about getting inf out of the market to stem inflation.

According to our Wiki:

Invention Origin Enhancement Sets (select specific recipes):
Uncommon Enhancement Recipe: 50-75 Merits
Rare Enhancement Recipe: 125-275 Merits

Actually the minimum is 50 for most of the Uncommon recipes.

Right. I don't mean an on-the-market price cap, I mean an effective price cap in that the number of people willing to pay more than 10 million for a recipe that sells for 10 million from the vendors are slim.