Inflation: knock off the inf-sink idea's please. Here's how to "fix" the perception problem.
By
Aura_Familia,
Posted on: 2010-03-21 18:03 in Suggestions and Ideas
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This presumes that people want to take the time to put things on the market. The faster my inventory fills up, the more likely I am to simply vendor things or delete them. Anything you do in an attempt to incent more selling needs to have something that makes that selling easier. More stuff isn't the whole of the answer, especially since:| Increase the drop-rates on Merits, invention recipes, and Salvage so that more players can have more items to put into the Auction House, and be able to fill the market demand. |
You're trying to create downward price pressure by increasing supply. It's against the seller's interest to sell more for less $
Whatever system you create should be independent of what the players choose to do.
I think maybe a better answer would be to come up with a system that monitors what is vendored/deleted, then link that to a market feeder script such that a % of what is dumped by players is auto-fed back into the AH market at a fluctuating price. Price should be set at a minimum double of the vendor price with a maximum as a certain % of the average AH price based on the number sold.
This kind of background system could go a long way to maintaining an even supply on items most players don't consider worth their time to sell, but are still needed. Also the fact that the system will be feeding items into the market on a consistent basis would let people feel more comfortable in putting in lower than average bids so they don't have to pay inflated prices.
Another potential solution is to put timers on Sales and bids. In WoW's auction, prices are somewhat limited by the fact that if you put up an item, it will come down again within a couple days, and part or all (I forget which) of the posting fee is lost.
I know I wouldn't put something up for a multimillion fee if it was going to come down again in 72 hours.
PS- no solution should force people to join a supergroup or run in sg mode if they don't want to. Groups that prey on people and force them to grind prestige are bad enough as is. You're just incentivizing that bad behavior by rewarding it with better drops.
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
I think you'd quickly see a change in prices if bids expired in 24 hours and bids / items were set on a per account basis rather than a per character basis. So if you have 20 total auction slots, they are the same 20 total auction slots. That way you cant bid 1 inf on all of your auction slots on every character and make it look like alot of people are suddenly bidding on a particular item. There are people that do this and thats why some items always have so many freakin bids. Ofcourse if they were to make it account based they would need to increase the maximum number of auction slots as 20 wouldnt be enough for all of your characters to share.
Other then that I don't believe inflation really exists in coh. Its just a hand full of players exploiting the system with low ball bids on multiple characters.
Friends don't let friends buy an ncsoft controlled project.
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Err... what?
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Originally Posted by Lemur Lad
It's against the seller's interest to sell more for less $
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http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
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So melee characters get drops for their secondaries. Blasters get nothing for theirs (especially a blapper build which is secondary heavy). Defender with ranged damage get less weight for their secondary (which include PBAOE or TAOE).|
The implementation here is based on a simple white-list / black-list. Players in a Supergroup can choose to set a flag to only get recipe drops that boost the powers they actually have. So tanks, scrappers, brutes, and stalkers would get recipe drops with equal weighted values towards melee attacks, defenses, and resistances. Blasters would get recipe drops weighted towards ranged, pbaoe, and mezzes. Dominators would only get recipe drops with higher weights on control and mez recipes, with lesser weights on ranged, pbaeo, and melee damages. Controllers and Masterminds would get high weights on pet damage, control, mezzes, buffs, and debuffs. Defenders would get high weights on mezzes, buffs, and debuffs, with lower mezzes for ranged damage. Corruptors would get equal weights on buffs, debuffs, ranged, and pbaeo recipes. The idea is that players who are flagged for specific drops will get recipes that they can actually use. Every tank, scrapper, and blaster whose gotten pacing of the turtle from Katie Hannon knows what I'm on about here. |
Tanks Can use your disparaged Pacing of the Turtle in every power of Ice melee, and arctic mastery plus some in ice armour.
Scrappers can use it in most spines powers plus a couple in weapons.
Blasters of course can use it in ice blast, ice manipulation and cold mastery, plus a couple in devices
Seems to me this 'weighting' is more about your personal playstyle and preferance rather than any objective analysis.
@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617
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Selling dozens of drops for less yet taking the same amt of time amount of time to do the selling, isn't in the seller's interests. It's just not worth my time when I can dump them on the vendor and be on my way.|
Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper
Err... what?
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Reducing prices by increasing supply and pushing players to do more selling to cover the same ground isn't the way to solve the problems.
It will always be easier to re-engineer the system to take advantage of existing behaviors instead of trying to change the behaviors. People are already not very interested in wasting auction slots on items that don't sell well, nor taking the time to sell when their inventory fills up quickly.
Account for that by supporting the people who don't want to take the time to sell at the same time you supply the market for people who need lower value stuff.
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
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Most of the SG's that I'm aware of doing this died out years ago on the servers I play on. I presume this is occurring largely on servers like Freedom or Virtue where the player-base has little interest in learning how to play the game, much less teaching new players how to play and interact with the game? Well, I'm sorry to say this, but if a player can't figure out that being "forced" to grind for prestige is considered a bad thing, and isn't willing to get off the junk servers and check out other groups... I have very little sympathy for that player. | PS- no solution should force people to join a supergroup or run in sg mode if they don't want to. Groups that prey on people and force them to grind prestige are bad enough as is. You're just incentivizing that bad behavior by rewarding it with better drops. |
There's also the underlying idea here that running in SG mode is a bad thing. Well, with the changes made to the prestige / influence earning, staying in SG mode is far from the punishment that it was a couple years ago. My particular goal with the suggestions I proposed is to make players want to run in SG mode. Okay, I will grant that a large percentage of the player base doesn't care about running a SG/VG, but that doesn't change the lack of any tangible reason for players to really get interested in having an SG or belonging to an SG.
So no, I'm not " incentivizing" any bad behavior here.
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| Err... what? |
...I disagree with your definition of Inflation, and thus I disagree with your proposed fix.
You claim that inflation is what players request as prices. I argue that INFLATION is the slow, steady rise of prices and thus the devaluation of infamy/influence.
The cause of a gradual INCREASE in prices is because more Inf enters the system than leaves it on a regular basis, and Inf enters the system at a faster rate than anything one can buy from NPCs for Inf is reasonably needed.
The fact that more of this inf is in the hands of certain rich people isn't the cause of inflation, as the rich people aren't the main purchasers. Certainly, some items, like PVP recipes, are purchased almost exclusively by heavy farmers and market-players, but salvage and MOST recipes are purchased by pretty much everyone. The community is getting wealthier over time and because of this, the same goods are costing more now than they used to.
Increasing the drop rates is a TEMPORARY fix. It will cause a sudden surge of price drops, after which things will settle out, and then inflation will start up again as even more money enters the system and players become richer as a whole. For the same reason level 25 characters are able to spend more than level 5 characters, 60 month veterans are able to pay more than 20 month veterans. They've earned more in their careers.
In order to have a PERMANENT fix for inflation, there needs to be a way to ensure that influence/infamy exits the system at a rate roughly proportional to it entering the system, thus not becoming devalued.
So what we need IS, in fact, an Inf Sink. Something that the AVERAGE CONSUMER will want to purchase in such a way that the AVERAGE CONSUMER won't have as much inf to spend on the big expensive things. Prices are set by what people are able to spend, and the only reason Common IOs are randomly selling for 5 million is because so many people have that much to throw around.
Long story short:
Inflation happens when people GAIN money as a whole or when goods BECOME scarce. As the merit system and the architect system have actually reduced scarcity of goods and yet inflation continues, it's pretty clear that the issue is people as a whole, not just the elites, having too much money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
NPCs: A Single Method to Greatly Expand Bases
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Just throwing this out there, but stereotyping like this means you have absolutely zero credibility. /unsigned because you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
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Originally Posted by je_saist
servers like Freedom or Virtue where the player-base has little interest in learning how to play the game, much less teaching new players how to play and interact with the game?
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I'm confused by this statement. Your goal seems to be to make IOs readily available to "casual" players, but you feel that it's still appropriate to balance the game against a lower standard, which would effectively make the game unbalanced. This would be akin to suggesting in the pre-IO days that the game should be balanced against DOs.
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Originally Posted by je_saist
[*]A solution must keep in mind that the vast majority of the game needs to be balanced against Single Origin builds, not tweaked IO builds.
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I would like the economy/market to satisfy the following things:
1. The price should be less than the inf cap. I think it's not a good thing that players have to get around the market to sell stuffs beyond the cap.
2. Common items should be cheap enough such that I don't need to type 6 or 7 zeros to buy or sell them. I think it gets annoying if the typical price of a common salvage is like a million. Right now, it's ok.
3. Everyone can afford to completely IO themselves with uncommon set IOs. It's the nature of MMO that players who play more will be better equipped. On the other hand, I think it's a good idea that everyone can have a flavor of IO sets. I think CoX is friendly enough to casual players that SO and cheap-IO builds can perform decently well.
As such, I think the current market situation is ok. I don't know what it will be like in the future. Some stuffs seem to get more expensive with time. The dev should have the data to tell. If there is really inflation, both inf sink and higher drop rate will help. For inf sink, just make sure that the system sucks more inf out of the rich, and does not make the poor poorer. For drop rate, the exact implementation will take some thought because not every recipe has the same price. A uniform increase of drop rate will make some recipes cheaper than dirt. I guess the dev probably will wait till the system violates all the 3 things I mentioned above before they want to do something. 
As an aside, one drawback of inf sinks like apartments and statues is that they'll create another have/have-not divide for the more socialist amongst us to complain about. Of course, this is no reason not to implement something along those lines. Someone will always have more, and someone will always complain about how unfair it is.
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AFAIK the statues were going to be designed that only the player would see his own statue. So if you had one in AP, only you would see it when you walked by. When I would walk by it would just be a generic statue if I did not have one.
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Originally Posted by Redoubtable
As an aside, one drawback of inf sinks like apartments and statues is that they'll create another have/have-not divide for the more socialist amongst us to complain about. Of course, this is no reason not to implement something along those lines. Someone will always have more, and someone will always complain about how unfair it is.
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To put it in more general terms: if you make the reward attractive then people who can't have it will want it. A subset of these people (or perhaps people who sympathise with them) will complain about the fact that they can't afford it.
If you don't make the reward attractive then nobody will want it, and it will be useless as an inf sink.
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Actually, as far as I'm aware, inflation is defined an increase in the amount of currency in circulation within any given economics system. It's what keeps governments from just printing more money to swell up their budgets. The more currency there is in circulation, the less each individual unit is worth and the more worthless units each item of commerce costs.|
Originally Posted by je_saist
Inflation is defined as the cost of in-game goods in terms of influence / infamy as requested from other live players utilizing the auction house system.
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As such, the prices of Inventions items and their availability are just a side effect of the larger problem of influence entering the system faster than it leaves it. I'm not confident that this occurs, but assuming that it does, this causes prices to increase as the rich get richer and progressively looser with their purse strings. Even if we increased supply, that still wouldn't help the little man unless that supply went to HIM, because more supply is still going to be gobbled up by those with more money, and the only way for poorer players to buy anything would be to either outbid the rich, which won't happen, or simply wait for them to buy what they want and buy after them, which rarely happens.
However, obolishing the market is not a solution, either, because it returns us to a very old, very irritating problem inherent to a lot of old-style MMOs - grinding. Yes, certain activities could give a higher chance to get drops, but that just means that you'll be rerunning these activities and crossing your fingers until you distort your knuckles. The Market provides a solution to that - you don't have to farm for anything when you can just buy it, provided people sell it for not too much. And I, for one, tend to sell for no more than 5000.
But the Lemur has a point. Currently, the Market interface is REALLY cumbersome. For one, you have to put your items into your market slots to see what they go for, and when you have fewer slots than items, that presents a problem. Furthermore, the market cannot be made to assume you want to drop all items in a stack and will always ask you, defaulting to the number of the previous stack you transferred.
It's already irritating enough to do when my inventory fills up once every half dozen missions or so. It'd be much worse if I had to do that every mission.
Far as I'm concerned, fixes to the economy need to target the community from the top down. I assume that's what the Market tax was designed to do - 10% off each sale, which hits big-money sales a lot more harshly than small-money sales. Buy a piece of salvage for 1000, you pay 100. Buy a recipe for 2 billion, you pay 200 million in taxes. Frankly, I'm not convinced that this is insufficient.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Plus, the devs have already repeatedly said that the game always will be balanced against SOs, with IOs deliberately not taken into consideration at all.|
Originally Posted by Redoubtable
I'm confused by this statement. Your goal seems to be to make IOs readily available to "casual" players, but you feel that it's still appropriate to balance the game against a lower standard, which would effectively make the game unbalanced. This would be akin to suggesting in the pre-IO days that the game should be balanced against DOs.
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Everyone complaining about the market always forgets that it's set up to be completely optional. You can make powerful characters without ever getting near it.
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Originally Posted by je_saist
Inflation is defined as (insert laughably untrue definition here)
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Actual economists and people that know what they're talking about define inflation as "a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time". These people don't need to pull a definition out of their ***** that simply serve to allow them to arrive at preconceived conclusions about the solutions needed.
I haven't bothered reading the OP beyond figuring out that they didn't post the real true solution to coh inflation, which is what I have suggested before and am about to repeat here:
A lottery where large amounts of influence is destroyed in exchange for a chance to create unique enhancements or recipes and salvage to create said enhancements. For lack of a better name, let's call it Lottery Origin enhancements (LOs)
LOs would be attractive enough to make people want to enter the lottery and destroy their wealth. I'm thinking something not quite as good as a purple enhancement, but slightly better than a HO. These things are going to be EXPENSIVE.
The lottery itself doesn't have to be presented as actual gambling, it would be better to make it appear like some form of high-risk investment such as scientific experiments, strip-mining the moons of jupiter, multi-dimensional ponzi schemes, summoning demons to hold cities ransom, invading other dimensions and plunder their natural resources, etc, etc. If the devs want I can probably come up with enough of these to fill every niche suitable for the genre. As you can see the examples I gave are all quite "epic" in scope, which is appropriate because entering the lottery would require epic amounts of influence. Hundreds of millions, easily.
The way I see it working is that you invest your influence into one or more of these high-risk-high-yield schemes, buying "tickets" or "shares" or whatever we want to call them for 25 or 50 or 100 million influence each, and after a certain amount of time you find out whether your investment has paid off; 5% chance per ticket sounds reasonable, 1% chance to win a recipe and 4% chance to win a piece of salvage. Maybe immediately, even though I would like it better if there was an element of time involved, to make it seem like you're actually waiting for your influence to DO something and you aren't just stuffing it into a slot machine to see what pops out.
The main thing to remember is that in order to be a true money sink it has to destroy lots and lots of money and provide something that can't be gained in any other way. The LOs, their recipes and the special salvage to make them should still be tradable on the market, of course, but in order to create them someone will have to destroy tons of cash. Once the amount of influence is at a comfortable level and inflation is reduced the cost of entering the lottery can be continously modified to maintain this level indefinitely.
Winner of Players' Choice Best Villainous Arc 2010: Fear and Loathing on Striga; ID #350522
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Not quite that they've said. They've made it clear all existing content is designed around SOs and will stay that way. They've made no promises about future content and systems. (trust me, I've read what Castle and others have said several times, it's very clear.)
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Originally Posted by Prof_Backfire
Plus, the devs have already repeatedly said that the game always will be balanced against SOs, with IOs deliberately not taken into consideration at all.
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"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
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| Some players are able to get lucky with the drop system, get a rare recipe or item, and then list that item for a huge amount of money. |
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| The prices of goods on the WentWorths market are driven by what each individual player lists their auctioned item for. |
Now, I'm not saying the sellers are *blameless* - after all, some do list items at rather exorbitant prices. But that's not true of all, or - I'd dare say - most. Personally, I tend to think there's a bit of cross-training going on. Person gets an item, lists at X price. People get used to seeing that item around that price at some point and just start bidding at that point. Future sellers see the prices at that point, and just start listing there... or, even if they don't, the existing bids often keep it there (or near there.)
(As far as that 300 million... yeah, spent it messing around finishing up a few things. Time or money - decided to save the time and spend the money.)
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| the best way to combat the auction-house inflation is to continue on the development path of removing the Auction House as a critical part of the game, or as a critical part in fitting an avatar with IO set enhancements |
You have a choice to spend one of two things - time, or money. And the more time you spend, the more money you make *anyway,* should you choose to IO out a character. Is it "instant gratification?" No. But - again - time, or money.
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To be blunt, this would be an exceptionally stupid idea in a game that encourages alts so heavily. |
Originally Posted by Noyjitat
I think you'd quickly see a change in prices if bids expired in 24 hours and bids / items were set on a per account basis rather than a per character basis. So if you have 20 total auction slots, they are the same 20 total auction slots.
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If I, for instance, went to either of my main servers and put two bids/sales in per character, *I wouldn't finish the server before running out of slots.* Given that I do sell off salvage, recipes, etc. I don't need - and cheaply - you'd do more harm than good, and move the demand off the auction house to "Yeah, if you want that (insert item here,) go talk to @auctionguy - he's got them at 20 mill each. Only real supply in town. Bunch of them hoarded in his SG."
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Agreed. This would essentially depopulate the market of just about everything. You think it's hard to find stuff NOW? It'd also wind up making the slots more valuable than most of the items put up for sale in them. Premium drayage anyone?
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Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
To be blunt, this would be an exceptionally stupid idea in a game that encourages alts so heavily.
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Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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So you post a flawed definition of what inflation is...|
Originally Posted by je_saist
I've been noticing a lot of threads flying about on here promoting different methods of fighting in-game inflation. To set the base for this, lets define inflation in the game.
Inflation is defined as the cost of in-game goods in terms of influence / infamy as requested from other live players utilizing the auction house system. Okay, with inflation defined, why is inflation occurring? Well, one of the simple facts behind in-game inflation is that the developers have very little direct control over the player-base's influence / infamy earning abilities. Some players can afford to farm for days or weeks on end, racking up huge amounts of influence or infamy. Some players specifically create certain archtypes and choose powers that make mass combat with no bosses quick and simple. Some players are able to get lucky with the drop system, get a rare recipe or item, and then list that item for a huge amount of money. Some players also sell items for more than the in-game influence / infamy cap... something the developers have commented on as a direct abuse of the system. One of the big problems with many of the I have solved inflation with my solution here... such as the arguments for apartments or statues, or any so called influence-sink, is that these ideas are based on the idea that the in-game farmers care about such influence sinks. Such suggestions are based on the very flawed idea that the player base's activities are fully predictable and that all of the player base will agree to utilize one particular influence sink or another.. |
You proceed to tell people that their ideas of "curing" market inflation is wrong and "very flawed" following this up with your own ideas that you proclaim are flawless and would fix inflation. In-which posters have...well, i'll let the replies speak for themselves.
Then you insinuate that Freedom and Virtues population are somehow inferior and flawed.
I'm seeing a pattern you may want to address...d;D
Other than those points. I agree with a few points such as the game shouldn't be dependent on the market and that drop rates should be increased.
Never mentioned a market merger or cross-server raiding, but I don't know where you stand on that.
I have a few suggestions as well on the subject of how to combat inflation... but I don't have a big enough ego to say I can solve it.
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The thing is in an MMO that has a loot system, making every thing essentially common and readily available would utterly defeat the purpose.| A solution to the rising inflation of Auction House goods must be equally available to all players on a consistent basis. Solutions based on luck of the drops or time played are inherently unfair to the casual player or may only have 4 hours a week to spend in the game, or for regular players who might run into problems with work scheduling or other outside issues. |
The whole 'wa wa wa I'm entitled to get anything I want without any effort' bit is getting very played out here- the fact of the matter is players without the time or devotion to acquiring uber lootz do not deserve to have them and the loot is not designed for those kinds of players.
There are other alternatives to WW/BM and I do think those should be addressed to help players have easier access to somethings. The merit costs of random/specific rolls could stand to be reduced somewhat. That will also reduce prices at WW/BM to some degree.
The real problem with prices at WW/BM is the fact that there used to be buckets of influence generated daily, but now there are industrial sized vats of influence being produced daily. People have more to spend, and so they do spend more. Sellers catch on and shift prices upward after the fact. The buyers are the problem not the sellers, because sellers can only sell for a cost people can afford to pay and are willing to pay.
Buyers having more influence to spend means prices go up on the limited supply of goods for sale.
There really isn't a fix for the increased generation of influence that has lead to higher prices. Market 'fixes' aren't likely to work as intended and would result ina true black market and a pissed off player base. The only reasonable thing to try and do is look at getting merit costs adjusted to help increase supply and decrease the time needed for less devoted players to earn enough merits to get desired items.
I am an ebil markeeter and will steal your moneiz ...correction stole your moneiz. I support keeping the poor down because it is impossible to make moneiz in this game.
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The amount of Inf being generated could be reduced.
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Originally Posted by Lohenien
There really isn't a fix for the increased generation of influence that has lead to higher prices. Market 'fixes' aren't likely to work as intended and would result ina true black market and a pissed off player base. The only reasonable thing to try and do is look at getting merit costs adjusted to help increase supply and decrease the time needed for less devoted players to earn enough merits to get desired items.
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I've been noticing a lot of threads flying about on here promoting different methods of fighting in-game inflation. To set the base for this, lets define inflation in the game.
Okay, with inflation defined, why is inflation occurring? Well, one of the simple facts behind in-game inflation is that the developers have very little direct control over the player-base's influence / infamy earning abilities. Some players can afford to farm for days or weeks on end, racking up huge amounts of influence or infamy. Some players specifically create certain archtypes and choose powers that make mass combat with no bosses quick and simple. Some players are able to get lucky with the drop system, get a rare recipe or item, and then list that item for a huge amount of money. Some players also sell items for more than the in-game influence / infamy cap... something the developers have commented on as a direct abuse of the system.
One of the big problems with many of the I have solved inflation with my solution here... such as the arguments for apartments or statues, or any so called influence-sink, is that these ideas are based on the idea that the in-game farmers care about such influence sinks. Such suggestions are based on the very flawed idea that the player base's activities are fully predictable and that all of the player base will agree to utilize one particular influence sink or another. Such suggestions also conveniently ignore the fact that short of permanent bans, nothing is really going to stop the abusers from abusing or finding new exploits. Case in point: abusers racing to find rapid leveling exploits in architect entertainment, and the developers racing to close off the leveling exploit holes.
Influence sinks do not solve the base problem of inflation. The prices of goods on the WentWorths market are driven by what each individual player lists their auctioned item for.
Now, there are various methods that allow players to operate around the insanity of the auction-system. Architecture Entertainment tickets, for example, can be used to pick up rare salvage pieces. Ouroboros arcs can be used to locate a specific type of enemy in a specific level range, and the enemies can be farmed for particular low level salvage drops. Task Forces and Strike Forces generate merits, which can be turned around and utilized to buy a variety of items directly.
While I don't have any direct proof, anecdotal evidence from the rising prices of goods on the Auction House and chats recorded from various server badge / grouping channels indicates that a large percentage of the player base utilizes these external methods in order to bypass the players abusing the Auction House system.
So, with this in mind, solutions to the problem of inflation need to meet certain criteria:
****
With these criteria in mind, the answer is fairly simple. The simply answer is complicated, again, by the player base. Improvements or bonus's to the drop system will simply cause the abusers to just abuse the system more. There's no guarantee that increased drops would enable the casual player base to catch up and have access to good io sets and in-game items without also partaking in farming and market-gaming.
Now, I don't mean for this to be a simply hopeless point of view on the state of the game's economy, or what passes for an economy. Remember, it's a game. It doesn't actually have to follow real-life rules.
So, with that in mind, This is my opinion:Now... how exactly can this be accomplished? If I was in War Witch's high-heeled stiletto pumps, I would start looking at putting some value back into being in a Super Group or Villain Group.
Now, this list is by no means exhaustive, or that it is the only way that the abuse of the auction-system can be addressed. I think, however, that the suggestions stand as examples on how to address the base issues and problems with the current drop-system in regards to how the whole game operates... rather than directly punishing the player-base, or further segregating the player-base.
Moving increased rewards into a SuperGroup mode gives players more reasons to work together as a team, without having to feel that they need to solo-farm every minute they are logged in and hit up the auction house to buy / sell / trade.
My opinion is that while the longevity of the game is not going to be jeopardized by making the Auction House more, or less, important to the player base, I am of the opinion that trying to establish and maintain a functional economy that depends on the actions of an erratic player base is probably not one of the best ideas going.
I'm also of the opinion that if the development staff doesn't, at least in some way, address the abilities gap between the hard-core players and the casual players, there will be a generation of a World of Warcraft enviroment where players feel they must continually tweak out and optimize a single avatar in order to continue to participate in the high-level challenges and (future) end-game content.
Admittedly, some of this may already be a moot point at the development level. We, as the player base, still don't know what Mr. Miller has up his sleeve in regards to that future end-game content, nor how players can make their avatars more powerful. We also don't know if the development staff actually intends to introduce The Battalion as an enemy group that requires IO's to fight.