Inflation: knock off the inf-sink idea's please. Here's how to "fix" the perception problem.

You're avatar pretty much sums up my feeling on this entire subject. I stopped trying to explain.

I can't really compete with this type of logic:


or this:
and this:


and I never said it would be easily circumvented. There would be people that would be able to get around the implementation of taxed salvage and enhancment storage but for MOST circumventing this would simply be going out of their way.

*shrugs*

I'm guessing by his statement that the PvP builds would be able to freely slot whatever they want. At least thats the only way the statement makes sense to me.

This.

sorry I am retarded. It would be similar to a "Mids" setup, where you just respec, rightclick on your slots and select your IO

how about not thread jacking. this has nothing to do with the topic at hand which is how to deal with the inflation.

Interesting...

Have it be autolevelled to 50 and ONLY in PVP instances...

That could address the 'have to PVE to PVP' issues. Make it more like the Guild Wars model.

With fleshing out, that could be a great system

Inflation is caused by currency entering the economy faster than worth is entering the economy. Supergroup mode causes currency to enter at a lower rate. Okay, maybe it's not a "sink" as defined, but it still helps combat inflation.


...And the idea of free-building in PVP is pretty awful. It'll firmly cement PVP as being completely unrelated to the rest of the game, and at that point, why bother? Especially as this would make the PVP Zones the number one farm zones as you can suddenly slot yourself to be a god in Siren's Call and have the best farming build there. We'd turn PVP Zones into farm zones, filled with people who get indignant when you have the gall to attack them. And we've got too many of those already.

Yes, right now we've got an issue of having to PVE to PVP except... This isn't a PVP game. It's a PVE game that had PVP added later as a secondary feature, and PVP still has a lot of issues, not the least of which is the rewards.

Also, invalidating all the money people spent on PVP builds is a really, really bad idea, especially when one of the accepted purposes of dual builds was already to have a second PVP build.

And this, of course, would have meant no AE ever, because many of these exploits took many, many players a significant amount of time to find out, and if it had only been the devs, or only on test, then they'd probably still have not figured out half the exploits they've shut down.

I think if you take away the need for PvPers to grind and farm their way to pimped out builds, you would also eliminate alot of the influence coming in. PvPers aren't going to "twink" (good word use though, I like it) their toon for PvE because its not needed. PvE is freaking easy and playing for accolades is just as easy.


I think if you remove PvPers from any market equations...I think you will find the market to stabilize. So, your possible answers are:

Waste time programming a method to remove money from the game
or
Waste time programming a method to remove PvPers need to buyitnao from the market

PvPers are a very small minority of this games population....
You want to implement a money sink and to combat inflation..implement a money sink in something that if not EVERYONE, most people utilize. Bases are one of these things.

bases are not the way to do it either. get of this hoarding thing, you are doing it yourself. while not an idea i would like to see implemented, i think one way to combat it is to lower what the vendors buy stuff for and increase what they sell things for. this pushes more things to the market and effectively lowers prices.

Sorry Tokyo: pinning this on bases is a misnomer. Why? The stuff has a 'hoarding' threshold. After everything's full, stuff's gotta move. Plus, not everyone has a base, or SG/VG.

I'd still look toward the earning power of 50's as a more troubling spot, as would the merit supply.

50's make double the money of a 49, and waaay more than that of a 40, 30, or even 20. Having a 50 that you can sugar daddy alts with is a significant plus, and is troublesome price-wise for those buying through the market without the big banker characters. Likewise, merits are the main supply of rare stuff in this game,and the price of 200ish merits for specific level range rares makes those 200 merits worth in the hundreds of millions, especially redside.

Another issue is 'flippers,' people buying up supply they never intend to use to overcharge when they sell it. This is no trouble for people with well established resources and connections, but is an irritation to casual/new gamers.

Flipped items of salvage or recipes have two bites taken out of them by market fees before they're consumed in crafting. Therefore, flipping acts as an inf sink and reduces inflation. Yay, flippers!

Something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. How can someone overcharge if someone is willing to pay that price? If indeed they were overcharging, their stock would just sit on the market and no one would purchase at that higher price.

I searched quite a bit over the user agreement and could not find anywhere that stated you have a right to pay a low price for the items you want on the BM or in WW.

Inflation is an increase in the supply of currency in the economy, not an increase in prices of goods. Increase in prices is due to the increase in currency - if there is more currency in circulation, each unit of currency has less actual value.

That said, all MMO's, due to creating unlimited quantities of money through the defeat of infinitely-spawning NPC's that drop either money or vendorable items, have some degree of inflation potential due to this, and the need to balance toward an 'average' player's ability and need to make money. This balance can get out of whack if the amount of money in the economy increases beyond the intended balance of units of currency per active character.

Money sinks directly combat inflation by removing currency from the economy. It doesn't matter who uses the money sinks, the result is money removed from the economy. CoH/CoV has the issue of relatively few options to spend money that will remove it from the economy, rather than transfer it from one individual to another. One can spend money by purchasing the weakest type of enhancements from vendors, by purchasing enhancement recipes from the crafting tables, by crafting recipes, and through transaction fees at the auction house, and a few other minor expenses such as changing costumes, which don't come close to the amount of influence generated by that same character. I may be forgetting some major expense that removes money from the economy, but I don't think so. In order to prevent inflation, the game needs to be balanced such that if a character introduces X amount of money into the economy (by defeating enemies and being rewarded, or by selling un-needed items to a vendor, instead of to another player) then over a long timespan, they should also average X amount of money in expenses that remove that money from the economy, as opposed to transferring it to another player. If balanced correctly, this keeps the total amount of money in the economy relatively stable, thus keeping the value of currency stable.

As others have said, increasing the supply of items would encourage many players not to sell their surplus items to other players, but to sell them to NPC vendors, instead. This results in the worst possible situation - the creation of more currency, while the supply remains the same or is diminished, driving prices up in two ways at the same time.

Most of your ideas would not help the economy - they would bypass it entirely, making the influence/infamy currency even more worthless, increasing the numerical prices of goods until the point where that currency is unusuable, and the market either becomes nonexistent, or is forced to move to a barter system in the absence of an equally fluid currency.

These suggestions are excellent. By having a background system which sells items that players destroy or sell to vendors, that supply of goods is not removed from the economy - it is put into the economy, it's made accessible to people at lower prices, creating a sort of 'default price'. Plus it removes money from the economy instead of adding to it - the person who got the item as a drop gets N amount of money from vendoring it, introducing N amount of money to the economy, but since the item then gets sold to another player at a price of N * X, the result is the removal of (N * X) - N currency from the economy.

Furthermore, a time limit on sales would indeed mean people would be more motivated to price their goods lower. When selling a rare item now, a person who is patient and in no need of money or auction slots immediately can leave the item for sale indefinitely - if it is a rare item, someone will eventually purchase it for staggering prices. By removing this freedom to continue selling the item indefinitely, a person needs to account for the number of times they are likely to have to relist the item at that price. If increasing the price by 50 million infamy means I am likely to relist the item enough times to spend 60 million on posting fees, then I'll set the price lower so it sells quickly.

Personally I would also say that the amount of auction house slots should be made unlimited. This - when combined with the time limit on auctions - would encourage people to sell items on the market, rather than vendor them. The limited number of posting slots makes it difficult to sell anything but the most expensive items, right now. Combined with the unlimited timespan on auctions, it also encourages me not to relist and lower the price of an item - the relist could be expensive, and if I just let it sit, it'll sell, eventually, unless it's priced at a truly ridiculous sum.

I also believe that overhauling the UI for the auction system would help in and of itself. Part of my consideration when I go to sell things is 'is this worth bothering with that interface?' A few simple quality of life improvements would help. Like if I drop an item in a slot to sell it, have the item's history come up, so I don't have to manually search for the item to see the price history. Increase the history length from 5 to say, 10 or 20, and perhaps even include an automatic calculation to determine the average price over the last 15/30 days, and display that as well. Right now it's too easy to see a short string of very low or very high prices, since it only shows me the last 5 transactions. Some of the previously mentioned stack issues are a problem too - have the selection box on stack number automatically default to the entire stack, since usually that's how many I want to move.

This solution might work - as you noted, any solution needs to destroy a significant amount of currency. I would be more in favor of removing the element of chance from such a system, and allowing people to directly purchase the enhancements. Making the enhancements entirely unremovable - you can respec and move them around from one slot to another, but you can't un-slot them entirely, attempting to do so destroys them - would prevent them from becoming too common, and keep people going back to purchase some more. Of course, a lot of people are just fine with gambling, so even as a lottery it would likely work.

The system wouldn't really be exploitable since the item would always sell for more money than was put into the economy. It's semi-exploitable in that I'm sure some people would find excellent ways to use it to get large amounts of money, but it would still be fulfilling its purpose of reducing total money in the economy because the sale price would always be many times the amount of money the vendor paid for the item.

As to why it's not a good idea, I saw a post noting it would not be a good idea to globally limit auction slots, which would indeed be a monumentally bad idea, but putting a timer on the auctions and forcing people to pay relisting fees would not be a bad idea at all.

Another useful thing to do would be to stop dropping common IO recipes, or at least make them a lot less commonly dropped. The ones you can buy at the university crafting tables, I mean. Those things drop very commonly, and the level 50's tend to be worth between seventy and over a hundred thousand infamy when sold at a vendor. Make people pay for those recipes at the crafting table, and that's another bit of money leaving the economy.

As to the entire long argument about hoarding and storage costs? Hoarding is damned irrelevant. Indeed, in a lot of ways it's a symptom of the problem - the fact that you can expect your money to lose value, but other items tend to retain their value. Obviously, if there's rampant inflation, people are going to look into converting their assets into the most stable form possible. In this case that's probably rare enhancements that are likely to hold their value, and be worth increasing amounts of currency, as the currency loses value. Penalizing people for storage space would barely make a dent in the inflation. It doesn't matter who it hurts, the fact is it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to the overall situation. Most importantly, just like the original poster's suggestions for increasing the supply of items, even if the idea worked and made people mass dump their hoarded enhancements on the market, all it would accomplish is a very temporary dip in prices until the market settles, and inflation continues on its merry way.