An out of the box idea for the Inf cap.

This idea is a little out of the box and is an idea to increase the Influence/Infamy cap of 2 Billion to 20 billion.

1) Take every inf amount, every reward, every price, everything, and round up to the nearest 10.

Examples
Single Origin costs 10,525 Influence before, now 10,530.
Influence Reward for a defeat of 3, now 10.
Influence bid of 5,000,100 before, now 5,000,100.
You are holding 10,205,295 Infamy before, now 10,205,300

2) Remove the zero at the far right. Essentially, divide all prices and every Inf value, Inf cost, and Inf reward by 10. Now the Inf cap is essentially "20 billion" instead of 2 billion.

Examples
Single Origin costs 10,525 before, now 1,053
Influence Reward for a defeat of 3, now 1.
Influence bid of 5,000,100 before, now 500,010.
You are holding 10,205,295 Infamy before, now 1,020,530

3) Add a superficial zero to the far right of every Inf value, Inf Cost and Inf reward. This change essentially makes most amounts appear to be almost exactly the same except for the rounding up to 10 part.

Examples:
Single Origin costs 10,525 Influence before, now 10,530.
Influence Reward for a defeat of 3, now 10.
Influence bid of 5,000,100 before, now 5,000,100.
You are holding 10,205,295 Infamy before, now 10,205,300

Is this crazy enough to work if the Inf Cap was desired to be increased?
Some very small amounts of Inf are slightly increased. I don't think that's a big deal.

I think its an excellent idea.

It would have to be pretty extensive and thorough.

Vendor prices would need adjusting.
Crafting costs for every recipe too.
Inf rewards for mission arcs and enemy defeats would need adjusting.
That 25 inf you get from the Mystery Gift would REALLY need adjusting to 3 inf!

Character's personal inf amounts would need adjusting.
Market bids and sales would have to be rounded off.
Pending emails with inf attachments would need modifying.

But yeah, its a good way round the 2 billion 32-bit barrier.

Why?

I think that this is one of those "good in theory, bad in practice" ideas.

As others have said, there are some significant technical hurdles to surmount.

There's also the perception problem. People who farm a lot will be upset that they suddenly make 100,000/hour for every million/hour they used to get. People who don't really pay attention will take their shiny new purple and list it on the market for 300 million, when it's really only worth 30 million. And other things people will do because they're used to doing it that way.

Fixed point arithmetic- cute.

I think it would be less error-prone (as mentioned, there have to be an INSANE number of places that "inf" is set and adjusted) to put in an int for "number of 2-billions held" and update as needed. Which is STILL a lot of work, but if you miss doing it somewhere you don't accidentally generate 10x the desired influence. You destroy 2 billion inf, instead.

... maybe it's not a better answer.

Option 1 messup affects the whole game.
Option 2 loses 2 bil inf from a handful of people who have multiple of 2bils.
Option 2 looks less destructive and easier to playtest and fix when it goes wrong.

I cannot speak to how difficult this would be to implement or how technically feasible it would or would not be. Nor can I comment on what could occur if this was implemented improperly.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lukewarmdog Option 1 messup affects the whole game. Option 2 loses 2 bil inf from a handful of people who have multiple of 2bils. Option 2 looks less destructive and easier to playtest and fix when it goes wrong.

What options are you referring to? I did not post any options. Are you posting options of what might occur on this 3 step change?

Didn't Mexico do the same thing with the Peso a while back?

Posting in a Smurphy thread to see if he notices meh.

Fulmens presented another option a couple posts up.

Smurphy, I don't see it happening. There are simply too many places where Inf is handled. It would be almost impossible to catch them all. The only thing it would do is make it easier to hold more than the Inf cap, or do transactions above the Inf cap. Currently there's only a single item trading that high, the PvP +3% Def IO, though granted a couple others are close. And the email system makes it easy to distribute Inf among alts or even hold it in emails. From a program manager's perspective, there isn't enough of a benefit to warrant spending the time, and the risk on top of that it too high.

If there were no errors, it would work fine. It's just a system where the least significant bit = 10 inf instead of 1. I worked in a system where least significant bit was 1/128 micron for years. (We didn't sell any, it went into a metal shredder, I'm not bitter. Much.)

I think my idea ("option 2" apparently) might be easier to implement than I realize. There's already a check for "over 2 billion" every time inf is added to a character, this would just do something different when it came up positive. You'd need to change a bunch of things- mostly display values- and write something to tweak "withdrawals" from a character (if amount_withdrawn > amount_on_character, check for 2-billions, or whatever the code looks like.)

I agree it's not a great priority for anyone.

Interesting idea, but I don't think it will fly.

1. Only 1% of the population is affected by this limit, maybe less.

2. People wouldn't understand what is happening when they try putting in the insignificant integer, unless they've read the forums (ie. it is non-intuitive).

3. Significant coding and verification would need to be done to do it.

4. The order of magnitude increase is so small that it doesn't fix everything for that 1% of the population. That is, a 20B limit is not really worth it because people would hit that cap right after they deploy it, and you'd be back here again.

I would suggest that a separate 'fat cat bank' be established if the devs are interested in working on this issue. The FCB would have no real limit (64 bit data type) and you would interact with it by moving 2B increments in and out (max).

They could just chuck another contact in the vault storage for that. Doesn't get around the 2B limit for transactions but at least you could stop using the Auction House and email to squirrel away inf.

Alternatively (or additionally), that FCB teller could sell tokens worth 1B or 2B and those could be stored on a toon as special salvage. The point of tokenizing the 2B is so trading in >2B can happen without multiple trades (avoiding rip-offs). This would still mean the Auction Houses would be left out though. Vendoring the tokens would return the 2B inf.

Many countries have tried to devalue their currency this way, and unless the root cause of inflation is addressed, the problem will just occur again down the line.

Aren't people buying and selling items for more than 2 billion off the market already? With the ability to email items to globals, this practice will only become more common. Devaluing influence would only fix this problem for a few months.

If the devs really do want to fix this problem, the best solution is to increase the size of the variable and database entities used to store influence. That's a big job with many pitfalls, but it's much better to fix it right than to waste almost as much time on a kludge that won't last long.

The whole concept of the thread seems to be "more is better". Being someone who has came back to the game and not really played since 2 years after release, not only does the holding cap seem astronomically high but so is the cap on on auction items and in general auction prices.

Luckily i have a couple of old friends in the game who helped me out, but the market in this game has to be off putting to say the least for anyone new to the game. And yet, people want caps to be raised?