Inflation and Inf Sinks

The topics of inflation and inf sinks have come up in a few recent threads and got me thinking. My main conclusion is that the game lacks direct influence sinks, and that introducing them could be a good thing.

Prices for desirable items have risen. This seems to happen gradually, and also in bursts such as occurred red-side when the MM/AE bug created a sudden influx of influence. A common response sems to be that while this looks like a barrier to a new player, inflation is inevitable and works both ways and allows them to make more money, which is true.

This is examining the problem from the perspective of the individual.
There is the individual player,and then the rest of the world, ie all other players and the game. The game gives you resources through playing it (inf, recipes, enhancements, merits, temp powers) and you can interact with other players either directly or through the market to shuffle these around. If you play with some 50's and gte a few level 50 recipes to vendor, thats the game giving you some nice inf directly. If you're lucky and the game drops a Steadfast +Res/Def, the main reward comes from other players rather than the game itself.

I'd like to look at the problem form a global perspective, ie the sum of all players vs. the game.

Every time any player plays the game, assets are generated, and the game gives to the players. The game also takes from the players through costume charges, market fees and direct buys from stores and crafting tables.

Five types of transaction can occur:

1) Rewards from the game itself in the form of direct inf for defeats/mission completion and vendoring items that drop. This is 100% dev controlled, and goes from the devs to the players. Merits also count here, as they can be exchanged for items that can then be vendored. This has grown. When I started playing I got inf and enhancements. I now still get them, but also recipes, salvage, merits and temp powers, so each new system has grown this amount.

2) Transactions between players through the market. This is primarily player controlled, and goes from players to devs in the form of market fees. The more the devs can convince players to shuffle around large amounts of inf, the more inf gets lost. Most items will get transacted twice at most, maybe by a flipper, and then a consumer.

3) Direct gifts from alts, costume contests, random benefactors. 100% player controlled and has no net efect on this model, since it doesnt change the total playerbase inf at all.

4) Things that players buy directly. Costume changes, temp jetpacks, PVP temp powers, inspirations. 100% dev controlled, this is a pure inf sink.

5) Player destruction of items. Deleting recipes, deleting characters, cancelling subscriptions and old characters who no longer get played. All these destroy inf.

Inflation will occur roughly when the gains from 1) exceed the losses from 2), 4) and 5). ie the playerbase inf total grows.

Recently on villainside, an AE exploit allowed masterminds to tear through content, increasing 1) dramatically. Prices for certain items skyrocketed, and have not gone down since, suggesting 2), 4) and 5) are not big enough.

Currently, influence is valued primarily because it allows you to buy top items off other players. If you have a windfall via whatever means (a lucky drop, costume contest) chances are you'll spend it on the market on a recipe or IO (transaction type 2) rather than blow it all on inspirations or jetpacks, simply because large direct purchases do not exist.

Imagine if they did.
Some suggestions are:

Temp powers available directly from the store, and for different costs. For example, the "18 Stun Grenades" power costs 100,000, making this temp power accessible to new players. The mutually excluisve "64 Stun Grenades" power costs 10,000,000. Its very much a luxury item, all it does is allow you to skip going back to the store, but players do exist with that kind of money to throw around. The cheap Kinetic Dampener Shield lasts 10 minutes, the expensive one lasts for an hour, but costs 1000 times more, and so on.

A 10-use crafting table for a large amount, 25 million maybe. Once again, this just makes life convenient. Combined with email of temp powers and salvage, this allows you to pop out a mobile weapons platform mid-mission, and hand out some temp recipes, which would be a rather cool "status" move.

Larger tier inspirations. Make them expensive enough be prohibitive for everyday use, but at least available for the billionaire who's just had his behind kicked by a tricky AV (or the forward thinker who wants to avoid that).

A purely cosmetic status power. Like someone suggested once here, a summonable butler who follows you around for several hundred million. Maybe add some badges and costume items here.

Balancing these items would be a case of working out the rate of inf created by playing vs. the rate of consumption. Say for example you spend all your inf on Kinetic Dampeners while playing solo at +2/x1, it would be possible to calculate a price for these items that allows you to have your shield up 100%, 50% or 25% of the time using datamining available to the devs. The expensive versions (eg the 1 hour shield) should be priced to be unsustainable, since the purpose is to shrink the ever-growing total playerbase amount of inf.

The big potential problem is the fixed prices. These values I've pulled out of my hat today may be chump change in the future at some point, similar to the way SO's used to be expensive but are now extremely cheap. Currently, the lack of meaningful direct purchases means that the devs don't have to worry about inflation too much. Hero and villain side balancing should be identical, since direct rewards are equiavlent over both sides.

What do you guys think?

The best inf sink idea I've seen is this:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=219336

However it should be simpler than the OP described. Just pay some inf each IO.

One such store already exists in Siren's Call. Unlike the Arena Powers, these are available to use at all times.

The timed powers all last 30 minutes of real time (think of the difference between the jingle jet and the raptor pack), the rest have few charges except the emp glove which gets 30.

I love these and use them on nearly all characters who aren't core damage dealers. The venom grenades I use on everyone.

I'd pay 10 million inf for 1 HVAS or 1 Longbow/Arachnos Mech (same one you earn in RV; temp power version, not in-zone Heavy) and 50 million for a Warburg nuke.

The best influence sink idea I've seen was one where someone suggested a crafting cost to scale any IO down to the level of your choice (i.e., turn a level 40 into a level 20).

It was interesting because it would in turn also alleviate the void of midlevel recipes somewhat.

The billionaire badge.

To receive it you simply click on the button and it deducts 1 billion inf from you and opens up the solid gold tycoon costume.

The multi-billionaire badge. When you click the button again it deducts another billion inf and opens up the "Gold Rolls" travel power. Which is just mission teleporter but it works on the entire team. A gold rolls pulls down the street, stops at the team, the doors open and the server shows all the members of the team entering the Rolls. The entire team then zones to the mission door.

Recharge on the power is 15 minutes. Each time the power is used 100k inf is deducted from the owner for fuel. You can cut the recharge down to 5 minutes by installing a hybrid engine the price for which is 1,000,000,000 inf.

Raffle tickets - The Devs hold anual Dev events (like Manticore's wedding - which was a fiasco the way it was done) and use the market to raffle off "tickets" to the event at 1,000,000 per chance. Lucky winners are allowed onto the test server for the event using the same mechanism used to allow entry to closed betas.

Base empowerments - should be converted into an inf cost per level or better yet allow both mechanisms to be used. Not everyone is a computer geek and assembles their own computer. Some people pay much higher prices to have the finished product delivered to their door.


The possibilities are endless. It just takes some dev attention to the problem and some dev action to implement a solution.

In the "never going to happen" category, I'd love to see purples, PvP IOs, Shivans, Warburg Nukes etc etc sold at an NPC vendor.

Shivans: 10-25,000,000 per temp power, one owned per player.
Warburg Nukes: 50,000,000 per Nuke, one of any type of nuke owned per player.
Purples: Trickier...Sleeps at 20-30,000,000 each. Confuses at 15,000,000 to 25,000,000 each, with the pricier ones at an appropriate cost.
PvPIOs: 100,000,000 - 750,000,000 each.
Respec recipes: 50,000,000 each.
Costume recipes: 1,000,000 each.
Extra costume slot: 10,000,000, which is likely far more expensive than just getting the salvage off the Market.

Won't happen because the Devs probably don't want that many purples or PvPIOs kicking around and they likely want us to work to obtain them through gameplay instead of purchasing them from vendors.

My unrealistic post aside, I wish there were SOME inf sinks kicking around as there is a lot of unspent influence and infamy out there. Heck, I have a friend that's been afk from the game for school/life reasons and he had, at last count, 1.2 billion on an alt. He doesn't like to "buy" from the Market so he usually just uses this to craft IOs for our group or "buy" from our COalition mates.

Then you could explore other options:

How much would you pay for Portal Jockey/Born in Battle?
How much would you pay for...a level?
How much would you pay for...50 levels?
How much would you pay for the ability to unslot IOs, as proposed by Aura_Familia, it appears?
How much would you pay for a TF completion?
How much would you pay for candy canes?
How much would you pay for Winter's Gift IOs?

Since, you know...people have paid influence or items to get this stuff done anyway (there's a black market for you) but you're not likely to convince the developers this is a good idea for their game, as people would go to RMTers, get afew billion to get a 50 or some badges.

Realistically, the inf sinks we are likely to see are increased market fees, increased crafting fees, some 'chase' items or some silly items which would have a self-imposed degradation timer.

"Wow, where did you get that sombrero?"

'Oh, I paid Serge/Facemaker a million for it!'

"Is that account wide?"

'No, I had to pay it for every one of my characters...'

"Is it permanent?"

'No, my character has been tagged to own this piece for two weeks.'

The Developers could go the OTHER way as well, REDUCING inf earned from tasks. If less influence enters the game, wouldn't this entail that less got spent as well? Of course, existing influence would be unaffected. I don't think less would get spent. Instinctively I just feel that people would just find the quickest way to get the slower allowance and they would be rankled at having the influence earned changed in a negative fashion.

The Devs could also tax your account...or simply 'create' all those items that are being bid on but not ingame, enjoy your level 52 LOTG 7.5, sorry you lost two billion, old boy...

I like 'pure' inf sinks that just eat inf and without delivering anything meaningful in return.

Badges are a great idea. I'd also love to see them add in some craftable pets ala WoW (the parrots and whatnot). Another WoW idea I'd like to see migrate over is the system they have for earning 'rep' with various factions. You trade in X number of trade goods (cloth, silk, whatever) for a point of rep, get enough points and it opens up missions and gear and stuff. It's more of a junk sink than an inf sink, I guess, but it would be a nice way to purge the market of oversupplied drops.

If you wanted a real inf sink, just make a unique item called 'the conch'.

By unique I mean only 1 player per server(wide?) has it. When you have the conch you get a specific aura/title/etc. It lasts one week and then it goes back into the auction house. Highest bid when it comes back wins it for the next cycle. Can't have it twice in a row.

Conches would do nothing but identify people as having 'the conch'.

Get rid of prestige and just have people spend inf to build/upkeep supergroup bases. Set prices at whatever you want to set them at to pull as much inf out of the system as necessary. Set up a system where the leader can set 'dues' that each member must pay every month to stay in the SG.

To the market community. Looks like I've picked up a stalker. If you're seeing the insulting meta tags referring to me, it's from a user name Pur3z. His behavior stems from this post: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=223546

So his retort is to follow my posts around and leave insulting meta tags...about a 1 in a ten point scale of cleverness I suppose. I'm not much bothered by it but I thought you all should know and share in the fun.

report 'em, those tags are sufficient cause for a modsmack.

In this thread the idea of renting billboards found some support:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=2682059