Important System Improvements in Going Rogue

There are a lot of things the Dev could do to lessen inflation, but they generally amount to the same thing: Dev control of the market.

I am not opposed to Dev control of the market, but that would be kind of against the point of having the free market in the first place.

What I'd like to see the Devs do is make it infinitely easy for drops to make it to the market. If that doesn't work, then IMHO the Devs need to take some direct control over pricing rather than play percentage games.

Most other measures that come easily to my mind: increasing drop rates, reducing Merit options, decreasing inf drops, etc is playing luck games and hoping the playerbase reacts the way you want.

I am more interested in seeing if the players will step up and use the power they have to resolve/prevent the market issues themselves, or whether they will 'prove' that the idea of a player run market is a pretty, but ultimately busted, myth.

If I was a dev I would introduce some kind of lottery where you can spend a whole lot of Inf in exchange for random salvage and recipes. Totally random, but of course with a very small chance for the good stuff to drop. This would remove Influence from rotation, which reduces inflation. By adjusting the cost of the random rolls the devs can adjust the inflation rate as needed.

In-game I would present this as high-risk enterprises which characters can invest in. Some examples:

Magical Rituals. You cooperate with The Midnighters in performing certain rituals to enchant items, contact and barter with various entities or investigate new magic. You will gain one piece of random magical salvage or a random recipe.

Super-science. Same as above but you help Portal Corp investigate new materials and form new scientific theories, explore other dimensions, and trade with them. You will gain one piece of random technological salvage or a random recipe.

Villains would have similar options but they would probably work within the framework of Arachnos, or possibly with the Circle of Thorns and Crey.

I have to ask this, why the change now? What finally clicked with someone to say "By golly I think this might work!" Was it like I woke up this morning and I think I'm going to have the markets merged or was it an eventual arm breaking snap from the collective that finally gave way?

Personally, I'd kind of like to see 2 or 3 digits chopped off/rounded up. Prices, drops, bank balances, everything, across the board. Don't change or try to "fix" anything else yet; just make the numbers a little more sane so we aren't throwing around millions and billions.

I say replace prestige with influence like it should have been from the beginning.

By the way, for those of you who RP, do you actually have to make a merged market "canon"? Like just because the game makes items available to both sides via the markets, you don't have to think of that as being an in-game thing - I assume most RPers don't try and work the floating damage and healing numbers or the player names above every avatar head into their "in-character" stuff, as they're just visible game mechanics to help make gameplay easier, so I don't see why it wouldn't be easy to look at the combined markets in the same way - an "out-of-character" game mechanic to make the game work better.

Another example of a visible out-of-game mechanic is the enhancements screen - along with the level up and power selection screen - a lot of the enhancments are abstract ideas rather than physical things, and while some power sets, like Martial Arts, would use set names to describe the attacks, other power sets wouldn't really have a standard set of names for each type of power, witht he same types of damage and effectiveness.
For example, I don't see the point in trying to RP why every single Hero or Villain who carries two guns only ever uses a small selection of identical attacks, which would be totally dumb in real life to stick to the same rigid moves all the time - or how exactly "Combat Sprinting" is some kind of physical thing you can buy or sell at an auction house.