Seeding?

While taking a look through some of the numerous threads that either started or turned into discussions of the market merger announcement, I noticed several people suggesting that the devs may begin to secretly seed the market to improve supply and remove Inf from the system. I come to the land of market knowledge for answers.

Is this a likely course of action by the Devs?

How would it be implemented? Would the Devs simply seed salvage that is in low supply and remove the Inf spent on the seeded salvage from circulation? Or would they go so far as to seed items like Hecatombs onto the market, perhaps at 10 mill less than recent bids and remove that Inf from circulation?

Would people react badly to the belief that they are being undercut but the devs even if there is no way to prove it?

The whole idea has me intrigued and I am curious what the market experts think.

Seeding in this form hasn't really been done before because of all the behind-the-scenes work that would be required. In past closed betas the devs have filled bids on the market by placing an item on the market for each bid, but there haven't been large-scale seedings because that would presumably be difficult or impossible under the current system. That may change, but we'll see. I think seeding even a small amount of items would help remove a large chunk of inf from circulation.

I doubt they would ever seed the market. They already know how to increase availability (supply) and reduce prices on the markets for items (see Costume Recipes).

yah there's no need to seed when they can just change drop rates for the stuff they aren't happy with.

dev seeding would be awesome in helping to keep supply at a "reasonable" level and for potentially lowering prices and removing inf from the system.

Will they? Can they ? I don't know.

I agree completely that they can just adjust the drop rates and if my memory serves that is the reason wings are affordable.

However, some folks seem to think the devs would do this as a way to remove some Inf from circulation completely. Is that a reasonable line of thinking? Do the devs, or market experts believe that something like this should be done as an Inf sink?

I doubt the devs would bother doing it as an inf sink. There have been many suggestions of other inf sinks they could use and they haven't implemented those yet.

I suspect that unlike a lot of posters they don't see an overall inflationary rise or even if they do figure that is just part of the optional aspect of the market and IOs.

But if they ever do all they would have to do is sell purple and PvP recipes in stores.

I wouldnt mind seeing them seed all bids currently on the market for non impossible items ( level 51+ stuffs) so that a large portion of inf. would leave the system and we would have hordes of stuff to start the merged market off with.

Personally I doubt they will do any market seeding for pretty much the reasons people gave above, it's a lot of effort for them and they could get similar benefits through simplar methods. That being said, market seeding would probably be a good method for creating an inf sink that is effective and doesn't upset people (especially if they don't tell us that they are doing it). In most MMOs currency sinks are a combination of steady low level costs (i.e. item repair and market fees) and a few high value prestige items (i.e. motorbikes and other cosmetic items). The problem in CoX is that thenature of the game and the audience makes high price cosmetic items very undesireable since people the flexibility of character design is one of the huge draws.

I'm not seeing the liklihood of dev seeding either for a few reasons.

1> The merger should raise supply naturally by some amount.

2> With all major changes, the devs historically have nearly always approached
"tweaking" with a "we'll wait and see what data-mining tells us" attitude.

3> They already have a very controlled way of adjusting supply by incrementally
changing drop-rates if point #2 ever tells them anything meaningful


I'd have to guess that "seeding" would be pretty unlikely.


Regards,
4

I'd happily convert some INF to cover my trio of monthly sub fees

It would be fiendishly clever, help out my perceived problems, and could remove a disproportionate amount of inf in a hurry.

... fourspeed? Whu?

I'd like to see a seeder for low and mid-level recipes honestly. The addition of the merit system sucked most of the supply of these items out of the market and now since markets have closed up so badly and nobody even looks anymore its a self-feeding system which severely limits the availability of recipes 10-49 which are from old pools C and D. IOs weren't designed to start at level 47 so I think this is a design flaw at the moment that seeding could help.

Of course it shouldn't massively raise the supply or else we'd see everyone with soft-capped to s/l toons from all the kin combats out there, but I'd like to see them seed the market to remove a couple billion a day of inf......with better data mining I'd have a better idea what the ideal is to slow the ever forward march of inflation since the 2B cap is pretty much a code-inflicted limit.

Something I haven't seen mentioned is the effect of returning players on market supply/inf.

I doubt if it is typical or not but my brother-in-law and his best friend are coming back when GR breaks and they have tons of stuff from back in the day, purples, pvp IOs, billions of inf and so on.

If this was typical, then it might mean even more inf that is currently tied up in unactive accounts suddenly moving.

For that matterhow much inf do you suppose is tied up in inactive accounts?

Also what happens to the stuff sitting in Wents/BM for inactive players?