How many people believe this?

People in general don't understand probability or economics. They probably can't name Newton's three Laws of Motion either.

An indirect way of capping the value of random drops is to provide a mechanism to allow players to buy a random roll either directly or by buying merits or AE tickets with inf. If the exchange rate is set correctly, not to high so nobody bothers or to low so the supply side of the market gets flooded, market prices should come down due to additional supply or reduced demand as well as setting a soft price cap. On top of that it destroys more inf than the market cut thus slowing inflation.

There is a reason that Eve has a paid economist on the staff.

Zactly. I'm thinking people are getting cranky after fifty hours of play and a brand new level 50 ...

You know, compared to say WOW I don't understand *what* people are complaining about.

1.) In WOW, in order to "max out" a character, there are certain items that can only be aquired via drops. You cannot buy them from vendors, create them yourself, or trade with other players for them.

2.) Additionally, those items are only available in certain group encounters. You would have to run specific content in order to aquire them.

3.) Some of that content essentially requires not only that your character meet a certain level of quality in terms of pre-existing items, but that the average item level of your group be at par.

The upshot is that if you are a "casual player" who plays the game for a few hours a week, you'll likely *never* be able to max out your character. Its basically impossible.

Compared to COX, everything that drops is available for purchase. With time and effort, you can earn enough influence to purple out your hero without teaming. You participate in every encounter in the game with just SOs. By earning merits or AE tickets, you can aquire every non-purple or pvp recipe in the game.

Preaching to the choir, but the "inflated prices" are an opportunity as well as a drawback to "poor" characters getting enough influence in order to get the IOs they want. It is only an obstacle to people who refuse to sell as well as to buy, people who treat Wentworth's like a store rather than an auction house.

To be fair, there is a rather steep learning curve to being able to maximize the potential of the market. Know what recipes are valuable, knowing how to lowball bids, having the recipe space, storage space in your base, and knowing the most efficient ways to generate recipes, salvage, influence, etc is not very straightforward. It can be tedious and cumbersome. Many players aren't willing to devote much energy to the market mini-game. And in fact, that reality is part of the reason why folks who *do* spend a bit of time learning how the market and inventions work have such an easy time getting rich.

That said, its hard for me to understand the attitudes of folks who simply aren't willing to figure out how the market and inventions work yet are willing to condemn it. Sure, you might not *want* to put in a bit of time to learn the basics about how to earn merits, tickets, sell good stuff, and buy what you want . . . but how does that equate to the system being broken? There's a difference in something being *impossible* for you to accomplish and you being *unwilling* to put in a bit of effort to accomplish something.

Just my $0.02.

what do i believe...well lets say i cant believe people arent laughing at the idea of making everything 100k...it proves tht person/people dont really care about their toons and dont want to work to make their toons awesome.

i argee of putting a cap tho (what price- i dont know tbh) maybe the 2bill is fine as it is. but a cap is needed to stop people posting parthetic prices.

I don't think a cap is needed. Who cares whether people post "pathetic" prices? If they ever get sales, more money is taken out of the market because the total price was higher.

I'd vendor or delete my purples before I'd put them up for 100k

Mind you, I can make 100k in 20 seconds of farming


So unless they changed all this, and you only got like... ten influence for a level 50 boss kill... yeah

I hope you all know that the 2B cap is a programming artifact, a signed 32-bit variable has a +/- 2B range. Changing that would be problematic to the market and player databases unless each entry contains plenty of spare bytes, otherwise a database conversion would be required and there's a lot of potential downside when you do that not to mention the time required.

Market transactions simply move inf between players with only a small portion leaving the game. If Stratos isn't boasting, then the market's cut for a 1M sale being earned back in 20 seconds isn't going to offset the massive growth in the inf supply one bit.

At those rates,the market's cut for a 1B sale is earned back in 20,000 seconds. Or approximately 5 and a half hours. And a 1 B flip (say 800M going in, 1 billion going out) takes around 10 hours for someone to farm up.

Or were you talking about the 100K price cap, where it would take eighteen thousand such transactions ?