how would you revamp the entire economy and reward structure?

I'd add a magic flying pony that flies around dropping purple recipes, rare salvage & rainbow gumdrops on all the poor casual players...

1) Change the AH to an open market system.

• Pricing would have to be limited to two significant figures ( 2,200,000 would be ok, 2,199,999 would not be {this is to simplify the listings, as 4k individual prices would be a nightmare for shoppers.} ).
  
• Bids would have an eight day decay.
  
• Daily transaction limit.

2) Adjust vendor supply of items to help reduce inflation.

• Adjust random roll cost (in merits and AE tickets)
  
• New pool A recipes that make complete sets with out the need for drops from other pools. Set bonuses would be suitably mild. Sort of a half-way point between regular IO's and current sets. These would also be available at university work tables and priced accordingly.
  
• Add merit prices to recipes available at the university.
  

3) Actually listen to other suggestions, once my first changes settled out. [ Reasoned arguments only. I'm sure there would be plenty of novel (and crude) suggestions. That would be wai. ]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen I'd add a magic flying pony that flies around dropping purple recipes, rare salvage & rainbow gumdrops on all the poor casual players...

FYI: The Dev's already did this, they're called tip missions.Then there's AE tickets and merits. I do hope I'm not giving out any secrets.

I'd merge the markets.

Oh wait!


Other improvements that would be helpful- raise the inf cap. With the ability to email inf to ourselves it is a purely artificial constraint that should be eliminated.

Since they won't get rid of merits entirely (my preference) allow users to choose the level of the recipe they roll for and eliminate the ability to buy specific recipes. This would go a long way to improving sub-max level supply.

Add more inf sinks. The problem isn't too much inf, it's not enough stuff to spend it on. My favorite suggestion is a badge that costs 2 billion inf.

SargentWild said: (emphasis mine)

Re: Flipping

I am a flipper of salvage. I have a lovely little niche where I purchase 1 kind of uncommon salvage and then turn around and sell that salvage for 30x what I paid for it.

Here's the catch - I'm buying salvage while I'm selling it. POP! Just bought one. 10 seconds later: POP! Just sold one!

Flipping on the scale so as to price fix, as so many people believe is happening here, is impossible. Limited market slots assure that.

Even if you assume that someone is using ALL of their market slots to do this on say... 10 characters, 5 of them are bidding and 5 are selling. Or, they're all using 1/2 of their slots for both. This allows for (at least) 100 x 10 for bidding and 100 x 10 for selling.

Using Alchemical Silver as an example:

Bid price: 50,000
Sell Price: 100,000

Let's assume for some weird reason that this person can flip every spot on every character every day.

That's 1,000 sales a day (good demand!) and 1,000 purchases a day (good supply!)

This person eats 10,000 per sale in fees, so actual profit is 40,000 per sale.

You find my numbers realistic?

I don't. But let's run with it!

This person now makes 40,000,000 a day flipping this. Divide that out by the 10 characters he's using and you're down to 4,000,000 a day profit per character. At this rate, even pooling money, it will take 50 days to hit the inf cap for 1 character. Clearly this is how the rich get richer.


I can make 40 mil a day using 16 slots. I can do this on 1 character with less time invested. Its a whole lot easier and frankly, the returns are insanely better.

Making money on salvage is probably the slowest way to make money on the market aside from a straight marketeering type perspective. Controlling a single item's supply and price fixing it is a nightmare, and even IF you were willing to invest the obscene amount of time in doing it, your returns would be pitiful.

Everyone seems to forget that "most" of the salvage on the market was dumped there by someone who does not play the market. They see the last 5 at 100k and so they list theirs at 100k. OR they see the last 5 at 101 and they list theirs for 101. Most people don't actually care enough to keep a mental inventory of what everything is actually worth.


Re: Changing the market -

I'd like to see 2 things:

1 - Sales capped at 30 days. No refund on the listing fee. This may cause people to consider a bit more carefully when listing low supply low demand items for obscene amounts.

2 - Adjust reward merits to actually be in line with A-Merits. Right now, if we compare apples to apples:

1 A-Merit is 5 recipes
20 Reward Merits is 1 recipe

Therefore, 100 Reward merits = 1 A-Merit

A-Merits can be done solo, and on your time. They can also be done considerably faster than an equal number of TFs or Arcs.

I think a reduction of about 25-50% on reward merit costs would go a long way towards balancing this.

Also, while we're reducing the cost of Reward Merit rolls and recipes, let's make them universal in price like the A-Merits. Why is a Numina Proc 250 merits when a LotG is 200? They both cost 2 A-Merits afaik.

I would like to agree that I think you should be allowed to roll at any random level. A slider for this would be huge!