Where'd all this money come from?

Hi All! I joined after i16 went out, so I'm experiencing all the benefits of all the issues and can't imagine what it was without it. So, I'm curious... when the market was introduced, did folks have billions hoarded and ready to spend? Just wondering how inf was pumped to create the economy now. Some questions come to mind:
- Did devs hop in and buy stuff to spread inf around?

Considering before IOs and the market existed, the only thing that you could really spend INF on was costume changes and SOs, and once you were fully SO'd out, you didn't need anything else, people were building up INF for years and years.

Three more things to consider:

1. Level 50 characters earn a pile of money just by defeating enemies.
2. With the new difficulty settings, everyone can easily fight as many enemies as their build allows.
3. Vendors destroy 100% of the influence involved in a transaction, but the market only destroys 10%.

there wasn't actually that much inf floating around in the pre-market days.

you were wealthy if you had a couple million on hand, and since there wasn't anything to spend it on folk generally gave it away in costume contests or converted it to prestige for their bases (which were a LOT more expensive back in the day).

The 'richest' character I had back in the day was my kat/regen scrapper, who had a few million inf when I logged him back in after I9. That's what used to qualify you to be a sugar daddy, lol.

common level 50 IO recipes sell for 50k to 100k EACH

The difficulty slider allows farming without fillers.

Lots of places.

i used to buy hami's from friends and whatnot

I knew a couple people who farmed up a billion inf [each, independently] before bases went in the game, so they'd be able to start with a good supply of prestige. There was at least one person who got a billion cash for the badge, quite early.

Then they found out how bad the inf-to-prestige ratio was and kept their money in disgust.

So there WAS a lot of inf around in the early days and it spreads fast. Costume recipes were showing up much less frequently than planned, so people were using them as status symbols (I remember someone standing at Wents cycling through THREE DIFFERENT SETS OF WINGS) and they were selling for upwards of 20 million per recipe for some. (Fairy wings were the big one, I remember... but there were more.) Anyway, at that point, the top-end build, with a Miracle/Regenerative Tissue/Numina's combo and whatever else people were building for back then (regeneration rate? Maybe?) went for around 300 million. We couldn't conceive of that much money. It was like a year before I learned there was an inf cap.

There was 3 trillion inf in the game (worked out to something like 30 million inf per player, but 1% of the players had 90% of the money) before anyone had any reason to make money. Once they started working on it, they learned to farm FAST.

The early I9 market was unrecognisable to people who've arrived long after. I made my first billions by buying common IO recipes at knockdown prices and vendoring them. I made 37M on a set of fairy wings.

One of the best sources of income in the early days before ouro and the market was the donations you'd get from advertising that you had the fortune teller mission available. Many people levelled past it before badges existed so would pay millions to a lowbie who would allow them to tag along. There was no better use for the money, it was just one less costume contest that got held.

Another thing I don't miss was the limit on how much inf you could trade in those days.

Before Inventions? I had about 20-40 million or so. And that was outrageously rich. Talk about a paradigm shift, with regard to rolling and leveling characters to 10 just so you can use them as banks.

It's a closed system. One with a multitude generating INF through missions and mob kills and relatively low opportunity for removing that INF from the system. The best INF sink, Wentworth's and the Black Market, can only destroy 10% of the INF of any transaction. It's a runaway inflationary system with the INF cap being the only limiting factor. I would expect it to only be a matter of time without any decent INF sinks in the game to control the inflation before any item that is actually deemed valuable to be worth exactly 2 billion INF.

In a totally unrelated point, Zybron1: I agree with your most of your post, but I'm really getting grated on by the phrase "It's a closed system." That term means something specific and it's almost the exact opposite of what you said. In a closed system, nothing comes in and nothing goes out.

[/thermodynamic rant]

... also, I estimate that H/V merits have destroyed trillions of inf. The new inf sink is pretty good, but it's got a lot of catching up to do. It started six years behind the competition.

Misaligned: You're trying to apply logic and sense to a world that has only inf and hunger for stuff.

The price of a crafted IO varies from "less than the raw materials" to "80 million, when the raw materials go for under 10M".

In an equilibrium situation you'd have the choice between paying (200 R-merits) or (100 R-merits and 40 million inf) for the same thing, so you can say that 100 R-merits = 40 million inf and therefore 50 reward merits = 20 million inf = half an A-merit .

There are other possible equivalencies: If it takes you an hour of playtime on the market to make 200 million inf [spread over a couple days] and it takes you an hour of slapping Freaks to make 50 merits, that gives you a time ratio of 4 million inf per merit; in that situation the 20 million inf is an invisible cost next to the 50 merits.

You might have to go back and look at how much inf you can get per hour farming, compared to how many merits, to find a more fundamental equivalence. Because the market just moves the money around (from the impatient to the patient), lowering the total number slightly. You have to know how much inf per merit is being generated. And that can go up VERY easily ("we're running this TF at +2/0 because we need the money.")