"Crazy 88s" inf destruction project

It's kind of a poor way to rank SG's. As we're about to prove.

EDIT: Almost everyone knows this. On the other hand, curling is an olympic sport, so people will get competitive about ANYTHING. This includes us.

I would gladly invest a billion to the project on Virtue.

Why not simply make this an SG event with Mid-Level Crisis (the marketing SG) on Freedom?

It'd be the highest investment level of course, but so what? The base is already, functionally, done (all telepads, near-max storage, raid ready, etc) for all intents and purposes.

As such, it's primo territory for a crass display of conspicuous over-indulgence like this.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

This is an awesome idea.

I'm a little confused as to the objectives of this project and was hoping someone here could enlighten me.

Lohenien was discussing it on Guardian and when I inquired, I was informed that the goal was "to act as a delation force on the market." Then it became that a group of market people would be destroying 300 billion to do "the same thing." I then wandered into this thread, and when I raised the issue, Lohenien suggested that he (or she) was acting to deflate the market, while everyone else (presumably this thread) was just acting to infuriate the role-playing crowd on Virtue.

So, at any rate, I don't really understand the goal of this project and would appreciate a little insight. If it is just trolling, well, not really my thing, but that's at least comprehensible to me. If there's an economic force behind it, I'd definitely enjoy more explanation.

I realized that I have a thing going on here that I have to do, in addition to whichever project I fund...

I have to continue to match actual basebuilders. It defuses potential rage (and burns more, different inf than what you guys bring to the table.)

Cipher: I simul-posted with you.

The basic theory is mine, and it goes like this:

1) Inf comes into the game, and leaves the game. Who it belongs to in the meantime will be brought up later, but this is a core measure for "inflation". If we, the playerbase, are generating more inf as a whole than we destroy, prices will tend to go up. Some things may get cheaper while other things get more expensive, but prices, as a whole, will go up.

2) There are three ways to destroy significant amounts of inf, that I'm aware of. You buy something on the market (10% of sale cost is destroyed), you turn Reward Merits into Hero/Villain merits (20 million is destroyed per H/V merit), or you convert influence into prestige (1 million inf -> 2,000 prestige.) There are things that don't seem to destroy much inf: costume changes (I haven't paid for one except maybe by accident since about 2006), crafting (unless you go for Field Crafter, which is sort of a 1-time thing, it doesn't seem to eat up much), buying SOs and inspirations and wentporters and things.

3) I've been on a inf-destroying binge for ... probably years. The challenge for me was to destroy more than 1 inf for every inf of mine. (Otherwise I could have just moved it onto a character and deleted that character, or even hoarded it. Same effect.) I did banking (side-to-side and server-to-server) - every time inf went from one server to another through Wentworth's 10% went away. [If you have the only level 36 Magic/Natural range DO on the market, you can sell it to yourself for hundreds of millions and it is very unlikely that someone will intercept the transaction.] I bought Respec Recipes, LoTGs, stealths, whatever, and resold them for slightly more. That always ended up being "noticeably more", so even after Went's 10% fee I still made a profit. And I came up with a plan to match influence-to-prestige, because most people on the base building side feel that 500:1 is outrageous. If I matched it, that became 250:1 (many STILL feel that's outrageous.) So for every inf I burned, someone else burned one too.

I've burnt, that I can confirm, 70 billion inf. Prices are still going up.

Obviously I need help.

So that's what I'm getting out of this project. Others may have different motivations, or multiple motivations, but as long as nobody's doing actual harm to anyone I'm happy with the results.

Interesting. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Well this looks neat but I really can't play. Given away most of my fortune on one thing or another in recent memory. Think I'm down to a billion, maybe one and a half.

Have fun all.

To add to my previous thoughts:

The 20million/HVM MAY make a significant difference in the generation:destruction rate. The generation side has a six year headstart, though...

Haha-- I love this! I have actually been doing the exact same thing for my SG of 3 players. We are about to crack the top 100 on Freedom actually. I might contribute to this once I burn a few more billion for my own cause.

I'd like to join, but I'm not as insanely rich as some of you, and am in the middle of slotting up a rather expensive character. Is there a minimum entry fee? I think I could pony up a half billion for a worthy cause like this.

Gavin: A few trivial and not-so-trivial nits to pick with your post:

1) There are more like 93 slots to fill (maybe more, but 93 was the number I worked with for the 6,000,000 inf man so it sticks with me.) This actually works to burn MORE inf.
2) Almost all yellow recipes require no rares. Most sets have at least one yellow recipe, and some popular ones have six.
3) For the common IO's, you can buy them for 300K at level 50 (lower in many cases- I saw damages going for 100K each) on the market because people like me have them memorized. 240K or less crafting cost [153K for a memorized Resist Damage], zero recipe cost, in the case of damage 10K or less total cost of salvage- 1K of which is destroyed- and 30K of Went-fee on the crafted product, for a total of 271K destroyed.
4) Going from L50 to L45 lowers your crafting cost by more than a factor of 2.

It is true that the maximum you could spend on crafting alone is on the order of (93 slots * 2 builds * 0.49 million/slot) = about 92 million per character. But the low end (L35 generics, one build, 93 slots at about 30,000 each) is 3 million.

I ran a L50 through a Citadel the other day, with no stealthers on the team so we steamrolled through. Two hours, almost no common IO drops, and I still got about 3 million inf, cash. That's about the minimum one could make playing a L50, I think.

The good news is it almost got me enough reward merits to burn 20 million inf making 5 recipes, which sold for around 100 million inf (and cost around 10 million inf in salvage) -burning another 11 million inf in Wentfees and 2.5 million in crafting costs. So total inf in system is down 30 M or so.

H/V merits are going to do a lot of good, going forward, but it's a slow process and we've got a lot of built up inf to destroy.

I'm just going to say this:

I'm a full-time, absolute, roleplayer from Virtue. I don't like being OOC, and I'm so ingrained in it that I talk ((like this all the time.)) I'm not trying to do this to upset my friends, or the people I don't know. Even if I had enemies on Virtue, I wouldn't do it to upset them.

Part of being a #1 SG in the game amuses me. Being in a SG with so many noble individuals amuses me. Amusement in this game keeps me here. It's already inspired me to breathe new life into an abandoned character, who will be my special Crazy 88. This character has a life and a voice, now--and will continue to be roleplayed as a proud member of the 88s.

And I cannot WAIT to see the queue of all of us wrapped around the SG registrar converting our inf.

God, I am so excited for this. I can't remember--does inf. converted pop up under the "inf. contributed to the SG" tab? Since this is all in fun, I propose a series of ranks based on how much prestige you put into the SG.

My first thought on the ranks:

Leader: Grand DeFulmenestrator
Commander (5B Contributed): Marketeer God
General (4B Contributed): Peasant Flogger
Captain (3B Contributed): Marketear Brewer
Lieutenant (2B Contributed): Truly Ebil Marketeer
Member (1B Contributed): Ebil Marketeer

Other suggestions? This spitballing, mind you, is just for fun. It's very possible that I'll only be in one of the lower ranks. I'm not THAT rich.

I'm in if we do this on Virtue.

Glad you caught my oversight of the starting position. Duh.