Raise the inf cap

FWIW, if they could get us to a 64-bit signed integer for inf, the "hard" inf cap would become 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. Given the assumptions that 2B is derived from being near the max size of a 32-bit signed integer, that would probably become 9,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's 4.5 billion times as much inf as we can carry now.

Taking the richest people I have ever heard of on this forum including things like summing their wealth across all characters or counting things like having several hundred crafted purples in storage, and then throwing in a couple more orders of magnitude just to be sure, that would be something like at least 450,000 times as much money as I've ever heard of anyone having on hand at one time, ever.

That seems like it might be a number we'd never achieve. Someone might be able to do it, but based on the last couple of years of seeing people post about earning rates, it seems like that could be really hard.

If selling for more than 2b was really against the ToS n' stuff, I think Mod12 would fall down upon the 4.5 threads selling or buying pvpIO's for >2bill on the front page of this forum alone, with great vengeance, since that seems to be his thing.

The 'quoted dev' is Castle and he thinks that getting around the 2 billion cap is not something that was intended when the game was created.

His opinion is his opinion and not dev decided law on the matter of influence caps.

Honestly the 2 billion cap is just something that was not designed with the market in mind. It's only an issue now because the devs didnt realize how the market would effect the game.

I posted this before about off market sales and the Dev's opinions on them. I guess it got lost in the fray - so here it is again:

I was thinking (surprise!) about the cap and I would posit that having a cap helps to keep the ebil marketers in check.

I mean, if the cap were 10 quadrillion, wouldn't the "rich" try to get still richer, at the ultimate cost of the poor casual player? With the hard cap and the logistical limitations of storing value in excess of the cap, I would argue that this is a disincentive for amassing wealth just for the sake of amassing wealth.

Now, when we find out that 2bn is the cap for prestige as well, boy I'm gonna be angry!

this is true- I generally don't bother selling anything our friend the 'casual gamer' can afford...well, except those generics I've been crafting, but people are happy to overpay for those too!

It's quite likely that it represents a plain old 32-bit integer data type in some database somewhere.

That said, converting a type to 64 bits is usually not particularly hard. Usually. May not be worth it, though.

It's actually very easy to increase the currency cap above the integer cap. First, don't increase the integer cap, that only messes with code that is working at the moment, possibly creating cascading code bugs.

Simply add another integer. Give it an arbitrary name, say 'Gold Coins' for simplicity sake in this post. Create a currency exchange toon who will sell you gold coins or purchase your existing gold coins for 1 billion infamy each.

You don't even really need to expand it beyond that, no need to have the market handle 2 currencies since as has been pointed out we're talking about a system affecting a very small portion of the playerbase.

Having the additional currency will facilitate aquiring a higher amount of wealth (roughly 1 billion x 2.2 billion as the new cap), and will simplify off market trades for the few people who deal in that price range.

Just make the trade window and email window capable of handling both currencies at the same time should be enough.

The devs have, at this point, done much seemingly harder things than tweaking the variable/column type used to store our inf. I'm sure they could.

The 2B inf question is do they think it matters enough to do. My 2B inf is on "no".

My point was really that I don't think they believe it's anywhere near seizing up. I can't really see the game's health being threatened by this. I am pulling numbers out of the air, but I'd bet less than 5% of characters have to worry about this. I also doubt the percentage of characters with the "problem" are increasing at a significant rate.

Even if 50% of characters were affected by it, it'd still be a QoL thing. It'd just have a better chance of being prioritized higher.

Point taken. And I'm never lending you my car.

They may think that, but I would be surprised if any fervency with which they think it is actually based on, well, thinking about it very hard. Being philosophically opposed to raising the cap (especially if the cap actually affected many players) even if it was trivially easy is, in my opinion, something someone would only do in ignorance about about what an easily reached cap does and does not do. Such ignorance could be born of (or at least facilitated by ) not actually thinking very hard about it.

Not to say I think that sort of ignorance or lack of thinking about the matter is out of the question.

I agree. I feel that "benefit" of the inf cap is wishful thinking by folks who think that marketeering is morally objectionable.