Praise elsewhere

The problem with the hypothesized "inf floor" is that it just gets us back even sooner to "nothing left to spend inf on". At that point, you're just creating utterly unbelievable inflation for, say, prostitutes in Pocket D. Because all the excess money lying around will go to, basically, anything you can't buy for inf from the game engine. And there's not much of that left.

The sooner you get to the point where you have all the IOs you want and you're done spending inf, the more spare inf there will be as you keep playing and have nothing to spend inf on.

At that point, I'm really not sure what to do, apart from, as noted, creating inf sinks. I'm not sure what they'd be. Very expensive badges? Allowing the purchase of game time for ludicrous amounts of inf? (2B/day, maybe?)

The thing is... That floor isn't really a floor, because there's a finite number of LotG +recharge any given character can equip. And once you have all the things that the store set a fixed price for, the inf you could in theory spend there has gone to a value of zero -- you simply can't use it for anything anymore.

Ultimately, without inf sinks, they can't make that problem go away, and the "store for recipes", while it reduces the maximum price you can have to pay for items, quickly makes the problem of people who have inf and nothing to spend it on even worse than it is now.

an issue I see with the system here is the players want the best possible gear. not just the great and amazing gear, the the rarest of the rare. but at the same time don't want to "play the market mini game" ... and you have always been able to do just that. However by not pooling the efforts of 1000s or 10,000s of players you are setting yourself up for a long and frustrating journey.

The way I see it is that is what the market mini game does for me; it allows me to pool in with all the other players who buy and sell stuff so that I can give them the stuff I don't need to get the stuff I want. And when you are good at that mini game they call you a marketeer and when you are bad you complain about high price.

In particular, an inf-based store would give even BIGGER advantages to marketeers...

BTW, the character cap is "only" 36 -- assuming you want to hang out with friends on a given server. And a billion each would take a marketeer under a year, typically.

What seems to be a driving issue with nearly all complaints about IO prices is that many people consider them to be prohibitive, or unfair.

To that end, what exactly is a "fair" price for IOs?

Each level 50 has 96 slots to fill at this time (I believe that is not slotting Rest or Brawl).

If we start with the notion that "fair" pricing would fall at 1 million each for every crafted IO, you would spend 96 million on every character.

Of that million, 490,400 would go straight to crafting cost. Assuming an average of 2 common salvage, 1 uncommon salvage, and 0.5 rare salvage (equal shares of recipes that require 1 rare or 0 rare) and assuming that those prices are only 2x what a vendor will pay for them you will lay out 8,000 for salvage. This gives you a "cost" of 498,400 (we'll round to 500k for simplicity sake).

At this point, the value of every non-pvp and non-purple recipe becomes 500k, or 1/2 of the total cost of the IO. Or, to be even more comparative, the recipe is costing you almost exactly what the crafting table is charging you to make it.

Looking at purples, you have 600k in crafting fees, 2 rares, and 3 commons. Applying the same "costing" as above and you now have a crafting cost of 626k. This values a purple recipe at a maximum of 374k. You've effectively decided that purple drops are worth "less" than regular drops. If I am on a run in this system and I intend to sell my recipes, purples are the first to get deleted because they are actually worth the "least".

So taking that from one extreme to another, what "would" be a fair price for purples?

**PvP IOs are a different beast entirely - so many people complain about the price of PvP IOs when they actually only mean a small handful. I have recipes that have been sitting on the market since the merge for 20 million that simply will not sell. Its not a matter of PvP IOs costing too much, its a matter of the 4-5 that people really want that are expensive.**

So what would be a "fair" price for purples? Being "ultra rare" and totally disregarding the Dev's value of 10-20x what a regular IO is worth (based on drop rates and A-Merit purchasing, its actually quite close to that, but we'll move on). Would 500 mil each be fair? Most say no. Would 200 mil be fair? Some would say yes, still many would say no. Would 100 mil be fair? I would say that 100 million would value them at approximately the same level as most of the desirable Pool C drops - below some even. At that point, I think a lot of people would say 100 million is a fair price for purples.

Setting aside the obvious benefits of purple sets (no exemplar restrictions, better proc rates and damage per proc, considerably better set bonuses in regards to ACC, and Recharge across nearly every set), we'll pretend that all purples henceforth shall be priced no more than 100 million each.

Ah... but here the sticky wicket that no one talks about. You don't slot 1 purple. You slot 5 per set sometimes 6. When you can, for most builds, you would want to slot 5 sets of 5. This is 25 of your 96 enhancements.

Those 25 shiny new purples that you slotted for the "fair" price of 100 million each have just set you back 2.5 billion. And you haven't touched the rest of your build yet.

How many people who complain about purple prices actually spend an average of 3 billion on every single character they get to 50? More realistically, I would say that *most* people in this game who play on a regular basis and don't marketeer or farm all day long will generally spend 200-500 million tops on their builds. You may go check the AT forums to back that up. Often you see "uber expensive" builds floating around, but for the most part, people will then ask for a build that's "cheap" and set a price cap of 500 mil.

Re: The PvP 3% def IO

Personally, I'm baffled. Yes you get 3% def at any level. Yes you get 10% chance for teleport resistance. Yes, you can slot it in addition to a steadfast 3% def. And yes, it can potentially save you up to 4 slots in a very tight build. Personally, I just don't see it being worth it - not even at 100 mil. But then again, I never had a problem selling the 2 I have gotten for over the 2 billion mark.

Re: Other interesting items on the market that never get mentioned. Hami-o's for example. One of the extremely small subsets within this game that require you to actually kill a specific "boss" to get the drop. They range anywhere from 100 mil to 500 mil (similar to purple prices) but I don't recall ever seeing a complaining thread about the price of these. Why is that?

I wanted to point out something that occurred to me with regards to the response in the OP.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Heraclea This inflation tends to be daunting to new players. You have to play the market minigame to buy anything desirable there. It would be a truly daunting proposition to try to buy anything worthwhile by fighting mobs for currency drops.

I'm not sure if anyone thought of it this way, but it's not clear that the respondent was saying you have to "marketeer" - do things like flip, or try to create price spikes. I think that's how many regulars would read "play the market minigame". But to my thinking, interacting with the market at all is playing the minigame, even if you just come and sell stuff you got playing the main game. And I think that reading of the response remains logically valid - you don't have to become a flipper (for example) to afford stuff on the market, but you probably do have to at least be a seller.

Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If the market is going to be the main place to buy stuff, there's no real conflict in having the prices at which you buy things being primarily attainable by first selling things there.

If all we got by playing the game was "currency drops", as the respondent put it, then I think this would be a very poor situation. Fortunately, that's not the case; we get saleable drops too. Moreover, the existence of the various "token" currencies allow interested players an alternate (and more deterministic) means jump starting entry the market - they can use tokens to create something valuable directly and then sell it on the market to create a starter fund.

I do think that there may be some issues with "sticker shock". However, I don't think my issue with that phenomenon are what most people who complain about the prices would expect. I think sufficient sticker shock acts as discouragement to participate, which may help keep people from experimenting with, becoming comfortable with and thus frequently using the market. I like the idea of more people using the market, so I have some dislike of this notion, even though I have no proof it occurs with meaningful numbers of players.

I'm going to throw this out because its something you might not know.
Issue 19 does away with publicly seeing set bonuses. Come I19 it will be impossible to know who is purpled and who is not.