Thinking out loud

This isn't exactly polished enough to be a suggestion yet, so I'm putting it in this forum instead of Suggestions. I'd just like some comments.

CoH does not have enough reliable Inf sinks. There are some NPC vendors, but the number of things a single character needs from them is quite small compared to the time spent playing. Even if you slot with SOs that you replenish every 5 levels, eventually you reach level 50 and don't need to spend any more Inf ever, but there are plenty of reasons to keep playing. Slotting with IOs is quickest if you buy from the market, where only 10% of Inf is sunk, and there is no way to produce recipes and salvage without also producing Inf.

You can get all the IOs you want bypassing the market entirely if you gather Reward/Alignment Merits. You can turn 50 Reward Merits into 1 Alignment Merit at the cost of 20 million Inf once a day. If you're level 50, you're quite likely to make more than 20 million in the course of gathering 50 Reward Merits, so this doesn't really sink as much Inf either.

If there was a way to trade Inf directly for Reward Merits, that would provide a consistent Inf sink, and indirectly a de facto price cap on any recipe in the game.

Supposing a Reward Merit costs 2 million Inf, and you are limited to getting 50 of them per day (a counter increments from 1 to 50 every time you buy one, and resets to 0 20 hours after your first purchase).

You can get one Alignment Merit a day by sinking a total of 120 million Inf, and not making any more in the process.

The "value" of a purple recipe becomes no greater than 1.2 billion. PvP recipes become no more expensive than 4.2 billion. It doesn't devalue them to the point where there is no point in trading them.

Additionally, this solves the problem of "many alts holding less merits than one roll" problem - if you have 15 Merits left over on an alt you're not planning to play for a while, you can send over 10 million Inf from your main, buy an additional 5 Merits and make a random roll.

The only potential problem I can see is Salvage prices jumping up, since there's still no way to generate Salvage without also generating Inf.

Thoughts?

You may want to look over the arguments in this thread, starting around post #23.

I'm not entirely sure how that's applicable. I'm not proposing a hard price cap on the market or an increase in drops.

There is a high % of sink on every transaction made through the market... i'm sure that is more than enough for now.

My biggest objection to this is the AE. It's pretty obvious that the AE is always going to throw up some form of exploit, and past ones have generated massive amounts of Inf.

Allowing exploiters to turn that Inf directly into enhancements gives people more reason to stick to the AE edge case missions where the inf rewards are ridiculously out of whack and discourages people from using the other avenues available to them in terms of getting Merits and A-Merits.

So the continued AE exploits for me would be the issue here, until that was finally addressed allowing people to buy Merits via Inf will cause more people to flock to the AE and use whatever the Exploit of the Week is.

Being able to trade inf for merits would mean that, with an extra step involved, a player would be able to buy recipes and salvage from a vendor with inf. I would not want to see this happen for a couple of reasons. First, it would lead to fixed pricing on at least some of the recipes. Second, it would devalue merits as a reward for playing through TF's/trials/story arcs as opposed to farming. I would like to see CoH use more money sinks, but there must be a better way.

There should, in theory, be a steady state solution, Shred. But it may take a long time to get there- months instead of days, in which case the system is changing long before we reach equilibrium. I don't have any good guesses as to how to estimate this.

Additionally, as Uberguy mentioned, you need a constant rate of making money and a constant ratio of money to stuff for equilibrium. Farmers have gotten faster and more efficient since issue 9 hit.

Back when I worked some of Topdoc's numbers, it looked like he was adding about 20% net inf to the system; I attempted to take his change in personal level of wealth, figured how much was from selling things on market vs. how much was from vendoring and cash. Subtract 10% [or 20% if he got flipped] of the on-market sales from the cash numbers and you get the total he was adding into the system.

Let me make up an example: Farmer Alpha makes 60% of his inf from recipes sold on market and 40% from vendoring L50 generics and actual inf from beating guys up. We would subtract 6% [wentfees removing inf from game] from 40% [inf added to game] and conclude that 34% of Farmer Alpha's earnings are new inf to the game.

Farmer Beta farms at level 50 and gets purples- 80% of his inf is from Went-sales and 20% is from vendors and critters. We subtract 8% from 20% and only 12% of Beta's earnings are new to the game.

We can have other examples- Farmer Gamma does PVP and so 100% of inf is from Went-sales , and they actually remove inf from the game and add none. Farmer Delta runs AE farms and 80% is direct pay, so 78% is new inf. And so forth.

I guess my point is that until you're making 91% of your inf by selling stuff at Wents, you're still inflationary.

Would adding a powerleveling AE option be a good inf sink (and I apologize if this is already an option, as I don't AE much). The idea would be that AE would give you the option to accrue experience more rapidly, but you would not earn any inf or tickets. This would be a sink in the sense that players would spend time playing but not add any inf to the system.

I think the main problem with the powerleveling option is that, unless it's a mode for everyone in the mission, the powerleveler would still earn money. It's rarely the money that the powerelevelee earns that's interesting.

Now, if it was indeed a mission setting, people who care more about being level 50 than earning inf might use it, but honestly, I'm not sure how many people there are who don't care at all about getting inf on the character doing the heavy lifting. Often that inf is put towards kitting out the new 50, at least when one player owns both (all) accounts. I think those folks would just stay on the lookout for genuinely over-rewarding scenarios and use them without the PL mode switch.

Assumes inflation is a problem, in the context of the game its not a problem, a bug or even undesirable. In another thread someone described the game as a treadmill of loot, well inflation moves the treadmill forward. Its also improves the game environment by decreasing the advantage long term players have over new players.

That said if you really wanted to stop inflation and soak up large amounts of inf, don't go half way. Put in an inf store for salvage and recipes. The vendors buy salvage and recipes they must do something with them. This way when there were shortages from player produced goods this would kick in, providing goods and removing large amounts of inf.

It would also eliminate the complaints about people being screwed over by the marketeers. The markets prices should always be lower than the store's and if they weren't people could always use the store.

The problem with making things too fungible is that the next step is making vendors sell purples and oranges. And well, then we are playing poker, 5 card draw, jacks queens kings and sevens wild.

If everyone is super, then no one is.

Yeah, I think the dev's implementations of Reward and now Alignment Merits shows they are very interested in putting greater reward/time constraints on the ability to create new items for use or sale than exist on the creation of inf.

Not to suggest at all that there's not variability in rates at which Reward Merits can be produced, but they are more restricted than Inf. The rate limits on Alignment Merit production are even stronger. (In that light, I find it interesting that the only available way to increase the rate of a character's production of Alignment Merits is to burn both Inf and Reward Merits.)

I agree that, if one is worried about Inf-flation, an Inf recipe store would do wonders. I just think the merit situation may be a hint that the devs don't want recipe creation rates to be subject to the wild (compared to merits) production swings we see in Inf today.

While I believe more people are producing Alignment Merits than were producing Reward Merits, I don't see very many people at all producing more than one alignment merit per day on average - and that includes quite a few people who are excellent at "breaking" the game. While producing Alignment Merits is relatively easy, I believe the devs made a good job of making doing it in bulk by a single player unattractive enough that it's not widespread.

Producing merits on more characters than you can log in at once had a large burst of activity when they were first created, and then tailed off as people got bored with running the missions. The serious game-breakers I know went back to farming for purples and/or inf as their hardcore wealth production methods, with alignment merit production they do once a day or so as a supplement.

So I don't believe that Alignment Merits increase the rate anything like allowing inf to create recipes directly (or, indirectly, by allowing inf to create merits) would.