I'd like to see a way to buy reward merits too. 2M per probably isn't too far off what I'd price them at. I'd also limit purchases to like 20 merits per day or some similar number so people can't simply buy 50 to convert with another 20M every day. And yeah 20 doesn't even divide nicely into 50 so thats deliberate too. I don't want this to be easy....but like someone said a way to even things out on toons with like 17 merits or whatever.
Plus it'd give me something to spend on other than the firepit of prestige conversion in a probably futile attempt to get my duo VG into the top prestige slot (258B inf more to burn.....54B down). I mean I have roughly 110B in stuff (at dump prices not patient prices) and another 39B in inf. I'd love for that to mean something other than some really full enhancer tables and worrying about going over the cap on many toons.
the way to burn off inf is easy make something desirable for sale from vendors at a high price. SOs were a great way to burn off inf until they were no longer desirable .
The trick is what is that something?
The enhancement systems is already fairly complex and saturated. Costuming was a good thing until they starting giving away tokens like candy (I have toons with over 50 tokens)
maybe make tier 3 inspirations for sale at .5-1 mil each? that would sink what 20 million before MoTF easy ... and completely optional
Card Carrying DeFulmenstrator--Member Crazy 88s
We burn more Influence before 8am than you make all day.
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Well, let's look at this Reward Merit rates we know of today. The only reference I know of is still recorded on ParagonWiki here. It lists the target rate of minutes per Merit produced during merit-producing activity as 3.7. The devs apply a bunch of fudge factors to modify how many merits/minute specific tasks are actually worth. I'm sure we could have lively, many-party debate about how valid those fudge factors are, but at least we have a base target rate number to work with.|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
That reminds me of one of my favorite jokes. I won't post the entire joke, but the punchline goes "now we are just haggling over price".
Just for the sake of argument, I currently calculate a merit as being worth around 1,000K inf, which means an alignment merit should be worth at least 70,000K inf. For the sake of argument, if you could convert inf into some original merit equivalent at the rate of 1,500K inf/merit it wouldn't have very much effect on item creation till the value of a merit rose by 50%. At that time it would start sucking inf out of the system . Depending on pricing you might see some speed due to salvage being more available, once again its all a matter of pricing. |
Some of the top end farming numbers I've seen are 30 million inf/hour. I'm pretty sure those numbers were from before the devs doubled the inf reward rate that 50s get, but lets stick with the 30 number, since I doubt everyone who farms is "top-end". (As a point of reference, my more tricked out level 50 characters can earn from 5-10M inf/hour running things like paper and scanner missions, with that range depending primarily on how high I can set their team size and have them survive.)
So using that 30M inf/hour number, we get 500k inf/minute. At a target rate of 3.7 minute/merit, that works out to 1.85M inf/merit.
At a merit purchase rate of 1.5k inf/merit, we'd have a rough equivalent of 333.3 merits per minute. I'm going to guess exceeding the Dev's stated target by a factor of 90 or so is probably too gracious. That sounds to me like it would radically flood the system with non-purple, non-PvPO stuff.
Enyalios' number of 2M inf/merit is a lot close to my guestimate, and works out to an equivalent of 4 minutes per merit - a lot more like the Dev's target number.
My guess, though, is that they would hedge even higher, because elapsed time isn't the only constraint on Reward Merit production. There's also something of a barrier to entry, at least for stuff with the best peak Reward Merit rates, which are TF/SFs and trials. Not everyone has access to a team that can form up fast or run anything like the best completion times, so not everyone is churning out fast Reward Merits. I'm thinking that's why there's such a firm time constraint on Alignment Merits - they're the "common man's" substitute for Reward Merits in the sense that they really don't have any more strings attached than regular missions and arcs do. (Edit: Well, they do have to own GR and stay hero or villain. I don't know what that does to production rates.) Thus I'm betting way more people can produce them , and so (my thinking goes) the Devs put more firm limits on how fast any character can produce them.
So since anyone (at least anyone with a 50) can produce boatloads of inf with no comparable rate limits, I'm betting the devs would fudge any inf->merit conversion rates upwards from the ~1.85M inf/merit I got above. I have no idea what fudge factor they'd use, but I'm thinking at least a factor of 2.5 or so. So using that and the 1.85M inf/merit number, get 4.625M inf/merit. I'll fudge down to something "round" and call that 4.5M inf/merit, which would be 9 minutes per merit.
Whether that's high or low from what they might do is probably most heavily dependent on the number used as the estimate on inf farming rates. I have the sense that they would hedge high on this number to mitigate the impact of things like AE exploits.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
I've said this before- I'd like to see merit buying on a 24 hour timer: first merit half a million, second a million, third two million, fourth five million, no fifth: something like that. If you're more than four merits short, you're not there yet.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
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They could simply gate the rate that you could exchange inf and make it account wide.
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Originally Posted by UberGuy
Well, let's look at this Reward Merit rates we know of today. The only reference I know of is still recorded on ParagonWiki here. It lists the target rate of minutes per Merit produced during merit-producing activity as 3.7. The devs apply a bunch of fudge factors to modify how many merits/minute specific tasks are actually worth. I'm sure we could have lively, many-party debate about how valid those fudge factors are, but at least we have a base target rate number to work with.
Some of the top end farming numbers I've seen are 30 million inf/hour. I'm pretty sure those numbers were from before the devs doubled the inf reward rate that 50s get, but lets stick with the 30 number, since I doubt everyone who farms is "top-end". (As a point of reference, my more tricked out level 50 characters can earn from 5-10M inf/hour running things like paper and scanner missions, with that range depending primarily on how high I can set their team size and have them survive.) So using that 30M inf/hour number, we get 500k inf/minute. At a target rate of 3.7 minute/merit, that works out to 1.85M inf/merit. At a merit purchase rate of 1.5k inf/merit, we'd have a rough equivalent of 333.3 merits per minute. I'm going to guess exceeding the Dev's stated target by a factor of 90 or so is probably too gracious. That sounds to me like it would radically flood the system with non-purple, non-PvPO stuff. Enyalios' number of 2M inf/merit is a lot close to my guestimate, and works out to an equivalent of 4 minutes per merit - a lot more like the Dev's target number. My guess, though, is that they would hedge even higher, because elapsed time isn't the only constraint on Reward Merit production. There's also something of a barrier to entry, at least for stuff with the best peak Reward Merit rates, which are TF/SFs and trials. Not everyone has access to a team that can form up fast or run anything like the best completion times, so not everyone is churning out fast Reward Merits. I'm thinking that's why there's such a firm time constraint on Alignment Merits - they're the "common man's" substitute for Reward Merits in the sense that they really don't have any more strings attached than regular missions and arcs do. (Edit: Well, they do have to own GR and stay hero or villain. I don't know what that does to production rates.) Thus I'm betting way more people can produce them , and so (my thinking goes) the Devs put more firm limits on how fast any character can produce them. So since anyone (at least anyone with a 50) can produce boatloads of inf with no comparable rate limits, I'm betting the devs would fudge any inf->merit conversion rates upwards from the ~1.85M inf/merit I got above. I have no idea what fudge factor they'd use, but I'm thinking at least a factor of 2.5 or so. So using that and the 1.85M inf/merit number, get 4.625M inf/merit. I'll fudge down to something "round" and call that 4.5M inf/merit, which would be 9 minutes per merit. Whether that's high or low from what they might do is probably most heavily dependent on the number used as the estimate on inf farming rates. I have the sense that they would hedge high on this number to mitigate the impact of things like AE exploits. |
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Yeah, I was thinking about that yesterday and forgot about it by the time I posted tonight. Putting in some sort of per/day purchase limit probably solves the problem I described above.|
Originally Posted by Fulmens
I've said this before- I'd like to see merit buying on a 24 hour timer: first merit half a million, second a million, third two million, fourth five million, no fifth: something like that. If you're more than four merits short, you're not there yet.
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Of course, at that point it's probably easier to map Inf purchases to Alignment Merits, since they already have an easy-to-compare purchase rate limit mechanism in place. Given current A-Merit prices though (20M Inf + 50 Reward Merits), and using a rough conversion rate of one A-Merit is worth around 100 R-Merits (very rough), then we've got 100 R-Merits = 20M Inf + 50 R-Merits, or one R-Merit is worth 400,000 inf. So if they let us buy around 100 R-Merits a day at price of 40M inf, that would be roughly equitable. (Edit: For access to purples and PvPOs, people might prefer or at least like in addition the ability to buy 1 A-Merit a day with Inf. My rough 40M is probably too cheap for that, though, since that makes 35 A-Merit PvPOs cost around 1.4B Inf.)
If they want to use diminishing returns they could let us buy R-Merits like 20 at a time (worth 8M Inf by my scribbling above), but start at a lower per-purchase price (4M Inf?) subject the purchase to diminishing returns like it's a TF.
That would look like this, for purchases made within 18 (20?) hours of one another.
20 Merits = 4M Inf
30 Merits = 8M Inf
37 Merits = 12M Inf
42 Merits = 16M Inf
46 Merits = 20M Inf
49 Merits = 24M Inf
52 Merits = 28M Inf
Obviously, one could play with this by fiddling with the initial value and the per-purchase cost. I chose 20 Merits because that's one random roll, and I mostly picked 200k Inf/Merit out of thin air.
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Originally Posted by Another_Fan
They could simply gate the rate that you could exchange inf and make it account wide.
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Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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If they don't limit on an account basis, inf=>merit have creates a merit you can trade. Also in your example, the high rate inf farmer could simply send 20 emails out and log in to 20 alts. I like the idea of trading merits. I would like it even better if they just made the recipe level slider actually work
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Originally Posted by UberGuy
I don't know if they'd limit it by account, since no other merit stuff is. But if they were looking to be particularly draconian, just to be safe, I suppose it makes some sense. You can't create Inf on multiple accounts at the same time, but I do suppose you can collect it on multiple characters simultaneously, using the market. Of course, that case becomes a pretty good inf sink.
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I've been thinking that they should move EoE's to vendor-only, and make similar insps for some of the upcoming TF's or trials. It's less optional than just selling large insps, it's a recurring cost, and it affects only high-level players who want to run the top content.
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Originally Posted by _23X_
the way to burn off inf is easy make something desirable for sale from vendors at a high price. SOs were a great way to burn off inf until they were no longer desirable .
The trick is what is that something? The enhancement systems is already fairly complex and saturated. Costuming was a good thing until they starting giving away tokens like candy (I have toons with over 50 tokens) maybe make tier 3 inspirations for sale at .5-1 mil each? that would sink what 20 million before MoTF easy ... and completely optional |
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Well, I think letting someone use Inf essentially creates that tradable merits no matter what. Even if I can't create merits on multiple characters in the same day, I can still send money from my rich ones to others and use that to create merits they wouldn't otherwise have. I can also use market monies to "earn" merits.|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
If they don't limit on an account basis, inf=>merit have creates a merit you can trade. Also in your example, the high rate inf farmer could simply send 20 emails out and log in to 20 alts. I like the idea of trading merits. I would like it even better if they just made the recipe level slider actually work
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That said, your example of mailing inf to alts definitely breaks the proposal I gave in response to Fulmens using diminishing returns. One character has to spend 16M to get 42 Merits in a day, where four distinct characters could get 80 total merits for 4M apiece or 16M total. So yeah, if they want to limit per-player rates of item creation, they couldn't implement at least that kind of scheme without limiting purchases account-wide.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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EoEs in particular are probably a bad choice. Servers with strong raiding communities need very few of them. Servers without such communities need lots of them, and this shifts the onus to the attendees to bring their own. But n00b and leechy raiders wouldn't do this, which shifts a heavy cost to responsible leaders and attendees who try to supply them. That sounds like a pressure against forming Hami raids that servers who don't raid regularly probably don't need.
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Originally Posted by Intrinsic
I've been thinking that they should move EoE's to vendor-only, and make similar insps for some of the upcoming TF's or trials. It's less optional than just selling large insps, it's a recurring cost, and it affects only high-level players who want to run the top content.
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Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
This is an interesting idea, and one I haven't heard before.
I agree that something really does need to be done about inflation though, but I have a different idea on how to fix it.
As far as I know, all inf in the game comes from two sources. Inf dropped directly from enemies, and recipe/salvage/enhancements dropped and sold to vendors. AFAIK, these are the only two ways to create new inf that did not exist before.
My solution to the problem of inflation is not to introduce new inf sinks to the game, but to limit the amount created. I think it can be done without affecting people who want to avoid the invention system as well.
Back when I was first playing the game before the invention system came out, by the mid 30s, pretty much every character was making more than enough inf to replace SOs every 5 levels. By 50, most characters had several million just sitting around, with nothing to do with it. As far as I know, inf drop rates haven't really been changed.
It seems then, that the amount of inf that high-level enemies drop could be significantly reduced, without impacting a players ability to buy SOs every 5 levels. Essentially, the amount of inf dropped by enemies would be reduced to the point that over the course of gaining 5 levels, you would get, on average, just enough inf to buy a completely new set of SOs from a vendor. The drop rates for everything else would be left alone.
Obviously, this would have to be done carefully, but I think over the long term, this could stop the inflation that we're seeing.
Actually, at level 50 inf drop rates from defeats were doubled with the release of I16.
This is separate from the fact that, as characters level up they tend to be able to defeat more and higher level foes in the same span of time as a lower level character - something that's been facilitated by I16's difficulty slider settings.
As a result, at this point, reducing the rate of inf reward from enemies would have to be very, very significantly, especially at 50 but also at other high levels (probably L35+ or L40+), to have a strong market impact. I don't know how the devs look at doing something like this. My bet is that there would be howling about such a change.
Of the options, decreasing inf reward rates would probably be the simplest (from a concept perspective, not necessarily in terms of code/configuration) and most unconditional thing the Devs could change that would impact inflation.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
As long as the AE has been up, there have been AE exploits to generate inf.
I would have a hard time supporting an inf for items exchange given that.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a *real* useful invention. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...t-sarcasm.html
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Just what was the rationale for the doubling of inf drops? I don't recall reading about this much at all and I was not active in the market & inventions forum when I16 hit. It just seems hard to believe that very many people in the know thought this was actually a good idea if they thought very long about it.
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Originally Posted by UberGuy
Actually, at level 50 inf drop rates from defeats were doubled with the release of I16.
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[B] GUARDIAN 50s:[/B] [B]Tank[/B]: Ice/Fire, Fire/Fire, DA/SS, Inv/WM, SD/Elec...[B]Scrap[/B]: BS/Reg, Spin/DA, DM/SD, Fire/WP, Claws/SR....[B]Troller[/B]: Ill/Rad, Fire/Kin...[B]Blaster[/B]: Fire/EM....[B]Defender[/B]: D3...[B]Brute[/B]: Elm/ElA...[B]EPIC[/B]: Widow, PB, Crab...CURRENTLY: 45 Stone/Stone Tank...38 AR/Rad Corr...21 Ice^3 Dom
I guess it depends on what someone else would have bought it for. If I'm paying more, I'm destroying more inf. If I'm paying less, I'm destroying less inf.
Also, if the thing I bought was Neverselling Ice, it would never have generated a sale without me.
But I think you have a point, it's not quite fair to count both 10% hits towards my total. So out of my 15M profit, I'm paying 3M in fees, so the amount destroyed is equal to 20% of my profit. If I make 100M that way, I've destroyed 20M in inf. So unless I made 20M from another source during that time, I'm HELPING!