Should prices be capped in the AH?

The people who pay the high prices are the ones who're driving up the price. If people would just agree not to pay over a certain amount, prices would reduce to that amount.
Personally, I never pay more than I think I should.

Oh, lordy. This again.

Price caps do nothing good. If players can sell or otherwise trade things off of the market, savvy ones will. Plenty of people mentioned this.

I have a sub-thread going on the market forum where I'm playing a level 50 character and making something like 300M inf every 10 days or so playing content pretty normally. Now, a bunch of that income is from market sales, but so far all of them have been small-ish. 5-10M inf. (I've been withholding selling the good stuff.) Unless we're talking about some super draconian price caps, I'd probably still be able to do that in an aggressively price-capped CoH market.

Now let's say I want a purple Apocalypse: Acc/Dam/Recharge. There aren't many of them being produced in the game, and lots and lots of players have 50s they might like to slot one in. Let's say the price cap is 50M inf. Well, hell, I am making that every day and a half! I can afford that, so I'll throw out a 50M bid. And so will everyone else remotely like me...

Caps as people usually suggest them don't address the core reason that prices are high - enough people have the money to consistently pay a high price. Placing a price cap does nothing to change that - those people still have that money. But if you cap the price down at a level that lots more people can afford to bid for it, now lots more people with less money will bid, because, hey, they would like one too. But you haven't increased supply at all, so now you've got more people asking for the same number of goods.

All this does is replace high price with long lines. Now, what you do in game no longer has any impact on when you can buy that Apocalypse - you can only get in line and hope you get one some day. It becomes the CoH IO equivalent of a Soviet bread line. This would be pretty unsatisfactory to a lot of players - even if a price is high, some people will strive for it and consider achieving it a goal to work for. There is no goal to work for with a bread line. It's out of your hands - you throw in your bid and wait.

Moving on to another sub-topic/suggestion... Providing a store that sells at some fixed price is not creating a price cap, it's creating competition. Yes, that would effectively "cap" the price, but that's not "instituting a price cap". It's just providing a competing supplier who sells at a fixed price. Remember, this doesn't just change price - it changes supply. Once price rises to the level of this vendor's list price, supply becomes purely a function of available money. It's pretty unlikely the devs would approve.

There's some evidence of this lack of approval. Importantly, stores already exist - the Reward Merit and Alignment Merit vendors already provide this in effect. Bit they don't let you buy goods from them directly with Inf.

Every currency we can use to buy things in the game should be considered a proxy for elapsed time. If we buy something with merits, those merits have dev-assigned rates at which we're expected to earn them. Reward Merits are earned based on median task completion times, with some throttles on a per-day basis. Alignment Merits are earned on a strict per-elapsed-day rate. But Inf is far more flexible in value - if people use any objective approach to their Inf spending at all, they should pay an amount of Inf for something based how long it would take them to earn the item some other way compared to how much inf they would earn during that elapsed time.

But Inf earning rates are highly variable, and have no throttle. Because of the variability and lack of throttle, no one should ever expect Inf to be the basis of such a direct purchase store. While the rates at which Reward and Alignment Merits can be earned is variable in several dimensions, they have much stricter overall controls than Inf creation does. For related reasons they are generally far less vulnerable to relatively frequently discovered Inf (and XP) earnings rates exploits. Tying specific item creation rates to fixed Inf costs is far riskier than using merits if one assumes the goal (or at least a goal) is controlled item production rates. After all, Inf (and XP) creation exploits are far more common than merit creation ones.

Remember, there's should be no expectation that the devs want us to be swimming in, say, PvP +3% defense IOs. If you want some evidence of that claim, take a look at the Alignment Merit cost of one and figure out how many days it takes to earn one. So the dev-controlled time-proxy price of these things is high. It shouldn't be surprising then that their Inf cost is high, because Inf is simply not all that valuable on a per-unit basis, because it's very easy to produce for high-level characters. Prices for some things are very high for good reasons - there's a lot of inf chasing a few, desirable goods. Thus, we have to ask, what are we trying to achieve with the price caps, and are they addressing the perceived problem, or a symptom?

Not mentioned so far, I don't think:

A move to off-market sales (which would be the result of price caps that were actually significantly lower than the value of the items) screws EU players particularly hard. The market is cross-server list, but glee-mail isn't. Therefore, the EU is cut off from the majority of off-market sales opportunities -- think of redside supply versus blueside before the market merge.

I value my time much more than my play money, so it's a no for any new artificial price caps. I'd rather pay some extra and get my stuff within a relatively short time than either get into a "real black market clique" where I can get my stuff for a lot extra right now or then wait ages and ages.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Grouchybeast Not mentioned so far, I don't think: A move to off-market sales (which would be the result of price caps that were actually significantly lower than the value of the items) screws EU players particularly hard. The market is cross-server list, but glee-mail isn't. Therefore, the EU is cut off from the majority of off-market sales opportunities -- think of redside supply versus blueside before the market merge.

And this.

Should they be capped? Nah.

They should have however adopt a eBay-liketime for sales - 3, 5, 7, or 10 days - as well as a rating system for sellers. 8D

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

Singing an old tune here, the problem is the uncontrolled growth in the inf supply due to high inf payouts and precious little in the way of inf destruction. Older inf sinks are no longer significant and the side effect of farming for purples is the creation of a whole lot of inf or simply farming FOR inf so they can buy want they want.

Hey before IOs, standard enhancement decay was the way that eliminated a good chunk of inf before your 30s. Next was the tailor whose prices rose with your level. But now, IOs you make once and there are more ways to get a free or discount costume change than I care to list.

Maybe the conversion of merits to A-merits could eat some of the money supply but I doubt it. Players would simply inf farm to get their 50 million.

So very soon, maybe we are already there, the IO economy is going to be like Zimbabwe.

While I'm not a supporter of a price cap for anything as that's doomed to fail, the recent inflation still baffles and concerns me. I mean... Why is so much common salvage selling for hundreds of thousands? And since when is RARE salvage so expensive. Prior to Going Rogue, I couldn't give away my rare salvage, and now I'm making a killing off it. What changed?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Rare salvage, to my knowledge, has never gone for 100 M regularly.

I know that without flippers, I personally, would buy a lot of stuf for far lower prices than I do now. I can be very patient when I have too. For some things that aren't being 'flipped' it still pays off to be patient, but for a lot of other stuff you just can't buy anything below the minimum price that flippers set.

I divide my play time between a lot of characters, so if one is on hold for a week, or even two, because I need to wait for a bid on a certain recipe or piece of salvage to be filled that's not a problem.

The problem probably lies completely with me, but, say, 100.000 inf means next to nothing to me. But paying 100.000 inf for a piece of common salvage completely rubs me the wrong way.