Influence Cap - Raised or Removed?

So I hit the influence cap for the first time ever on my main the other day. I suppose I could have easily hit it before but I always got impatient and spent my cash before I got there. This time I more or less saved up for it, especially since I've been doing a LOT of TFs since GR came out and I've been making money even easier than usual.

So I got to thinking, why is the Influence cap set at 2 Billion? Couldn't it be raised given the economics of this game, and why is there an influence cap at all?


Raising the Inf. Cap- So at the very least I think the INF cap should be raised. 2 Billion in this game isn't all that much. The Games economy is constantly undergoing inflation, every time some one defeats something they get more money that for all intents and purposes comes out of no where. Same thing for any time some one gets enhancements or salvage that they sell, that money comes from no where, gets put in the economy and there aren't that many money sinks to take it out again.

So people can literally store mass amounts of cash, and prices for things being what they are, some items selling for over a billion and others selling for hundreds of millions and quite a few being sold for tens of millions, it seems like having only a 2 billion cap is rather small.


Eliminating The Cap- So when I start thinking about raising the cap I have to wonder, why have a cap at all? I mean it's sort of pointless to cap inf at all. What happens when I reach the cap? I start putting more money on an alt . Even if I never bought additional slots, with 12 slots on a server, I could have 24 billion per server or 264 billion across all the servers. In theory one could purchase enough slots to access all 36 slots on each server and net up to 792 billion.

Even further, one could place bids for items in the market, up to what 20 per character, of 2 billion each for some item that may not ever show up, IE some level 53 recipe that no one seems to ever have, and do that on their characters. Or some one could just let large amounts of INF sit in their email for long periods of time, it's theoretically possible for one player to have trillions of INF stored up across ALTs, in email, in bids on the market etc. And it's no longer even the slightest bit difficult to transfer. So why have an Inf cap at all? Does it serve some function I'm not aware of? I mean it makes max bid on the Auction House 2 billion, but people can still get around that so easily it's not like it presents a huge hurdle.

This is a topic gone over many times in the Markets Forum.

Everyone has their own opinion. Mine is:

It is pretty easy to hit the influence cap. The original programmers probably didn't ever consider how easy it would be. You can buy almost everything you need for a lot less than the influence cap. Reprogramming the game to increase the influence cap will almost certainly be detrimental to your gaming experience in terms of downtime.

So who cares? If you really judge the quality of your gaming experience based on numbers, then hit the prestige cap for your supergroup.

It was only easy to hit the cap after the market came into being. Before then it was a lot of work for nothing but bragging rights, now with something to spend all that inf on, it has become more mainstream.

Software, as a rule, does not handle true open-ended number values well. There /are/ ways to implement theoretically unlimited numbers (although at some point the program will run out of memory to store it in when you reach millions of digits) but they're significantly more CPU intensive than a simple "what's the value stored in the X bytes of memory starting at position Y?" which is how you retrieve most regular data types.

So you need a limit, and because computers like powers of two and multiples of sixteen, they figured a 32-bit integer would be plenty (Of course, so did the guys who specced out IPv4, and that's starting to creak at the seams), especially since at the time the engine got designed the market didn't exist and the most expensive thing you could buy cost less than fifty thou (IIRC, changing your costume at the tailor was a feature added in Issue 1).

Katie has the right of it. In the absolute best circumstances, they'd have to change a definition in one header and forcibly alter every database table on every shard to accept a larger data type (and there we're already assuming the database can easily handle numbers larger than two billion in the datatype they've chosen for influence), recompile, bugfix, test every possible scenario where edge cases could occur, test a representative subset of all possible regular cases, make sure every single place where Influence is displayed has the ability to display 2^63-1, make sure every single place where you can /enter/ an amount of inf can handle values in that range...

The longer I think about it, the more possible problems I'm imagining they might very well run into, and I suspect I've barely even scratched the surface.

Two different approaches:

1) Implement banks in the game. We already have a bunch of bank buildings and interiors, let's use them. Speak to any teller to deposit influence in the bank, store it on a 64-bit integer, for a cap of about 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 influence. Markets and personal cap remains at 2 billion, but you can transfer influence to someone else's account by just providing the global. A COD option could also be available at the bank: email an item but ask for X influence from their bank balance in return (with a fee like the market's for the service). Requires coding, so probably won't happen.

2) "Coin" salvage. Wenthworths already has a "Fixed Price" category; add salvage pieces worth 10 million, 50 million, 100 million, 500 million, and 1 billion to the list. They would sell at any vendor for same amount. The character inventory would be limited like all special salvage, so 9999 coins worth 1 billion would be the cap. Markets and personal cap remains at 2 billion, but you can trade 3 billion with someone in the same server by giving them 3 coins worth 1 billion. This would be ridiculously easy to implement (just add the salvage to the market listing) but it's doesn't help for cross-server transfers (you could email the pieces to yourself, make an alt in the server you want to transfer, do the transfer, then email the thing you bought back to yourself).

Someone beat me to it, but a semi-standard way to handle this is to create tokens with an exchange rate equivalent to a set amount of money (say, 1 billion) or a second denomination of money (in the same way there are different kinds of bills). Could be a lot of work though.

Yeah, making "salvage" coins seems like it would be super easy to implement. It would just be a special store NPC. Basically buying stuff like that from a table or NPC is a re-use of the crafting system. For example, the NPCs now that lets us turn Reward Merits and inf into Alignment Merits are almost certainly letting us combine inf and Reward Merits to "craft" Alignment Merits. Such a coin like you talk about would just have one component - inf, in some large quantity. Similarly, the NPC would let you sell the coins back to them, converting them back into inf. (Making sellback "lossy" has been discussed as a kind of inf sink, with varying feedback.)

If the coins could be mailed, they would really be a handy bulk value currency. CoH's astral diamonds.

*has evil thoughs*

How about... lowering the cap?

Mwahahahahahahahaha!!!



Disclaimer: the above post shouldnt be taken seriously. Or it should. You never know what the crazy Kay is thinking.

I like the bank idea especially, and I think it would be (relatively speaking)
fairly easy to implement, as only "Bank Balances" would need 64 bit Ints.

That said, I'm not sure the devs would favor the idea of players accruing
huge amounts of inf - at least, until they have more attractive inf sinks in
the game, even though there are already players with 10's of billions across
their accounts as it is.

In terms of the ease of reaching the cap, before I9 and the market, it was
extremely difficult and equally rare. Without any real lewt in the game, it
was a fairly astronomical limit, and I can't blame the devs for not thinking
about it back then.

With the market, and real lewt, reaching the cap is in fact, quite easy.

At least one marketeer has documented going from 0-cap in about a week.

Without market interaction, or a couple very lucky drops, it's still fairly hard
to get to the cap for most folks though.

That said, there is a LOT of inf in-game, and we estimate somewhere around
1-4 Trillion of new influence being generated every month, depending on
how consevative you care to be with your numbers...

So, even without the market, reaching the cap is getting easier for high
level characters.


Regards,
4

We shouldn't forget that we haven't gotten the market in a vacuum. Without the market there might not be much interest in hitting the cap, but many other changes would make it quite possible completely without market play, assuming you play at 50 regularly.

IOs made it possibly for characters to attack more often, survive more damage, and go longer without running out of endurance. Collectively these increased how much reward/time they can earn fairly significantly. Common IO recipes follow an exponential recipe price progression with level, as opposed to the linear one used by SO/DO/TO enhancers, increasing average earnings (edit: @ level 50) by as much as 50%. Then XP "smoothing" came with some significant to changes to rewards. Notably, over-level mobs became worth significantly more (and under-level mobs became woth much less). Before I16, it wasn't easy for the general population to fight as many foes at once as was optimal for their IO-enhanced capabilities, but with I16 that changed. Then on the tails of that, the Inf earning rates of level 50 characters was doubled.

I have a sub-thread over in the market forum showing that I'm earning something like 150M every 10 days playing a fairly AoE-poor level 50 melee character. (It's a DM/Regen Scrapper.) That's inf created from scratch from defeats and recipe sales, not including any market sales.

From that it's pretty clear that we'd have people hitting the inf cap even if we had no market, assuming we could still have IOs the way we do today without a player market to trade them on.

i like the idea of the bank, all they would need to do is integrate it into the vault storage and bam, instant bank

the only way to make the bank even better is to make it a global storage for all your toons (this same idea i would also transfer to the vault salvage storage as well cause IMO its pretty lame as is)

I Like the idea of Coins, though I think there should be some kind of influence sink involved in the conversion- maybe have a 1B Coin cost 1.1 Bil, or only cash out for .9 Bil.

and I think they shoulc be called "Billion Universal Coins"...

I would love to see a National Bank of Paragon implimented... I would probably hope for the following features.

* Global

I would love to see a National Bank of Paragon implimented... I would probably hope for the following features.

* Global influence store, where any character on your account can deposit inf to the bank, and

I would love to see a National Bank of Paragon implimented... I would probably hope for the following features.

* Global influence store, where any character on your account can deposit inf to the bank, and your total is

Is this like one of those drinking games:

I went of a trip and took: a pair of blue shoes

I went of a trip and took: a pair of blue shoes and a green handbag