Inflation. How to fix it?

Inflation. You can't deny its existence anymore, just looking at the dramatic price increase of almost every IO post I19. Salvage is seemingly not affected, but perhaps this is due to AE's booming popularity as of late.


Why did it happen?

I think the most important reason(there are likely a few) is that through the incarnate system, people have been selecting merit rewards from level 50 TF's far less often, and people are doing sub 50 TF's less often. This means that a major inf sink, the A-Merit conversion, is used much less. Due to the coming slots and higher boost tiers maintaining the demand for shards and components, this likely won't change.

What's my suggestion to fix it?

Make Incarnate Shards drop from sub 50 mobs as well. This will make lower level TF's more popular, thus making reward merits more common. If you unlocked your alpha, any non-AE mob that doesn't con grey/green will have a chance at dropping shards.

Eh, people pay what they bid. If they want to place 500K for a piece of salvage or a billion for a recipe, that is their choice. Additionally, IOs and the market are opitional. I have toons with SOs on them, and am willing to bet there are other players out there too.

I would favor more inf sinks added first (like Black Hole IOs (in sig), which would help me respec more easily ) rather than add shards dropping from sub-50 mobs. Also, I still see in my globals people doing non-50 TFs, so they are still going on. And IMO, people just got a new shiney with incarnates and it is a holiday when people can be home to play. This game goes in waves up and down with activities and players will be doing all the content.

It's hard to say how long the status quo will last. Lots of people have been respeccing lots of characters for inherent stamina. This generates a lot of demand for recipes without the corresponding playing time that accompanies leveling up characters in the normal fashion, and the corresponding increase in supply.

A lot of people are home for the holidays, have a limited horizon for their playing time, and may be less patient to wait for bids to fill. They want to finish their builds NOW! These behaviors may change over the coming months.

Just a short while ago people were bemoaning the fact that hydraulic pistons were going for 1 million a pop. Now they sell for peanuts.

I'm not sure how many people actually use reward and alignment merits for random rolls. I can use 2 a-merits for an LotG: +recharge or Kinetic Combat that's worth 100 million plus for sure, or I can make 10 random rolls and maybe get a whole lot of nothing.

The Apex and Tin Mage TFs already give merits in addition to two shards. Also, as time goes on people will have their alpha slots slotted. They may run level 50 TFs for the shard drops and then take reward merits instead of the uncommon component, which they may not have any use for because we don't know what components future boosts will require -- but we know we'll be able to use shards in any case.

How to fix it is simple; massive entirely superflous inf sinks.

<Badly formed thought went here>

Any sort of activity that produces salvage or recipes also produces Inf. No matter how much salvage is created, there will always be more inf to bid on it than there was before.

Easy solution: have an NPC who gives a random piece of salvage (any level, any kind, any rarity) for 200 inf. Salvage is created, Inf is sunk, more Salvage than Inf, prices fall, everyone rejoices.

Answer: Massively cut the amount of inf generated by playing.

Give all your infs to me.

It won't really help much if at all if inf supply is diminished. Prices are always relative to the earning potential so the current "outrageous" prices would just diminish to a level that would be just as "outrageous" if our earning potential wasn't as high.

What we need is inf sinks.