Inflation. How to fix it?


Adeon Hawkwood

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
I wouldn't mind to much if the devs did this but from a market point of view I don't think the effect would be what you want. In general when people pull enhancements off during a respec they are pulling off the most valuable. Removing that ability would actually cause the price of the most valuable IOs (i.e. purples and the nicer rares) to rise slightly due to decreased supply. Removing the inf buyback would slightly decrease the supply coming in but I think it makes up such a small portion of total inf generated that it wouldn't mke much difference.
I was thinking that people would have to spend more inf on buying SO's/HO's and crafting new IO enhancements for secondary builds and new characters rather than burning respecs to pull them off of builds to reuse them.

I also think that it's possible it might cause a drop in prices on the market because people may be less willing to spend hundreds of millions on items that they can't recycle. So sellers could be forced to lower their prices.

Of course this is just wild speculation on my part.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Auroxis View Post
Because it's more comfortable? Instead of wasting your time shuffling stuff between alts you could manage just one char or at least less than you would if the cap wasn't increased.
Even my time isn't valuable enough to lament the few seconds a month I spend shuffling inf around. =P

Quote:
EDIT: I also referred to the WW inf cap, which is another inf sink that will get underused if purple recipes get over 2 bil worth.
If purples reach the point where a meaningful number are "worth" 2b it's going to be a long, long, loooong time from now. In the short term its a distinct non-problem.


The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.

My City Was Gone

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project View Post
I was thinking that people would have to spend more inf on buying SO's/HO's and crafting new IO enhancements for secondary builds and new characters rather than burning respecs to pull them off of builds to reuse them.
Realistically though that wouldn't make much difference. A full set of level 50 SOs costs less than 6 million, the crafting cost of a set of level 50 IOs is less than 50 million. That's less than half the price of a respec recipe and it would take 10 respecs to fully strip a character. I don't think people are using their respecs specifically for that enough for it to make a difference.

Quote:
I also think that it's possible it might cause a drop in prices on the market because people may be less willing to spend hundreds of millions on items that they can't recycle. So sellers could be forced to lower their prices.
Look at it this way, the change would probably cause three changes to the supply/demand curve of high end items:

People less inclined to buy due to permanence: demand decreases
People cannot strip an old character to outfit a new one: demand increases
People cannot strip a character to sell the enhancements: supply decreases

The first item would cause a price drop but the other two would cause the price to rise. It's impossible to say which would have the stronger effect but my guess is that the impact of the latter two would be greater than the impact of the first.

I don't think most players who purchase purples do so with the intent of recycling. Purples represent a significant investment so most players who purchase them likely do so for a specific character they intend to keep at the time they are doing the enhancing (whether they do actually keep them long term is less certain)..


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
Realistically though that wouldn't make much difference. A full set of level 50 SOs costs less than 6 million, the crafting cost of a set of level 50 IOs is less than 50 million. That's less than half the price of a respec recipe and it would take 10 respecs to fully strip a character. I don't think people are using their respecs specifically for that enough for it to make a difference.


Look at it this way, the change would probably cause three changes to the supply/demand curve of high end items:

People less inclined to buy due to permanence: demand decreases
People cannot strip an old character to outfit a new one: demand increases
People cannot strip a character to sell the enhancements: supply decreases

The first item would cause a price drop but the other two would cause the price to rise. It's impossible to say which would have the stronger effect but my guess is that the impact of the latter two would be greater than the impact of the first.

I don't think most players who purchase purples do so with the intent of recycling. Purples represent a significant investment so most players who purchase them likely do so for a specific character they intend to keep at the time they are doing the enhancing (whether they do actually keep them long term is less certain)..
Hence the last line in my post

Quote:
Of course this is just wild speculation on my part.


I still want to see them remove the ability to pull enhancements off of builds if not for anything else but the cries of nerdrage and teeth gnashing we'd see on the forums.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
That would be pretty much impossible to implement, people would figure out a work around (such as doing multiple small trades) or simply resort to barter so the net effect would be to reduce the amount of inf sunk through market fees.
Yeah, smaller transactions would get around, but more of the whole would it be worth item. It was crazy and don't expect anything like that implemented. Just can't think of reliable inf sinks.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project View Post
Hence the last line in my post



I still want to see them remove the ability to pull enhancements off of builds if not for anything else but the cries of nerdrage and teeth gnashing we'd see on the forums.
They could do that far more effectively by implementing FREEEEEEM.

And it would not be a pointlessly frustrating limitation that creates forced twinking.


A game is not supposed to be some kind of... place where people enjoy themselves!

 

Posted

The answer to fixing inflation is simple. Take a lesson from the current administration. Give everyone that leads teams a stimulus incentive bonus of 100,000,000 Influence per mission.

Semi serious thinking on this. I used to mess with the market back when it first came out. Ie. use all 10 slots (at the time) to buy and bid on 1 item - I would buy up every item for a price of less then (at the time) 5000 (which was a lot back then) and then turn around and put them up for sale for 10,000. It seem the best way to avoid this type of 'market scheming' would be to have the game periodically dump (once a week or so) mass quanities of items in on the market at the low low price of 500 per item for white salvage, 1000 per item for yellow salvage, and 5000 per item for red savlage. Thus ending the ability to manipulate the market. The same process could be used for recipes as well... but base the price on the value of Regular Stock IO's - yellow recieps 3X the value of reg stock IO value of a similar lvl recipe - Red recieps 5 x the value of reg stock IO of similar lvl - Purple 10 x the value of reg stock IO's of similar lvl. - Or some formula that seems accepitable to whomever decides how much things should be paid for.

2 cents worth.
________________________________
Psychology is considered a 'soft' science because most people's brains are considered 'mush'.


 

Posted

if they want to supercharge supply changing drop rates is the easiest way to do it.

And "market scheming" does nothing to drive up prices- quite the opposite.


The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.

My City Was Gone

 

Posted

Mmm...

If you want to really place inflation in a head-lock, and even reverse the cost of salvage, recipes, and IOs; you would need to institute sources of such goods outside of the traditional market (WW/BM).

Notice that the costs of red and yellow salvage is to an extent placed under restrictions thank to AE and your ability to trade tickets for salvage. If AE would offer white salvage as well, it would also clamp on the white salvage cost inflation and ruthless manipulation we see today.

Notice you can buy standard enhancement recipes at the university, thus the cost of that recipe is effectively capped. It may make sense to have the IO set recipes also available to thru the university as well, thus hard capping the prices for IO recipes. I would suggest an entirely different thread to determine what a fair price for the various types of recipes would be.

AE somewhat addresses the recipe thing, but since it is a random recipe drop for the exchange of tickets, its kinda pointless from the position of getting what you really need at the level you really want. Perhaps the ticket amount you can store can be significantly increased to accomodate a true exchange of tickets for recipes of your choce and level, aka like we can do with Merits.

The Merit system is another way to acquire recipes with out using the market, if the preponderance of the players would do this instead of using the market; I would predict the prices at WW/BM would commence to drop.

Alignmernt Merits works in the same way as Merit System, its just a different way to acquire the merits for trade.

Vanguard Merits, are kinda useless in this regard. Perhaps they could also be made tradeable for salvage and recipes, but once more I suggest a different thread be started to discuss what the trade rates should be.

As you can picture, there is already an almost comprehensive set of systems that allows us to circumvent the market, and avoid the ravages of inflation and player greed.

My dissertation on how I make money, is simply an example of using those already in game systems that allows us to not use the market.

The basic principle, stop using the market! Thus demand plumets and so will prices will have to follow.

I do not support measures to deny players the ability to store influence, items, or what not when the market system can be circumvented all together.

The devs have all kind of ways to fix this as well, if inclined. A sudden increase in the drop rate of the good recipes would have shocking repercusions on the bloated market prices for instance. After all market prices are a function of supply and demand, if the devs provides ample supplies, then the price would obviously drop.

Hugs

Stormy


 

Posted

Or, Stormy, more simply just place a bid you are willing to pay, go play and have fun, come back after some time, and collect said item. I see too many people saying prices are crazy. But if they showed some patience, they can get what they want much cheaper.


 

Posted

I don't think the 'frequency' of drops will actually solve this problem... cause I will bet most people will hoard the 'valuable' stuff, ie. alchemist silver that usually is expenisive, and red salvage especially (I know I hoard them cause I don't wanna pay 3,000,000 for a diamond) and with the talk of even more storage space the problem will probably get worse not better.

Ok.. that was a dollars worth.

________________________
Battle not with monsters, least ye marry one, for when you gaze into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you! - Almost Famious Quote


 

Posted

I don't see AE as a fix. Yes, I farm tickets when I really need them, but they always seem to nerf the farms for tickets, which is a pain, because I usually end up having to find a new farm instead of enjoy playing the rest of the game. I appologize if this attitude seems offensive, but I'm not a huge fan of AE, some people seem to enjoy the AE farming community, it's not for me. I just solo farm for tickets. Next project, learn how to make ticket farms in AE.

_____________________
They say memory is the 2nd thing to go, good thing I can't remember the first.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolfgang_Tao View Post
I don't think the 'frequency' of drops will actually solve this problem... cause I will bet most people will hoard the 'valuable' stuff, ie. alchemist silver that usually is expenisive, and red salvage especially (I know I hoard them cause I don't wanna pay 3,000,000 for a diamond) and with the talk of even more storage space the problem will probably get worse not better.
There's a big hairy fly in the ointment of your theory, and its called "supply and demand".

If, say, Alchemical Silver were abundantly supplied.....it would no longer be valuable. There's no motivation to hoard oversupplied junk.

In the very recent past an MA loophole supercharged the supply of rare salvage. Even knowing the loophole would be closed eventually, prices of rares crashed across the board. I'm sure some folk hoarded against the eventual return of the status quo (I know I socked away as many Hamidon Goos as I could fit in my various bases, turning a tidy profit), but supply was running so high it didn't matter. I was flipping stuff that usually went for around 3,000,000 on a daily basis, buying for 500k and selling for 1m.

Many people seem comforted by the myth that small numbers of players can effect meaningful, longterm price shifts on the market. The reality is supply and demand rules all and is dictated on a grand scale by the actions of the entire playerbase, or dev fiat.


The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.

My City Was Gone

 

Posted

Aside from my other issues with the market, etc, I find the huge numbers unaesthetic. (Rather like pinball, which suffered from a period of "score inflation", with at least one attempt to re-impose some sanity.) I wish we could just chop a few zeroes off, across the board... but that doesn't scale well to low levels, of course. The endgame is driving everything these days.


My characters at Virtueverse
Faces of the City

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolfgang_Tao View Post
I don't think the 'frequency' of drops will actually solve this problem... cause I will bet most people will hoard the 'valuable' stuff, ie. alchemist silver that usually is expenisive, and red salvage especially (I know I hoard them cause I don't wanna pay 3,000,000 for a diamond) and with the talk of even more storage space the problem will probably get worse not better.
Then don't bid 3 mill for a diamond. Really, is this so hard to understand? Just bid what you want to pay and come back later. It will be there. I have been doing this since the market came out. People keep clamoring about this fairy tale of price swings and inflation. I just sit and wait and pay the same each time.

And what talk about more storage? We have beyond enough now, how could we possibly use more?


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolfgang_Tao View Post
The answer to fixing inflation is simple. Take a lesson from the current administration. Give everyone that leads teams a stimulus incentive bonus of 100,000,000 Influence per mission.
They did that not to stop inflation, but for other purposes. If anything it was done to prevent a deflation which can be worse.

And that would just... oh you were being sarcastic.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolfgang_Tao View Post
It seem the best way to avoid this type of 'market scheming' would be to have the game periodically dump (once a week or so) mass quanities of items in on the market at the low low price of 500 per item for white salvage, 1000 per item for yellow salvage, and 5000 per item for red savlage. Thus ending the ability to manipulate the market.
Theories about ways to stop marketeering are funny. It doesn't have to be stopped, and unless what you are proposing is... a specific thing I will not say so as not to give the anti-marketeering people ideas, almost anything you do will just make the marketeers richer. That's among the things that make it EBIL. Since marketeers take advantage of price fluctuations, and any such ideas will just make more price fluctuations, either way we win!

He he he HA HA HA MWAHAHAHA


A game is not supposed to be some kind of... place where people enjoy themselves!

 

Posted

The basic problem of inflation in this game is that influence is magically made by defeating enemies. That means the influx of currency into the game is vastly outstripping the availability and consumption of goods.

The only way to realistically reign in inflation in this game is to either take influence out of the game by destroying it (even watching billions being burnt off by the 88s shows that a few players have zero effect on inflation, no matter how many zeros they put behind their effort) or by limiting the influx of it (which would take away some impetus to defeat/farm).

The basic problem of this game, or any other video game, is that while inflation is a problem, to introduce real world scarcity to fix gameflation would make the game no longer fun (ie. the fix is worse than the problem).

No one wants to have the market defeat price of a malta agent go down because too many people have farmed them, or have to wait for a Nemesis map to regenerate because 'were all out of WarHulks'.

Sorry but there is no fix for inflation because people want to play without scarcity on enemies, and whenever a scarce item (like purples and rares) is introduced, it will automatically be the focus of lots and lots of currency.

That being said, the increase of level 50 earning power and AE exploits have made inflation worse.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by PennyPA View Post
Then don't bid 3 mill for a diamond. Really, is this so hard to understand? Just bid what you want to pay and come back later. It will be there. I have been doing this since the market came out. People keep clamoring about this fairy tale of price swings and inflation. I just sit and wait and pay the same each time.
How long do you suggest I wait? This is a serious question. I've been trying to do this lately, rather than just paying the "last five" price, but I've only come back (a week or two later) to unfilled bids and prices that have usually gone up in the interim.


My characters at Virtueverse
Faces of the City

 

Posted

If you can buy an A-merit (100 merits) for 20m + 50 merits, let people buy 50 merits too.

100k*level to take an enhancement off and into inventory
100k*level to move a slot to some other power (only if empty)

Add every temp power to a NPC where you can simply buy it with inf, much more expensively but more conveniently


A game is not supposed to be some kind of... place where people enjoy themselves!

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Megajoule View Post
How long do you suggest I wait? This is a serious question. I've been trying to do this lately, rather than just paying the "last five" price, but I've only come back (a week or two later) to unfilled bids and prices that have usually gone up in the interim.
Well all depends on what you want.

In general, for common salvage (and many IOs), I bid at the beginning of night of playing, then come collect at the end of the night.

Some uncommon salvage, a day to a few days.

The above two allows me to keep my SG bins generally filled.

For rarer stuff, how ever long it takes. But I should note that I bid within reason. If people are paying 3 mill for salvage, then maybe 500K or a bit more will be my bid. If a time like a week goes by, maybe bump up slightly to say like a million. It will come.

Two extreme examples:
1) I got IOs for my blaster (which I very, very rarely play). I bid 5,555 (yes, that much) for what I wanted primarily - crafted generic IOs and a few others things, nothing special/purple/unique. It took 6 months, but I got everything I bid for. That is the most extreme example for me.
2) My widow has a number of purple sets (of 5) plus some uniques (LotG/Mir/Num/etc.). I bid 15,555,555 for each. It took 3 months. I got all but 1 recipe, which by then I had tons of inf and just bought the last one to celebrate, hehe.

I don't expect people to wait that long but I do.

To be honest, the question is not how long do you wait, but what is the difference with or with out what you want and does it bother you? I have a DP/traps corruptor that I wanted a complete set of 6 IOs. The 6th was in the hundreds of millions. So I placed bids for all 6, and got 5 very quickly (can't recall the exact time). But then went 2 months before I got the 6th. So every time I played, I had a hole in my slotting. I survived without the bonus and the extra slot. It made no difference. I just kept playing and doing whatever. When I finally got the 6th, I plopped it in.

I guess it is not important to me to be uber-mega-max all the time. So what if my defense is not at the soft cap or my recovery rate isn't crazy fast or can't recharge powers so fast I can't press buttons fast enough. I play to have fun and relax. The game is easy enough that I don't need the l33t gear to play it.

One other thing I do is plan out ahead. My last 50 was a brute that I started in Praet. I planned ahead a number of months my build and placed bids. By the time GR came out and my brute started to level up, every single IO I bid for was crafted and in the SG bin. So when I leveled after 20, I just popped into the base, grabbed the IOs for that level, and moved on. I did that basically from 20 to 50 with that toon (and doing that again for future toons). I never had to buy anything except inspirations after lvl20 and sold it all, ending up with 800 mill inf on that toon (which did about 90% tip missions for A merits and 10% TFs, I didn't do any regular contacts with that toon).

Anyhow, the TLDR version, if you are patient, place what you feel comfortable with and go have fun. If you want it NOW!!!!, then expect to pay.

EDIT - One more comment in that this is why I don't see these massive price changes. I am not dumb and know they are there as is inflation (we need more sinks!). But I take the longer, steady path and catch my purchases on the ups and downs of the market. So yeah, I could pay more or I could have paid less, but the fluctuations happen so much and I wait long enough, I miss them.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by PumBumbler View Post
The basic problem of inflation in this game is that influence is magically made by defeating enemies. That means the influx of currency into the game is vastly outstripping the availability and consumption of goods.
The other part of the problem is that the ration of goods produced to inf produced is not a constant. Even ignoring the level variations different activities have different inf to goods ratios and different ratios of good types.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Megajoule View Post
How long do you suggest I wait? This is a serious question. I've been trying to do this lately, rather than just paying the "last five" price, but I've only come back (a week or two later) to unfilled bids and prices that have usually gone up in the interim.
PennyPA gave a pretty good summary. My general finding is that when the market is stable (so not when there's a major exploit going on or right after a patch) a bid in the range of 66% to 75% of the maximum last 5 price will normally fill within 24 hours, often quite a bit less for salvage. Longer than that can sometimes get you better deals but not necessarily. My general rule for pulling a bid is pull salvage after 1 day, most recipes after two or three and purple bids after a week. Any longer than that and you're waiting for a significant market fluctuation which probably means a few months.

To use the example of a diamond with the last 5 being around 3 million, I would probably place a bid of 2.2million and expect it to fill within an hour. I could probably get a lower price by waiting overnight but I'm a horribly disorganized and lazy marketeer so I'd rather pay more and list my goods before logging off.

A few other tricks are to look for "tells" in the last 5 pricing. Most people when making bids only use 2 or 3 non-zero digits (i.e. they'll bid 2,200,000 but not 2,263,746) so if you see a bid with more non-zero digits it's often a marketeer. If the bid is quite a bit lower than the other sales then it almost certainly represents someone flipping the product for profit and as such is probably pretty representative of the "24 hour" low price. This isn't guaranteed but it can be a way to get a feeling.

In any case this is why I always advocate for more price history in such threads. I know why the devs set it up the way they did but I think only showing the last 5 discourages people from learning how the market works. Just showing the 24hour high and low prices as well as the last 5 would make a nice change IMHO.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolfgang_Tao View Post
Semi serious thinking on this. I used to mess with the market back when it first came out. Ie. use all 10 slots (at the time) to buy and bid on 1 item - I would buy up every item for a price of less then (at the time) 5000 (which was a lot back then) and then turn around and put them up for sale for 10,000. It seem the best way to avoid this type of 'market scheming' would be to have the game periodically dump (once a week or so) mass quanities of items in on the market at the low low price of 500 per item for white salvage, 1000 per item for yellow salvage, and 5000 per item for red savlage. Thus ending the ability to manipulate the market. The same process could be used for recipes as well... but base the price on the value of Regular Stock IO's - yellow recieps 3X the value of reg stock IO value of a similar lvl recipe - Red recieps 5 x the value of reg stock IO of similar lvl - Purple 10 x the value of reg stock IO's of similar lvl. - Or some formula that seems accepitable to whomever decides how much things should be paid for.

2 cents worth.
All that would do is eliminate any confidence by sellers that they won't be swamped by cheap market influxes, and destroy the sell side of the market. You might as well replace the markets with stores at that point: what's the point of having players set prices in between the periods when the devs swoop in and destroy that economy.


I have some thoughts on how to improve market conditions, including addressing influence sinks, but at this point you can't just implement half-baked tweaks: the players will just trade their way around them. You need a combination of two things: increased participation and rational influence sinks.

There needs to be lower barriers to participation and better incentives to participate. By creating off-market merit-based purchasing systems, the devs kicked the legs out of the markets. That was a mistake. Not in adding them in the first place, but in not thinking through how they would affect the markets and how they might be integrated into the markets.

Consider this: when we use merits or tickets to buy a specific item, rather than *create* the item and give it to the player, the system could have created a "coupon" that allowed you to buy it from the market at the current best price, and essentially buy it from a player rather than the game. In isolation, this would have issues because there would be the possibility of exhausting supply, but its an example of a way to integrate the merit systems with the markets rather than distracting from or diverting away from them. It prevents the merit and ticket economies from sucking demand away from the sellers, but the players get their stsuff all the same.

Inflation is actually a minor problem relative to the bigger problem of liquidity. The more items being traded, the easier it is to apply fixes to other problems such as inflation. But one way to draw significant influence from the player population is with controlled selling of high-priced items that are very thinly traded. Hypothetically speaking, suppose I was in charge of the markets, and I had an in-game alt specifically designated for this purpose that received daily a set of items in roughly the same proportions that they drop in game, and my job was to seed the markets with these items. Rather than flood the markets with them, though, I would act as a market maker, trying to facilitate sales by reducing spreads and creating just enough order flow to make players confident that orders would execute in reasonable amounts of time. Adding liquidity and confidence in that manner could draw in more participants, and certainly reduce wide bid/ask spreads by forcing players to meet in the middle (without giving any preference to bidders or sellers). If such a process could be automated, or at least automated to some degree with dev oversight (it would have to be someone that understands market making), that could simultaneously be an influence sink (rather than trading items for influence with some overhead, the market maker in effect converts influence into items, destroying influence in the process) and encourage more people to use the markets.

This presupposes, by the way, that the number of items goes down. The whole "recipes at every single level" thing was a bad idea: I would downscale it all to recipes only at five level intervals, with the caveat that you can always slot inventions at the next tier (level 16s could slot level 20s because level 19s don't exist any more). If we had a million subscribers, it might make sense to have ten thousand different recipes for sale. We don't have the volume for that to be sane.

One more peculiarity I'd like to mention. One thing that screws with the influence/item ratio that isn't talked about too much is that its easy to max out your item slots (salvage and recipes) but not as easy for most players to max out their influence. So its often the case that players are running around no longer getting drops because they are full, but still getting influence because they are not capped. I'd want to fix that. One interesting way to do that is to set up a system so that any drop you get that you cannot accept because you are full automatically gets sent to the markets and listed for some fixed price based on the item. The price would be deliberately low so it executed fast, and even if it doesn't sell for some reason this special sale doesn't take up any of your limited market slots. In this way, none of these drops gets "lost" to the playerbase as a whole. Someone somewhere would get them (except perhaps for common salvage that no one wants, which would just accumulate in the markets - a different problem to solve). And you would never know what they were: the system would not show them to you. So no "oh my god I lost that purple because I forgot to sell, holy crap!" moments. And no matter what the item was, you would only get the standard rate for them. If it was a expensive item that someone just paid 100 million for, that influence would be quietly destroyed by the markets. You still get more than what you would have gotten for those drops, which would otherwise get lost, other players get to benefit from a drop the game should have generated but the limited inventories would have ordinarily prevented from coming into existence, and even more influence would get destroyed.

There are lots of potentially creative ideas that attempt to work with the markets to improve their functioning rather than simply swamping or destroying them.


[Guide to Defense] [Scrapper Secondaries Comparison] [Archetype Popularity Analysis]

In one little corner of the universe, there's nothing more irritating than a misfile...
(Please support the best webcomic about a cosmic universal realignment by impaired angelic interference resulting in identity crisis angst. Or I release the pigmy water thieves.)

 

Posted

Mmm...

I seen some really intriguing concepts, and they make me wonder.

It seems a basic premise for a large part of the posters is:

Premise 1:

"Excessive influence held by players produces market price inflation"

Thus given that premise as valid, then it becomes logical to deduce that the solution to inflation is "taxing the rich" so the poor has it better, ha ha ha... I am sorry could not resist the political barb...

But the feel is if we could decrease how much influence a player could hold, then they could not afford to pay any price for anything the desired, and therefore the prices at the market would drop.

While this seems very reasonable, after all supply and demand rules would essentially support this position, after all if demand is essentially broke, then the availability of demand for the current supply would plumet and thus the supplyers would have to reduce their prices.


I have been addressing the very same issue, from a different angle...

Premise 2:

"If the noraml way of acquiring goods is too expensive, go outside the box"

Unlike Arcanaville who would suggest to get coupons to buy player supplied items, I want to totally and completely decouple from that environment.

Let me explain, why I don't think the coupon concept would work, is the coupon worth whatever price the item at WW is priced or is a fixed amount; thus if fixed it would essentially render the coupon worthless. If it pays the player asked amount, I believe it would only make the inflationary costs go even higher and now we are looking at some aweful exploit conditions, such as I get a cheap white recipe, place it for sale at WW for a billion, then go do TFs get my merit purchased coupon and buy my own recipe for a billion...

I believe under the principles of supply and demand, if you want to force the suppliers to drop their prices: "You have to drop demand", not increase it.

This is why I support A-Merits, Merits, Vanguard and AE Tickets as a way to actually drop demand at WW/BM. Why should I buy an over-bloated priced LoGT 7.5 at WW when I can get it for 250 merits at the vendor or 2-Amerits as well?

Once more, yeah it may be a bit tedius, maybe. But tips can be done in a few minutes and are not that bad to do. If you are patient in a week or so, so yo will have your 2 A-merits, also while doing tips you can get shards, recipe drops and all kind of wonderful things as well. Frankly hardly a bad deal.

But my alternate principle is simply, find ways to satisfy your needs outside of WW/BM to drop demand, that will work if enough of us use this process.


Now here is a simple one the devs could do:

Premise 3:

"Vendors sales all things as well, thus price capping"

This one is quite radical, but it will sure as fire work! It will end inflation hard and fast. Not only will it end the over-pricing and inflation it will cap how expensive anything is and perhaps make the pain of those who are not so lucky in getting what they need a more reasonable enterprise.

If the vendors sold everything, salvage and recipes. Then at WW/BM it would make no sense to sell stuff higher priced than what the vendor would sell them to you. A good question would be what are fair prices for salvage and recipes, were it would it still allow for a healthy MM/BM operation. After all how much a player could sell something for would have to be less than the vendor, and yet good income could be achieved from actually receiving a drop, that is a fair profit. For instance, if we say an invention set common IO is worth 500,000 influence purchased at the vendor, then a player could reasonably sell that recipe for 250,000. Knowing that any two whites of his, would allow him to purchase at a vendor any white recipe he would want, or find a bargain at WW/BM.

There is another approach, one pretty much illustrated and desctribed by Penny:

Premise 4:

"Bid a fair price, and be patient"

Actually if as a community refused to pay the over-bloated prices, that in itself would force prices down. The two obstacles I see with this very simple suggestion is personal patience and the community standing tough over a fair price, besides determining what is a fair price?

I can't think of a 5th approach, maybe some of you smart ones out there can...

A quick recap...

I don't believe the "limited influence accumulation" proposition to be proper; my second proposition to use "alternate sources to acquire goods" can be rightfully accused of tedius; the third "Vendors sells it all" Can be very reasonable but for the players that really abuse (play) the market would be a horrifying turn of events; the fourth could actually work, but can we get enough mass participation to achieve the effect?

Hugs

Stormy


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by ChaosExMachina View Post
If you can buy an A-merit (100 merits) for 20m + 50 merits, let people buy 50 merits too.

100k*level to take an enhancement off and into inventory
100k*level to move a slot to some other power (only if empty)

Add every temp power to a NPC where you can simply buy it with inf, much more expensively but more conveniently
I want that first idea of merit buying thing so much. I was just thinking that last night how I wish I could just buy my A-merit flat out with inf or buy the r-merits for it.

I also like your suggestion of buying temp powers. I am all for simple options and it doesn't get any simpler than pay X inf to get something.


total kick to the gut

This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.