How to make inflation a non-issue:
Auto-fill everyone's current INF to the 2 billion cap, and leave it there. All items will then *also* cost 2 billion, because it just won't matter. You'll bid, win, and instantly have 2 billion back. Admittedly you won't be able to claim your INF from the market, but we can just let the "sold" listing disappear... you'll have 2 billion anyway.
Too much?
Then use the market for what you want, or use AE, or wait for drops, or use A-merits. Use the alternate means provided. Might take more time than putting down a GetItNao price, yes.
(And yes, I *do* do this. If I think (insert piece of common salvage) is too high here - and when I'm seeing them at 50-100k each, and lower bids are *not* being filled, I think it is,) I run a short AE arc and burn the rolls on common salvage at the level I need. Get the part(s) I need, use some of the rest, dump the others for 5 inf a piece.)
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That wouldn't work. The sale would execute normally, which means it would execute against the lowest offer, not yours. Only if you found an item that had no sellers would this work, and the system would need safeguards against that. That's one of the reasons I suggested compressing recipes to 5 level increments rather than individual levels.|
Originally Posted by Stormfront_NA
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...
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In a sense, it does inject influence into the system, but that's a compromise attempt to strike a balance between liquidity and inflationary pressure. I do not believe focusing on inflation at the expense of liquidity or trading volume is appropriate at the moment. Liquidity is the more serious problem. With proper inf sinks, inflation eventually solves itself.
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| 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 really another example of trying to solve a problem of the markets by destroying the markets themselves. Any solution to market issues that has as a component removing participants from the markets is a market-destroying suggestion. Its illogical to enact because it presupposes that the problem with the markets is the markets. Again: if you don't want the markets to set prices, you eliminate the markets. You don't make the markets a marginal sideshow to the stores.
A lot of the talk surrounding the markets reminds me of a guy I know. Once upon a time he wanted to sell his house and buy a better one. The problem was that it was always the wrong time. When the housing markets went up, the houses he wanted were unaffordable. When the housing markets went down, his own house became difficult to sell to get out of. So basically, high prices hurt him and low prices hurt him. What he wanted was a magical moment when his house went up and the kind of house he wanted went down simultaneously.
I think that's the problem a lot of people have with the markets. High prices shouldn't hurt players. They make it more expensive to buy, but it should also make it easier to earn influence by selling. The problem is that they can't sell what they have and buy what they want because there's still a gap between the two. What these players don't realize, I believe, is that this is not caused by inflation pressure. Its caused by scarcity. Some things will be worth more to players than others, and you cannot convince the players that have them to give them up for what you have when its not worth as much. It doesn't matter how many zeros are in the numbers: it will still be the case that the LotG I have I will never give to you for the two sniper recipes and stack of scientific proofs you have. And the game cannot really make me. Of all the problems you can attempt to solve, this fundamental one is not solvable, because its not really an economic problem. Its an attempt to force players to value things in a manner other than what they really value them as, and that's basically impossible. If the game said I could only sell LotG's for 50k, I would sooner give them away: the person I give it to would appreciate it more than I would the 50k. You cannot make me value it less than what its worth, no matter what sort of economic engineering you attempt.
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Well a good way to improve that would be:| 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. |
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| 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. |
Other advantages would include faster and more efficient market queries, better readability, and a simpler more inviting system for newbies.
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| 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. |
I'd add buttons to the interface that let you instantly sell at NPC price, or manually send to market. To deal with the caps you mentioned there should be an overflow inventory that can only send to market or NPC, not accept trades to yourself. This way you get the advantages of not using caps plus the advantages (encourage market participation) of them.
A game is not supposed to be some kind of... place where people enjoy themselves!
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I understand this, but I would still, personally, like to see some of those superfluous and meaningless zeroes go away, if only to make the numbers easier to display, handle, etc.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
It doesn't matter how many zeros are in the numbers: it will still be the case that the LotG I have I will never give to you for the two sniper recipes and stack of scientific proofs you have. And the game cannot really make me.
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So scientific notation? Those zeroes aren't meaningless.|
Originally Posted by Megajoule
I understand this, but I would still, personally, like to see some of those superfluous and meaningless zeroes go away, if only to make the numbers easier to display, handle, etc.
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Apart from that nothing other than deleting all inf from the game or changing to a new currency can do that and then they'd still need to limit earning and storing capabilities of players.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
It's simple supply and demand. Before the auction merge, the player economy was limited to the individual server. Prices were different on high populated because the supply would keep increasing and people would buy. Now that the auction is merged, people still want the same prices and will slowly lower it when they know it can sell (without losing all their money with the fees).
I don't mind selling everything for 1 Inf each and paying the 5 Inf fee, than getting the 200 million (minus fee) back. Sure beats the fee for trying to sell it at 200 million and paying the fee and having the item sit on auction for a week.
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No it wasn't. |
Originally Posted by Nodnal
It's simple supply and demand. Before the auction merge, the player economy was limited to the individual server.
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| The Consignment House works across servers. Items being sold from any server, US or EU, may be purchased on any other server. It does not, however, allow trading between Heroes and Villains. Note: As of Issue 18, trading will exist between all factions. |
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If you mean "wouldn't deal" in the sense of not giving the player tons of influence to buy purples, it doesn't do so deliberately. What it does is attack the problem on the supply side, by adding supply that the reward tables already say should go into the markets and eliminating the barrier from them actually getting to them.|
Originally Posted by ChaosExMachina
Addressing caps is a good idea, but that implementation would run into some difficulties, particularly due to the increased load of sending those to the markets. And if it blocks you from receiving a large amount of inf it wouldn't deal with purples either.
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| I'd add buttons to the interface that let you instantly sell at NPC price, or manually send to market. To deal with the caps you mentioned there should be an overflow inventory that can only send to market or NPC, not accept trades to yourself. This way you get the advantages of not using caps plus the advantages (encourage market participation) of them. |
The concept is not that players shouldn't have recipe caps and this is a clever way to outsmart the devs. The concept is that when a player is supposed to get a drop but their own packrat behavior or lack of selling prevents them from getting that drop, the entire economy shouldn't suffer because of that. So in fact, conceptually I see this as a phantom market bot getting all the drops that players are prevented from getting and listing them on the markets to increase supply. The fixed price return to the player is a token gratuity that is really there less to give them more influence (I'm trying to suck influence out of the system, remember) and more to give a constant reminder that they are losing drops by not selling, and tease them by never specifically telling them what they could have been.
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Actually, to be fair: Price capping, in the sense of "setting a maximum allowed trading price", is bad for the economy. Look how little traffic there is in PvP IOs through the market, where the fair market value is above the 2B the interface will let you bid.
Price capping, in the indirect sense of "guaranteeing that everything is for sale at some price", is... well. In the real world, it's disasterous, because you can run out of things. In CoH, where the devs can manufacture all the LotG +7.5% recharge they want, it's... maybe not so disasterous. It would tend to stabilize market prices at a little below the fixed-purchase-price.
In short, if you could craft and sell Black Market Teleporters, they would sell for some amount under 10k inf. If it were enough cheaper to make them, people would probably do so, but there would probably be very little demand over 10k. (Though not none. In another game I played, you could auction vendor-purchaseable stuff for tens to hundreds of times vendor price and get some sales.)
I actually think it might not be bad for the CoH market to have some way to convert inf to desireable things at some fairly expensive rate.
Okay, imagine this. Imagine that we allow you to buy a reward merit for 1M inf. This would impose an effective cap not much over 140M for any recipe which could be purchased for 2 a-merits, because the maximum cost of it would be 100 reward merits plus 40M in conversion costs. However, the actual cap would be a bit higher, because you can't do that every single day. (Similarly, in a hypothetical other game, crafting-with-cooldowns had a higher market value than crafting you could spam, usually.)
The thing is... Obviously, this would result in a massive shift in market prices. But one of the biggest effects would be that people would be spending immense amounts of inf on reward merits, which would be promptly turned into some of the most valuable recipes. So prices on stuff like LotG +rchg would drop noticably, while prices on a lot of other stuff might not change as much right away. But! There'd be a functional cap on the costs of a lot of those things. Without any worry about cooldowns, 240M inf => one lotg +rchg. As often as you want. Now, that's not something that's going to hugely impact the market, while LotGs are selling for less than 240M... But it would have one effect, which is that people who don't feel like messing with the market have a guaranteed path to getting anything they want at a reasonably effective price. And, for a lot of recipes, that price is under 100M, which is "pocket change" for a marketeer.
If this happened, I'd probably spend close to half my money buying specific recipes at specific levels, because I'd rather spend 100M today than bid 40M and wait 1-3 weeks or maybe a month. And I bet a lot of other people would, too.
So I think that would be a very effective inf sink, and while it would have the side-effect of creating a functional maximum price for a lot of things, it wouldn't have the catastrophic side effects of a "price cap".
I would totally not mind an option for "automatically vendor" or "automatically drop on market". Of course, I run out of market slots quickly.
Maybe make a special rule where items listed for 1inf don't take up market slots. 
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There is a heavily underutilized opportunity to do that: temp powers. Most are totally worthless (slugger). Some are actually worth a lot (the recovery aura one, whose name escapes me at the moment). If the crafting costs of those were made level-dependent so it could be set to reasonable costs for any character to make them, and such things had other properties (like being able to store extra "charges" for them up to a limit that was higher than "you can only craft one") I think you could make a bunch of those that people would be willing to craft, and thus spend inf on. Basically, disposable powers.|
Originally Posted by seebs
I actually think it might not be bad for the CoH market to have some way to convert inf to desireable things at some fairly expensive rate.
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Temp powers can't be traded (the recipes can, but not the powers) so these things could be cost-normalized to level and draw inf from all levels.
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Oh hell yes, I would be all for the ability to pay a bunch of money for more charges of the useful temp powers.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
There is a heavily underutilized opportunity to do that: temp powers. Most are totally worthless (slugger). Some are actually worth a lot (the recovery aura one, whose name escapes me at the moment). If the crafting costs of those were made level-dependent so it could be set to reasonable costs for any character to make them, and such things had other properties (like being able to store extra "charges" for them up to a limit that was higher than "you can only craft one") I think you could make a bunch of those that people would be willing to craft, and thus spend inf on. Basically, disposable powers.
Temp powers can't be traded (the recipes can, but not the powers) so these things could be cost-normalized to level and draw inf from all levels. |
More Recovery Serum? Check. More Envenomed Daggers? Check. More Plasmatic Tasers? Oh yeah. And other powers I currently don't use could BECOME usable, like the defense toggle. 30 minutes is just not enough time to bother with for me.
That would be a great place to aim money.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.
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One word of caution: if not limited in some way, players could possibly create "Swiss Army" characters that can do everything and fear nothing. "Permanent" Wedding Bands, Cryonite Armor and mental shields, Envenomed Daggers and Beanbags and Tasers (oh my!), a bag full of Shiva Shards (enough to run a whole TF with one out, per character)...
"So what's your primary and secondary?"
(*looks at tray full of temp powers*) "Uh, I forget."
"What AT, then?"
"Blaster... I think."
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That's a potential danger, but there are lots of ways to safeguard against it. Although to some extent its not a big deal: its only a big deal in a few critical areas such as mitigation or powers so strong we don't need to encourage people to buy them already, like the emergency radio.|
Originally Posted by Megajoule
One word of caution: if not limited in some way, players could possibly create "Swiss Army" characters that can do everything and fear nothing. "Permanent" Wedding Bands, Cryonite Armor and mental shields, Envenomed Daggers and Beanbags and Tasers (oh my!), a bag full of Shiva Shards (enough to run a whole TF with one out, per character)...
"So what's your primary and secondary?" (*looks at tray full of temp powers*) "Uh, I forget." "What AT, then?" "Blaster... I think." |
I don't care nearly as much, on the other hand, if blasters can buy 500 charges of the slugger, or scrappers can have 300 charges of the revolver for runners, or if people can have an unlimited amount of power analyzers. Powers with long cool down times are also good candidates for this kind of thing, and to the extent that there aren't that many, we could make some.
The goal is to make the powers good enough that they are worth using, but not so good that they become essential gear. Right now, many temp powers are so weak that you're almost self-nerfing yourself by using them because they aren't worth the cast time, and certainly not worth the crafting time. They probably drop at one hundred times the rate they are actually used.
Examples of powers that could be useful, yet not overpowering to have in high charge quantities (in PvE: PvP would likely have to exclude or modify these):
Vitality booster: +20% health for one minute, five minute cool down.
Teleportation Snare: long range teleport foe (for runners), seven second cast time.
Accelerated Healing: +300% regen for 20 seconds, +100% regen for 40 seconds, +50% regen for one minutes, six minute cooldown.
Emergency Force Field: 10 second emergency PFF, 0.5 second cast, ten minute cooldown
Critical boost: next five attacks have 15% chance to crit, five minute cooldown
Temporal Accelerator: +500% recharge for five seconds, ten minute cooldown (useful to break out of super-slowed situations).
Stuff like this, if not exactly this, would likely fall under the category of "nice to have, not mandatory to have, but probably at least worth crafting and having around, or using while I have it." The idea is to use either cooldowns to make them limited, high cast times to make them not as good as alternate analogs such as power pools, or situationally powerful without being globally powerful (numbers negotiable).
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There are already players doing this. It would just make it much more convenient for them.|
Originally Posted by Megajoule
One word of caution: if not limited in some way, players could possibly create "Swiss Army" characters that can do everything and fear nothing. "Permanent" Wedding Bands, Cryonite Armor and mental shields, Envenomed Daggers and Beanbags and Tasers (oh my!), a bag full of Shiva Shards (enough to run a whole TF with one out, per character)...
"So what's your primary and secondary?" (*looks at tray full of temp powers*) "Uh, I forget." "What AT, then?" "Blaster... I think." |
Perhaps if the influence scaled dependant not only upon level, but by how many copies of the same power you had on your character.
Imagine that at level 50 it takes 1 million influence to craft a Kinetic Shield recipe and get 30 minutes of time. If you wanted an hour of time, it would cost you 2 million influence to craft the second recipe. If you wanted an hour and thirty minutes of time, 6 million influence for the third. I don't think many people would pay to craft the fourth.
If the person had less than a full recipe's worth of power, it would round to the nearest side for costs. So if you had 14 minutes, 59 seconds of Kinetic Shield, you'd be charged as if you didn't have it, but at 15 minutes even, you'd be charged as if you had 30 minutes.
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Would it be potentially worthwhile for some of them to have crafting costs vary by AT per power? So that we can still add 'primary function' powers without busting up role boundaries.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Stuff like this, if not exactly this, would likely fall under the category of "nice to have, not mandatory to have, but probably at least worth crafting and having around, or using while I have it." The idea is to use either cooldowns to make them limited, high cast times to make them not as good as alternate analogs such as power pools, or situationally powerful without being globally powerful (numbers negotiable).
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For instance, buying a mitigation temp power could cost X% more for a blaster than a squishie with some mitigation, and Y% more than a melee type. Similarly, making area ranged attacks more expensive in the other direction.
This way you could set prices so that they're highest when they're the most disruptive to role, and lowest when they're just more of what they already have? This would let people occasionally buy things that suit their concept without having to pay out the nose when it doesn't really impact balance as much. I mean, I used to grab Revolver on my AR character back before I could reroll her as DP. And there's other powers I don't strictly _need_ that I still grab because they amuse me.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.
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Those all sound reasonable although regarding the Critical Boost power, is that even practical to make? My understanding is that powers that can crit essentially have a "chance to damage" proc added to the power, so wouldn't this require adding a chance to crit function to every attack in the game?|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Vitality booster: +20% health for one minute, five minute cool down.
Teleportation Snare: long range teleport foe (for runners), seven second cast time. Accelerated Healing: +300% regen for 20 seconds, +100% regen for 40 seconds, +50% regen for one minutes, six minute cooldown. Emergency Force Field: 10 second emergency PFF, 0.5 second cast, ten minute cooldown Critical boost: next five attacks have 15% chance to crit, five minute cooldown Temporal Accelerator: +500% recharge for five seconds, ten minute cooldown (useful to break out of super-slowed situations). |
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Originally Posted by MajorDecoy
There are already players doing this. It would just make it much more convenient for them.
Perhaps if the influence scaled dependant not only upon level, but by how many copies of the same power you had on your character. Imagine that at level 50 it takes 1 million influence to craft a Kinetic Shield recipe and get 30 minutes of time. If you wanted an hour of time, it would cost you 2 million influence to craft the second recipe. If you wanted an hour and thirty minutes of time, 6 million influence for the third. I don't think many people would pay to craft the fourth. If the person had less than a full recipe's worth of power, it would round to the nearest side for costs. So if you had 14 minutes, 59 seconds of Kinetic Shield, you'd be charged as if you didn't have it, but at 15 minutes even, you'd be charged as if you had 30 minutes. |
i like the idea of rechargeable temp powers as inf sinks.
i also like the idea of being able to unslot individual enhancements by paying a fee. i wouldn't do it as a straight cost per level. Partially because some of the most valuable IOs of a given type are actually the lowest level available. Maybe make the fee ((character level^2)*500)+(enhancement level*2,000) or something similar.
Dr. Todt's theme.
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How about the black hole suggestion? (see sig) |
Originally Posted by Schismatrix
i also like the idea of being able to unslot individual enhancements by paying a fee. i wouldn't do it as a straight cost per level. Partially because some of the most valuable IOs of a given type are actually the lowest level available. Maybe make the fee ((character level^2)*500)+(enhancement level*2,000) or something similar.
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Too cheap.|
Originally Posted by Schismatrix
i like the idea of rechargeable temp powers as inf sinks.
i also like the idea of being able to unslot individual enhancements by paying a fee. i wouldn't do it as a straight cost per level. Partially because some of the most valuable IOs of a given type are actually the lowest level available. Maybe make the fee ((character level^2)*500)+(enhancement level*2,000) or something similar. |
((Character Level+Enhancement Level)*1,000,000).
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i thought the same thing a bit after i posted it, but by that time i was busy at work.|
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Too cheap.
((Character Level+Enhancement Level)*1,000,000). |
i think that it should not scale linearly with level though.
((Character Level^3)*1,000)+(Enhancement Level*2,000) to unslot an enhancement is better in my opinion.
Each enhancement unslotted at 10 is 1,000,000 base plus the enhancement fee. 20 is 8,000,000+. 30 is 27,000,000+. 40 is 64,000,000+. 50 it's 125,000,000+. Still not perfect, but it's a thought.
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Originally Posted by PennyPA
How about the black hole suggestion? (see sig)
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However, i like the mechanic of character level also increasing the costs to unslot, but maybe that's just me.
Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...
One thing to keep in mind is that with respec recipes you can unslot 10 IOs for about 150 million - 250 million (depending on the length of time since the last freespec). So if it costs 100+ million to unslot an IO it becomes cheaper to use a respec recipe.
I would say 30-40million is probably a good number. It's still more expensive than using a respec recipe (paying for convienience) but not so much that people won't use it.
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It's not just about instant gratification. I happen to value beating up bad guys more than bid creeping and multiple trips to the market.
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Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Get people to stop making stupidly high bids. The prices are driven by the players suffering from GottaHaveItNAOitis. There are too many players out there who have to have instant gratification and will pay thru the nose to get it.
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As in any long term game, the wealthy will get wealthier and wealthier. The same happens in real life. But us commons don't go around complaining that we're not entitled to Rolls Royces and beachfront properties. Inflation should happen, and you've been getting the "rich man's" stuff at basement bargain prices all along. Just wait 10 more years and see how much purples will be going for. The prices should inflate ridiculously out of the reach of middle to upper class players. Only the top 1% should be getting purples. The price will set itself according to scarcity and the richest. There is no need to fix inflation. You just have to be realistic about what you can afford and stop thinking you're entitled to everything just because you're a paying customer. You really don't complain bitterly about what you don't have in real life. There shouldn't be a duality in your attitudes. Recognize yourself as not among the elite. You can get there if you want to sacrifice your game time to marketeering. But then again, a lot of self-made billionaires in real life got there by working hard and sacrificing their free time. Prices are where the elite are willing to pay. Don't complain that you can't compete with them and entitlements should be thrown your way. Buckle down and compete with them to be one of the elites. That's how they got there. That's what you need to do. If you don't want to do it, then stop complaining. You really weren't meant to have purple sets and those nifty pvp sets.
"Excessive influence held by players produces market price inflation"
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.
If you are trying to limit the total influence wealth people can hold they will switch to an alternate form of currency, like trading LotGs for goods in order to tokenize the highest end items.
"If the noraml way of acquiring goods is too expensive, go outside the box"
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?
Also, when using A-merits to purchase LotG 7.5, they are also competing with even rarer and more expensive goods like PvP IOs (from a purchaser's point of view), so it hasn't really blunted demand for LotGs as much. Just remember that most people who are able to generate 250 merits are usually generating a lot of influence (at level 50) as well, which means they can afford to buy a lot as well.
I would presume that you think LotG 7.5% are overpriced because you refer to their market price as being 'over-bloated', but the price is simply reflective of the incomes of the players.
In order to reduce the amount of influence that is being devoted to LotGs you would have to massively inflate the supply of LotGs in the market or reduce the demand. Neither is an especially palatable option since increasing the supply means that the 'rare' recipes will no longer be rare, and in order to reduce the demand you would have to introduce a new replacement that is substantially better and make it drop as often.
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...
The fair price model would only work if influence liquidity remained substantially the same. That isn't what is going on in this game. Flat rate pricing is pretty much what we had before the market existed. No one cared about influence then because it didn't matter very much.
"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?
Again, the biggest problem with being patient is that a fair price is a moving target against a regular and increasing influx in influence in the system. That is the classic definition of inflation. Too much money chasing too few goods.
The problem I see with all the proposed solutions (excepting Arcana's, I'm still ruminating on it) is that most of the solutions aren't fixing the markets, they are nuking the markets (or other parts of the game). Given that a lot of people are using the markets, and many of them are entertained by the market, nuking the markets probably isn't the best idea.
Changing the supply of goods just to 'fix' the market isn't a great idea because all sorts of other problems arise. Since this is a MMO with loot, scarcity of goods and the desire to accumulate 'nice things' is a big impetus to continue to play this game. Removing scarcity would be a big rewind and may not keep players engaged when it comes to keeping players subscribed.
A larger question to ask would be, "Is using the market entertaining to me?" I know there are more than a few people here who would definitely say "Yes," and more than a few who would vehemently say "No." The question for the devs is what is the proportion of the people on both ends, and how much of the population is in the middle. If it shakes out like a classic bell curve, then I would argue that there isn't much that needs to be done. If it is lopsided one way or the other, then the devs probably need to tweak/fix/nerf things.