A possible Influence Sink

Hi:

There has been a current ideology that the price of goods at the market are driven to very high levels because influence is too abundant in the game. As a result lots of players have recommended ways to suck the influence out of the game, ranging from weird taxation, limiting influence accumulation, etc.

It occurs to me, if one truly wants to remove influence from the game a new form of consumption needs to be deviced in order to leach out the influence.

I am thinking there is a way to drain player's influence pockets, and not really be too arbitrary about it.

In Dark Age of Camelot, they have a concept of equipment wear. Essentially as you use your sword to attack and your armor absorves damage for you, they naturally wear out and in time require repair or maintenance, and in time after so many repairs the item is too worn to be repaired and essentially falls apart. DAOC refers to this 2 traits as "Condition" and "Durability". Both are marked in percentages, with Condition indicating the state of repair of the item thus a 93% would indicate a 7% worn out, Durability is the actual item's life condition, so a 87% means that it has spent 13% of its useful life already. Of course when the item's durability drops to 0% its gone.

So the question, can these principles be applied to CoH? It is a different question, if we even want to!

I can see Condition and Durability applied to power enhancements, each time a power is used it has a 25% chance to experience a 0.01% wear or loss of Condition.

Each time you execute a repair onthe item, it has a 25% to suffer a 0.01 loss of durability.

Like DAOC it would be interesting if the bonuses provided by the enhancement were decreased by the condition of the enhancement. For example if you have asingle IO in a power anditprovides 42% ACC, it would only provide 21% bonus if the enhancement was at 50% condition. Durability has no impact on the bonus performance of the enhancement.

If this concept was to be used, it would also have an impact on the market!

After all, if a player respecs and pulls out old "used-up" enhancements and sales them, they are obviously not worth as much as a brand new one with 100% Durability, this in itself can create a new dynamic at the market as well, and also be used as a device to bring prices down.


Oh yeah, what would the repair cost should be?

Base Cost: 100 Influence
Enhancement Cost Mulitplier:
Trainer: 1
Duo : 2
Single : 4
White IO : 10
Yellow IO : 100
Red IO : 1,000
Purple IO : 5,000
PVP : 10,000

Repair Cost: Base Cost x Enhancement Multiplier x % condition being repaired

Thus a Purple IO down to 80% Condition would cost

Purple Repair cost: 100 x 5,000 x 20 = 10,000,000 influence


What you all think? Any suggestions on cost of repair/



Stormy

The influence inflation isn't a big enough problem to justify a suggestion like this, which would likely upset a large portion of the playerbase.

Also, you get to the point where the repair cost of some items would be less than the price of buying the item from the market, leading to a more significant drain of supply on certain items, with no corresponding increase in supply. Thus, this would lead certain items to increase in price, until the purchase cost was roughly equivalent to the cost to repair.

What would this do? On high-price items, people might pay to repair the items (although, this would basically be a straight nerf to enhancements, as many people would see it). However, the lower-priced items on the market would increase in price, making it harder to get them. People will still want the purples, however, so the price of those would likely not increase, but lower-priced items would. As such, this would be an influence sink which has the opposite effect from what it is trying to solve.

No, please. I'm not at all against item decay, and this is a great way to keep inflation in check...but it's too late in this game's life to make such a drastic change. Good idea, but not for CoH.

We need a sink that is accessible by most, and wanted by most. Something where the more you put in, the more reward you get. Ideally, it should decay like you've suggested. It's needs to be recharged.

How about buying Patrol XP? Even that feels flawed.

Edit: Bolt from the blue! How about buying a temporary buff that increases drop rates of non-rares? You need to use inf (dunno what amount) to purchase the buff, and the drops you don't want will go on the market. Marketed drops incur a fee. Demand lowers, so prices lower.

This way it can potentially burn the candle at both ends.

Personally I remain unconvinced this game actually needs any further INF sinks. But even if it does I think the idea of introducing the age-old MMO trope of Equipment Durability/Repair costs would be the least desirable or workable way to do it.

The concept of Durability makes sense in old style "loot" based D&D styled games where everyone is basically using swords and armor. But I really don't think that square peg can be pounded into the round hole of a superhero MMO. It'd be like trying to force people to use tennis rackets while playing soccer. It just doesn't apply.

If this game wanted to get serious about applicable INF sinks it would offer things like personal apartments (created with potentially millions of INF with ongoing rent costs), more costume/temp power recipes, purchasable costume slots (which would encourage more costume design spending) and so on.

Mandatory INF sinks (like this Durability idea) would only hurt newer players and/or those players who don't already make millions a day from buying and selling on the markets. *shrugs*

Item decay is not going to work for this game. There are simply way too many items per character when compared to other games. In other MMOs a character may have what, a dozen pieces of items (chest, gloves, boots, sword, earrings, belt, cloak, shield, etc)? Here we could have a dozen pieces of "items" for just 2 powers. Due to the sheer volume of enhancements, if item decay was implemented, a large chunk of our in-game time would be spent on replacing the broken down ones. It wouldn't just an inf sink, it would be a nightmarish time sink as well, especially for those of us that have many characters (I have 18 level 50's on two accounts for example). Given that CoX was promoted to be very alt friendly, I would imagine that the vast majority of CoX player also have many, many characters. That's not how people want to spend their in-game time, at least not me. Maintenance is not fun for a lot of people. It's a job.

Now you could make the decay rate to be extremely slow so that even if a character runs multiple missions per day, the enhancements would only have to be replaced once every few months. Well, the counterpoint to that would be, what's the purpose then? Such a slow rate of replacement is not going to affect the inf supply in any major way. As things are today, people are already sinking tons of inf into the market (auction fees) to upgrade and/or replacing existing IO sets, particularly during a respec. That said, this idea basically boils down to a lot of development time spent and additional player annoyance for what would ultimately turn out to be a very minimal gain.

You want item decay, stick with SOs. You get to replace them continually 'til you hit 50.

I *despise* item decay in other games.

See my Guides and Tutorials

How about the devs just remove our ability to pull enhancements off of builds during respecs. The game already tells us that they are permanent once slotted.

A better inf sink, I think, would be to encourage more base use (via more things to do with bases, both for full SGs and solo SGs), along with a better inf => prestige conversion ratio. One that people would be willing to pay.

In addition, perhaps a way to contribute inf to the SG which may only be spent on buying prestige. Perhaps I don't have enough inf to buy a prestige conversion, but I can donate 10,000 inf now, and 150,000 next week.



Another option would be to increase Wentworth/Black Market's profit margins from 5% to 10% or 15%. The market's cut mostly decides the lower end of an item's price (few things sell for less than 5 inf now), rather than an effect on the upper value.

Maintenance based sinks have been suggested before, and have always met with general "thumbs down". When ya gonna learn? The beauty of CoH is how it is different from other "typical" games.

So, just to be clear, again; NO
Thank you.

.

Two previously suggested inf sinks

1) an unlockable costume option. 2 billion inf fixed cost recipe 'the inf cap'

2) A (or two) billion inf buys you a badge (named appropriately)


Either is better to my mind than equipment wear

Ummm....NO.

How would you feel if that Gladiator's Armor +3% Defense that you either paid through the nose for or grinded out 35 Hero Merits suddenly broke and vanished because you were in the middle of a TF and didn't have time to go fix it?

I'd be pissed as all hell, and I'm sure a LOT of other people would be too.

Adding "Item wear" to this game after 6 years of not having it has the potential to actually cause the game killing mass exodus that the doomcriers are so afraid of.