inflation forever?

Causes of true, technical market inflation can be defined as anything that increases the ratio of the rate of inf production of relative to the rate of production of stuff we pay inf for. That's what inflation is - an increase in the money we pay per item.

Some changes in the game aren't market-wide inflation. For example, it seems likely that Alignment Merits increased the supply of "Pool C" recipes, causing a decrease in price, but they don't seem likely to have dramatically increased the supply of purples. One interpretation of the result is that money no longer spent on valuable Pool C recipes shifted to purchasing purples, leading to a price increase for purples as the price for things like LotGs went down. More money chasing the same number of goods is inflation, but it's only inflation in a specific market segment.

Most sources of market-wide inflation are things that increase the earning potential of the game's highest earners across the board. Examples would be pure increases in reward for high-level mobs (XP "smoothing", I16's inf doubling for L50 characters), ease-of-access to large spawns (I16's difficulty settings), and increases in character power (probable increased adoption of IO builds, Incarnate abilities).

Some (almost all) of these things also increase rates at which players produce drops like purples, or the speed with which they can run TFs or tip missions. But consider that Alignment Merits have a hard limit on how many you can both earn and spend per day. Reward Merits are theoretically based on the time it takes to complete a TF, and the time it takes to defeat foes is not always the primary throttle on those completion times. Eventually, increased inf earning rates from increased combat efficiency probably outpace rate of earning any other rewards that don't also tie directly to rate of mob defeats. (Like purples or "Pool A" recipes.)

So will inflation continue forever? That really depends on how much further our combat efficiency is allowed to increase without some corresponding decrease in reward for defeating the same foes with greater alacrity. As far as we know, the future will bring more combat effectiveness in terms of Incarnate abilities, but also as far as we know, there's nothing about that increase that will make, say, level 52 mobs worth less per defeat. That suggests that market-wide inflation still has some wind in its wings, with a rate that will depend on how fast we can earn new incarnate abilities. I'm not sure inflation will be allowed to continue forever, but if it continues at its pace from the last year or so too much longer, I think the devs might be forced to concede that either the aggregate rate of per-capita reward or the inf cap need review.

Yah. A good inf sink would handle a lot of this.

I think they could dramatically improve the game by allowing people to buy reward merits for around 1M inf. There'd be a brief massive bit of chaos (yay!) after which I think prices would stabilize MUCH lower for a lot of goods, but with a much smoother curve.

The other thing that would help the market a lot is letting people set levels for random rolls instead of "your level or recipe's max level".

One interesting thing [to me] is that the 20-million-inf-per-AM conversion doesn't seem to have had a lot of effect on the amount of inf floating around. I mean, maybe it did- Red Fortunes are down from 10 million each to 2 to 5 million each, Numina's uniques were floating around 70 million each- but if there's an effect, it got swamped by the effects of AM's.

I could see it happening ONLY if there was a severe self-correction involved. For instance, a daily timer, like TFs.
First time: 4 merits, 10 million
Second time: 2 merits, 10 million
Third time: 1 merit, 10 million

Yeah, something like that could work. I'd still be surprised, but less so.

That was a very well written explanation, Uberguy.

EDIT: I mean the one that starts "Causes of true, technical market inflation can be defined as ..." This thread is experiencing runaway inflation!

Not to rain on the parades of DOOMsayers or anything, but inflation in this game has an upper limit with regard to the market. It can't continue forever without hitting the cap. Semantic, I know, but just wanted to throw that out there.

In light of what UberGuy said, I would expect the pace to increase as more end game content comes out. If the Alpha Slot is any example the devs don't want anyone to be able to 'buy' their way to incarnate abilities. This makes the inf gained while farming incarnate shards worth less to someone doing just that since a part of his power progression (incarnate abilities) are tied solely to luck and time spent playing; the market can't be used as a shortcut. e.g. I can't use my vast ebils to buy moar stuff for my casual warshade so I may as well casually stack 2billion inf bids for purples for my casual widow. That would tend to casually drive prices up for high end stuff.

Of course price inflation is pretty sweet from a seller's perspective. If you don't think you're ebil enough you could always kill some mid-level Tsoo & Circle, then sell the resulting alchemical silver for a bundle. I hear Clave_Dark_5 is paying well.

Technically, the more things get sold off market, the worse inflation gets... a 2 billion inf sale removes 200 million from the game, a 3 billion inf sale removes zero.

Caveat: I'm totally gassed. Not quite Ted Kennedy-level, mind you.

The problem with inf and inflammation ... inflation ... ahhh ... you know what I mean ...

in CoX is that the game continually prints money. Every time you defeat a mob, inf is generated out of nothing. Every time you vendor an item, inf is created. Most of the classical def ... defin ... ahhh ... definitions of inflation assume a static money supply; that's not the case in CoX.

What we have is something betwixt inflation and ... hyperinflation. hic

hic

Gahhh ... losing my train of thought ...

Hmmm ...

hic

The game doesn't have enough mechanisms to deal with the expanding monetary supply, and we've generally seen prices drift north since i9, and prices of the high end esoteric stuff (purples and some PvP IOs) are nucking futs ... and more than compensate for the relatively static prices of the low- and mid-range items.

Oh dear god am I ever going to be hung over tomorrow. I can feel it.

hic

Ahhhh ...

off to drink some water.

And have some vitamins.

The game won't have a stable economy until it has a stable monetary supply.

Devs: please stop adding new currencies.

The Tin Mage and Apex Task Forces have us fighting 54s. If this is how future Incarnate content is going to be, and I see no reason to believe otherwise at this point, it will only make the problem worse.

Uberguy did a great job explaining the possible reason for this situation. Inflation has gotten pretty bad. Just came back from a 15 month break. It's been disheartening seeing the loss of population, but no surprise the market has inflated many times over. I will wait for 2xp and winter event chaos to balance out for a true tally, but as of now my base that had roughly 3 billion in storage then is easily worth 10 now, and thats a rough guess. Items I had bought during hiatus were all fractions of going rates (stack of respecs for 24m). Then only a couple purples were 100m +, now some sets are all 100+.

Inflation will only continue with new ways for earning recipes, and some remaining only feasible to purchase with inf. Add on a playerbase of longtime vets and newbies where the inf is either overabundant or in short supply, toss in items with limited supply and stupid prices, and welcome to now.

When I was talking about Incarnate abilities increasing our combat efficiency, I was thinking of things like how Spiritual and Cardiac can increase how much DPS we can output or how many toggles we can run without running out of end. I was also thinking of things seen when other, currently unannounced slots were leaked to test that outright would improve DPS or act as direct attacks.

But I've realized that level shifting introduces a source of absolutely pure inflation, defined as an increase in money supply with no corresponding increase in recipe or salvage supply.

I imagine this was pretty obvious to some. I actually did realize it was inflationary, but hadn't thought about how direct the effect can be. For those for whom it isn't obvious, consider the following example.

Imagine some level 50 character, who the owner of likes to play against +2 and +3 foes. Over some long term, lets say that this character can average X mob defeats per hour. It doesn't matter what X is, or really over what term we measure it. We just need to know that for any given set of conditions (foe type, number of foes, etc.) this character can defeat X foes per unit time. This then translates into some number of Inf generated per hour, and also some rate of pool A and purple drops per hour, and maybe also some rate of Merit production.

Now this level 50 character gets his Rare level shift. Existing foes become effectively one level lower to him. To keep up his challenge, he bumps the level of foes he fights - his missions now have +3 and +4 foes in them. These foes now act exactly like the +2 and +3 foes he fought before. The net effect on his defeat rate, X, should be exactly zippo. He should be defeating mobs at the same rates he did before.

But now, even though fighting it feels just like it did before, each mob of a given con color is worth more Inf than it was before. (I tried to find a reference for the ratios, but didn't come up with one handily. Maybe I'll dig it up in-game tonight.) So our character is producing more inf/time for the same activities at the same level of challenge and rate of progress. Most importantly, though, since his defeat rate ostensibly didn't increase, neither does his rate of drop production, or, presumably, any production rates for our various merits. (Note, though, that AE Ticket rates are linked to mob level, and so their production rate would actually increase if the player used the AE.)

There's a big assumption here that's that the player would actually increase their difficulty to counteract their level shift. I'm certain not everyone would do that, but I know lots of people who have done so for their non-TF team play, so I do suspect it's common if not a majority approach. (TF speed runners look prone to leaving their settings low and burning through TFs even faster, so this will tend to mitigate inflationary effects on Reward Merit item production.) As long as a non-trivial proportion of the population ups their foe levels in step with their level shifts, it will tend towards inflationary effect. At least until we run out of level bumps to give our foes.

This was brought up in a thread in another section of the forums, but while I know there are people who run at the lowest settings that will get them drops, I don't personally know farmers who do that. I know a fair number of people who farm, either hardcore or occasionally. The issue they see is one of short-term gratification. Windfalls from drops are at the mercy of the RNG - you can go days without getting something good. A single decent purple can make up for that in an instant, but until that happens, the well can feel very dry. We're sometimes talking about people who have posted in here raking in 60M/hour in defeats alone, so it's not really chump change, and keeping the defeat inf rates helps them feel like the well has some kick in it between windfalls.

There's a practical, min/max aspect to it, too. Primarily because of how AoEs work in CoH, there may be little practical difference in how fast a character with strong AoEs can defeat +0 versus +2 or even +3 foes. There's no real point in lowering your foe's level if it doesn't actually translate into meaningful kill speed increases - one might as well leave their difficulty higher and accept the extra cash.

As you say, I think none of us have any real idea how many people do what, but I am not at all sure that most farmers run at lower difficulty settings. Too many I meet in game and who post in this forum have done otherwise.

My XP measurements [years ago, measured in the low 20s] gave me 30% more XP going from 0 to +1 and 30% more from +1 to +2. If that ratio holds true at 50, and holds true for inf, the level shift will give about a 30% boost to top-end prices.

daaaaamn yoooooooooo level shift!

Personally, virtually 100% of the time I am farming, it's to level up an alt of mine on another account. I usually farm at +3 x 8. But now, since I got my level shift yesterday, I will likely increase to +4 x 8, since my difficulty will stay essentially the same, but the xp for my alt should increase. If I was just farming for drops tho, (which I never do, they are just a byproduct of my xp-fest), I would probably stay at 0 x 8 and mow through mobs even more easily. So count me in as increasing my difficulty, for the above mentioned reason.

I don't see why farmers wouldn't jump at the chance to run on lower settings. I don't have the specific numbers, but last I understood -1 actually generates more rewards than +0 because the increase in mobs defeated per hour more than makes up for the decrease in rewards per mob.

Now, I do understand why farmers up until now haven't run at -1; level 49 recipes are harder to liquidate than level 50 recipes, plus whatever other bonuses 50 offers that 49 doesn't. But with the level shift, farmers can run at -1 and still be fighting level 50s. That seems like a dream come true, doesn't it?