How you would balance the Market?

The problem with this game's economy is that players generate ludicrous amounts of influence (farmers exacerbate the problem), and then 90% of that inf goes into another player's hands. The game has very few ways to destroy influence. That is to say, players are "creating" influence by farming NPCs, but the game has limited ways of destroying the influence that's been created. Thus, hyperinflation.

To fix this, the devs need to implement ways that players can spend a lot of inf in-game instead of buying everything from the market and putting it back into other players' hands.

Also, to balance out recipes, they need to redo set bonuses for the "crappy" sets to put them on par with other uncommons and rares. They also need to increase the drop rate of the PvP IOs drastically so that people don't have to farm the good ones.

More inf sinks.

The more I think about this the more I think it's near-unfixable.

There is by my estimation one to five billion inf for every person in the game. (figure 60K players, 60-300 trillion inf.) Between the five major prestige-buying SGs that I know of, we've destroyed something like a trillion inf in the last three months and prices didn't blink.

I think adding AM's burnt a trillion inf in the first week they were in the game, maybe considerably more, and prices changed- but supply went way up, too.

If you could put something in that allowed a character to get a small benefit in return for burning one to fifteen million inf a day- that might make a dent in the supply. Eventually.

Undoing the level 50 influence fix would drop prices 30%, I estimate.

Nothing else I've been able to come up with would be more than an order of 5% change. (That was upping the Wentfee to 15% on transactions over 20 million inf.) Selling to the market from ghost characters? Maybe 1%. Allowing billion-inf tokens that sell back for 900 million? Maybe 0.1%. (It would fix the problem that off-market sales don't destroy inf, though.) Doubling level 50 crafting costs and halving level 50 sellback prices? 1%.

Maybe I'm just depressive today.

I come back to the idea that we need more inf sinks. What would be good inf sinks?

(1) Renting additional storage capacity. It would be worth more than 100 million inf per month to me to increase the capacity of storing mail to myself (a/k/a global storage) by 10. It would be worth more than 10 million inf per month to me to increase the capacity of a character to store recipes and IO's by 10.

(2) Prestigious rights. The idea of renting billboard space using an auction system has been raised several times. Also, would it be worth it to supergroups and costume contest sponsors to be able to buy fireworks displays and rent searchlights as part of their events? What about public bonfires of inf? What about renting an entourage to accompany your character in public places?

(3) Proto-inspirations. Given the need for 3 matching inspirations to combine into a needed inspiration, would players be willing to buy proto-inspirations that could be converted into any needed inspiration (or maybe just count as any type inspiration for purposes of combining 3 inpirations)? Especially given the current inflation, perhaps instead of a fixed price a certain number could be put on the market each day.

(4) Turbo boosters. Another luxury item could be turbo boosters to increase travel speeds outside of missions.

(5) Elite club. Create a clubhouse with a monthly membership fee. Give it at least one nifty exit location, such as near the hami raid entrance.

(6) Private dwelling. Allow a character to rent a dwelling with some storage capacity.

(7) Unused News Terminals. Convert the currently unused news terminals (or whatever those terminals were for) into classified advertising. The downside to this idea is that supergroups might stop spamming Atlas.

(8) Respec recipes -- in lieu of drops, sell a certain number on the market.

A point which you may have peripherally made, but I overlooked, Rhysem:

The more stuff sells for 2 billion+, THE WORSE IT GETS. I will attempt to splain.

Let's pick two items- generating one generates 150 million inf that can be associated with it in some way. After you've sold everything else you generated along the way and burnt that inf, you have 150 million inf that gets "charged" to the account of that item. If you sell it for 1.5 billion, you destroy the 150 million that got created along with it.

The other one generates 250 million inf. If you sell it for 2.5 billion off market, you destroy NOTHING and you create 250 million inf of inflation. That 250 million goes to buying other things. Prices go up.

(The flip side of this used to be PVP recipes: No inf was created with them, so they were a pure inf-destroying measure. Now, some of them still are but the biggies are not. )

There are ways to increase your inf-to-stuff ratio: playing on higher difficulties, for instance. People aren't having to do those things, which means that we could cut a LOT out without affecting people's ability to seriously farm up inf if they wanted to.

Re Fulmens: Yep. I'm actually kinda worried we're getting dangerously near market collapse into a barter-only economy. I'm worried about it because if we get the market collapse (as you elaborated on), then ... what is inf good for? You can trade it, but that's the only use for it. Why not just demand what I want in return for my IO and let some other sap find it all for me? If I've got a good enough piece... the definition of which will start narrow (+3% def/res PvP IOs) and gradually broaden (purples... high-def-set-bonus-sets... recharge sets/uniqes... etc) then barter becomes the only way I trade. Bleh!

Extra penalty in that the collapse doesn't actually trigger at 2 billion -- it triggers when recipes hit around 1.8 billion so that crafting and reselling them doesn't net you any profit. (Technically its under 1.8 billion by crafting and salvage costs, plus some overhead for any listings you make that don't sell, plus some overhead for the opportunity-cost of the auction slot... but we'll call it 1.8 its good enough here.)

You could look at it and say, "nah we aren't that close to that point yet" but I'm trying to project out how long it'll take the devs to notice A) there's a problem, B) come up with a fix, and C) get that fix in game. If you start talking about "two issues down the road" then ... I dunno, that's the better part of a year. If its three issues, then historically speaking that's over a year.

Back in the HOs-as-endgame-loot days, you (essentially) couldn't buy a HO with inf. For one thing nobody wanted to sit through that many trades of 10k inf (or was it 100k? I think it was.) at a time -- then again people are getting closer to "needs 3 inf trades" on the +3%def PvP IO than they are to "within 1 trade". But also inf wasn't really "worth" anything -- people had more than they'd ever need for the inf sinks, so getting more if it wasn't really helpful.

To be honest, I think our IO system as "crafting" rather fails and would like to see a rather scortched earth revamp policy to it. That'll chain into some market revamps (fine). As long as you're doing that, either up the inf cap to a 64-bit integer so this 2 billion thing is of the past and/or "re issue" inf as a currency and do something about the worthless money we're printing with each mob we kill. Since you're messing with salvage and IOs, base storage needs a sweep again -- in particular people need a IO storage vault that doesn't require them to be in their own supergroup.