How you would balance the Market?

There are a few things I would do to balance the market.

1. Remove the restrictions of 5 tip missions per day. This would increase supply across the board of recipes/enhancements above 20. It make a big difference mid-level shortages.

2. Successful Master of xx badge runs reward a random purple IO. This would reduce purple costs, and give people a reason to attempt more difficult content. It would also reward players for doing more challenging content as opposed to doing what is best reward/time.

3. Rebalance PvP and create a CTF style game; also reduce the pvp drop rate from 1/60-70 rep valid kills to 1/30 rep valid kills. If you make a balanced, fun pvp game more people will participate. More participation = more supply. Single IOs going for inf cap once a week on the market, and 1.5x inf cap off market is totally unacceptable.

*** This is all my opinion. I'd also like to say that I know absolutely nothing about economics, in fact it was one of my lowest marks in college.

I think the problem lies not in the market itself or the players, but in the rewards system in place in CoH. It is one of the few games that does not adequately reward players for completing the most difficult tasks in the game. Everything being random dropped makes the market the only viable way to completely equip a toon. A-Merits were a good start, but the time frame on getting things is entirely too long and makes it impossible to complete a build a reasonable amount of time (assuming use of purples etc).

People pretty much always do best reward/effort. Increasing the rewards for difficult content won't change that, it'll just leverage it.

Heres a fix... IF random is random, then randomize EVERY drop that drops. Increase the drop rates to compare with AE tickets. That will get more people out of AE and into the game AND supply recipes at various levels where there are currently 0 and stabilize thte market. If nothing is done, then the devs are happy with most sets costing a billion dollars now.

I think what many of you forget, is that this is a videogame.

Honestly, I think NOTHING of overspending and dropping stupid amounts of inf.* to get what I want asap because:

• ITS PLAY MONEY
• I CAN MAKE MORE FAST
• I HAVE MULTIPLE BILLIONS OF IT.

Or maybe like this.

If the Devs wanted to get rid of inf. they could put 1 of everything up on the market for 1 influence once a day and toss the inf. That would remove inf and provide recipes in every IO level for the mid level guys. If they see a surplus in an area they could have logic to skip putting 1 in or buy up the excess above some arbitary number at 10 inf above vendor rates.

INF/Dollars.... = the same thing in this game. How about being useful and reply with a logical reason to help and not try to be smart, because frankly its not working....


The "GOOD" sets that people actaully WANT in this game are very expensive. NOT JUST PURPLES....

Go buy a full set of Kin Coms, Numinas, Miracles, LotG, etc. and let me know how little you got it for. The whole set. Go ahead, i'll wait. Noone wants air bursts, serendipity, and plenty of other sets. They may as well delete them from taking up space. Who actually goes to WW to get them for their builds? Go ahead and look at the sub forums and find a build posted where people want them in their builds.

The sets I use most are Crushing Impact, Thunderstrike, Red Fortune, and Doctored Wounds. I can pick up a set of any of those for under 10 million inf easily. Also, I use Air Burst frequently for frankenslotting. I pay a moderate amount for a moderate increase in performance, and then I save for big-ticket items for another moderate increase in performance.

A billion inf is just a number. Inf has no fixed value on the market. In fact, the less one inf is worth, the easier it becomes to achieve the level of performance that the game was designed for, because NPC vendors never raise their prices for SOs, while you can get more and more inf by selling drops on the market. I remember when it was hard to afford SOs; now I don't even think about it.

My definition of market health has less to do with prices, and more to do with availability. I'm not worried that rare, valuable items cost a lot of inf; I'm worried that rare, niche-value items aren't available at all.

When I started my bots/traps, I really wanted rocket boots, because they went with the costume. I looked, and I simply couldn't afford them.

Early on, I took someone's advice to roll for recipes with merits or AE tickets, and I got a random recipe, and went to craft it, and discovered that I couldn't afford the rare salvage part.

But then, back then, I thought it was amazing that one time I got 5000 inf for selling something, I think it was brass.

Builds on the forums are extremely frequently builds that have no price ceiling. They are "dream" builds in that sense.

Even for players who have no intention of building such things, those builds are informative. You can go a long way replacing the gold-plated platinum pieces of those builds with, say, copper, and still have a pretty damn effective build.

That said, I see plenty of build requests with stipulations like "no purples" or some other way of saying "don't make it too rich for my blood", and I've never seen a thread with reasonable traffic not comply.