How you would balance the Market?

I'm talking about the contemporary game, post player defined spawn sizes and level 50 earning buff.

If we're talking ancient history I remember buying Karma -KBs by the stack for 50k and poaching LotG recharges for a few hundred K. Which bears the same relation to today's market as the Model T does to Ford Motors.

There are objective changes since two years ago, and even more from three years ago. You are right, Rhysem, that there's sticker shock.

However, different people mean different things by "there's inflation". If prices on everything are steadily marching upward, that's a pretty good sign that an ever increasing amount of influence is chasing the same amount of stuff. If prices lurch upward only when there are changes to the game, that's a pretty good sign that inf is leaving the system, normally, at about the same rate it's entering it.

Now this is going back a considerable distance, so I'm probably making some mistakes myself, but here are some changes to both inventions and drop rates:

1) There was a bug and level 50's were getting half the inf they "Should" have gotten- maybe under most circumstances, maybe under all. (I think they weren't getting XP turned into inf when they exemplared, but I wouldn't put money on it.) Since almost all the inf in the game comes from level 50s, that's going to double your prices right there, once it percolates through. Which seems to take a couple weeks, as mentioned.

2) People are playing their level 50's more, since issue 19 and the alpha slot. As mentioned, almost all the inf in the game comes from level 50s. [By the way, I could buy level 50 Crushing Impacts for about half a million each for the recipe, before double XP. That's an item that's gone down in price from two years ago. And that's an item that has a direct ratio of items created to inf generated by 50's. ]

3) Defense set bonuses have gotten larger and more general- Kinetic combat went from "only good for Invulns" to "Everyone wants four or five sets", because it went from 3.75% Smashing defense to 3.75% Smash, 3.75% Lethal, and 1.8% Melee. Thunderstrike and Aegis went to around 4% Defense per set (ranged/en/neg in one set and aoe/fire/cold for the other.)

4) People have had a lot of time to work out various techniques for various things. Farming purples, farming AE tickets, farming inf, farming merits and [now] farming A-merits are much more efficient now than they were.

5) With gleemail, characters can now, easily, accumulate inf in a single place to make a bigger individual bid than they could previously hope to.

It is possible that, along with all of this, we have a slowly increasing supply of inf "sitting around". In fact, we probably do. But that is not a matter of abstract inflation: it's a matter of the game changing in different ways.

When the game was new, Steadfast Res/Def was a junk drop- I put one on my 6 million inf man because I didn't have the money for the KB protection I really wanted. Now it's 50, 60 million inf. Why? People figured out how good it was, AND people can now get near the soft-cap with other set bonuses, so it's disproportionately more valuable.

Devastation was loved when the game was new. Now, not so much.

I've gone on far, far too long. But the point is, we're doing things differently than we were.

uh.....yeah, what Fulmens said.


the numbers look bigger coming back from a long hiatus, but given how much easier it is to make and move around inf they don't represent that big an obstacle. When you start mucking around earning inf in even a semi-organized manner you'll realize prices aren't as threatening as they first appear.

I'd like the numbers to be smaller just because I think they're awkward and unaesthetic - no other changes - but I doubt that's going to happen. Inf is a devalued currency in runaway inflation, like the countries where you need ten thousand ____ to buy a loaf of bread.

I gave a specific example [L50 Crushing Impacts] where prices are DOWN from when you left the game. It would be interesting for me to go back through the "6 million inf man" build [back in issue 9, one weekend + one unslotted level 50 spine/dark+ 6 million inf] and see what it costs now. With one glaring exception, I could probably do a very functionally similar build for no more than 20 million inf ... if you gave me two weeks instead of three days. There would be specific changes [I think I got a lot of cheap Titanium Coatings at the time, and I might have to replace them with something else.]

You're thinking "But 20 million is a lot more than 6 million!" And you're right. But before issue 9, nobody had had any reason to try and make inf on purpose, so that was before ANY inf had really been seriously earned.

20 million was then, and is still, the cost of 6-10 rare salvage.

Bidcreeping on most common/uncommon salvage is kind of dumb.

The IO system is one of the things that kept me in CoX. You can add a lot of improvement to a character at a pace that literally anybody can do. It only takes reading a couple of guides.

I feel so bad charging people for my time as a programmer, taking advantage of them when they could do the programming themselves if they'd only put in twenty years learning to code. I must be very greedy.