hyperinflation

As opposed to making moral statements about investment strategy ?



If you don't work on what is measurable definitions and real data you wind up with dueling anecdotes, and fools making appeals to the majority.


Person A: Is it raining
Person B: Only by dubious definitions of rain



I would love to know how you define good faith ? Is it like hyperinflation, something you can only tell is there by ancillary effects ?

What to make of this ? When followed by this ?

Every bonus in the game has limited value beyond "A certain point" DEF is the best example of a bonus that has very limited value beyond a certain point.

LOTG+ 7.5 (lvl 25) 195 mil last five as I write this.
(level 50) Avg 155 mil

Lower value, this another one those terms that has an interesting definition for you ?

Oh so are you Rockefeller Rich (est peak net worth = 3% us gdp) or meerly Bill Gates rich (est peak net worth = .3% us gdp)

Or maybe you are just upper middle class and bought yourself a nice house and have a decent car ?

I never did that and you know it.

Well let's see. We have (at least) two quantitative definitions:

• Yours says that hyperinflation is defined by a 100% cumulative inflation rate over three years.
• Then there's Philip Cagan's definition, which states that hyperinflation is 50% inflation per month.

We almost certainly have enough inflation to qualify for the first standard. We have nowhere near enough to qualify for the second. So what we're left with is a discussion of how apt the term is in the context of the game's economy -- a game economy wherein the traditionally dire term is nearly toothless.

You're being deliberately obtuse. I can't come to any other conclusion based on the posts of yours I've seen on the Blaster forum. Still, for the sake of any interested reader with the superhuman patience to have read this trainwreck of a thread all the way through:

Recharge tends to give you diminished practical benefit as you add more and more of it, and the cap for recharge is basically unachievable for any build by itself. By contrast, each subsequent point of DEF up to the soft cap is more valuable than the last -- and even after you have capped to one type/position of DEF, most builds would benefit from raising DEF in another area. No one can soft-cap to all positions or types on IOs and pools alone.

Global recharge is usually a matter of achieving a given attack chain. Sometimes you can push yourself to a better tier of attack chain. Sometimes you can't. Shaving an extra half a second off of Build Up isn't a big deal though. Even when you can afford them easily, purples aren't always the best choice.

Lower value compared to what they were before, like I said. I don't have a perfect recollection of what the market looked like three years ago, but I believe LoTGs were going for 70 or so million back then. Now they're ~200 million.

Compared to the rise in earning power, and compared to the inflation in purple prices, that's not such a large increase. If nothing else, Alignment Merits make formerly high-luxury items like LoTG procs far more freely available to everyone. We've been through this. Endlessly.

A high-end purple set (that's five pieces of an attack set) runs about two billion influence these days. That's a lot more than even five LoTGs will run you.

Most people I talk to in game consider my Dominator build spectacularly expensive. (Most people consider my Tanker with perma-Dull Pain and 45% S/L/N/E DEF pretty effective, too, and it has not a single purple.)

I am pretty darn rich, but nowhere near as rich as you are.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Yeah, but the point people are trying to make is that it's only like this when you focus on buying only the absolutely most valuable of the valuable things.

How many characters you could outfit using 50 Bil to have something like 50% global recharge and defense in the mid 20s to mid 30's to one position or L/S (assuming they get no defense in their powersets)? How about if you use a mix of Merits and cash to do it?

If I were to exclude purples and PvPOs, I don't have a single character that would cost me more than around 1.5B inf. 50B inf would outfit almost four times as many 50s as I have right now with builds like that.

Think about it. A couple of years back only people who either had a bunch of accounts or who were willing to ask for "padders" could readily set up a good money farm. Now, anybody who can take the heat can set up a farm. All the new people cranking out more cash find the game's ultra-rare goodies that more within reach. They're competing with you now. They're bidding against you on the market. Guess what? That drives up prices.

Of course some of these people are also producing more purples. But not all of them. Some of them are getting their inf in the AE. Some of them are playing TFs or story arcs that exemplar them down. Some of them are just hoovering up smaller wads of cash from the less prolific cash producers, selling lots of stuff for 5, 10 or 25M inf, then rolling that up into large single purchases.

We get it. The price of rare, expensive stuff has gone up a lot. Rare, expensive stuff is not "the market". It's just a part of it. No one's going to say the price on that stuff hasn't gone up a ton, and that inflation isn't (a big) part of that. But not only is inflation not the whole story, it can't meaningfully be described as "hyperinflation" except in the most pedantically mathematical ways for the reasons Obitus has mentioned - hyperinflation suggests extremely negative conditions that mean your whole economy is going to hell in a handbasket. That's not what's happening here.

If you want to build the equivalent of in-game bomb shelter stocked only with illiquid assets, that's you're prerogative. Personally, I'm going to continue to store my wealth in a diverse set of assets that include inf. So long as anyone is selling anything on the market, inf is useful. I can always use the market to liquidate an asset in some other form, but having cash on hand means I don't have to wait for the market to do that for me. After all, if I list something at "sell it nao" prices, I'm not getting an optimal return on my liquidation, so selling for a good price takes time. Keeping liquid cash on hand avoids having to wait - it's fuel for instant gratification. I can snatch up something that costs up to 2B inf on a whim. That's all I care about my inf allowing me to do. I don't care that next year it might be worth half as much as it is now, because I plan to earn (a lot) more.

I think we can all agree that someone who has, say, 30 million dollars is very rich. That's not world-beating wealth, but it's enough to make 99% of the population green with jealousy. How many yachts does 30 million dollars buy you? Not a whole heck of a lot. You're surely not going to be giving them away as party favors.

The problem here isn't that you're too poor to buy more than any individual could ever want or need (including the proverbial yacht or two). With 50 billion influence, you can, in fact, kit out at least four characters with absolutely top-of-the-line bleeding-edge builds.

The problem here is that the game encourages you to want to buy yachts for several (sometimes even dozens) of individual characters.

MMO design tends to emphasize long-term, singular character progression. CoH didn't follow that mold for the first few years of its existence -- instead focusing on a strong diversity of character builds that players could max out at leisure -- but Inventions (and now Incarnate content) are meant to give players long-term goals for their favorite characters. The flip side of that design decision is that you're probably not going to be able to kit out every single one (or even most) of your alts without becoming the COH equivalent of Warren Buffet. We can't have it both ways.

You can choose to give a legion of alts really good builds, or you can choose to give a handful of alts the most expensive builds available. Whatever you choose, what would be the fun if you had no further goals after you spend your current bankroll?

In short, you're very, very rich, but perhaps not the international mogul you might've imagined yourself to be years ago when you were sitting on 3 billion influence. You can take that as you will, but for the game as a whole, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Quite the opposite, in my opinion -- and I say that knowing that I probably only have about a quarter of your wealth.

Also, what Uber said.

Oh, and I like the edit note

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

vs

When I post to this forum I often think I am addressing a conclave of creationists or a gathering at an asylum.

If that isn't an attempt to play the hypocrisy card, I'd like to see what is. Its also horrifically bad reasoning. All I have given you with that statement is my current asset levels. You are looking at one data point and drawing a line that suits you through it.


You are assuming your conclusion.

This is at best a mischaracterization. Depending on attack chains being used and nature of the powersets increased recharge can have anything from a linear benefit to an exponential benefit. I can't begin to estimate the benefit from being able to set hasten to auto and ignore it. Aim, build up, mindlink, domination, fulcrum shift, sleet, benumb, accelerate metabolism, all powers that benefit insanely from extra recharge and do change the way you play.

There are these little things called inspirations. It doesn't take much in the way of lucks to softcap especially if you have something to start with. Depending on how you play and what your are playing increased defense is more often than not superfluous.

Just as a data point, I have a blaster with 168% global recharge and little or no defense, that does perfectly well and really wouldn't see much benefit from having more defense.

I agree with purples not always being the best choice. That is another matter again, and worthy of its own thread.

In other words we have a new currency that devalues the inf ?

1.) Yeah, you can get a decent build for under a billion influence. But not on every toon.
2.) You got most of that money on the market which means you became part of the inflation problem. Buying and re-selling is a source of inflation. Farming without reselling is the only solution.
3.) That's 2 billion influence every 18 days, which as you've been so kind to point out is a stupidly unprofitable way of doing business. So it's not a viable alternative.
4.) I hate farming, am focusing on WST's, have a real life and a lot of other 50s to io out. I could sink 6 bil in to finishing one toon with three io's or IO out 4 others. I haven't finished my main toon more in protest than anything else.

I win.

I'm sure it seemed pretty alarmist when Israel Bissel rode through the colonies shouting "To arms, to arms. The war has begun." He was right, though.

Actually, you can't. Unlike with the vendor interface for Reward Merits, only rare set IOs are present in the Alignment Merit interface. Sets with no rare pieces are not present at all, and sets with a mix of rare and uncommon pieces have only the rares on offer.

This is never a source of inflation. Price increases are not the same as inflation. (In fact, flipping increases the amount of money destroyed per time relative to the amount created, making it a net, though possibly small, decrease in the ratio of money in the system to items.)

This worsens inflation if any of the money farmed while farming for items ever makes it to the market to buy something. That would be injecting money into the system but injecting zero goods for it to be spent on. Increasing the money supply without increasing the item supply is practically the textbook definition of inflation in this context.

Tuhmaydough, tuhmotto. Many tiny corners of the common and uncommon salvage world are filled with people buying specific pieces of salvage for 1-15k influence then selling them for 100-600k influence. Oh, don't worry, inflation isn't the problem. It's just people demanding nonsensical prices and getting them for extended periods resulting in something that seems like inflation. If someone shot a hole through you, you'd complain about the hole in you. By this logic which you've presented, if a tornado whipped a metal pipe with a two inch diameter clean through your body you shouldn't have the right to complain just because it's not technically a bullet hole. But the hole's still there. Who care's what's causing it? Just because some minor amount of deflation happens with each resale doesn't mean the person reselling is losing anything or being forced to lose any money - it just means that the person doing the buying is throwing more of their own money in to a hole. It's not a fix. The person selling has already counted on that money vanishing and is pricing their goods at an artificially higher than necessary price to compensate for this loss in profit - so what we have is a "mechanism for deflation" which results in higher prices for everyone. But it's not inflation. Who really cares? Fine, don't call it inflation. I call it a pile of stinking offal.

You misunderstand, I'm saying the only solution is to farm and then sell what you make without ever resorting to resale.

Alignment merits may wind up displacing inf. If you use your alignment merits to make direct purchases, you have that much more inf to spend on other parts of your build.

You seem to have a fundamental misconception that any time the price for something increases in an upwards direction, that is inflation. It is not.

In the real world, inflation can be caused by a couple of common things. One is an increase in the cost of producing commodity goods, like foodstuffs, fuel, etc. Because either everyone needs those goods (food), or everything they use or do depends on those goods to happen (fuel), that price is reflected in all other products and services. There is no equivalent to this in CoH, because nothing ever takes more resources to produce, and our characters will never starve. Increases in salvage prices might increase the price people ask for crafted IOs, but would never directly affect the price of recipes.

Another common source of inflation in the real world is monetary policy. For example, the classic example is for a government to print more money. This is the closest analog to what we have in CoH. There is no central banking authority controlling the money supply - we all create it by playing the game. The only thing counteracting the money we create is when we spend it on things that don't hand all of what we spent over to another player. Money sinks, like the 10% market fee.

Here's what Wikipedia says about real world inflation.

(Emphasis mine.)

Here is the Wikipedia definition of "economic growth"

(Again, emphasis mine.)

Translating that into our game, inflation is an increase in the amount of money in the economy that is greater than any corresponding increase in the amount of goods.

Someone flipping items never creates inf by doing so. Flippers drive the price of items towards what the market will sustain at a brisk transaction rate for the item in question - they try to find an optimized balance in price per transaction multiplied with transactions per time. If that price that a flipper can drive to is increasing over time then that is not creating inflation. It may be revealing changes in demand or supply caused by shifts in how people are playing the game. (Example: a new defense powerset comes out and people start buying more defense IO sets.) Or it may be revealing real market-wide inflation as I have described above.

Price increases and inflation are not the same thing. Inflation leads to price increases, but not all price increases are inflation.

Semantics are how we determine what's being discussed. I assure you that the semantic definition of "inflation" is relevant in the context of this thread.

Your clarification tries to paint the topic of discussion (inflation in the wider game market economy) as nonexistent, and instead price increases being wholly the domain of marketeers manipulating prices. This blithely ignores the reality that, for any given amount of money moving through the economy, there is a limit to the price any manipulator can ask for something and expect anyone to actually buy it in any reasonable time scale.*

If that ceiling price is itself increasing, with all other things being equal (no new powersets, no nerfs, no new reasons to play at 50, etc.), that quite possibly indicates inflation, as I defined it based on those Wikipedia quotes.

* This applies even for things that sell for >2B inf off-market. You just have to transition to direct-to-consumer sales to transcend the 2B ceiling. However, I don't envy anyone taking on the task of trying to control the supply of something sold off-market by diverse individuals.

You like wiki and quantifiable definitions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism

Highlights: "Sophism has two different but related meanings: In the modern definition (from Plato), a sophism is a specious argument used for deceiving someone."

spe·cious
   /ˈspiʃəs/ Show Spelled[spee-shuhs] Show IPA
–adjective
1.
apparently good or right though lacking real merit; superficially pleasing or plausible: specious arguments.
2.
pleasing to the eye but deceptive.
3.
Obsolete . pleasing to the eye; fair.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_dispute

There comes a point when all you can do is talk to hear yourself talk. The only reason there's any sort of debate anywhere here is because we lack appropriate, definitive terminology that everyone can agree upon with which to address the issue at hand. This has been a central theme in every post I've made here. If you've missed it, I don't know what to tell you. Crap costs too much and it boils down to greed. Let's discuss solutions, like what to call the increase in prices. You don't like hyperinflation, which has no solid definition. You don't like inflation. So prices go up. It's a problem. I don't care if you're married to calling it "price increases." The ridiculous price increases are a problem, they are unnecessary and maybe we should discuss rarity transaction caps and such instead of browbeating, patronizing, etc.

Or, you know, maybe I actually care about the topic, and want to explain why I think what you're saying is introducing confusion. Maybe the reason I use a lot of words to say what I am saying is because the heart of the matter is confusion over what's being discussed, and I am trying to be excruciatingly clear.

Which is a separate and distinct discussion from whether or not there is inflation, or hyperinflation. That's my point. You want to talk about price increases, but you cannot ignore real inflation in the game economy when talking about "reasonable" prices. If there is 10x as much money in the economy and prices go up by a factor of 10, do things cost too much? Hint: there's not enough information in that question to answer it, and yet that's what your assertions about prices try to do.

This thread wasn't ever about that. The OP in this thread asked if people thought there was hyperinflation. Nothing more, and nothing less. You want to discuss a distinct and separate topic, which is whether things cost too much. Inflation and "costs too much" are distinct topics, and talking about inflation, as much of this thread has done, does not address the question of "costs too much" at all. However, you cannot answer the question of "does it cost too much" specifically by looking at how prices change over time without accounting for inflation.

The topics are related, but not the same.

I suggest that if you want to discuss whether things cost too much, why, and what could be done about it, that you start a separate thread on it. Where necessary, people can refer to concepts in this thread if they want to discuss the effects of inflation on prices. (There's limited hard data to use as reference in this thread, but it's probably a decent reference for concepts.)

So, would you consider yourself anti-semantic?

Neat, I've never been in a soon-to-be-closed thread before.

Which gives him a leg up on you.

You must have a million ways of saying "you're wrong", all of them snarky and/or condescending. And all equally pointless; a waste of bandwidth that contributes nothing to any conversation.

I keep getting the impression that what you're passionate about is being right rather than actually hearing what people are saying with respect to the context of the dialogue. Have been fooled before. So then, what is it you really care so much about?

Hyperinflation, we've determined, is an opinion. The form of inflation you've described is outlined by the quantitative theory of money - which is just that. One theory, which may or may not hold any water here and which is challenged very competently by other theories. You're presenting it from the austrian view. Pretty much the only form of traditional inflation which can definitely happen in this game are forms of demand pull and cost-push. Those are caused by fluctuations in aggregate supply and demand, which are subjects long since discussed here. You are in essence asking me to kick a dead horse. And then you followed it up by asking a question that wasn't even a complete sentence. I will agree there isn't enough information.

It's remarkably presumptuous to assume you can dictate what's said where. Go with the flow. Stop being so defensive, and join me here in reality where conversations much like rivers do not end where they begin.

A witty expression proves nothing

Given that this entire thread has been about people trying to redefine the term so it doesn't apply, that would be exceptionally sensible.

We could have another thread on why the word sends some people into a tizzy, but that would be another thread.