Time for Market and Inf Revamp

Time for Market and Inf Revamp


I've played the game since launch and I have about twenty level 50 characters and many many alts. However, I've never been a person who likes to farm either for Inf, Badges (Healing, Damage), Levels and whatnot. But this game is getting to a point where you are going to have to farm to make some of the IO sets and worse some of the new Incarnate slots.

I know you don't have to do the Incarnate stuff or have IOs to make your character playable, but let's face it, most of us want all that stuff.

The other day I got my MA/SR Scrapper to level 47 and in order to deck him out with several IO sets it cost me over 2000 merits, and about 1.5 Billion inf and there is not a single purple on him. NOT ONE. I stripped all the inf from my other characters and had them use their reward merits to "buy" some of his recipes and emailed them to him, took about eight hours total.

I'm suggesting that it is time to put limits on the items in the market. All of it. I see common salvage going for 100k inf and that is just crazy. That is like making a loaf of bread cost a $100 in real life. Sure there will be people who pay it and can afford to pay it, but the common player can't. I sure can't and I've been here since the start of the game. There are rumors out there that the Devs actually make real money by selling inf to the RMTers, I don't believe that. And if it is true, then I need to go find another game.

With the new Incarnate powers that are about to be released in order to make some of the required items it costs 400,000,000 inf. You read that right, 400 Million inf. My most played character has just gotten the 250,000,000 inf badge after having been made almost seven years ago. I know there are players whose characters have that badge a month after being made, but again the common players don't have that badge for a LONG time.

I know some people with say "Play the market, you can make money that way." or "Run AE missions use your tickets to buy rare salvage and sell it, you'll make a billion real fast." really? Is that what this game should be, work? I want to have fun, I want to feel like I'm advancing and I want to feel powerful, but I don't want it to start feeling like work.

Please put set prices for the items in the market. Here is my suggestion:
Uncrafted:
Common IO Recipe or Salvage: 1,000 inf
Uncommon IO Recipe or Salvage: 100,000 inf
Rare IO Recipe or Salvage: 1,000,000 inf
Purple: IO Recipe: 10,000,000 inf
Crafted:
Common IO: 10,000 inf
Uncommon IO: 500,000 inf
Rare IO: 5,000,000 inf
Purple IO: 50,000,000 inf

This is just my suggestion.

Also the new Incarnate costs need to come WAY down, they are just ridicules.

Rich the Revamp Guy

/unsigned

Just because you cant make money, doesnt mean other people can't. I have over 7 billion in liquid inf over all my 22 characters, and i made about 85% of it while working at my real life job. The market is a great way to make inf, and if you can't do it, doesnt mean things need to be changed.

Plus very rare NEEDS TO BE VERY RARE.

Eleventy bajillion % /unsigned. Lrn2usethemarket. All putting price caps will do is run things off of the market. Learn how to NOT use the AUCTION house as a store and how to use it the correct way.

Absolutely not.

Just look at PVP IOs right now as for why. There's a hard cap for programming reasons of 2 billion. Yet they can sell for more than that... and do.

You put a cap of 1000 up for common salvage, when I've been making 25-40,000 or more selling them? Where do you think I'll sell them? (OK, I *personally* won't care, but if people want that kind of profit, it'll go off-market.)

About the only thing I'd want to see change is a nice, simple "Send to vendor" button - if something hasn't sold in X period of time (2 weeks, 30 days, whatever) - like, say, that Calibrated Accuracy Acc/Range you put up for some reason - you can just hit a button and "sell" it to a vendor for vendor price. Yes, people will sell accidentally now. No, there shouldn't be a "Create item I want to buy" button.

See my Guides and Tutorials

/unsigned for reasons already stated above

For all the market's flaws (for there are many), capping prices like that would completely break the supply/demand model. Common salvage only goes for 100k when either a) there's lots of demand and very little supply or b) people are idiots. Unfortunately a lot of people are idiots.

The biggest problem with the market that leads to price inflation is that you have to pay to list items, which you don't get back if you unlist them. This discourages you from unlisting items even if they're listed for well over their "market value" because you don't want to lose the inf you've spent. Additionally, things never stop being listed unless you unlist them yourself.

This is fine as long as there's supply, you just never sell your items, but once supply dries up or there's a spike in demand and yours is the only item left, people with lots of disposable inf and not much patience will bid high enough to buy it, meaning that there's a sudden jump in the "last 5" prices and other people start listing their items at that price because they think that's the "normal" price and so it goes on.

Of course, the fact that none of the items have any intrinsic value means that pricing is something of a crapshoot at the best of times anyway.

Personally, I'd suggest disposing of the blind aspect of the whole rigmarole, displaying the currently lowest seller and highest bidder, as well as the average sale price over a significant amount of time. Market speculators thrive on knowledge of statistics that Joe Metaverage doesn't, and while that in itself is no crime on their part, over time it can {and arguably has} break the market supply and demand curve completely.

An open letter to NCsoft

Things I actually want to see in a market revamp :

1) "Vendor this item" button for items put onto the market so you can quickly dump unsold items
2) A History, so you can see what you've looked at before. This should be both a "Back / Forward" type interface and a pane which shows you the last X items you looked at
3) Favourite / Bookmarked items.
4) "View Enhancement" link for recipes taking you to the listing of the crafted enhancement and "View Recipe" link on Crafted enhancements taking you back to the recipe
5) "Place all items onto market" link on Salvage and Recipes, with a tickbox to prevent placing of Salvage used in recipes you have. This is a shortcut for dumping all items (or just items you don't need at the moment) onto the market. You could also add a "for price" textbox so you could throw everything on for a set price

Oh, I'd also be in favour of expiring Sales and Bids after a set time limit (say 30-60 days)

I'd like an auto search function, you know like you put a recipe into it and it brings up the salvage automatically.

/unsigned greatly, and agree with the reasons that the other posters said.

First, learn to search OP if you really have been here this long. This gets brought up in this forum and the market forum. You are bringing nothing new to your gimmegimmegimme post.

And second, word of advise. Learn patience and to plan ahead. Waiting to lvl47 and expecting stuff to be waiting there for you is all wrong. My last 50 was a brute that I started in Praet. A few months before GR came out, I planned a build out and put bids on the market. By the time GR came out, I had every single IO/set I wanted. Bit was just a matter of time for me to level the toon so I could use the IOs. I did not spend billions or thousands of merits. I was patient and didn't pay WANTITNOW prices. And I definitely would not have spent 8 hours in game time when I should be having fun.

Yup, after seeing many of these posts in the past, I tried something over the weekend. I rolled a new Brute last week, and took him through the AE from level 5-8, doing some good story arcs in there, solo.

When I got to level 8, I rolled for common level 26-40 arcane salvage, and listed everything I got on the market for 5 influence. I didn't even completely deplete my ticket stash (still have a few hundred left), and I was sitting on top of over 5 million influence. And that was at +0/+1 mission settings. Once I get to a higher level and want to go back into the AE, I'm sure that I'll be able to do better.

This wasn't playing the market, it was just using those high prices to make myself a quick buck. And I ended up with more than I expected. If others are selling for something you consider to high, then sell, and make a quick profit. When you need the same salvage later, be patient, and make a profit. This isn't hard.

*FACEPALM*
*HEADDESK*

You're not asking for a market. You're asking for a STORE.

You already have 2 of them. The merit vendor and the AM vendor.

At that point, your complaint boils down to "you don't like the prices set by those vendors".

As has been pointed out in the past, you are not SUPPOSED to be able to trivially outfit your toons with a world-beater build. Pre-planning and strategic bidding in the market can help reduce costs and time constraints, but won't ever beat them down to the levels you desire.

Even with a hard reset of the market and inf system (destroying all extant inf), you're only going to see a temporary downward flux in pricing. It'll eventually rise back to it's current levels. Probably quite rapidly as I'm sure some people would resent such a rework (and theft of inf) enough to leave the game, further reducing the pool of players who actually generate such things.

And 50 million inf for a purple? Quite a few of my characters have 50 million inf before they hit level 20.

The market is only a painful experience for the stupid and impatient.
Also, as has been said, inf is so easy to come by in this game that those complaining of it's dearth must not be trying at all.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

/unsigned

While I do think that inflation is an issue that needs to be dealt with, capping prices isn't going to fix the problem.

Everything on the markets is expensive (and getting moreso) because as a group, we earn influence faster than we earn 'stuff'. That lets us pay more and more as time goes on for the stuff. The solution then is to either earn stuff faster, or earn influence slower. That's the only way inflation will be fixed.

All that's going to happen if prices are capped is people will take their trading off-market, just like they do now with some of the PvP IOs that sell for more than the inf cap.

I do agree that the inf costs for the incarnate system are currently too high but I'm gonna have to say no on putting caps on prices for items sold. While it may suck that pvp and purple IOS are expensive I can't say that putting a cap on them would be a good idea.

Now something that might be a good discussion would be about adding additional ways to earn alignment merits. Whether its something similar to adding threads as a reward to +4 tfs I don't know. But even then you don't want people earning too many alignment merits or things lose value and the market is flooded with premium items.