Living an INF-neutral lifestyle

So, my “main” marketing character, Invisible Fist, just got the Leader badge for 500,000,000 inf earned through defeats and mission objectives. Yay me! But it got me thinking. First, “Boy, that’s a lot of inf.” Second, “Actually, that’s not a lot of inf at all, I take more than that out of the market weekly.” Third, “I’m hungry.” Fourth, and most important, “So what?”

We talk a lot on this board about inflation and the effects the money supply has on the marketplace. But this was the first time I really thought about how the money supply comes in and out. We all know that there is an infinite amount of inf that CAN enter the system. But I’m starting to get a little concerned about the amount that IS entering or exiting the system. Note: we all know that buying and selling on the marketplace does not create inf, it destroys it. I buy something from you for 10mm, I lose 10mm inf, you receive a net 9mm inf, 1mm goes to Back Alley Brawler’s Caribbean hideaway. It’s an influence burn.

So Fist added 500mm in mob defeats and such. But hasn’t he sold over 5bn on the marketplace (10% vig) to get him to neutral inf generation? Yep. But what about vendoring? Has he sold over 500mm of items (mostly lvl 50 IO recipes) to vendors. Yep. But what about inventing? Has he created over 1k or so lvl 50 recipes? Yep. I figure Fist is roughly even on inf creation, more or less. An INF-neutral footprint, if you will.

But I can’t think of another character I have (and there are many) that is even close to having introduced as much inf into the system as they have taken out. Not even close. Several of my 88ers are many billions in the hole for burning inf for prestige.

As this game matures and makes it easier to generate items like LotG 7.5% that can be sold for inf, and introduces even more potential inf sinks in i20, isn’t there a real risk of deflation? Where more inf exits the system rather than enters it?

So, let’s call “i” the total amount of influence in the CoX system. “i” is a big number, definitely more than 100bn and in my opinion much less than 100tn. Let’s also call “delta i” the net rate at which inf enters the system on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.

Some questions for you:

1. Are you inf positive, negative, or neutral?
2. What are the sources and drains of systemic inf in this game? I’ll list the ones I know in the next post and I know I’ll miss a lot, so your input is appreciated.
3. What do you think “i” or “delta i” is?
4. Where is all this inf coming from? Is it stored? I don’t think so.
5. Do you think I am crazy in the head for thinking that a few months from now, people will be starving for inf cash?


Best, Yomo

Ways for inf to enter the system:

* defeat mobs
* mission objectives
* mission completion
* selling recipes to vendor
* selling TO/DO/SO enhancements to vendor
* respecing crafted enhancements
* selling inspirations to base

more soon.

Ways for inf to exit the system:

* delete character with inf in storage
* posts an item for sale on the marketplace (5% of post price)
* sells an item on the marketplace (10% of sales price minus 5% of post price)
* buys fixed price item from marketplace (marketplace transporter)
* buys TO/DO/SO from vendor
* crafting costs
* trading inf for prestige
* converting merits to alignment merits
* costume vendor costs
* item vendor costs (e.g. jetpack)
* purchasing recipes from invention table

more soon

Out:

*Inf stranded when a player leaves the game
*Base upkeep (probably insignificant)
*Marketeer altruism (Crazy 88s, Fulmens, and other forms of deliberate counterinflation)

I did a little musing on it a year ago - I found some actual farming numbers from TopDoc at the end of the thread. That was mid-to-late 2009 and things have changed in the last 18 months. AM's for one thing.

1. I'm strongly inf-negative. I've introduced MAYBE a billion or two inf into the game. I've personally and directly destroyed ... well I was at something like 65 billion when I lost count.
2. An old and obsolete inf-destroyer is "using the market to transfer inf between servers." This is still necessary when moving inf from EU servers to US ones, but that's a tiny fraction of the transfers that were happening before gleemail. Second-order effects which don't quite fit on the list: Generating PVP recipes by PVP'ing is "inf destruction" in that you generate no inf but do generate recipes that sell for millions [or billions in three cases], and filling up on recipes or salvage and randomly deleting the crap is "inf destruction" in that you're not selling those to vendors.

3. I got a number for delta-i of around 5% of "personal wealth change" for TopDoc's farming. Now that's an old number, and TopDoc is a very efficient farmer, and there have been a number of changes in the system since then [AM's, for instance] but I still think delta-i is severely positive generally.

For i as a total, I took some blatant guesses and so did other people. I now consider that 100 trillion may NOT be a high number, actually. I'd guess between 10 trillion and 1000 trillion.

I guessed once that in the first week of AM's, at least a trillion inf disappeared into AM conversion fees. The system didn't even blink. PsychotiX and Wing Protectors between them have destroyed around a trillion inf by turning it into Prestige.

4. There's a lot of inf stored. I've known a couple people who refused to pay ridiculous prices, while still selling things for ridiculous prices, and ended up with ridiculous amounts of money that they were too cheap to spend. [... other than me, I mean. ] There are people with fifty characters with a hundred million on each that have no idea they're billionaires five times over. There are people out there with expensive marketing machines- It takes tens of billions for Enyalios to keep all her investment schemes working.

5. I don't think "people will be starving" - I think prices will be lower. If market prices drop by half, the amount of inf leaving the system goes down by roughly half. [TO/DO/SO's from 1 to 50 is on the order of the market fee on a single Kinetic Combat D/E/R. The market destroys WAY more than anything else.] Some people may run out of inf, and either complain or learn to make money or both. But I don't think we're going to see the market get so tight that, for instance, 50-million-inf IO's will have prices within 20% for crafted and raw, or weekly high and low prices within 20% of each other.

You might be misinterpreting some of my statements- I actually was talking about liquid inf. Enyalios has both items for sale and bids up, so to zeroth order half the value of her money machine is inf and the other half is items.

Your idea about stored inf going down may be true. My first reaction was "i hasn't decreased, because prices have gone UP". However, I'm not sure that's true, because people have all of a sudden gotten the ability to gleemail their wealth around, so they can easily put together much larger bids. And destroy much larger amounts of inf at the same time.

Kali-like, I can pull out another hand: the large number of level 50's playing on large TF teams changes the ratio of shinies to inf gained, considerably. 8 person teams generate about 1/3 the number of drops as 8 people playing separately [assuming all are at +nx1] and generate 2.5 times the inf. And of course level 50's generate much larger amounts of inf than anyone else.

I would have difficulty with the idea that delta i is negative for all, or even most, people playing this game.

Edit: I got carried away with rhetoric. Sorry. I do think we have a comfortable number of Enyalios-level people; back when I had a currency exchange before gleemail, I met at least two people who don't have a board presence that I know of, but wanted to move 10 billion inf or more from side to side. I wouldn't be surprised if we had 500 people playing the game who each have 50 billion inf, and another 50 who have 500 billion inf or more. Those are high numbers but not implausible ones.

/Edit

I don't think we have 1000 trillion inf. But it would be very easy to exceed 100 trillion inf.

How many badgers do we have with Leader? How many of them don't spend much time marketing? How many of them got Leader a long time back, then kept going with all the Mo* task forces, all the switching sides and running all THOSE TFs, all the new content? Those people are monumentally inf-positive.

How many people go out there on 2XP and grind because they see the market as a store and they want to make lots of inf?

How many people ran multiple MMs up to the 2-billion inf cap when the level 1 GM exploit was around?

How many people found the bug I did, and didn't report it, where you could buy a stack of ten crafted IO's for free, and the system just invented the inf? [I only saw it happen once before I accidentally did it, but that doesn't mean anything.]

There was 3 trillion inf in the game in I9. How much more have we generated since then?

I worry about a negative delta even less than a positive delta. It's impossible to be starved for money when you control the printing presses.

True.

"O NOES WE HAVE TO RUN AT +1 DIFF OR WE'LL RUN OUT OF INF".

I'd venture to guess that there are many, many players out there who are inf positive.

I play about 5-7 hours a week, and do very little "money making" via the market. I basically sell what I have, and buy what I want. (Odd eh?) I did some marketing for a while, just to try it out, and quickly made about 200 million, but discovered something even more important - I didn't like it! I already have a job, and just don't need another one.

I don't have any pimped out purpled casual warshades, and just don't need any. Most of my builds have a mix of mostly plain IO's and some sets. These toons are still plenty effective for my needs, so why go the extra mile? (Not that I resent those who do)

I've made hundreds of millions, if not a few billions in the PVE game, and destroyed plenty via vendor purchases, but the amount destroyed pales in comparison to the amount made. I have tons scattered across 5 or 6 servers, as I'm sure most vets do. Most of the players I know very well are in the same boat. I realize that's not a statistic, btw.

In short, I wouldn't worry about not having enough inf in the game. And on top of that, not enough for what? Perhaps not enough for ebil marketeers (tongue firmly in cheek) to make their billions, but plenty to buy SO's and get invention drops from those who have them to those who want them.

I know I'm substantially inf negative. I actually tried to be inf positive but I'm just a really horrid farmer even on my most efficient characters. I rarely vendor anything, I even market my common recipe drops, I delete temp power recipes and costumes. I sometimes vendor a few common salvage and I usually vendor To/DO/SO drops. But really that's not an impressive bit of inf entering.

I do a lot of inefficient crafting, I buy level 50 common recipes off of the crafting tables when I'm feeling lazy (which is often) and I blow surprisingly large wads of inf on the tailor. Hell, not only do I blow inf on the market, I don't often respec and salvage IOs, I just write over them.

Personally, I think that the total inf in the system is going up. Though I'd love to be wrong.

I'm definitely inf positive. I turn up my difficulty as high as I can handle, and I very rarely actively market. Every character I have with a level shift immediately turns their difficulty up to compensate, thereby automatically putting more inf into the system. I can't be the only one who does that.

I KNOW there are people out there with a lot more inf than I have. I have at this time about 75B in liquid inf, another 20B tied up in bids to make more inf, and about 450B worth in IOs stored in bases across 3 servers (I have a SG and VG base on every server but very few have more than a handful of items in them -- I only build inventory when prices are dropping and I still have yet to fill up Victory and Protector).

People who have the type of inf I have can actually single-handedly cause inflation on high-end items. I slotted 6-8 toons with purples/Kin Combats/Procs at the same time and caused a roughly 15% rise in prices over the time I was doing it despite the fact I never moved my bids. I assume ambient buy-it-nao! demand caused those people to bid over me and I was patient and took a little supply off the market...which was enough to spike prices. When I was done prices on purples dropped back a little before rising again.

I would guess if 3T inf was in the game as of i9 that we're somewhere around 100-150T now. Inf generation has never been easier than it is now and we have level 51 farmers now to generate inf even quicker.

That said, I'm quite sure I'm inf negative over my account as a whole.

I don't know about the 50-50 split inf to pops for sale from farming.....maybe I'm an incompetent farmer or something for inf but my split is probably 20 inf -80 pops. Of course I farm Lib TV on +1 x8 rather than AE on +4 x8. I get purples instead of tickets and less inf per kill to maximize my chances on purples/shards.

I'm glad i20 has some major inf sinks. Not that I don't like having 100M prestige on my main and all. But, its nice to have other things to spend on that actually do something.