Anybody notice any effects from I20 money sinks?

Not i20. i19.5. During the alpha run, massive quantities of TFs were being run. This generated massive numbers of merits. This killed 20mil a pop each time someone ran the WTF and converted it into a more valuable AMerit. That AMerit killed multiple millions a shot on rare salvage for creation, trading fees, selling fees, creation fees. The TF and WTF certainly didn't provide enough inf to pay these costs. They were coming straight out of pocket. i20 should have had something more i19.5 to it to burn inf. The big stick just isn't palatable compared to burning money through AMerits.

I don't know many people who are opting to convert incarnate components with inf. Even people who can afford to and have all the rares needed are preferring to trial more and hope for the very rare to drop rather than throw 400 million into it.

I think it's largely because most of the very rare incarnate powers are only a minor improvement over the rare versions, but are literally more than twice as costly in terms of resources (since they require two rare powers, plus a very rare component, to craft). Most of the people people I know personally are looking at that, going, "all that plus 400m or 30 empy merits? Eh, I don't really need it." The few that are considering it have fully purpled out builds already and are sitting on billions of inf with nothing to spend it on, and are growing fatigued with the trial system and its broken-seeming reward paradigm. Those people may drop the 400m to get it over with and stop trialing.

I really doubt the devs intended that to be motive behind this if it's intended as a broadly-used inf sink instead of more of a 'safety valve' for potentially unacceptably low reward rates.

Supply does seem to be up at level 50. I'd add that I think in the next 1-3 weeks we're going to see at least a small demand surge, especially if the devs don't pull back from "participation diversification" as people abandon characters that don't do well in the trials - at least up until the patch fixing the uncommon droprate, many people report extremely consistent rewards by character - and then finish levelling up their new characters to 50 and are looking to IO them.

I'm kinda n00 to all the thread stuff, but is "upgrade 10 shards into 10 threads for 2.5 million inf" useful once you've got your alpha slot taken care of? That seems like a small, but steady, inf sink.

I can't speak for anybody else, but the influence cost isn't why I plan on avoiding the conversion. That kind of Inf falls out of trees in this game. But spending two weeks getting enough Emp merits for one very rare is just too much for me. For now I'll just save mine and see what they can be used for in the future.

My mistake. Ignore me.

I have a pretty decent amount where I can spend 400mil, but I still don't. As of right now, 400mil plus 4 rare just to make the very rare component (not to mention making a rare boost) for the minor difference just isn't worth it to me. If there was a larger change from rare to very rare, I would be more likely to do this.

I also kinda still enjoy the Trials, so I would prefer to try for the very rare table and go from there.

I haven't been doing much on the market for awhile, so I can't comment on that side. But I do know I'm earning a large amount of money just from kills, because I'm putting a good dent in those badges. So I know there is a ton of inf being generated, and I'm seeing a hard time of that much inf because removed from shard-->thread or thread --> ixp.

I think I burned Threads to get from 70%-100% on something on my 1st character I did the new stuff with. Since then, I only use that method if I find myself less than 10% of the way to the end. My reasoning? I need to run a metric crapton of Trials to get the Incarnate salvage I need anyway, and I need a metric crapton of Common salvage, which I tend not to get as drops. So since I am normally going to need to get a bunch of Trials anyway, I will run more than enough to unlock my slots, and I need Threads to create commons. So I just stay the course and unlock stuff naturally, earn Astrals and Threads, and craft my way along till I get a Rare.

If I got a Rare very early, I might see burning threads to unlock a level shift, but mostly I really don't see the value.

Now that we can downgrade uncommons to commons, my thinking might change. I haven't been playing the Trials since they did that, because the lag is insane.

I haven't spent a single Inf the slots from I20. There's no need.