Quote:
I miss my Pummybear, he is no longer playing btw.
|
Originally Posted by Fulmens
I remember doing an inf exchange for someone with like 100B in inf, before the merged red and bluesides, who I'd never heard of, who didn't post, who was an SG-mate of someone who'd used my services. And he had a few very wealthy friends.
And I seriously doubt those people have gotten poorer. My example of someone who's really, really rich is PumBumbler, who is a forumgoer but only peripherally visits the Market forum. The guy just likes to play and keeps running up against the 9999 merit limit  FourSpeed's calculation is a good mental tool; we can play with the dials all we like and get highly variable answers, but it's a good tool to get within, say, an order of magnitude. I think there are half as many total players as FourSpeed does, but more of them have broken the 2-billion-inf mark. |
"Play Nice and BEHAVE! I don't want to hear about any more of your shenanigans brought up in our meetings at Paragon"-Ghost Falcon @Tritonfree @Philly's 2nd Convenient CIGAL BoBC/INOANN Arts&Crafts Sporks
Average Joes FAP THE MENTOR PROJECT Justice Events
Quote:
I have a bad habit of matching Fulmens' destruction donations anytime he wants to blow some inf up with a 100% bonus burn rate. So I'm probably responsible for keeping him "poor". |
Originally Posted by Fulmens
We may be getting into a discussion where we have to distinguish between "increase in personal net worth", "increase in personal actual cash" and "increase in inf added to the game." Honestly, between high-efficiency farming, SuperTeams, and CEBR on one side, and mass generating of PVP IO's on the other, I couldn't actually guess whether TopDoc has added inf to the game or subtracted it. I like to think it's come out on the negative side but I have no idea.
Oh, and Right now i have... maybe... 15 billion liquid? I know I only have 6 billion stored and I only seriously market on four characters. If you count up my "provably vaporized" pile it's respectably big, but I don't keep any of it. (Note to self: almost time for spring cleaning again.) |
I'm worth over 100B at the moment despite blowing up or slotting 25B in the last 2 months and I am almost certain that I am NOT in the top 10 richest people in the game. I don't know who is, but i doubt its me. I am however probably in the top .1% of the infholding playerbase.
Quote:
Point of order: I just added up on my fingers the outstanding bids on the 'big three' pvp procs, and came up with something over 2300 bids in place.|
Originally Posted by FourSpeed
Certainly, there are caveats with using the forum population in lieu of the game's population, but more data would be helpful,
PS> My estimate on the revised sheet is ~161.4 Trillion |
If we assume those are a billion each, there's 2+ trillion you can look directly at.
Quote:
I've got at least one bid on a Gladiator's +3def IO placed for 2Bn, and it's been placed for weeks, so I'm not sure how you'd decide on an average bid in the 'big 3' category... Still a big lump of inf, but a somewhat fuzzy edged big lump |
Originally Posted by mauk2
Point of order: I just added up on my fingers the outstanding bids on the 'big three' pvp procs, and came up with something over 2300 bids in place.
If we assume those are a billion each, there's 2+ trillion you can look directly at. |
Warning:
The above post may contain Cynicism, sarcasm and/or pessimism. If you object to the quantities contained, then tough.
I farm, pvp etc. With 3computers, 13accounts(2 I pay for) and 11 are F2P to pvp farm I generate 2million influence a night(7hours) just from the kills, around 10+recipes daily average of 1.5billion INF for 2months now. Before, I only used 2, which gave me enough INF to slot 30 50s with about 50bill inf
I'm up approx 350billion. After dumping 100bill into prestige accross 3servers, slotted IOs, 19enh. bins full of pvp/purple IOs(to be converted), given about 30billion if not more into events, sg mates, friends.
Most INF I ever had liquid is around 54billion
I don't marketeer, I don't have the attention span to sit that long.
Largest and Most Active Group on Exalted! Daily Teams, events, raids, trials, task/strike forces! /chanjoin OOCIC - 7Servers, 20bases, 8 bases in top 100! - We have ventrilo and forums!
Quote:
For a while I was storing my inf in 10 bids of 200 million each to make SURE I wouldn't accidentally buy an IO and have... to go ... to the trouble... of profiting off it... I don't do that now. |
Originally Posted by Canine
I've got at least one bid on a Gladiator's +3def IO placed for 2Bn, and it's been placed for weeks, so I'm not sure how you'd decide on an average bid in the 'big 3' category... Still a big lump of inf, but a somewhat fuzzy edged big lump
|
The point being that the average could get thrown off VERY fast by people doing that.
TL;DR: I agree. Fuzzy edged big lump.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
Another way to put a wild guess to the amount of inf could go like this:
1000 people playing actively in combat 24/7
1000 Inf per Second earned, sustained average rate
86400 Seconds per Day
365 Days per year
7.5 Years of CoH operations
-- Multiplication Occurs --
= 236,520 Billion.
I pulled my first two numbers out of thin air, but this speaks to the huge potential Inf production the game can have.
Quote:
I also store inf that way myself (typically 1.8 Billion per slot where I do that).|
Originally Posted by Fulmens
For a while I was storing my inf in 10 bids of 200 million each to make SURE I wouldn't accidentally buy an IO and have... to go ... to the trouble... of profiting off it... I don't do that now.
The point being that the average could get thrown off VERY fast by people doing that. TL;DR: I agree. Fuzzy edged big lump. |
That said, for folks posting in the Survey Thread, they should also be counting
those as part of their liquid assets, because a single button click can get that value
back out of the market.
The flip-side of that, of course, is while there may well be a couple thousand
bids out there for an item, there's no telling what they're worth (except for our
own).
Clearly those are significant to the inf pool though, and of course, we're purely speculating
in any case. Only the devs could actually get a real number, and the last time
they did that they were off by orders of magnitude.
Regards,
4
I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is definitely better.
Light is faster than sound - that's why some people look smart until they speak.
For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich,
there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. - Obitus.
My main banker has about 20 slots of bids 10@200M each for the +Def IO, though I don't know if it's the recipe or Enhancement. My other banker may have the same. I really should get out of those in case the price really crashes with I22. I doubt it will, but you never know. Someone looking to fake demand could have 1000 bids at 1. There may well be 100 bids at 2B, but I really doubt that the average is 1B.
I've been selling my +Res procs in the Market slowly. There have been about 5 or so for sale on the market regularly (only 1 from me) for a while. Anyone who bids 2B will instantly buy one, so there are no outstanding 2B bids for that. Panacea procs are even lower, I think around 1.5B last I checked.
(Tangent alert) We really need a 1B Inf piece of Salvage that we can buy or sell at the Market. That would solve the problem of storing massive Inf, and it would let people do large transactions securely and easily.
Goodbye and thanks for all the fish.
I've moved on to Diablo 3, TopDoc-1304
Quick question about storing influence:
Let's say you have 9 bids of 200 million influence on something in a slot, and your character has 410 million influence on them. You click to cancel the stack of 9 200 million bids. Are you completely unable to claim any of them, does it claim the entire thing and the overflow is lost, or does it just claim as much as you can hold?
Culex's resistance guide
I *think* it's all-or-none . I am *fairly sure* that it won't do a partial and throw the rest out. I believe I've tried to claim 2x1,000,000,000 when I had 950 million on me and nothing happened.
But I don't feel reliable on the topic.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
When did you last test? I could've sworn they fixed it so you could retrieve stacks of sales that went over 2 billion somehow, so was wondering if they changed it for canceling bids as well.
Culex's resistance guide
I know they stack stuff separately (two 1-billions won't form a single stack anymore, nor will two 2-billions)...
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
Oh, so they forced sales stacks to split if it went over 2 billion? Well, that works.
Guess I'll double check on how the canceling works myself sometime, but it sounds like they didn't change much beyond making sure stacks don't go over the inf limit.
Culex's resistance guide
Quote:
WARNING! |
Originally Posted by Enyalios
Anyone have good estimates of the total amount of liquid inf in the game at the moment? I'd like to think that 250B at least removes a measurable portion of the excess (0.3%?). Or are we at the point now where we're in the low quadrillions of inf?
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This is going to be a lengthy post (even for me 
) covering my analysisof data gathered from the Informal Survey thread from 10 days ago.
tl;dr version.
A good estimate? No. We have nowhere near enough data to guess anything
that is remotely accurate with any reasonable confidence. Being aware of the
caveats of extremely small sample size, any conclusions here are purely speculative,
albeit loosely based on some trends that did appear noteworthy to me in the data.
Are those trends real? No idea. But, they're at least suggestive.
Based on a 100K account population (a number which is also highly speculative in
itself), I'd estimate an amount roughly between 400 Trillion and 2 Quadrillion (a 5X
span from low to high). 1 Quadrillion might be plausible (depending on the actual
number of game accounts).
More on that below...
-------------------------------------------
As of today's update in the survey thread, there were 123 accounts represented,
with a total holdings of roughly 2.24 Trillion inf on-hand.
Assuming folks were honestly estimating in good faith (I believe they were),
the following facts come out of that thread.
32.5% of the respondants (40 Accts) had 10B+ on their accounts.
69% (85 Accts) had 1B or more (consolidating categories D&E - as explained
in that thread).
Average inf based on that data is: 18,192,682,927 / account.
Now, for a metric crapton of speculation
Game Population: No idea what it is. Every chart I've ever seen is around 100K.
Given that they don't purge accounts, and new accounts are now free, this is
as useful as any other number for speculative discussion.
Active/Stale Accounts: Again, we've no idea what that ratio is. That said, it's not
as big a concern given the presumption that all accounts have some inf that
hasn't been deleted, and could come into play the minute its owner logs in these days.
Forum Bias: I've little doubt believing that forumites in general are more successful
in-game than the average player. But how much so? 10X? 100X? I have no idea.
Clearly from the reported data, however, Forumites in general have a *lot* of
inf in-game.
From that, I'd think using them as representative of the entire population would give
us a maximum amount for the upper limit of inf. Also, from the actual data, it can't
be less than what was reported, and since very few people did report, it's obviously
orders of magnitude higher than 2.24 Trillion.
Simple Math: If I simply multiply the Average above by Population, I come up with
an upper limit of roughly 1.82 Quadrillion for 100K accounts - Yikes!
Analysis of Categories: As previously mentioned, consider Categories D & E as one
(all in D - 1B-10B) for this discussion point. That gives us the following distribution
from the forum data:
Code:
Amt: 100B 50B 10B 1B 100M 10M 1M 1 Cat: A B C D/E F G H I ~Pct: 4.1 8.1 20.3 36.6 17.9 8.1 3.3 1.6
expect would be ~1.84 Quadrillion inf across 100K accounts.
Some interesting trends (to me) were the data was fairly symmetrical around Category D/E,
and each category further away from there had roughly half the hits of the closer category.
So, how about a more conservative estimate?
Well, assuming the game's population as a whole is less wealthy, we can shift the
distribution a full category to the right (ie. an inf shift factor of 10X for the most part)
and adjust the largest category (F) so everything adds to 100. We get this result:
Code:
Amt: 100B 50B 10B 1B 100M 10M 1M 1 Cat: A B C D/E F G H I ~Pct: 2? 4.1 8.1 20.3 36.2 17.9 8.1 3.3
we estimated earlier in this thread.
Can we shift the categories further right? Since we're speculating, why not?
Code:
Amt: 100B 50B 10B 1B 100M 10M 1M 1 Cat: A B C D/E F G H I ~Pct: 1? 2? 4.1 8.1 20.3 38.6 17.9 8.1
Can we adjust further right? Honestly, I don't think so. Looking at those categories,
we could easily argue that anyone in I is a totally stripped account, or simply
an unplayed one (ie. someone who maybe tried the tutorial and AP and then
left).
Category H will surely be hit by an account with just a single alt played a reasonable
time - It takes ~20M for an alt's 1-50 career to slot SO's, and even in I1 days,
an L50 usually had SO's and few million to spare. That by itself easily puts an active,
single toon account, at the top of Category H, and very possibly into G.
Even without an L50, it's certainly not too much of a reach to think an account
with a handful of mid-range alts would also reach this category fairly easily.
Given minimum earning rates of 1M/hr for even substandard L50 AT's, it's a pretty
good bet that most players with a non-PL'd 50 is in Category G, and folks with several
alts or a few L50's have a real good chance of hitting F - especially if we realize
that cashing in 2 A-merits and selling a LotG 7.5% would put them into Category F
all by itself.
So, I doubt the player base at large is fully two entire categories poorer than
our Forum group.
How about the distribution? Certainly some of those percentages could vary,
but this distribution looks reasonable - in several financial disciplines, particularly
income, the data has a log-normal distribution, and such a distribution, when put
on a log scale (loosely what our categories did for us automatically), the resulting
distribution is also normal.
Consequently, I wouldn't expect large percentage shifts, and I'd still expect
them to be symmetrical around one of our categories.
Based on the points mentioned above, I seriously doubt that G, H, I would be the
mean.
Finally, even cutting the population in half as Fulmens mentioned earlier, puts
a loose floor minimum of ~200 Trillion for a base 50K players. To be sure, the
*actual* game's population would be a large factor in the total inf calculation,
but sadly, that is a datapoint that remains elusive.
While the Survey thread is probably nearly dead after 10 days (it was on pg 2
when I looked this morning), I do tend to think the data we did get makes a
pretty suggestive case for there being a LOT more inf in-game than we may
have thought previously.
In the absence of enough data to pin it down more closely, I find it quite possible
that there might be anywhere from 400 Trillion - 2 Quadrillion currently in-game.
Wow!
Two weeks ago, I'd have thought that crazy, but today, I wouldn't be too surprised
to think there might be roughly 1 Quadrillion inf in-game, assuming ~100K accounts.
How much is *actually* in-game? No real idea. This is just my guess...
Hopefully, it's an educated guess based on some real data, but still a guess.
Regards,
4
PS> I'll keep an eye on the Survey for the next few days, but I doubt we'll get
much more data than we've already seen. <shrug>
PPS> Given my conclusion of ~1Q / 100K accts, that would mean I'd estimate
total inf = 10B * Accts (as a quick and loose, ok very loose ballpark number)
for any arbitrary number of accounts currently
I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is definitely better.
Light is faster than sound - that's why some people look smart until they speak.
For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich,
there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. - Obitus.
Quote:
You went and got data and made reasonable assumptions and I'm going to engage in petty sniping at it. Because I'm awesome like that.|
Originally Posted by FourSpeed
WARNING!
This is going to be a lengthy post (even for me ) covering my analysisof data gathered from the Informal Survey thread from 10 days ago. tl;dr version. A good estimate? No. We have nowhere near enough data to guess anything that is remotely accurate with any reasonable confidence. |
I think the question is "how many 100-billionaires are there?" If we've got four thousand, that's 400 trillion right there; your "conservative" assumptions move it down to a thousand [holding 100 trillion].
I know more A's than I realized, but still I know about half the "A" players who responded. The market is small enough [to me] that I run into various players' signatures every once in a while. This implies that the "serious market community" is relatively small, which I [badly] extrapolated to a couple hundred people. If all of us were A's, which we're not, that drops your 100 trillion on "A" players to 20 trillion.
How can I justify my non-data when you've got actual data? Self-selection. Like any hobbyist ,we like what we do, we like reading and talking about what we do, and we tend to be proud of our muscle cars/SG bases/giant piles of cash/whatever. So you're going to get disproportionate responses from the imaginary rich people because we like to brag AND because we like discussing our hobby.
So if I saw off the top end of the log-normal and say 1% are A and B players combined, worth 80 billion each, that gives me a "top 1%" total wealth of 80 trillion, and if I take 9% C at 25 billion that's a "next 9%" wealth of 225 trillion. If the rest had a billion each that's a "bottom 90%" of 80 trillion. Total around 400 trillion.
At a ten million cash inf an hour we are still talking about 40 million person-hours of play... divide by 100,000 and that's a fairly reasonably 400 hours per person, or 4000 hours at a million inf an hour. Reasonable for seven years, although this is post-inf-sinks and the first four years didn't get anywhere near that much.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
Quote:
The what where???
|
Originally Posted by FourSpeed
... my analysis of data gathered from the Informal Survey thread from 10 days ago....
|
Goodbye and thanks for all the fish.
I've moved on to Diablo 3, TopDoc-1304
Just to throw a little inf on the fire... has anybody considered the gold farmer accounts that are out there? I'm sure they're sitting on quite a bit of inf
I know several people who played back in I1-4 (but don't play any longer) who're sitting on inf that's just rotting away... at least 5 of them were dupers - had 2b(? whatever max inf was back in those issues) on each character while they were able to do that. I realize these guys are a small drop in the bucket, but there are others like them with retired accounts sitting on piles of inf too. It isn't active inf in the system, but it is inf that is out there.
Quote:
...and, after all I did for you in the Crazy 88's too... Ingrate! |
Originally Posted by Fulmens
You went and got data and made reasonable assumptions and I'm going to engage in petty sniping at it. Because I'm awesome like that.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Fulmens
I think the question is "how many 100-billionaires are there?" If we've got four thousand, that's 400 trillion right there; your "conservative" assumptions move it down to a thousand [holding 100 trillion].
I know more A's than I realized, but still I know about half the "A" players who responded. The market is small enough [to me] that I run into various players' signatures every once in a while. This implies that the "serious market community" is relatively small, which I [badly] extrapolated to a couple hundred people. If all of us were A's, which we're not, that drops your 100 trillion on "A" players to 20 trillion. |
Of 123 Accounts, 5 of them were over 100B right there, and like you, I also
can think of several posters who may fit that category, but didn't represent in
the thread (TopDoc, Arcanaville, Werner, macskull for instance).
Additionally, several of the "oldtime" marketeers that haven't posted in awhile
(Smurphy, dave_p and several others I can't recall atm) may also be in that category.
Further, while I fully concede that the Forum Marketers are definitely in the higher
tiers, to assume that nobody else in the unspoken masses, have not reached
such wealth seems to be pretty shortsighted if not denigrating.
Given that we can think of a dozen or more folks off the top of our heads, who
may qualify, I don't think it's that much of a stretch to find a few hundred or more
in that unspoken pool of 99500 (or so) accounts. For me, I think that is the
surprise. I believe there are more top-enders than we previously thought (all
"leetness" pushed aside)
One thing that may mitigate it (though I hope the math offset it) is the way
inf/category was assigned. If you're in the 10-50B group, it counted for 30B per
acct, for instance.
That's very probably an overstatement of wealth. Hopefully that is offset somewhat
by using the minimum of 100B (rather than some guesstimated average) for the
A group.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Fulmens
How can I justify my non-data when you've got actual data? Self-selection. Like any hobbyist ,we like what we do, we like reading and talking about what we do, and we tend to be proud of our muscle cars/SG bases/giant piles of cash/whatever. So you're going to get disproportionate responses from the imaginary rich people because we like to brag AND because we like discussing our hobby.
So if I saw off the top end of the log-normal and say 1% are A and B players combined, worth 80 billion each, that gives me a "top 1%" total wealth of 80 trillion, and if I take 9% C at 25 billion that's a "next 9%" wealth of 225 trillion. If the rest had a billion each that's a "bottom 90%" of 80 trillion. Total around 400 trillion. |
pleasurably guilty of) consider this thought.
How representative is the Porsche Club's get-togethers compared to all Porsches
sold? How likely is it that only they keep their cars sparkling and shiny?
In other words, we expect that from them, but it doesn't preclude "outsiders"
from the same.
Anybody on the web can read the Forums, and seriously, *anyone* could make
billions in the game pretty easily. The data gathered does not say whether
they actually have, but it certainly is suggestive that the number could be distinctly
higher than we may have thought.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Fulmens
At a ten million cash inf an hour we are still talking about 40 million person-hours of play... divide by 100,000 and that's a fairly reasonably 400 hours per person, or 4000 hours at a million inf an hour. Reasonable for seven years, although this is post-inf-sinks and the first four years didn't get anywhere near that much.
|
achieved, even by fairly casual players, and I'm certain that most of us have
that much time on several individual toons by themselves.
With all the ways they've added to make even more inf, I believe it's very difficult
indeed for active players to remain in the lower wealth categories at all, and
while the big-hitter categories are pretty dominant to the total, thousands of
folks in the C & D/E category are significant contributors to the total also (~40%).
The real problem, of course, is the complete lack of data on population and
income, which forces us to rely on the income distribution curve to estimate.
After this research though, I'm much more likely to believe that there's a lot
more inf in-game than we imagined previously... YMMV of course.
Regards,
4
I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is definitely better.
Light is faster than sound - that's why some people look smart until they speak.
For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich,
there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. - Obitus.
You've moved my estimate up by a factor of 4. I'm just not sure I'm willing to go higher than that without more than five top-enders in the survey. I know there are a lot of top-enders that never show up on the forums- when Smurphy and I were running an exchange, I ran into a few VERY wealthy individuals who were recommended by previous clients, whom I otherwise would never have met.
My "market-based" estimate of the heavy hitters as "a couple of hundred" went something like this. if I'm in around 20 niches and I run into Enyalios in 5 of them, there aren't very many high profit niches (in our metaniche, midlist IO's) and there are maybe 20 people working those.* If there are 200 niches in my metaniche, there are therefore 200 people working 'em. If there are four times as many people doing "big money stuff" frequently, whether that's running six ITFs a day or farming their faces off or handling market niches I'm not touching [purples etc]: that's 1000. And then I assumed they were all worth an average of 80 billion.
* I'm bumping elbows with the same signatures in several different recipes. There aren't that many people out there doing what I do, in terms of frequency/price/level.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
One point of reference in attempting to guestimate how much actual influence is in circulation in the game is that Paragon reported the amount of influence held by player characters on or around the seventh anniversary of April 2011 as about 56 trillion. At least, I'm assuming that's what they intended to report; they actually reported it as 56 billion which is of course obviously too low.
If we accept 56 trillion as the correct April 2011 value, that suggests the current amount of influence in the game is likely to be far lower than some of the projections being tossed around: its more likely to be closer to 100 trillion.
I believe part of the discrepancy between the estimates being generated and this value is that marketeering, which is one of the most common means to amass large fortunes, inherently destroys influence, it doesn't create it. Every 100 billion inf person out there likely destroyed at least approximately 10 billion inf to get there. Of course, they might have also created influence from other activities, but its very hard for a strong marketeer to create more influence through gaming than they destroy through marketeering.
Every rich player represents a lot of influence, but also very likely represents a significant influence sink unless they are also doing very heavy PvE farming.
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Would it be fair to assume that the most active players in CoH hold most of the wealth?
Would it be fair to assume that the forums represent a cross-section of the most active players?
If so, then you might apply the Pareto principle to your data. Using 100k total active players, we would then say that the top 20K hold 80% of the total wealth. Extrapolating your data over 20k players yields about 364 trillion inf. Divide that by 80%, and you have 455 trillion total inf in the game.
There are a lot of assumptions in that analysis which may not be accurate at all, but it's one other way to look at the data.
@TopDoc: See post #26 in this thread for a link to the Survey thread (In Player
Questions, where more folks are/were likely to see it).
@Intrinsic: That's as reasonable for this data as any other approach, and for
a quick napkin calculation it puts it right into the range I'm talking about.
FYI, the Pareto Law is based on a Pareto Distribution (Exponential / Power Law) for
income distribution, which is one of the other key statistical distributions applied
to income along with the log-normal distribution.
They both yield comparable fits for income distribution, though it's not always
80/20, and various white-papers quibble about which curve is best.
@Arcanaville: My issue with the devs number beyond the obvious 1000X error
in reporting is twofold.
Given that first misreport, how do I know they didn't mean 560T?
That's only 10X more than 56T and would be right in the 400-2Q range I listed
(especially, considering that was nearly a year ago now at this point).
Secondly, *what* was counted? Was that just loose inf on toons? Did it include
WW bids (Several of us have billions stored that way)?
I would love to see a definitive number from them that A> Makes sense in the
first place, and B> Gives us an idea of what was actually considered.
As for the inf sink, this is a very good point. However, that should already be
removed from the equation (in my Survey) based on the fact that I *only*
counted inf and bids, and intentionally omitted sales and storage.
Any sinks are already long gone and not part of the total, and 2+ Trillion was
the result from a mere 123 accounts.
@Fulmens: 4X? Nice
Let me see if I can toss out a few more factors to bump it up a little higher.
First, your point is that you recognize some of the big-hitters who are actively
trading in your niches. Fair enough - I do too.
However, that omits several other wealth vectors that will leave no discernible
trail at all, all based on folks who aren't buying, but simply selling their shinies.
For instance:
PvP IO farmers: They get the recipe, and drop it on the market (as is or crafted)
for big bucks.
iTrialers: On many servers there are several folks that run those each day, all day
That's a pretty nice chunk of cash in itself, not to mention what they can do with
Astrals as well. TF's (minus the astrals) are also pretty lucrative this way.
AE'ers: During CEBR, I dabbled with it and simply traded my tix for rare salvage,
to the tune of 600M (on *one* toon). While we know the Devs were unhappy
about CEBR, AE ticket farming still remains a pretty lucrative approach.
Gold Farmers: We've conjectured about these guys here before. Maybe they're
avid marketers, but the consensus seems to be that they're folks running a handful
of missions over and over all day, and (presumably) selling their drops.
H/V-Merits: With Tips and SSA's this is about as cheap a way to get into the
high wealth categories as there is - 4-5 merits/week exchanged for key recipes
is Big cash.
I think there are several vectors to Category C (at least) that leave no visible
signatures apart from simple transaction activity in sales.
I don't find it a stretch to think there could be thousand people or more across those
groups who may fit into Categories A-B. <shrug>
When I look at the data and its distribution, and I mull that over with some
activity and category analysis, I keep running into a LOT of inf in-game even
when I try to pare it down.
Mind you, I'm not adamant about my numbers, although I do think the rationale
behind them is sound.
If the rationale actually IS sound, it gets much more difficult to arbitrarily shrink
the A and B counts.
The numbers, the graph distribution, and the vectors for making Big Inf keep
suggesting otherwise.
Regards,
4
I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is definitely better.
Light is faster than sound - that's why some people look smart until they speak.
For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich,
there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. - Obitus.
Quote:
Good question, and I'm not sure. I'll see if I can clarify that.|
Originally Posted by FourSpeed
@Arcanaville: My issue with the devs number beyond the obvious 1000X error
in reporting is twofold. Given that first misreport, how do I know they didn't mean 560T? That's only 10X more than 56T and would be right in the 400-2Q range I listed (especially, considering that was nearly a year ago now at this point). Secondly, *what* was counted? Was that just loose inf on toons? Did it include WW bids (Several of us have billions stored that way)? |
But as to the question of why I believe the most likely number was 56 trillion, I don't think someone datamined the value and wrote it down as a number, if so that number would have just been copied into the graphic. In fact, to make it more impressive looking they might have actually reported the actual datamined number: 56,054,898,325,201 tends to look more impressive with the useless precision. My guess, and its an educated guess, is someone told the graphics artist "its about 56 trillion" and the artist then translated that number incorrectly into digits. That would make it more likely to be off by a whole group of zeros. In other words, I think the error went 56 trillion -> 56 billion -> 56,000,000,000. I think its a lot less likely that it went 560,054,898,325,201 -> 560,000,000,000,000 -> 56,000,000,000. But that's of course a guess.
Quote:
|
I would love to see a definitive number from them that A> Makes sense in the first place, and B> Gives us an idea of what was actually considered. |
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And I seriously doubt those people have gotten poorer.
My example of someone who's really, really rich is PumBumbler, who is a forumgoer but only peripherally visits the Market forum. The guy just likes to play and keeps running up against the 9999 merit limit
FourSpeed's calculation is a good mental tool; we can play with the dials all we like and get highly variable answers, but it's a good tool to get within, say, an order of magnitude. I think there are half as many total players as FourSpeed does, but more of them have broken the 2-billion-inf mark.
it also calculates based on a population field, so it's pretty easy to play with it
(sorry I can't make the sheet itself available - it's on my work computer,
so sharing it is verboten).
In any case, I thought it might be interesting to survey our forum goers (in
this thread) to see if we can get a better idea of what those percentages might
be.
Certainly, there are caveats with using the forum population in lieu of the game's
population, but more data would be helpful, and I'd expect the forum group
to be better informed, and therefore probably wealthier, than the average player.
As noted yesterday, the higher tier categories have a larger effect, so this
informal survey would give us a useful (if incomplete) minimal estimate.
In any case, feel free to participate: I'll tally up the various categories in a few
days and see where that leads.
Cheers,
4
PS> My estimate on the revised sheet is ~161.4 Trillion
I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is definitely better.
Light is faster than sound - that's why some people look smart until they speak.
For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich,
there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. - Obitus.