Inf Supply: Idle Speculation

As far as the unwashed masses:

I think a lot of people get discouraged early by the market: they press the lever and get a shock, so they don't press the lever again.

Now those same people pressed the lever and got a pellet of food, so they're gonna press the lever some more.

I think we're gonna see some new marketeers come out of all this.

If an obscure, low-margin trick can get me 200 million per AM (Midlevel Crisis: The Revenge) I think it's going to be a long time before we run out of massive and easy profits.

*blushes* So it was.

Well, I was sitting on 70 billion, spread out in bids, with 16 e-mails of 500 mill each.

Then, I did a respec, and somehow, I still spent 7 billion. I could have bought recipes and crafted instead, but recipes seem to be costing more than the ios.

Wouldn't ya know it, tho - I already made a billion and a half back - and expect I'll be back up to that total in a couple of days.

wait - it was only 6 billion. I used 1 billion to place some lowball bids to recoup the cost of the build.

The best part was instead of grinding through AE and council missions to fund the build, task forces with the merits and SSAs now seem to do the trick - and I was doing those anyway.

Some new information appears: http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/n..._continues.php

Well, that gives us a plausible upper range of about 168 trillion, assuming scrappers are at least on the high end of the total wealth count. That's... a ways to go, huh.

That number makes me giggle. I'm not even sure why.

Totally off-topic. Good lord, mac, is that avatar for real?

I think people might be spending more freely just because there are so many ways to get the enhancements you want/need now.

When the only way to get 'em was either the market or merits you had to be a little tight and bid well and long just to preserve your pile for the next purchase/build.

But now who cares if you spend a little extra inf?

I don't have to worry about whether 3 sets of Thunderstrike at level 30 are going to be available or affordable. I'll buy what I can with inf or maybe the SBE's or trade in some merits or do some AE tickets or even AM.

Heh. I had gotten my answer from mac in-game, but it was the one with the guy pwning himself with a flash-bang grenade.

Hmmmm... Ok, I did some more digging...

I went to look for Arcanaville's thread about AT Popularity that she originally
took from a BaBs post circa 2008-2009 and found her re-post here.

Basically, ~13.5% of active toons played when that came out were Scrappers.

Assuming the numbers hold, let's imagine that 13.5% of the 43M toons created
are scrappers (disregarding whether they're active or not at this point)

That would imply that appx 5.8M toons have appx 12T on them (no mention
is made whether that is their simple inf total, or if it includes stored bids, gleemail,
SG storage etc.). I'll assume that it's cash directly on hand straight-up.

On average then, each scrapper toon would have ~2M on them (2,067,183), which
seems like a pittance over all.

That said, if I extrapolate that over the 43M total toons, I come up with a total
of 88.9T in "cash" -- that ought to make Fulmens proud.

However, I don't begin to think that covers the story at all.

Edit:
Zeroth: I've assumed that 13.5% is still an accurate portrayal these days
although I suspect it isn't. Still, we've not seen anything to state otherwise
in that time.
/Edit

First it assumes that all AT's make inf at the same rate - a point we know is clearly
NOT true, just by looking at simple Farming Builds, nevermind any other factors.

Second, it presumes that the bulk of our wealth is on-hand cash - another point I
know to be untrue. Only about 10% of mine is "cash-on-hand", and amusingly
enough in my case, almost none of that on a scrapper (I've not made a scrapper
since I-2 days, and never gotten one above L15)

My 30B+ wouldn't even be counted at all in their figure.

Third, even among the AT's I *do* play, my wealth isn't spread evenly - For instance,
I have a Stalker and a Widow that have ~60% of my entire wealth on just those two
toons even though I also have billionaire Blasters, Controllers, and Brutes.

Fourth, we're using generic averages. With average cash on hand of 2M, clearly,
none of *those* toons would be marketeers

Unfortunately, the "12T on Scrappers", doesn't actually give us any meaningful
information about the amount of inf in-game. That 12T could easily be 120T,
if like me, they store a lot of inf in market bids. It could be the bulk of an account's
wealth, or it could be virtually none of it - depending on how "Scrapperific" their
owners tend to be.

One thing I think would be fairly self evident at this point is that 100T would
be an absolute, bare-bones, rock-bottom minimum for an in-game number.

For me, I find the 43M toons and the 500K accounts with at least one L50 toon
on them far more intriguing to the in-game influence question, and I think that
analysis points to a LOT more than 100T in-game. Once again, a number 10X
higher than that would not surprise me in the slightest.


Regards,
4

It's amazing how I get a number and I'm immediately not happy with it.

What percentage of the L50 accounts are "PLed to 50 thinking it would be the start of the 'real game', left disappointed?" What percentage are multiboxer accounts? What percentage left before the Invention system and never made more than 15 million inf total? What percentage are AE babies who, again, left disappointed? I don't know if those, and similar, categories add up to 50%, 90%, or anything in between.

*sigh*

There was in fact a short downward spike when the rest of the converters went live- and one the weekend after. I bought a batch of 3% Defenses at slightly over 200M and sold them for 3-400M, and did the same with 3% Resists on the next spike.

One aspect might be that a "12 billion inf" build now only costs, say, 8 billion (or 6 if you are slow and careful in your buying.) So if you were saving up 12 billion and you get bargains on the big things, you don't care so much if you overspend on the little things.

So I was thinking about this thread recently, and it occurred to me that I hadn't actually seen anyone attempt to analyze how much influence is likely sitting in the markets tied up in bids, which one would assume is a potentially large reservoir of influence (if someone has already done this, well another set of eyeballs can't hurt).

I didn't have time to do a complete analysis, but I did try to narrow the range of possible values. I specifically looked at the number of bids for a bunch of things I thought were likely to be capable of holding a lot of influence (and in some cases unlikely but easy to count). In round numbers (because the numbers certainly fluctuate over time anyway, and this is a rough estimate regardless):

ATIOs: 8,900
Crafted Purple Enhancements: 9,600
Crafted PvPIOs: 7,200
HOs: 4,700
Purple Recipes: 6,100
PvP Recipes: 6,500
Recipe: Maelstrom's Pistol: 153

All Salvage Combined: 144,000
Crafted Common IOs: 14,000

Its clear that salvage and things like common IOs don't account for much. Assuming the average bid on salvage is 3 million inf (which its not; even accounting for strange bids on base salvage) and the average bid on common IOs is 1 million inf, the combined total is only about 450 billion inf. Not much. Ditto Maelstrom's pistol: at best that's 150 billion. Toss that into salvage and common IOs and you have about 600 billion inf, less than one trillion inf.

If we assume the average bids for ATIOs is about 100M, Crafted Purples is 500M, Crafted PvPIOs is about 400M, HOs is 100M, Purple and PvP recipes is about 300M, and multiply out, we get about a total of about 13.5 trillion influence. If we assume that the total market is twice what I've listed above, and I think what I listed above is likely to be more than half the total market, then that means a reasonable estimate for the maximum credible amount of total influence stored on the markets is about 27 trillion.

If we think players have far more than 100 trillion, then actually the amount of influence tied up in the markets is an insignificant fraction of the influence out there at any moment in time, and the vast majority of influence out there is stored directly on individual characters or in global email. And that seems shaky.

Or is it possible that I've overlooked a massive place to store influence that is not in one of the above categories? For reference, what I did was select only items that had bids (using the radio button) and then tallied up all of the bid totals for every item that showed up. I double-checked to ensure the system actually showed all the items that had bids, and I tallied up regardless of level. In each category's case, I believe I've set a very high estimate for the maximum likely average bid size, whether people were bidding to buy or storing influence in bids without intention to buy, although I'm open to suggestions on where those numbers might somehow be low.

Unless there's a critical flaw in this estimate, there's actually far less influence sitting in the markets than I first thought. And by extension, that makes influence estimates of hundreds of trillions of inf in circulation much more shaky in my eyes. I'm also taking note of the fact that something between 15 and 25 trillion influence on the markets actually meshes reasonably well with the devs statement that 12 trillion was in the hands of scrappers, previously stated to be the richest archetype in general. Those proportions "feel" more correct to me intuitively.