Inf Supply: Idle Speculation

Quite right: I forgot to add in the 51-53s although I don't know why because I did remember to actually count them; the total number of bids for all level 51 through 53 recipes and crafted inventions of all kinds is about 9230. That's not a lot: at 200 million per bid that's about 2 trillion inf, and about 9 trillion if they were all billion inf bids (which seems unlikely).

That still doesn't get into numbers that would seem to be likely if hundreds of trillions of inf were in circulation. And even if I overlooked an item somewhere, we're talking about something on the order of a half a million bids necessary to store a hundred trillion inf. I don't think its likely I'm going to find half a million bids somewhere storing inf. You'd expect to find hundreds of items storing thousands of bids, but the top dozen items probably has over half the storage bids and in just a few hundred to a few thousand per item.

In actual fact, it is likely that the total influence stored in the bids I mentioned in the first post is vastly lower than what I calculated: that was just the upper bound for the amount of inf that was likely tied up in those bids. Only a small fraction of them are likely storage bids of some kind.

But that makes the projected amount of influence in the markets even lower: possibly as low as ten to fifteen trillion as a ballpark figure.

I seriously doubt that number because if it were correct it would mean I am personally holding about 5% of all the games liquid inf and that doesn't seem likely.

So where is it then? There's no such thing as a hidden bid. If the bids exist, they exist in an item I haven't seen yet, or the markets have a serious display bug in the bid counters. But I'm open to corrections. Its not hard to spot places a lot of people stuff bids to hold influence, and they only have thousands, not hundreds of thousands, of bids.

Also, this is just a projection of the influence in the markets, not the game as a whole. The presumption made is often that the influence we can estimate in the hands of player characters (or the devs might be counting) could be only a tiny fraction of the total. But that doesn't seem to be the case. The amount in the hands of players could, by the devs numbers, be on the order of 50 to 100 trillion. I was just trying to discount the idea that another 300 trillion might be in the markets. I can't find anywhere for those hundreds of trillions to be.

I don't make the claim of knowing where it is I am just pointing out that if your statement is taken as true there are some pretty big logical inconsistencies that pop up. You would expect to see more effects from the people burning inf, a much larger deflationary effect from superpacks, hero merits converter purchases etc.

I did notice while scanning for bids the market was a little inconsistent about presenting all of a category.

I'm not sure if we can call them logical inconsistencies when so much of the mechanics of influence circulation is guesswork. But I'm inclined to believe in the absence of an error that this indicates a much lower supply of influence than has been assumed, because one of the presumed storage areas seems incapable of holding as much influence as earlier suggested. Unless, of course, the market interfaces are off to the tune of hundreds of thousands of bids. Each trillion inf requires at least 500 to 5000 bids to store on the markets, depending on storage methodology, at a minimum. There aren't many things, as far as I can see, that even have more than 5000 bids in them capable of storing significant influence (i.e. not things like common salvage).

If I had to guess, my guess is that influence is destroyed at a lot higher rate than presumed, to the tune of trillions, perhaps tens of trillions of inf a year more than estimated. But honestly, I didn't expect to see the potential storage value that low. I actually expected to find fifty to a hundred trillion inf on the markets that I could reasonably account for. I have to stretch to guestimate ten or fifteen trillion, which is unexpected.

Hmm

100,000 accounts in the game

For the sake of argument

100 mil on average in email/ account
An average of 3 alts per account
an average of 100 mill stored on each alt

There is 40 trillion right there.

Now if we assume an average of 1 scrapper/account we know the devs pegged the number at 12 trillion inf on scrappers. That gives us 120 million per scrapper and they are the most popular AT so that jibes with the 100 mil average per alt.

All you would need to get higher numbers of inf out there would be more Alts.

I know...well I hada friend that used to game with his family. The main one had a Fire/Fire Tanker that just logged in to farm Freaks day in and day out, then run high level TFs. He said (and I have no reason to dismiss him) that he had around 3 billion sitting across alts because "he did not trust the markets to be stable and not crash" in his own words. I myself have inf across a bunch of alts.

Remember that there are items that can no longer be produced such as Base Salvage which have bids on them. I personally have made "accidental fortunes" logging legacy alts, placing base salvage on the market for 1 Inf then getting 50 million times a bunch. That's not even counting level 1-49 HOs or SHO bids, level 53 bids...there is a LOT of inf out there. Right now I'm purpling/PVPIOng a future level 50 Dark/EM Blaster and my liquid inf has dropped slightly below 5 billion...guess I'll have to throw a bunch of purples on the Market or sell some crafted IOs...

Again, TLDR: Inactive accounts ftw. I recall @xxBudweiser23xX (or was the 23 even in there...) had close to a trillion across his 11 accounts before he went F2P...and stopped playing altogether.

It was an interesting way to do it, but I doubt many other people were doing it that way based on conversations with other marketeers.


I did count both crafted enhancements and recipes in the total. I didn't break them out because from a storage perspective they are basically identical. But there were, at the time I looked, about 5260 51-53 recipe bids and 3970 51 to 53 crafted bids.

The numbers are there in theory, but they require huge participation by the entire playerbase which seems unlikely. The original presumptions were that only a fraction of the playerbase could be responsible for a huge amount of influence. But if that assumption is faulty, there is no missing influence to account for. In that case, the question becomes why is it reasonable to assume, with no other evidence to support it, that hundreds of trillions of influence exist within a hundreds of thousands of alts collectively storing a huge amount of influence.

I assume you read my post in which I tallied all the bids on all such items I could account for (plus the addendum reply to Another_Fan which shows the 51-53 bids). Do you have a specific one you believe that list omits?

On the subject of whether people use the "ten bid" system or storing in one large bid: there are *lots* of items with multiples of ten (sometimes exactly ten) bids in them - usually the ones with small numbers of bids suggesting a few or as little as one bidder using it for storage. It suggests that the more common practice is to stuff with ten bids in a slot, although it does not say what the actual percentages might be.

But even if you multiply all my numbers for bids that could be used in that manner by 10, you still don't get hundreds of trillions of influence. Nine trillion could be 90, but it cannot be 400. The numbers still simply don't exist on the markets.

It seems less likely that there is more influence in global mail than the markets, certainly not an order of magnitude more. There could be in actual characters, but that requires making some very large assumptions about the amount of influence people store on individual alts. In the absence of any other calculations, would it sound like a reasonable assumption to assume that a couple hundred thousand alts had an average of a billion inf each, or alternatively millions of alts had an average of hundreds of millions of inf each?

That's what it takes to get to hundreds of trillions of inf. Tens of trillions the markets and conservative estimates of character inf can reach. Hundreds of trillions and it seems the markets cease to be particularly helpful to account for that level of inf, and the numbers for character storage seem to get very large very fast.

I thought about that, but "12 trillion on Scrappers" includes everyone's scrapper alts, unless we're assuming that storage alts are preferentially some other AT. So if it's out there, we'd be seeing it. (I don't see the overhead as prohibitive; making two billion inf takes a few hours, levelling a storage alt to 10 adds maybe half an hour. I could store 100 billion personally on characters with actual names and playtime and not run out of alts. )

Looking at the information that was posted, we have 500,000 accounts hit 50. Getting to 50 generates roughly 40,000,000 inf. So if you use 40 million and 1 alt as the low end of the wealth distribution curve across that number its pretty easy to have that much inf in the game. If the wealth distribution obeys the 20/80 rule it does in real life it's more likely

Edit: The real question is which numbers or assumptions are wrong ? The 12 trillion held by scrappers, 500,000 accounts to 50, behavior of the "average player". I favor the 12 trillion being off seeing as the last time the devs gave us an inf number it was 56 billion.

That generates a lower bound limit for influence *generated* at 20 trillion. That's an inconsequential number compared to the hundreds of trillions conjectured to be in circulation, and doesn't factor in any influence destruction due to market activities. In fact, when I did that calculation myself it sounded to me to be of comparable magnitude to the estimated influence destruction likely over time from market activities: tens of trillions of inf.

On the generation side, all I get are estimates of tens of trillions of inf generated and tens of trillions of inf destroyed, which makes the lower figure of merit estimate tens of trillions of inf.

My guess is that farming or just plain playing at level 50 is more likely to generate more influence than leveling to produce the numbers the devs have given. But while its possible for the playerbase to generate hundreds of trillions of inf in theory, I still don't see compelling evidence that the activity required is likely to be happening. Its not unlikely either: there's just no strong evidence either way. But before I looked at the markets I believe everyone including myself assumed that if large amounts of influence existed, the markets would be one large reservoir of it. At the moment, I don't see enough bids to make that likely.

That automatically means that prior dev reporting errors aside, the assumptions players have made appear more shaky than they originally appeared to be. Its not a question of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that hundreds of trillions of inf don't exist in circulation, its a question of whether the analysis that suggested that amount is solid. I think its much more questionable without a gigantic influence reservoir in the markets.

It's entirely possible, though, that there is skew in what people who do that sort of thing use as the AT of their "bank" characters. Especially if such players are rarefied enough that their personal preferences don't "average out".

One observation: since Scrappers were identified as the most popular alt at the level cap, that would imply that all other things being equal they should also be the richest archetype in terms of influence generated. If they are also the richest archetype in terms of influence held, that would imply that either influence warehousing coincidentally parallels that, or most of the influence in circulation exists on characters and not in other storage environments, or other storage environments were not counted by the devs in that calculation. With the markets at least at the moment apparently having a limited amount of influence, that makes two separate pieces of information suggest that there is a strong possibility that the number of players that actually accumulate and then keep large amounts of influence separate from generating it and holding it potentially very small compared to the playerbase as a whole. We might be talking about dozens to hundreds of players at most. Their behavior may not average out, but it also might not be very large compared to the playerbase as a whole.

Actually the exact opposite.

Its incredibly unlikely the wealth distribution is going to be linear. If it obeys the 20/80 rule the way real world wealth distributions do

80 % of the pop = 16 trillion inf (assumes 80% have the very minimum)
20% of the pop = 64 trillion inf

So we are talking about 80 trillion as a minimum.

Now seeing as we are talking about 100,000 accounts in that 20% and we know at the top end there at least 4 trillionaires, it suggests that the size of curve is considerably larger.

I don't think you can get there directly, because you can't automatically call that calculation the 80% even if the 80/20 rule holds. And its unlikely to hold strongly for the specific case where there is a variable driver: there is a driver for influence generation from level 1 to level 50 that vanishes at level 50. The 80/20 rule, if it applies at all, is far more likely to apply to all influence generated at level 50, but there's no current way I can see to estimate the proportion between leveling generated influence and level capo generated influence.

Agreed. I only meant to suggest that it might not be safe to assume that the ratio of Scrappers to other ATs might not follow among those who use characters as banks. But I don't mean to suggest that means they are actually hiding inf of the magnitudes being discussed. I mean, they might be, but I think the effort required, while not immense, is potentially distracting enough to make it a relatively rare approach. Even using Fulmens' 100B number, it would take what seems like an awful lot of people creating a lot of banker characters to hide on the order of 100T.

I was only using the population of 50s

edit to be precise accounts that had made it to 50

Some percentage of the 50s are part of the 80%, and some are part of the 20%. It doesn't seem currently possible to know what that percentage is so it seems currently impossible to to know how large the 20% is and how much influence they have.

Another issue with the calculation of how much influence is earned from 1 to 50 is that a substantial amount of it is likely destroyed by the player through enhancement purchases. Before the markets existed influence was constrained until the late 30s, sometimes for some players to the low 40s. The markets didn't increase the amount of influence generated, it only allowed influence to flow between characters. If that same influence destruction occurs now at similar rates then the amount of inf earned through leveling might be insubstantial compared to the influence earned by level capped characters.