Inf Supply: Idle Speculation

Arcanaville: While sub-30 characters are definitely net consumers of inf, they aren't *large* net consumers of inf. 0 to 30 on DO/SOs is under 3 million inf, or roughly what a 50 makes in an hour when not even trying. Even if that under-30 creates salvage that sells for a couple million, or a recipe that sells for 15 or 20 million... they're not making a big dent in the inf supply.
The ability to convert purples made a much larger dent in total, I think: a sleep purple can now sell for 200 million as a recipe, 300 million crafted, get converted into an Apocalypse and sell for 400 million- plus the cost of the converters, the crafting cost, and the Wentfee on the salvage. You're potentially approaching 100M destroyed for a single IO. (I don't know if that happens often; I imagine some of those 300-million-inf mezzes I sold got converted, but I don't know if they got resold after that.)

100 million inf is 30 characters' 0-to-30 trip funded. Less if they do a lot of tooling up at Wents (L4: buy and craft plasmatic taser, kinetic damper, backup radio, medkit, and recovery serum. While you're there, might as well pick up a jetpack. And the envenomed dagger you'll need eventually. )

A couple of notes on this subject:

I routinely gleemail my new alts 5.000.000 inf at their "birth." It used to be that prior to level 25 I used more than I earned.

However at level 25 this trend tends to reverse now and I start earning a bit more than I spend. A majority of the reason for this is that at about level 22 I start frankenslotting IOs for effect. Since I never need to replace these IOs I no longer spend inf upgrading them.

Every 2 levels to level 30 I have to create 3 new IOs but usually by this time I am earning Merits, A merits, and now converters. Slotting what I want as I get it and selling the things that I don't need or want. I usually get each character a minimum level miracle +, Numina +/+, and for the squishies a Zephyr -KB. When I hit 50 I am completely frankenslotted and have 25-50 million inf on hand and I have a large stash of unspent Merits, A Merits, and some converters.

The stash that is left and the pile of other rewards is usually enough for me to complete my build (sans purples) before I start working on incarnate content. So I only consume more than I produce from level 1-25.

One Caveat to that. I started a character and neglected to gleemail myself. I jumped in the sewer trials and sold the SOs I couldn't use that I got as drops, used the veteran IOs that I got as powers opened up that could take them, and when I hit level 12 I had enough influence to buy shiney DOs for every slot that didn't have a vet IO in it and still had some inf left over.

I struggled a bit from level 20-level 22 but I think that I could actually make a go of hitting 50 without using more than I produce if I used all the tricks I've learned over the years......

Won't happen 'cause I'm rich, but I think I could probably do it.

I have no idea how the supply of, e.g. "generic level 20 intangibility enhancements" that drop, and what they sell for at the vendor, compares to the amount of DO's and such that used to drop. Looks like a L20 IO recipe sells for 3-4K . If they haven't changed it, DO's sell for similar amounts and drop MUCH less often from L12-19 enemies. (I remember hunting for those occasional Family L20's that used to hang around by the Independence Port gate, because they dropped like 30% DOs instead of like 0.5% DO's . Ah, the bad old days.)

It feels like, if I soloed a level 16 character for X time in I22 vs I7, never touching an auction house, the I22 character would have more inf at the end of that time. However, the I22'er will also have made more progress towards needing their pricey SO's.

I was thinking about another potential data point, but I haven't had the time to really collect it like I wanted to. Supposedly there are about 300,000 super groups in the game. The total prestige they contain could provide an estimate for a lower bound limit on the amount of influence that has been generated in the game. But that's a much trickier analysis for two reasons. First, you can't trivially list all the supergroups to find their prestige counts, and even if you could, tallying 300,000 would be crazy even for me. Second, there's two ways to generate prestige, one by *earning* influence at the same time, and the second by *destroying* influence converting it to prestige.

Having said that, I haven't fully thought out this analysis yet; I've just started collecting data points. But I thought I would share what I have so far for discussion purposes. I looked at the top 100 (heroside) SGs on Freedom, Virtue, and Triumph and calculated their total prestige. What I get is:

Freedom: 23.5 billion
Virtue: 15.5 billion
Triumph: 6 billion

Now there are two main ways to accumulate that influence, separate from the membership bonus (which is inconsequential for the top 100: the smallest of them have over 30 million prestige). You can earn it the same way you earn influence and simultaneously with it. My review of my logs suggest that the ratio of influence and prestige at level 50 is between 100:1 and 200:1 depending on the reward source (bosses have better ratios than minions, for example). The ratio differs at other levels but I'm assuming the ratio at level 50 will dominate for now. If we assume that the top 100 averages about 10 billion prestige across all the servers, then across 15 servers (I'm not counting Exalted for now as its probably too new, although that's my next data point) that's an estimated 150 billion prestige and 15 to 30 trillion influence *generated*. Alternatively, that prestige could be mostly influence conversions at 500:1. In that case, that's 75 trillion influence *destroyed*.

The truth is in the middle somewhere, although the lower bound is a bit lower than 100:1. The lower bound seems to be the case where all that prestige is first earned by activity which earns influence, and then that same influence is exchanged into prestige. If that's done at a 100:1 earning ratio and then converted at a 500:1 ratio that's a net 80:1 influence to prestige ratio, and a lower bound of about 12 trillion influence generated.

In any case, that's not bad given the margins of error we have with other methods: the prestige numbers imply something between 12 and 75 trillion influence created at some point (that's a lower bound obviously, because it only counts the top 100 SGs). However, these numbers don't give a good idea of how much of that influence is still around, because a lot of it could be influence that was generated and then destroyed. Without that, this could be a way to guestimate influence generation rates, but not influence holding rates.


Incidentally, the 80/20 rule does not hold for prestige for the top 100. On Triumph, the top 20 hold 38% of the prestige of the top 100, on Freedom its 54% and on Virtue is 58%. This is possibly because of the issue I mentioned earlier: while its possible the 80/20 rule might hold for the entire player population and the entire supergroup population, there has to be a point where scale invariance breaks down because influence and prestige earning is not themselves scale free. Whether there is any evidence a comparable rule holds below a certain threshold is something I haven't looked at yet.

Also, outside the top SGs there is some evidence that a large percentage of the 300,000 SGs have not earned much or any prestige beyond the membership bonuses awarded per SG member. That's based on a random search through the SG lists on all three servers.

Wow. Get out of circulation for a few days and all heck breaks loose

I don't disagree with most of these points.

I've little doubt that the bulk of the 43M toons are inf deadweight.

I agree the upper category of wealth could easily be a few hundred ppl

I'm fine with L50's being a minority of toons. If I take the simple 500K known
L50's over the 43M character base it's 1.2% by itself (as a minimum).

Agreeing with all those points, and shifting population numbers accordingly in my
spreadsheet (throwing out the real survey, distribution and pareto principle -- all difficult
decisions to justify, mind you) with a 500K account population basis and the
following wealth categories (calculated using middle of range or 100B for A):

Inf   Liquid   Survey     W.A.G (Wild @ss Guess)    
Cat   Wealth   ~Pop %    Pop%      Accts    Amount (T)
--------------------------------------------------
A:     100B+      3       0.05       250     25.0  
B:    50B-100B    6.5     0.20     1,000     75.0
C:    10B-50B    19       0.50     2,500     75.0  
D/E:   1B-10B    38       1.00     5,000     27.5
F:   100M-999M   20       3.00    15,000      8.3
G:    10M-99M     6.5    10.00    50,000      2.8
H:     1M-9M      5      25.00   125,000      0.7
I:      0-999K    2      60.25   301,250      0.2
---------------------------------------------------
               100     100.00   500,000    214.5 T

I have no problem with 4's "headscratcher" numbers for inf. They don't make me scratch anything.

I'm not sure, but I have maybe 100 alts scattered around the place. Most of them are, like, "that ff/archer on Guardian at level 12 I made to play with a friend's 50" or "those three Luck Charmers below level 20" or "the Paragon City Power and Light char at level 16". The LC's might have a million or two each, but by far most of my alts are below level 22, and have less than a million inf each. Most probably have less than 100K each. Even my beached 50's are sitting on only a few million each. (For me to bring them back to regular play, I'd have to start by respeccing into inherent fitness...)

I ran into someone the other day who probably had never seen 15 million inf in one place at one time. They had a new SG that was in the negatives for prestige (some people had quit the SG) and had no idea how to fix that. I made a donation. So there really are a lot of people who are just ... not like us.

Replying to 4's "I don't disagree" post above:

If we have 100K current players (I used to think 50K but my reasoning may no longer be valid in the brave new F2P world) and we have 8 million characters being played [43M-35M] each player is playing 80 characters ON AVERAGE.

I'd be surprised if we have more than a million characters being played in any given week.