Inf Supply: Idle Speculation

I wonder if the answer to the implied prevalence of poorness is simple, but seemingly impossibly mystifying to those of us who regular these forums. To this day there are people who almost completely avoid the auction houses. Some find the market thematically distasteful, some are afraid of the learning curve, and some just don't care if their characters have the best enhancements, even if that just means SOs at 22.

It may suggest assume that actually only a small part of the game population uses the market with anything like expertise, and only a small part of that subset of the population is actually toting around even hundreds of millions, let alone billions of inf.

Another thing to consider: it may be common for people to use the market effectively, but only to the degree they need to buy what they want, when they decide to try and get it. In other words, they may not use the market to earn inf which they keep, but rather only earn enough to buy what they want and then stop, presumably until the next time they want something. See the earlier question wondering why people are storing billions of inf.

A few more random thoughts:

If characters are net inf burners before level 30 and that is the level that many blasters are abandoned then there may be many sitting there with expired enhancements, unfilled slots, and no influence.

Gleemail could account for some of that also. A player has multiple alts most of which are abandoned and they all have some small amount of influence on them. They have 1 level 50 that they play as a main that they wish to outfit decently. They siphon off all the influence from all their other alts to "uber out" one toon. Leaving the rest of the account (and the level 50 once it is outfitted) literally barren.

I logged on to a level 50 of mine that is on a server I no longer play on. I had not played it since before I9. It was all level 50++ SOs and had a handful of HOs (some of which were HO+). The toon had a total of 1.7 million influence on it.

You all remember how many people we used to get in here on almost a daily basis that complained about how hard inf was to come by and that ebil marketeers were destroying the game?

Remember when base construction switched over to using invention salvage and how angry the base builders were about that? They blamed US for making it hard for them to build their bases because "salvage" was too expensive for them. The few of us that went in there to try to help them with influence earning tips were run out on rails and not at all politely.

I could believe that most accounts are near 0 inf accounts if that represented a majority of the casual players rather than a small fraction of the player base.

I can believe that many or even "most" casual accounts are flat a$$ broke. Especially those that level to 50 and then alt "because that toon is finished."

I've met a lot of people who, when I ask, are happy to learn how to market. I don't think that there's a lot of RESISTANCE to learning to market, they just don't know where to go to learn.

Of course I'm mostly helping people who have SG's and want prestige, so I'm self-selecting my audience.

What springs to my mind with that is that I don't think it lines up very well with any of the analysis I've seen done for estimating the number of active subscriptions we've seen done in the threads that crop up when the NCSoft quarterly numbers come out. I may be on shakey ground here, because I didn't do any of those analyses, so I can't readily defend their conclusions, but let me at least mention them.

Up until Freedom, and if I remember correctly, the latest of those subscriber estimates put the number of paid subscriptions somewhere in the 65k-85k range. So the low-end estimate over 4x larger than what's required to make the Inf numbers line up. (For 85% or more of 100k accounts to be inactive, then that's only 15k active accounts, and 65k is more than 4 x 15k.) If the 65k number is even close to right, that doesn't seem very Occam's Razory to me. So I think something has to be really horribly wrong with those subscription estimates (not impossible) or for some 40,000 people to have been paying for subs they weren't really using (that seems to break Occam for me), or we're still missing something in the market usage model.

I do think it's unwise to ascribe to in-game markets the same assumptions that are valid in real-world markets. The actors have related but potentially critically different drivers. No one in an MMO will starve if they don't make money. (Well, OK, not in this MMO.) Being rich in an MMO almost certainly won't earn you the same things it often will in the real world - better health, financial security for offspring, maybe a bigger pool of sex/relationship partners.

I know that Pareto shows up in more places than (real world) wealth distribution, but I think it's a reasonable concern that the absence of directly comparable drivers might at least shift k away from 20%.

Fourspeed's assuming 10% of 500K accounts; Uberguy is assuming 15% of 100K accounts. Someone's misunderstanding someone there [possibly me, misunderstanding both.]

10% of all accounts with fifties being active seems like a plausible bet to me; a LOT of my old friends from the game no longer play (and those were people with a big batch of fifties each.) Five of the core eight Viva Las Vegas players aren't around any more, for instance. Most of my global friends list is nothing but memories. It's been eight years, and if most people who get a 50 stick around for a year or so... 10% is a decent approximation of that.

EDIT: Slow hands. Fourspeed got there first.

Another reason Pareto may not apply: we have a two-tier system where you can SO out for far, far less inf than a "basic" IO build. So you might have 80% of the people using SO's and only 20% even in 'the market' at all.

Stratonexus: you can send an email to your own character [not your global] explaining what you're bidding on and why. I don't know if that's more trouble than it's worth; in a post-scarcity game like this one, you can always make more inf.