The Best Time of My Life

I've never cared for the big $$ sinks to solve video game inflation, because, as Arcanaville pointed out, they rarely impact the big fish and can really impede the small fish.
(Perhaps this is all 'no-duh' territory, but I've never really discussed the topic much)
The problem I have with doing the above is the nature of in-game moneys:

First of all, because games are inherently for fun and the further impeding of people who play less often, who don't chase after in-game money as much as others... impedes their fun (when encountering sizable money sinks). Which, eventually impedes all players' fun (everybody's fun bounces off of each other in these community games).

The cause is mostly that you basically have tireless virtual workers that can put out productive efforts unlike any mortal... but that is generally only if you want to spend your game time doing as such. And, no matter how quickly you might earn money playing casually... the people playing above that (and the people pushing way, way, way beyond that) are making it just as easy multiplied by a large integer.

Now, especially within CoH, the diversity of legitimate playstyles and approaches counters the nature of penalizing players for not approaching the game with the goal of optimal income earning.

Now, I, personally, never found the inflation in this game to be very hurtful. And I have been a player that doesn't run TFs very often, doesn't ever farm, usually only plays a few hours a week and when I play more often, tend to spend a lot of that time not really earning things quickly (I might be role-playing for hours or I might just be playing through a story arc very slowly). Perhaps I didn't encounter money problems because I didn't chase after IOs, so I wasn't spending all that much on my enhancements (I usually just created highest level standard IOs).
And, at least you could really turn quick profits with just a little bit of smarts on the market.
Most importantly, I seemed to earn plenty from just simply playing (very causally).
Although, my wife believes (and points out regularly) that my main, Electric-Knight, was exceedingly fortunate in all of the recipes and salvages that I'd get in missions and sell for millions. *shrug*
It's hard to say... I did have a lot more than her, but I don't honestly know how much of it was luck (She's not reading this, is she??) and how much may have been better money management.

In-Game economics are just a whacky thing to me and always have been.
I understand the concept of the fairness in work more, get more, but I think the bottom line always has to be (from the designers): What measurements of time+accomplishments are we using for the baseline of keeping it fun for everyone?
And then, everything above that is just fat cat city.
The tricky part is not really wanting too many people to fall below that level, otherwise it's just unmanageable doubleplus unfun for those players, I'd imagine.

Anyway, the inflated economy worked well for me, despite me not being a fat cat (although, winning a billion Inf in a huge cross-server costume contest did make my final results look a little fatter. Still, I never even tapped into that).

Actually, I'm more curious about what was actually low and what was average than I am about what was the richest.

I have been loving the new demorecord tools BP
Wish I had known about all this stuff sooner.

There's also the fact that at least some of us have more or less liquidated our fortunes.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Oh, one question I been meaning to answer.

Why Didn't We Do Name Purges?

We all really did want to do a name purge. But there were a few major issues.


Technical Reason
The biggest being we didn't have any way of doing it. There IS no name purge tool. The first (and last) time we did it was by using an incredibly unstable ad-hoc script, which caused a ton of issues when it was finally done. You guys may not have seen it, but it broke a lot of things in the account database. Even if we wanted to run it again, we couldn't as the databases had changed too much since then.

So then the question came to how do we create a brand-new tool? It may seem like it's "just data," but keep in mind it's incredibly disorganized data. And it was stored in systems that were designed by folks who were no longer at the studio.

What should have been a simple task ended up becoming an enormous challenge, one which would have required significant resources to pull off, which would have come at the expense of content. Having a small team meant that EVERYTHING was a trade-off.


Business Reason
We also had a hard time figuring out best time to do it. With both Going Rogue and Freedom, we knew a lot of former players would come back. If they came back and found that they lost their name though, they'd be a lot less likely to stick around. Their name was an important part of their character.

So the trick was finding the right time when we had development resources AND we weren't getting a constant flood of returning players.

We're still figuring out when that time would be.

I will always remember Black Pebble like this: