Grouchybeast

It looks like this:

A while back, AH prices were trending upwards. The devs could have shrugged, said oh, well, there's nothing we can do to combat inflation in an MMO, it's inevitable, and done nothing. Instead they made a tweaked ratio of inf to drops by removing the XP-to-inf mechanic from turning off XP, which also removed a related AE exploit. There was a lot of drama on the forums and predictions of doom in every direction, but the actual outcome was the prices did stabilise, farmers kept farming, marketeers kept marketing, and everything was fine. So the regime of small, targeted adjustments seems to be going pretty well so far.

They've effectively done this already. There's no need to interact with the 'official' Incarnate storyline at all any more. Incarnate XP starts accumulating automatically once you hit level 50 and goes into unlocking your incarnate slots until they're all unlocked, at which point it stops dropping. Threads and shards drop in normal content, non-Incarnate top-end TF drop Alpha components, and Vet levels award threads and emp merits which can be used to craft other components. It's slower than running trials but perfectly viable.

It's like cake. I can make my own cake which will be cheaper but more time consuming, or I can buy cake from the nice bakery which will be easier but more expensive. Either way I get cake, which is a win for me. What would be weird would be going to the bakery and yelling at them for 'price gouging' because they offered me the option to pay for their turning-flour-eggs-butter-and-sugar-into-cake service and get delicious cake on demand.

AFAIK, loot drops are rolled with the same chance per kill regardless of party size and then assigned to a single character in the party, so they won't increase with more characters on the map. I'm unsure if the exact formula is known, but inf per kill falls as team size increases, but everyone in the gets that per kill amount. So assuming all the inf is pooled at the end, multiboxing will result in more inf but not a straight multiple of the inf a solo character would have got for clearing the same map.

I'm used to threads just getting locked. This thing where the thread gets sat on the naughty step for a day to calm down and think about what it did is new and exciting.

If you're suggesting that AE farmers are not that bright because they just picked a place to farm at random with no clue how good the rewards are, that seems kind of rude.

This is me, basically. The suppression period would probably need to be about a minute before it stopped being an average buff for me.

I built a farmer using Fourspeed's budget farming guide which self-funds as you level. It's really quick and easy and works exactly as advertised. I never got as far as the full level 50 build because I didn't enjoy the actual farming and abandoned the character, but it was an interesting experience.

There are so many great innovations on HC compared to live. On live there was: No level-bucketing of recipes and IOs, so drops were largely worthless for lower-level characters unless you got lucky with a desirable proc. No level-bucketing of salvage, leading to unpredictable supply and price-spikes. No auto-attuning of IOs through the market (maybe not an economic difference since attuning was a late addition, but it's a wonderful QoL change). No normal drops in AE outside of dev choice arcs, leading to hugely inflated market prices for everything desirable (but still lots of AE-levelled characters who wanted to buy them, pushing up demand even higher! Two for one terrible idea!!) No converters (until the very end, when they were rare, expensive and account-bound) which made most drops worthless and some IOs eye-wateringly expensive. No off-market way to buy purples until near the end of the game (with...one of the million weird extra currencies they introduced, I think). No PVP recipe drops outside PVP zones (hello, 4 billion inf IOs!) The HC devs have done a frankly brilliant job of balancing the economy so that a good build is in everyone's reach. On live AE farms were a huge part of the problem. On HC they're a integral part of the economy. They're probably going to get tweaked from time to time, like everything, but there's no sign the devs don't want them here.

The reasons prices were like that on live was largely because of the state of AE on live, and the terrible choices the devs there made about it. Wherever farmers on HC choose to farm we're not going back to those prices, because of the very fundamental differences between the live and HC economies.

Inf/minute, minimally competent marketeering is absolutely the best way to get hold of inf.. The devs don't care, though, as the market is a deflationary force -- although they've certainly said they'd like to revamp the market to make it easier to use, which I guess should reduce inf/minute profitability if it worked out as intended.

Yesterday I unfolded the blanket on the sofa so that it covered the whole sofa instead of just the left-hand end, and my cat responded like it was THE WORST BETRAYAL EVER. She could NEVER SLEEP ON THE SOFA AGAIN. She spent most of the evening dramatically flopping onto other potential sleeping spaces but they were also THE LITERAL WORST and obviously she was soon going to DIE FROM LACK OF NAPS. This evening she's fast asleep on the blanket in the exact centre of the sofa, so I guess THE GREAT SOFA DISASTER OF AUGUST 2022 has somehow been survived.

Only if you assume that the data would clearly show that AE farming has a huge advantage over other types of farming. Perhaps it would turn out that it's roughly equivalent to other popular farms.

They changed it in the second build, which is what I quoted. It's in the current patch notes.

AE farming on live was in a completely different league to HC, especially in the early buggier days when some people were indeed banned for absolutely hammering obvious AE bug exploits. It was nuts. AE was shut down completely a couple of times at least, and other times it was obvious from the effect on the market that there was another exploit in play, but the devs would manage to quietly patch it out before things got out of control again. Over time the more egregious bugs and exploits were hammered out, but for whatever reason they never fixed some of the basic issues like having different drops inside and outside AE, which is why the market on live was a flaming trash fire.

Now I want to make Impostor Man, a villain with a selection of classic hero costumes.

A lot of game exploits are just ways of using the existing game code to do what it was meant to do. What makes then exploits is that the devs have deemed them to be exploits. E.g. Creating mobs in AE that only do fire damage isn't an exploit, because the devs have deemed it to be not an exploit. Running AE farms with XP disabled and Patrol XP active to get significantly higher inf drops was an exploit, because the devs deemed it to be an exploit. Both of those are just using the game as written, but one is still here and one was patched out.

The devs can do it. They have plenty of tools and information available to look at and make decisions about game balance.

Or you could report it via Support, and let Homecoming deal with it.

To be fair, they actually changed AE very significantly right away (normal rewards instead of tickets is a huge change) and then did a couple of tunings over time (halving XP fairly quickly, and then later removing the patrol XP exploit) which in combination with other changes have kept inflation largely under control. It's going an awful lot better than it did on Live, anyway.

For a full and fair comparison, don't forget to run the AE farmer through the outside content.

Indeed. Hence why, as they have said, they don't have anything against farming.

The devs have said multiple times that they don't have anything against farming. The only position they do seem to take on farming is that, in an ideal game, all those different types of farming should give approximately equal rewards, and that none of them should damage the economy.