Grouchybeast

I think the number of people who are slotting only what drops for them is probably really, really small. Most people will be putting their recipes onto the market where, thanks to the magic of level bucketing, it doesn't matter what level they were earned at, they become supply for the full range of the set's levels. Same is true for crafted IOs: once they go onto the market, the level they were crafted at becomes meaningless. With free attuning via the market, the need to replace IOs is much less than is was on live. Also, with all the extra trays it's possible to respec at 50 and pull out more-or-less every IO you have which can then be reused or listed on the market. If they go back onto the market the magic of level bucketing once more makes them available to everyone, no matter what level they want to buy. Anyway, even if players replaced the IOs in every slot at 50 and reused or sold nothing, they're still generating 5 times more recipes than they use, and that will only grow with time if they keep playing after 50.

A level 50 character only has about 90 slots, so even with your most pessimistic estimate, they're still generating over six times more recipes than they can slot themselves. Not all of those 676 recipes will be useful, of course, but with plentiful converters and level bucketing they can all potentially become useful. I'm not sure that the difference between a 6 times recipe excess and an 11 times recipe excess per levelled character would have all that much effect on the market.

The problem with that is that it becomes fantastically complex and time consuming to balance and maintain, and even then there are more players out there willing to spend more time min-maxing than there are devs trying to balance the rewards. That's even before you get down to questions like how would you reward roleplaying, or holding costume contests, or organizing large events like MSRs. I'm just not sure how much effort it's worth from the devs, for a game that is already minimally grindy, and where the game already rewards 'normal' play at a level that allows players to equip their characters with relative ease. I honestly don't think that CoX is difficult enough to merit it.

They're hard to find because of all the thread merging and moving that went on, but @Jimmy addressed farming and marketing here, here, and here. There are other GM/dev posts in that monster thread, but those seem like they cover the main points of HC's views on farming and the market.

Sure, you can try that if you want to lose inf. But if you want to flip, you need to bid above the existing lowest sale prices (because you want to actually buy stock) and list for below the normal highest sale price (because you want to sell stock). All flippers really do is stabilise supply and narrow the gap between high and low prices. Over time, the lower price creeps up, and the higher price creeps down. Eventually, the high and low prices close to within 10%, the niche collapses, and everyone leaves. It really doesn't have as much effect on prices as people tend to think, especially if you're willing to be even mildly patient. Bid one inf more than the flipper, and the next sale is still yours at a low price.. ETA: This is reminding me of all the time I spent on live flipping yellow salvage when AE exploits were in full swing. It was never outstandingly profitable, considering how much time it took, but it was oddly hypnotic watching the stacks of salvage simultaneously filling and emptying.

If converter roulette is market manipulation, then so is a baker buying flour and yeast, turning them into bread, and selling it to customers who would rather buy bread than flour. You can call that market manipulation if you like, but it's a somewhat idiosyncratic definition.

HC seem to be committed to exploring both inf supply reductions and inf sinks, which is good. Back when they last released data for playtime, farming was about 30% of total playtime, and 45% of level 50 playtime, so I suspect that farming is actually responsible for a significant proportion of de novo inf generation. However, as long as the market is performing reasonably well, and prices aren't rising too fast, it doesn't really matter.

What effects the game economy isn't individual players amassing inf, it's the generation of inf from thin air, and even more so the ratio of inf generation to generation of recipes and salvage. If inf generation rapidly outpaces recipes supply (as it did with AE farming on live) prices will spiral. On HC, a combination of normal drops in AE missions and plentiful converters keeps prices remarkably stable for an MMO. Converter roulette is a self-regulating system for turning trash recipes into desirable recipes. It's as though the recipe drop rate constantly adjusted for demand, and is why you don't have to pay 75 million for a LotG +rech on HC. On HC AE farming isn't fundamentally different to regular content, it just happens faster. If the ratio of inf:recipes is balanced in the rest of the game, it's also balanced in AE.

Could you post your build, and maybe a description of your strategy in the mission (do you use binds to combine inspirations, that kind of thing)? I'm pretty sure that there are people around who will be able to help you improve it and farm satisfactorily. I leveled up a self-funding Spines/Fire farming brute according to @FourSpeed's Low Budget Fire Farmer guide. I've never actually used it much, truth be told, but it certainly seemed to perform as described.

IIRC the HC devs have made noises in the past at looking at AFK farming. My guess is that the reason it's gone so long without a nerf is that it isn't, so far, having any negative effect on the game in terms of the economy or anything else, and so it's dropped down the priority list of people with limited time put into the game. I would also guess that if they start to see negative effects of some kind, they'll look harder. At the moment, things seems to be pretty nicely balanced. AE farming on live was terrible for the economy, but that seems to have largely been the result of the way that AE worked on live. HC changes to AE in combination with changes to the market and converters are working out okay at the moment.

I've played since I13, and I had literally no idea about the plot of any of the TFs until I duoed through them a couple of times on HC. It was exciting, after probably several hundred ITFs, to finally find out what those giant ersatz-Nazi robots were doing in Ancient Rome. I only know the plots of a lot of the normal story arcs because I overwhelmingly solo or duo. I think one of the best gameplay improvements the devs could make would be to find a way to mirror mission text to the non-leaders in a team.

I guess I just don't care what farmers are doing with their time, or what rewards they're getting for it. At the end of the day, it has absolutely zero impact on my play. I don't PVP, so the fact that someone levels up a character ten times faster than me, or makes ten times more inf doesn't worry me at all. As long as they're having fun, good for them. I'm happy to leave them to it. Put it this way: let's take your numbers and say that it takes 2 hours to level a character to 50 in AE, and 20 hours to level to 50 using your preferred play style. And let's say that the devs nerf AE farming so that it takes 20 hours to level a character to 50 there, too. The game has literally not changed for you. It took 20 hours before the nerf, it takes 20 hours after. I don't see what benefit you, personally, have gained from that change. The people who are committed to hitting up the content that returns the best rewards for time spent will not spread evenly across the game, they'll simple move on to the next most profitable content, because min-maxing rewards is what they enjoy. (The only thing I do care about is that inf and recipe generation are kept sufficiently in check and in balance that we don't end up with the runaway inflation of live, or with IO prices that make it impossible for the casuals to purple out their warshades should they desire to do so. So far, the HC devs seems to have an excellent handle on this, so I'm happy to trust them to keep monitoring it and react again if it becomes a problem.)

That would be a fair question to ask, except that most content in CoX does get played. Everyone in the game isn't in AE. People are playing TFs, running story arcs, soloing and teaming, It continues to be true, as it was even on the live servers with their much more inflated market, that simply playing the game provides more than enough inf to equip characters. As the saying used to go on the old forums, the game rains inf, all you need to do is hold out a bucket. (And a much smaller bucket, now, since IO prices are in some cases literally orders of magnitude lower.) Farming is entirely optional. I assume that most people who farm are doing it because they enjoy it as an activity, not because they feel forced into it. I guess some people do feel compelled to stick to the gameplay that gives the greatest reward over time, but to my mind, at least in CoX, that's very much a them problem. The game itself easily supports all kind of play styles. HC CoX is just not a very grindy game. I'd say the main clue is that it was released in 2004, when the number of MMOs which existed for the devs to take ideas from could be counted on the fingers of one mitten hand.

Welcome, OP! Don't be disheartened by people recommending against starting in Praetoria. You'll get to see some of the better arc writing in the game, and since it sounds like you're teaming, then the levels will fly past fast enough. Basically, there's very little in TFs that you don't get in missions. Until the very highest levels (50+) of the game TFs are still limited to the same 8-man team size. Also, because CoH has a great mechanism called side-kicking, you're not missing any of the hero or villain TFs. You'll always be able to go back and play any you've levelled past simply by talking to the TF contact, and the game will automatically give you a temporary level adjustment. (You can also access ordinary story arcs you've out-levelled, but that's a little more involved,) Have fun!

Another good thing the HC devs have done (in terms of balancing inf and recipe supply) is to allow normal drops in AE. Now AE produces the same output as normal play, just at a much faster rate. The old AE system where farming there generated inf through enemy defeats but recipes via tickets was one of several bafflingly terrible choices that the original devs made with AE, and contributed significantly to the market issues on live. And they never managed to fix the problems they'd created. The fact that you could spot the regular arrival of a new AE exploit because of their predictable effects on market prices was interesting but depressing. (I'm still sad that the huge potential of AE as originally conceived never came to fruition. I hope one day HC will give it the overhaul it deserves.)

I don't believe that the devs directly regulate the market -- for one thing, that would be very time-consuming, and they're all volunteers who have better things to do with the time they spend on the game. I think the only direct market supply intervention they've done was to seed salvage, and that's seeded well above normal market prices. What they have done, rather brilliantly, is to give the players tools to regulate the market themselves, primarily by pooling recipes, IOs and salvage, and making converters freely available. If there's an increase in demand for an IO, then prices rise. Marketeers will spot that and start converting other IOs to supply the niche. It's very easy to do, and while there are some high-volume marketeers there are also a lot of people playing converter roulette on a small scale, and in combination it keeps supply pretty smooth. The CoX market system also inherently buffers prices via the existence of tranches of high listings and low bids. Another thing they did, which seems to have had a very good effect on the market over time, is to remove an inf-generating exploit from AE, and at the same time remove an unwanted side-effect of adding post-50 XP to the game which was also increasing inf flow into the game. That nudged the ratio of inf:recipe generation via farming more towards recipes, and that seems to have had the desired effect of stopping runaway price rises.

If you're trying to play self-sufficient characters without farming or marketeering, then double XP, DFB, door-sitting AE farms, joining teams running Council papers at +4x8, and other ways to speed through the early game are a terrible idea. Things that are good: playing story arcs to get merits, checking all drops to see if they're worth crafting and selling, running on level-appropriate smaller teams.

These are all post-converter prices, though. Before Issue 22, which was only a few months before the shutdown, prices were way higher, and had been for a while. Converters, even in limited supply, had an enormous effect on the top end of the market. All of those prices can be at least doubled to get the pre-converter prices. LotG+rech had climbed well over a hundred million. Of course, the converters also had the opposite effect on 'cheap' purples, PVP IOs, etc. Before converters it had been possible to pick up non-damage purple sets for (relative) peanuts.

+1 Dual Pistols/Martial Combat has so many powers to choose from, and all of them are some joyous variant on punching someone in the face, kicking someone in the face, or ridiculously OTT gun shenanigans which will eventually result in shooting someone in the face. The damage is decent, and the animations are pure delight. And then there's an awesome bunch of utility stacked on top. Do you need to spend a lot of time in melee range to dish out maximum damage? No problem, here's a combat teleport and a chunky defence buff while you lay waste to your enemies. Mez getting you down? Have a click mez protection. Mean people trying to close with you? AoE Slow field on your sustain! Did some of them get up to you anyway? Ki Push them away, and why don't you get in another kick and then shoot them while they're flying slowly backwards through the air? It's just endless fun times.

Hand on my heart, I'm treating the Name Auction suggestion with all the seriousness it deserves.

Hmm. This could be avoided by adding a Name Tax. For every day that a character isn't logged in, they are taxed X amount of inf, perhaps fixed, perhaps scaling with some attribute(s) of the character. The tax is auto-deducted from the character's inf balance when they're logged in. If characters don't have enough liquid inf on hand, then another character on the same account has to visit City Hall and pay it for them before the character can be played. Players can also choose to go to City Hall at any time to clear Name Tax debts from any or all of the account's unplayed characters The names of characters with current Name Tax debt cannot be auctioned.

I was going to say that these arguments about freeing up names from dormant accounts have been running since way back on the live forums, and they continue to be a waste of time because nothing new ever comes out of them. But, hey, now I have a great idea for a Fawlty Towers homage character, so there's that!

On the extremely rare occasions where I went into a PVP zone on live and someone actually attacked me, I'd always stick around and get killed a few times. You had to feel sorry for anyone who was hanging around in Warburg or Siren's Call looking for PVP action on Defiant.

There are some mutually exclusive lower level contacts who share identical missions, and only one from each set of those contacts is in Ouro, I assume so that there aren't loads of duplicate missions in there. So while there quite a few missing low-level contacts, there are a lot fewer missing missions that it looks.

I'm always surprised that no one has ever started up a PVP-focused server and concentrated on really developing mechanics and balancing for the PVP game, without needing to consider effects on the PVE game at all. One of the biggest advantages of the code being out in the wild is that the players now have the power to take the game and shape it the way they want, instead of having to wheedle the devs into doing it.