Gremlin

That's an interesting idea. I'd never thought of using these sort of buffs on a permanent basis.

Personally I'd like that one but I think the badgers would be sad. On the other hand, if you can get them to go for it you've probably solved the inflation problem. 🙂

I've been thinking about inf sinks that could be added to the game. I wonder how you feel about them and whether you've got some better ideas. Ebil Merits They're just tokens that you buy for 1 billion inf each. You can't do anything with them except admire your collection. They're just a way to keep score really. Hero/Villain Bonds You can buy bonds for 10 million inf. Bonds have a small chance to drop goodies from time to time. The goodies are similar to pack contents except that they only drop tradeable items. I'm not sure whether bonds should be profitable or not. If so, how long we'd have to hold them for to break even? I think bonds would have to be account bound unless they're profitable. I look forward to your ebil comments.

This patch reduces the inf flowing into the game. What can we do to increase inf flows out of the game? increase Auction House fees (may cause hording) create Ebil Merits which can be bought for 1 billion inf each and let the marketeers remove the inf. You can't do anything with an Ebil Merit except admire it. sell new Packs which contain account bound incarnate salvage Any more suggestions?

The evil part of me would love the devs to announce that. Imagine the chaos that would follow. First of all there would be massive panic buying as everyone with spare inf tries to turn it into something that won't be deleted. After the inf deletion, prices would crash hard. Eventually things would return to normal. The ebil marketeers would make out like bandits. ... but it would help to curb inflation a bit. If you go over to the market forums, you'll find that ebil marketeers do things that don't fit this rather nasty view. For example, we'd quite like to have other in game methods of burning inf. At the moment I'm experimenting with buying and opening Hero and Winter packs. (Buying a Winter Pack extracts about 27.5 million inf from the economy.) People occasionally push the price of some desirable item down. They lose a ton of inf in the process but that's what passes for lol's when you've got more inf than you can spend. Other's simply stop trading because there's no point making more. You say that the marketeers hold most of the inf. There's a lot of confusion and bitterness in that statement. First of all, as others have pointed out, a very high proportion of the player base trade. If they buy low and sell high then they're trading for profit. I suspect that the majority of players do this to some degree. The second misunderstanding is to think that marketeers are significant somehow. Either they "hold most of the money" or "they drive up prices". The thing is, the game economy is absolutely huge. A few billion inf is peanuts compared to the amount of inf that flows through the market daily. Marketeers occasionally try to use their piles of inf to make a splash in the economy. (Losing inf in the process of course.) Even chucking 10 billion into the market tends to just cause a very small ripple that disappears in a few hours.

As I understand it, inflation happens because inf (money) enters the economy faster than it leaves. Do you think that the inf flows can never balance or is there some other reason why you think that inflation is inevitable?

That's very helpful. Thanks very much.

That's a good point. Even when I've seen someone try what should be a totally gimped build, the general reaction is a combination of amused interest and encouragement.

How? All flipping does is to smooth out the price peaks and troughs a little. Everyone can see what the flipper is paying because the same number keeps appearing in the last 5. Anyone who doesn't want to buy from the evil flipper can just bid one more inf and take the next sale the flipper would have got. If you're in hurry then the flipper will sell you an item now. Odds are it'll be cheaper than the other offers 'cos the flipper is trying to undercut them. Crafters are even less evil. They turn things that people don't want into things that people do want. Most people can't be bothered to buy vendor trash yellows and convert them into LofG procs but fortunately they don't have to. The marketeers are doing it for them. You never need to give money to a marketeer. You can always pay what they pay and do what they do. This requires a bit of time and effort, of course and that's how marketeers make money. People pay more for stuff they can have now for zero effort. The practical upshot of all this is that trading drives up the price of things that people sell and drives down the price of things people buy to use. That seems like a good thing to me.

This is one of the things I love about the game. I like to take time levelling my toons so I can experience they way they change as they progress. Picking a power that gives you more end feels like winning a prize when you've been constantly short of end for a few levels. Getting your first AOE when you've only had single target powers makes the toon feel awesome. When I hit the high levels I can look back and think how far the toon has come.

This morning and this afternoon it was generally below 450k. For a while it was 412k which is the lowest I've seen for some time. Prices always swing up and down at lot. The only issue is whether or not we're looking at a trend of some kind.

Not quite. The 1 million profit included selling everything except the weird temp powers. Hero packs on the other hand...

I opened 60 yesterday without any problems. For anyone who's curious, I had the "automatically flip cards" option enabled. I closed the card popup window as soon as the first card turned over. I didn't try to open them as fast as possible though.

I aimed for the top end of the last 5. In practice that meant that I sold all 12 enhancements for 20 million. One or two went for 1 million more or less. They sold in less than 24 hours over a weekend. I'm not familiar with the Winter Set market so I've no idea how typical these prices are.

For me, it feels like the CoH is a playground rather than a game. We aren't restricted to doing whatever the original lead developer thought we'd be doing. We make your own entertainment! This creates an incredibly rich and varied experience. Street sweeping feels very different to doing door missions. Soloing is so different to playing in a full team that it feels like playing two different games and yet I use the same build, on the same toon for both. ...and all the while the community actively encourages you to try new things. I may get bored with the game occasionally but I doubt I'll ever feel that I've experienced everything it has to offer.

The writing got better and better as time went on. Some of the early arcs are barely enough to justify the mission but the later stuff is well worth reading. Praetoria and Dark Astoria are particular stand outs for me.

FWIW I bought a stack of 10 Winter Packs on Saturday. I sold everything without converting or creating any superiors. The average value of each pack after sales tax was a little under 26 million. That would have been an excellent return if I'd bought them for 10 mm but I didn't!

I was pretty sure that you'd all have some interesting perspectives and I wasn't wrong. Thanks very much for taking the time to answer.

To answer @Yomo Kimyata. My suggestions for minimal marketing are very similar to @Bionic_Flea so l'll just mention the differences:- convert merits to unslotters and sell them sell salvage that drops buy salvage as you need it craft and sell all uncommon recipes craft and sell rare recipes unless the recipe sells for less than 100k at the market (maybe someone can refine this a bit) Plan to slot cheap attuned sets while you're levelling. If you feel like it you can replace them with more expensive sets when you've got the inf.

FWIW I have a toon that was inspired by this thread and a couple of discussions. I wanted to see if I could kit her out without any market knowledge, farming or trading. Her only sources of inf are:- getting merits for exploration badges and buying unslotters with them listing drops at the going rate crafting and selling recipes that drop Restrictions are:- cannot use the P2W vendor for anything no door missions no teams cannot use converters can buy enhancements to slot can buy recipes to craft and slot can buy salvage can bid low So far she's at level 27 and has a pretty shiny build. Most of her powers are slotted with cheap sets. Some are attuned and some are not. Smashing Haymakers are about 60k to buy and craft! The key thing is that her build is rammed with uniques. She has:- Gladiator's Armor +DEF Steadfast Protection +DEF Kismet Accuracy Panacea +Hit Points/Endurance Regenerative Tissue: Regeneration Numina's Regen/Recovery I've not had many tasty recipes drop but each piece of vendor trash makes a few hundred k. If I did door missions instead then I wouldn't need to do the exploration badges and I'd probably be a lot richer! As it is, it looks like I'll have a complete build by level 50. It won't be a top end build but it'll be a lot more impressive than I was expecting.

Back in the before times, when CoH was a subscription only game, I remember reading a list of the average subscription periods for various MMOs. IIRC, they were usually around 6 months but CoH was double that. There clearly is (or was) something unusually sticky about CoH. Is that still true, and if so, why?

One of the great strengths of this game is that if you stick any 8 players together in a confined space you get a mulit-coloured, rofl-stomping monster that hits mobs like a nuclear weapon. You don't need particular builds or particular skills to team. Just turn up, take part and enjoy the madness. IMHO teams rarely need a plan let alone performance metrics. I'd hate to destroy such a wonderful part of the game by accident so I'll be voting "no thanks".

Welcome back. This is a really well run server. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

I think some people who enjoy Task Forces and iTrials trade while they're waiting for the team to start.

I have some very bad news for you. The real economy is much more like the game economy than you think. Real money is not a finite resource and it's not backed by anything real either. Governments can and do manipulate real world economies in order to control things like inflation and wealth disparity. I didn't believe this when I started playing the market in CoH but then I wanted to know what the differences were between "real" markets and the game. What I discovered is that real markets have most of the same features as the game. The laws of supply and demand are the same. Price setting is the same. The existence of spreads, liquidity problems etc are the same. The main differences that I've noticed so far is that the game doesn't have market makers, you can't corner the market in the game and the spreads are much larger.