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You can't enter the arena in Echo Galaxy, sadly, which means you can't get the badge.

It was for a good cause.

I'd make a character on there called Leandro, so that the mirror universe is complete.

None that survive! Muahahaha! (You might wanna track down SuperJoe and Spanky. They were doing this a few months ago, I dunno if they still are.)

I think the first one is MunkiLord.

Man, it always staggers me how much people make. I've definitely got less than 2 billion to my name, having been here since HC launched. 100 billion, that's mind blowing to me. A hard cap would absolutely be an effective deterrent, but also might be a bit of a switch-off. I wonder if it would change the state of the market currently. Stuff is so cheap thanks to supply that there's not much practical difference between my wealth and yours (except that a spending spree I might go on would be significantly shorter I guess). I'm not even sure the market would change all that dramatically. Well, actually it might. If there's an inf cap then farmers may stop farming once they hit it and not chuck supply at the market. Maybe prices could go up? I don't know what the turnover is for a farmer to make money, kit out an alt, repeat (to put it simplistically) so maybe it's rapid enough that the farming carries on? Are you talking about set prices for everything, then? At the current merit gains and prices it would be really slow, but they can be altered. Something else would be farmed that has a high merit yield, maybe MSRs. I think AE would fall into neglect. You're right, low valued items would need to feel proportionately smaller than they are now. That means the amount of merits you gain needs to be a lot higher, and the prices increase respectively. So that the resolution you can buy with is bigger. In the end, I think you'd end up with something identical to a pre-AH CoH economy. That might not be a bad thing, but it'd be a dimension of the game gone. The relationship of merits and inf is a good one, they work well together. Merits as a set currency with set buying power means that inf kinda-sorta has a set value, a bit like a gold standard. You probably know this already, but since when did I let things like that stop me waffling? You can trade a certain amount of inf (I can't remember what value. 1mil, I think?) for one merit. These means that no matter what, the price of a purple, which is set at 100 merits, will never exceed 100mil inf. It's pretty cool that we're at about 1/5 to 1/4 of that. Oh 100%. I'm no economographer but I'm really enjoying talking about this stuff. I was thinking earlier about what would happen if Earth ditched real world currencies and just went for CoH inf. My conclusion is that it would be indistinct, except that everything in the game would be considered a luxury and get super expensive, farming would be illegal (and maybe even playing the game at all) and trying to buy milk would be really inconvenient.

There's a distinction between inflation and prices here. If a community of wealthy players only traded with each other at the exclusion of other players somehow, prices could increase to reflect them. But if they're not actually generating any influence, there's still no inflation. And you're right, the converters and merits are exactly what prevent this. Supply is huge right now with no end in sight (thanks in large part to both marketeers and farmers - the exact people who drove prices up before now keep them down). Before, rare items were actually rare and the market was competitive to get them. (Switchfade posted at this point and described the problem that was resolved better than I was trying to) This is fair, and also why I think rewards from most of the game need a really good looking at. I certainly want to see good incomes from a lot of avenues rather than just two.

You're describing how the Live market got to here. If any inf generation stopped, inflation would also stop, regardless of how it was moved around. If one person amassed 90% of the wealth somehow, the market will adapt to the remaining 10% distributed among the rest of the playerbase. That one person can't make the market reflect their wealth. Live got to a state where the market was only even accessible to a certain part of the playerbase. Casual players were downright omitted and couldn't make an impact, except for occasional luck.

This is untrue in the long term. Casual players would struggle a lot more under rampant inflation than from this nerf. I was fairly casual on live, and the thought of a complete build was a pipe dream. I'm still quite casual in my playstyle, the difference in accessibility is tremendous. Unless such players never, ever touch the market, I guess... But I think that's a huge challenge to set oneself.

Not all poetry has to rhyme to be beautiful, my dude.

Yeah, this is largely true and quite interesting. There's a slight risk that if a lot of people who hoarded a lot of inf suddenly decided to make a whole lot of alts and kit them out all at the same time, overpaying on everything, there would be some weirdness with pricing. That behaviour certainly isn't exclusive to farmers. Their hoarded wealth gets redistributed around to the general playerbase too, so higher prices might get sustained for a while. In fact, I reckon we'll see this happen any time a new powerset is released. (though I think prices went down with Electrical Affinity, so maybe not. [Edit: maybe that was because the update saw an increase in players, and subsequently an increase in supply] ) The impact would be an outlier, though. It takes sustained behaviours across a wider proportion of people using the market to permanently affect the market. But I think it's safe to assume that farmers farm in order to create enough inf with the intention of using it, though (And there's nothing wrong with that behaviour at all). As some have said in this thread, they're not really trying to hoard wealth. I don't have the data to back this up, but I'd imagine that most of the inf generated from farming gets mobilised in the market. If the inf generation from farming significantly exceeds the income from any other gameplay, the prices would start to follow farming trends and rocket up until you had to farm to participate (as happened on Live). But you're right, any inf that doesn't get used basically has no impact besides increasing the impact of the unlikely potential scenario described above. Meanwhile, in a fantasy world where farming wasn't a thing for some reason, inf-per-player would be a lot lower, just because the remaining methods of generating inf would be less efficient. In principle, that means the value-as-proportion-of-total (there are probably real terms for stuff like this that I don't know) of each unit of inf is greater. It gets interesting when you think about prices - they'd probably be a lot lower against HC values, but since lack of farming would bring in less supply, the value-as-buying-power of each unit of inf might be lower. So in reality stuff could be more unaffordable for the average player. This is why trying to keep the difference between farming and other gameplay fairly level is so important. I'd say that the value of real world money is just as mythical as the value of influence. It's just that fewer people are subscribed to the latter myth.

So many good ones! I'll try and pick from the more obscure names. The Radio (Port Oakes, 10-14), later followed by Slot Machine (30-34, requires Gangbuster) and Television (Grandville, 45-50, requires Master of the Airwaves) - they may or may not all be connected. Seer Marino (Mercy Island, 15-19) is a classic. Marshall Brass (Cap au Diable, 15-19) is very good and relates to the PTS. He has two arcs and they're both worth doing. Bane Spider Ruben (Cap au Diable, 15-19) is a fairly recent one. It's quality. Vincent Ross (Sharkhead Isle, 20-29) and Diviner Maros (Sharkhead Isle, 25-29) are about The Leviathan. (There's one more really cool Leviathan arc and I can't remember who's it was) It's probably worth catching Darrin Wade (Sharkhead Isle, 20-30) at this point too, so you can see his later-significant plans starting to occur. Jury's out on if it's good though. People like Dean MacArthur and Leonard (Sharkhead Isle, 20-29), and they're really cool arcs. They're the equivalent of the alternate dimension self arc from blueside. A lot of Nerva Archipelago has arcs against particular signature heroes. They're a little samey, but it's nice to encounter them. Technicial Naylor (Nerva, 35-39) has some low-level lore about Nemesis and the Shadow Shards. I played Kelly Uqua's (Nerva, 30-34) arc for the first time recently. It's kinda bland but it's got a cool twist. It's preceded by Timothy Raymond (Nerva, 30-34) for more context. Hardcase (St Martial, 30-39) has a lot of minor St Martial-related arcs, and St Martial is my favourite zone. Vivacious Verandi (St Martial, 30-34) is fun. Johnny Sonata (St Martial, 35-39, requires Obsessed) is my favourite arc in the game. Mage Killer Kuhkara (Grandville, 40-44) is a really long trilogy of arcs, but it ends on a unique map that I've never seen anywhere else. It's really cool. Operative Grillo (Grandville, 45-50) will give you some closure with the Snakes.

The market on live wasn't accessible in practice or in theory. It's ok if people choose not to engage for whatever reason, but a problem if they can't even if they wanted to. That's the scenario we want to avoid. You're completely right, though. And anything that makes it more user friendly would be great.

No, that's too much answer! I wasn't ready! *melts*

This picture has raised more questions than it answered.

Just out of curiosity, I don't suppose you have an estimated income difference as a percentage from farming?

Usually just half an hour.

I was thinking something like this, if each arc had an invisible tracker for missions each character has completed (either of their own arc or someone else's). When you get them all you get the badge reward. Maybe the merit reward too? (This is me hurling my brain at the forums, expect no coherence) Arcs could award merits per mission, which would be the arc's reward divided by the number of missions. But then some missions would be worth more than other and that seems wrong. Like there might be a really quick mission at the start of an arc that's worth like 8 merits and it'd just get farmed. Unless you then bias longer missions like kill-alls with a higher proportion of rewards, but that would take a heck of a lot of testing. I was wondering something like using that tracker to see who joined for the parts of the arc, and then when the arc is finished everyone gets awarded the proportion of merits for how much they joined... but I can immediately see that not working. Maybe the arc holder has the option to share the arc, and everyone else on the team gets that progress. It would need to break the rules in two ways: one that lower levelled sidekicks aren't locked out and two that people can still undertake the arc themselves later if they want to - like it doesn't flag as complete for that character. Eh, I got nothing. I don't see any of that really gelling well.

2mil and then they're on their own. If they don't survive, they are no son of mine.

I don't like to either, for a couple of reasons. Mainly, I round up in my head that 10 converters = 1mil inf (it's more like 750-800k right now). That means that as well as the 50k-or-so crafting fee and AH tax, I need to end up with an IO of 2mil within 10 conversions to be worthwhile at 1 mil a pop. That's getting harder to do right now with prices going down. I also quite like the cleanness of keeping my merits > converters separate to my inf > IO sets. Yesterday I misclicked, paying no attention, and spent all my merits on catalysts instead of converters. I haven't stopped crying yet.

It didn't, but it did have that nemesis system, where you'd spend ages crafting your most loathed enemy and then the game casts them as a barely coherent baffoon whether you like it or not.

Yeah, there are definitely solutions to be found in reward merits. One big change that really needs to happen is that everybody who participated in an arc get the merits, not just the arc holder. But that comes with a few caveats. As others have said, looking at drop distribution while teamed would help. I've found as a trend that characters I solo with can end up with 50-100mil inf by 50, plus at least a few sets, with little effort on my part, whereas support characters who teamed sometimes end up with just 5-10mil and generic IOs. I see that as a design problem.

I think a lot of the perceived difficulty comes from information overload rather than technical complexity required to operate it. A new player looking at crafting for the first time needs to take in a lot of new ideas all at once to make the most of it, while at the same time trying to work out what might work best for their character. Not that I have any solutions, but finding natural ways to take players through it, or consolidate some of the features, would go a long way.

I actually agree with you on this point. I don't think it's particularly great that the two best ways of making money in the game have little to do with the core of the game. Diversifying ways of making income would be a challenge though. It's kind of a two-pronged situation that's led us here. On one hand, the rewards of the game never really updated to match where the IO economy went (and it went wild on Live) and on the other hand, players found and created optimal ways to make money that exceeded the expectations of the game. Depending on if Homecoming's market finally reaches a point of "This is normal forever" it could be possible to adjust balance accordingly. On the other hand, adjusting that balance could push the prices up... Ugh, I don't like thinking about this stuff. It goes in circles makes my brain go gooey.

It comes up because the market is at the eye of the storm in that conversation. Those who can engage with it are the 'haves' and those who can't are the 'have-nots'. By the end of Live, that disparity was huge. On Homecoming right now, everyone can engage with it. And that's incredible. Amassing a fortune isn't an issue (Just typing that out, I feel the urge to add that I don't feel the same way about real life wealth. Different beast). Worst case scenario is that someone with an incredible amount of wealth and no sense decides to buy every IO five times each for a few million more than what they're worth. There would be a temporary bump in the market and it would normalise again as people buy and sell for a more average wealth. A few wealthy players cannot make any long-term change to how much things cost* - the average wealth is a more powerful mover. As money gets poured in and swished around, the average goes up and the prices go up with it. On Live, that average must have been very high - not because a lot of people had that much money, but because the disparity between rich and poor was so big. *I guess a sustained, coordinated, 24-hours-a-day effort with the intent of screwing up the economy for everyone would do it. But then nobody benefits out of that. The wealthy players most of all, who just lost all their money buying a ton of crap that was worth half as much as they bought it for.