Some Random User

I love you and I want to metaphorically have your babies.

So how did the game wind up this way? The short answer is that the game has never been able to work the economy out because J. Emmeret was a tabletop pen-and-paper roleplaying games developer and the game was designed to lack an economy. The idea of Enhancements becoming obsolete was partially dropped with Inventions, partially dropped with Attuned Enhancements, and the N.P.C.s' Enhancement stores and the continued presence of T.O.s, D.O.s, and S.O.s was never addressed. Those things are still in the game. I.O.s and Sets are supposed to be for the high-standards high-tier min-maxing player. Other players are sort of guided into crafting and the auction house right now. That doesn't fit the reality envisioned. So how would I personally fix this situation? How does this look to you? The short answer is that I'd institute all of the following: I'd do away with T.O.s entirely. Only D.O.s, S.O.s, Salvage, and Recipes as drops from level 2 on. I'd give a meaningful incentive to slot D.O.s by giving them a straightforward trade-off: Making them only drop as Attuned versions of themselves. This gives a player a reason to ever slot them, even with the lower bonus (because they're more cost effective). This doesn't eliminate the math advantage S.O.s and I.O.s already have, so some players will use them instead. I'd make a design principle that the effects created by higher-level S.O.s are balanced to always be better than equal-level I.O.s (this would require adjustment of either S.O.s or I.O.s for some levels). That way there would always be a reason to use S.O.s (some players just want the best bonuses). I'd bring back the relevance of the N.P.C.s' stores by making the prices of D.O.s and S.O.s something that made sense. Since you still want to be able to slot Sets and your own cool crafted stuff there's still a reason to use Wentworth's, but would allow skipping the auction house for any players who didn't want to. I can still have my level 40 with nothing but Common I.O.s if I want, and can still hook him up with some less frequent Set I.O.s if I want, and if I want to just use Attuned D.Os and wait until level 50 I can.

Yes, I can. That literally used to be my job. I can also tell you how much things would cost if our goal was to optimize for any of several scenarios. I would do this by using math to show you how much Influence someone earns through normal gameplay as they level a character, and how many Merit Rewards they usually "accidentally" find as they do so. Then I would show you what the guides and Archetype forums say a normal level 50 build looks like, then I would work backwards to see what reasonable builds in the 20-25 range and level 35-40 range look like. I would say: "This is your budget in this level range, that build should cost an amount that pays attention to your budget. You can set things so they have to come up sort if you want them to work harder, or you can set things so they have extra flexibility. Once you've set your standard anything higher is either because you want the players to have to work more, or is an inflationary market fluctuation you didn't account for. If you have inflation you need to address that with market intervention/controls."

Sounds great. I'm playing the same game. Please provide two pieces of information: How expensive these builds generally wind up. How you come by enough Influence (normal leveling, playing on the auction house, playing converter roulette for profit, playing converter roulette to get the Enhancement you actually wanted, etc.).

What you said makes me see what the problem is. In economics there's a concept called "anchoring" which is when a person thinks something has a certain value. I think what's going on here is I'm used to working with accounting software and helping calculate how profitable something is, and I'm trying to figure out what the real buying power of 1 Influence is. The rest of this thread seems to be about how expensive things feel. "They used to be more inflated" doesn't mean things aren't inflated. Over the past few weeks I've been exploring the existing guides on a lot of topics and focusing on trying to put together something comprehensive and meaningful for new recruits. That led to me trying to figure out the Enhancement system, which led to me to notice the prices are still inflated, which led me to do a fairly deep dive into what's going on. If I'd realized I'd trigger concerns about out-of-game politics I would have handled this through private messaging at the staff instead of making a suggestion thread. I'm trying to tell the community, we have real, meaningful ways to figure out how much something should cost. The builds posted in the guides section and the archetypes subforums don't have realistic price tags. I'm happy to grind at the game, I'm happy to work at putting them together through in-game play. I don't want to have to memorize a bunch of "going rates" so I can speculate on the auction house. Telling me I should be willing to play converter roulette requires me to know what is profitable. If others want to pay attention to the ever-evolving five purchase history instead of grinding that's fine. The difference is that I can actually look at the two meaningful realities of the game - what a build should be at level 50 and what I earn from playing up to level 50 - and then do math that can help the staff in setting conversion rates. If the staff are willing to listen to that information I'll do the research myself and put that together for them. I'm here to play a video game, not handle marketing when I get home, but if the staff can eliminate the inflation discrepancy, I'll put in the work. I have the skills necessary to do that for them. I presumed other human beings had done at least a back of the envelope calculation trying to figure out what the buying power of an Influence award for killing a Minion is/was/should be. If they don't? I'd rather they be aware there is a discrepancy between what is going on with the auction house and what a budget is really like. There's no shame in trying to solve a problem nobody thought about before, but the responses from the non-staff keep going off-point. This is not about some exterior-to-the-game political disagreement. If not, answering that can only help the staff. If the staff wouldn't want that sort of information available to guide how the prices should be set, well, I respectfully think knowing you're right with data is better than knowing you're right without data. I am not a political opponent demanding $1 000 of free money every month. I'm trying to make certain the game is behaving as intended. I like formulas and I like math. This isn't a complicated economy with a bunch of market forces. I punch a guy and points pop out, and I turn those points in for my choice of several ways I can punch a guy better. This isn't even about things like what I can buy with 1/2 an hour in a "kill all" Mission. This is about how my build looks and how my build should look at different points in the game. If our builds are never supposed to be finished so we have a reason to grind, tell me that.

No, things cost things because the market has controllable effects going on. I'm trying to discuss that. Please don't derail this into a political discussion. I just want to be able to know what the staff think our budget should look like to build our character and what the resulting build should look like. That will let us have a real discussion about what meaningful goals are for the game.

I want to address both the theory and the practice, and I feel there is something going on in-game. In response to justicebeliever the following: We need to define our terms. There are three prices to consider here. The price anchor: There's the price the staff have weighted things to conform to through both Merit Rewards and seeding prices. The ideal rate: There's the price the players would expect to be able to pay through competent budgeting of the Influence and Merit Rewards they earn while leveling. This is generally a semi-fixed rate, and can be calculated based on the amount of XP they earned so far. The market rate: There is the price things are currently selling for. Inflation (the noun or adjective) is when the market rate is inflated above the ideal rate. Inflation (the verb) is a trend of increasing inflation (the noun). There are things that typically cause inflation. What we have right now is a price anchor above the market rate, which is in turn above the ideal rate. What we have right now is a pattern of the market rate spiking up above the price anchor and then dropping to a middle-ground, and that middle ground is still inflated. What I'm not seeing is consideration of the ideal rate. Economies are systems. Back during C.o.X. free-to-play there was a forum thread that addressed this idea in the terms of making a build work on your budget, and the devs got into the weeds on how they figured out what they wanted knew what the market to do. I kept up on that thread because I had something to apply their logic to. At the time I was using their logic to decide how to handle buying and selling magic gear in a Dungeons & Dragons game. I tried to use the same principles to set up an economy in another system's large (12+ players) ongoing P.v.P. game where trading among players was an important part of the game. In my experience human beings try to game systems, and try to get themselves a benefit where one exists, and react very poorly to having those benefits removed. My perspective by way of an aside: This is regarding an ongoing P.v.P. game mentioned above. Before my changes, when someone ran that game normally there was something like Quake's old rush for the grenade launcher. One person would try to get a plum first, then play gatekeeper by killing everyone who tried to contest their monopoly on that plum. Almost every campaign had to be short term because the game fall into this quickly. Some games added more players and could keep going by running a treadmill. The old cool kids would sit on their plum and recruit new players, who would quit in disgust after remaking characters and still being fleeced a couple of times. Everyone wanted the campaigns to keep going so they could roleplay their characters, so I added a small rule that removed the incentive to bottom-feed, and I set up an environment where long-term players were guaranteed different types of plums if they stuck with the game long enough. Something that I found interesting was that there were a few players who had metaphorically demolished other campaigns. When they heard I'd had a game running for about four months (a long time in that game's community) they visited my game. After examination of what I was doing differently they began privately approaching me and demanding I give them a way to bias the field. They dominated other games I was playing in and wanted me to broker a situation where they'd also dominate the one I was running. I pointed out the game was supposed to be about other things, like the roleplay, and my players preferred that kind of game. I said that I already knew someone who either explored the story or who had good strategy could turn a profit by getting their own unique plum or trading favors in-game with the other players. Those visitors quickly quit, never to return. Two of their friends stayed. About four months later they turned out to have habitually cheated, and had been lying to other players about things like them having official staff positions or lying about what the rules were. They were targeting new players to steal in-game items from the newer players. When this was discussed with them they felt they were quite open about their view that they felt entitled to be the "rich" of the game, and since I wouldn't bias the market against the in-game "poor" (new players) they had decided to cheat the poor players instead. When I insisted I personally referee a few in-game exchanges with other players they went along at first, and later when they tried breaking a rule I calmly reiterated the rule they had been breaking. One of the players literally "rage quit," yelling and everything. Again, that was how they behaved over a game when they found out they had to play by the same rules.

QBasic, here.

Things may have started out that way, but regarding live devs, they made regular posts on the forums (later on) focused on fixing the initially broken in-game economy. The guideline they came up with was the idea that by level 50 your build should be finished, and that should be reachable through normal leveling, with the auction house only existing as a place to move Enhancements around (so that builds could be rounded out). They repeatedly stated they viewed grinding as different from speculating at a sort of pure finance game.

That's good news. That doesn't match my experience. I'm willing to start private messaging build links for Pine's so we can have a conversation about this. Maybe we'll figure out details we don't realize are causing our different perspectives.

I'm not trying to embarrass or call anyone out. Back on live we had a guideline that was set by the live devs. To be fair, I've been on software development projects before, both as a hobbyist and professionally. For all I know OuroDev could be pulling numbers out of their butt. I made a couple presumptions about how the Homecoming staff does things, and I don't know how your staff are organized, what the culture is, etc. What I presumed was that the Homecoming staff were mostly either professionals of a techy sort who had been computer science majors once upon a time, or were current computer science students who thought the project was neat, and that the natural consequence of that would be someone being assigned to spend an afternoon sitting around and applying their one or two economics courses to this question. If that wasn't done then, in the spirit of being a good neighbor, to paraphrase Hayek, I want to warn you that "economics is hard." I and others I've spoken to in-game feel there's a problem. Others feel there's a way to climb up to a position of relative wealth and are willing to invest the time doing that. Once they're there they don't see a problem. That is a result of anchoring and survivor bias. I feel presuming that one group invalidates the other isn't the best way to decide if there's a problem in the first place. Maybe before we can even have this conversation we need to ask the staff to reach some sort of guideline for what a build is supposed to look like.

This provided me an insight into how you're approaching this. This shows me that your way of evaluating the interaction is based on consent. When I look at this I'm seeing an attempt to budget for a set amount of funds. I don't spend every day on the auction house, so I have no way to know when a spike is going on. There is no transparency about what the rates are "supposed" to be, so if a player has to just compare against Reward Merits all the time that's the only guideline they have. Doing the math based on that the builds that are in the community's guides are insanely expensive. I don't get how someone can afford them, and whenever I ask I'm told I should be spending my time speculating on the auction house instead of playing a superhero game.

What I'm asking is what those values you just listed were based on. If the costs were pulled out of thin air, instead of being based on anything, that wasn't what I expected. If that is what's going on that might explain why these values are causing issues if we aren't printing infinite money for ourselves.

You're implying they didn't quickly sell out at the 12 000 000 cost, only to be replaced by new examples, which is what they did. That speculator made the history look like 12 000 000 was the expected price, and saying that only a few players were conned doesn't un-scam them.

That's fine. That's also not the question I asked. Can you point me to what guidelines were used to set the values currently in use?

Just because someone is talking about economics doesn't mean they're being political. Homecoming isn't following the guidelines used by the live devs. Homecoming isn't using the guidelines suggested by OuroDev, either. The in-game economy is not the offline economy. Unlike the real world a player turns a fixed amount of profit for the amount of XP they've earned so far. The game's prices are also essentially fixed, and they used to be fixed in a very different way. If you have more money that's great. Let's have a conversation about what a reasonable build is and how different the cost for one is from what we earn when leveling.

Thank you. I've visited the OuroDev site. They have guidelines for how the auction house should be seeded, but Homecoming doesn't follow those guidelines. Can you point me to what guidelines were used to set the values currently in use?

and

The history shown in the auction house is only for the five prior purchases. Cornering the market is just a matter of affecting six purchases.

That's really two statements. First, if the current staff want us to convert Merit Rewards into Influence and then buy I.O.s, that's a reasonable piece of the system. I get that, and don't oppose that. What is less reasonable is the second part. When I can't get the Enhancement I want because there are literally zero Recipes for sale, or when I can't get the Enhancements I'm told everyone is using because the actual supply is so small, that's less reasonable. They're not infinitely available, and the Enhancement Converter system seems to be how I'm supposed to craft what I am looking for rather than buy them. If that's the case, and I can't memorize Uncommons and Rares, then why do we have Influence?

Actually, the moderators are fixing the price of certain goods (based on the conversion rates of Merit Rewards). This is a command economy, not a free market. The free market rate is the rate we'd get if they weren't fixing the prices.

I can see you didn't read the entire post and the ensuing responses I've made, and there are others who are also just skimming then responding, so I'm going to edit the title of the thread to better reflect what I'm talking about. The staff decided to anchor the prices in a way that doesn't represent the prices the live devs wanted for goods.

No. The market was only partly anchored to Reward Merits. That's not how to answer that question. A player that just plays the game (without ever visiting Wentworth's) has three sources of income: They earn Influence by fighting and running Missions at a reasonably predictable rate. They can sell Enhancements to N.P.C. shops at a predictable rate. In addition to Influence they earn Reward Merits at a predictable rate. Back on live the devs made very clear that a player who never wanted to play the spreadsheet game at Wentworth's shouldn't be expected to do so. They were tuning the in-game economy to allow a player who used only the sources described above to be able to be meaningful to their party. "How much should a player be spending on their build" is a very basic economic question. I'm concerned that the staff are unable to answer this question. The fact that a player who uses the auction house to make more money is able to afford something is not the conversation I'm trying to have. If the staff feel players should be forced into converter speculation then that's a different conversation.

I didn't move the target, and neither did justicebeliever. I was trying to have a conversation about the prices being above where the market would otherwise cause them to be. That led to talking about the effects of the staff seeding the auction house. I was aware the staff were doing that, and that's the sort of price control I was expecting them to bring up. The way you have a conversation about inflation is you talk about where prices should be and what is restricting those prices. Nothing that has been said in any way invalidated the initial assertion that the prices are inflated above market rate. They are inflated, and the prices continue to have spikes that go above the price the staff clearly want items to be at. The inflation is intentional; the staff are anchoring the prices above the market rate. The thing that is inflating them is a set of controls the staff put into place. The question of how far the inflation escalates is only one part of the conversation. Back on live the devs said they wanted players to be able to play the game and put together a decent build without ever touching Wentworth's. Back on live when these matters were discussed on the forums there was an acknowledgement that there was some hypothetical budget, based on what was earned without ever touching the auction house, that a player should be able to make a competitive build with. That allowed conversations around prices to have a theoretical budget the player was presumed to be working with. I'm concerned that, unlike on live, the staff didn't figure out where they wanted the economy to sit. "How much should a player be spending on their build" is a very basic economic question. I'm concerned that the staff are unable to answer this question. We need to reach a consensus on what the staff think a "typical" build should look like, then we can talk about how much of a range up or down we get in practice.

Check the edited post.