Drop Throttling System

[Wild Claw]

10 minutes ago, roleki said:

Clearly, the people at fault for everything being so expensive are the people who dramatically increase the supply of those items.  

 

The only way to fix this is to reduce the supply to a trickle, then the prices will drop!

Trickle down economics! 🙂

[Omega-202]

35 minutes ago, roleki said:

Clearly, the people at fault for everything being so expensive are the people who dramatically increase the supply of those items.  

 

The only way to fix this is to reduce the supply to a trickle, then the prices will drop!

Don't know who you're writing that in response to, but there is a kernel of truth to that for certain drops.  There are a lot of high demand items in the economy that farming does not produce, or does so at a disproportionately smaller rate than the rate that it injects influence into the economy.  

 

Quick example: running TFs or Oro arcs can net a purple's worth of merits in about 30-40 mins.  Farming for 30-40 does not, on average, get you a purple, as shown in one of the older purple drop rate research threads.  Therefore, farming is injecting vast amounts of currency into the system at a disproportionate rate to the drop supply of purples it is producing.  Even worse for things like Hami-Os, some of which are in low supply / high demand and climbing in price.  No amount of farming is going to drop a Hami.

 

Sure, farming is why ATOs are relatively plentiful and standard uncommon and rare IOs are 0.5-5 mil instead of the 100 mil from live but you can't pretend that it doesn't also drive up the price on certain items.

[ShardWarrior]

11 hours ago, DarknessEternal said:

Homecoming has a system to prevent inflation already.  It's called Reward Merits.  Their changes to those effectively limit the cost of things in influence because if things become more expensive than their merit/time ratio, people will use that.

 

It does not have a drop throttler.

Was going to say this.  I like the system we have here much, much, much better than we had on live in this regard.  Items are much more affordable here.

[Doc_Scorpion]

3 hours ago, Omega-202 said:

I think you're all talking in circles.  Inflation is a trend, an increase in price and decrease in per unit purchasing power.  By definition, it can't happen "all at once".  It has to be over time. 

 

So day 1 of IOs and the 2 bil per character is irrelevant to the argument.  The issue was that despite all of the accrued wealth, prices for high value IOs only ever went up for years. 

Not entirely irrelevant.  The Day One prices (actually IIRC the first month or so as the unleashed torrents of Inf sloshed through the system) helped set the bar and contributed to farming's rise in popularity.

[Omega-202]

Just now, Doc_Scorpion said:

Not entirely irrelevant.  The Day One prices (actually IIRC the first month or so as the unleashed torrents of Inf sloshed through the system) helped set the bar and contributed to farming's rise in popularity.

I'm not sure I buy that it drove the popularity of farming up.  Farming is farming.  It'll happen in any MMO, even here on HC where everything is super plentiful.  I don't think the "slosh" did anything to increae or decrease the rate of farming.  Also, ok, the "slosh" happened over the first 1-6 months.  And then prices continued to rise for years after all of that old inf had already been washed from the economy.  The prices would have gotten to the same point eventually either way.

 

I feel like we can all have an economics discussion forever on this, and I'm not arguing that the pre-market accumulation didn't have an effect when the market opened, but I don't think that the prices would have been any different 2-3 years after the opening of the market if all inf was instead set to zero on day 1.  Numina's would still have been 100 mil at the close of live.

[Doc_Scorpion]

1 hour ago, Omega-202 said:

I'm not sure I buy that it drove the popularity of farming up.  Farming is farming.

o.0  No offense, but how can you possibly believe that going from "no place to spend significant quantities of Inf" to "lots of really cool stuff to spend Inf on" would have no effect on the desirability of ways to acquire Inf?  Economically speaking, that's the equivalent of believing 2+2=3.
 

1 hour ago, Omega-202 said:

And then prices continued to rise for years after all of that old inf had already been washed from the economy.  The prices would have gotten to the same point eventually either way.

Which should lead to thinking about why, if all the "old" Inf (accumulated over a period of three years) was gone, did prices continue to rise?  (Especially in a game with steadily declining population.)  That can only happen if Inf continues to flow into the system, and does so at ever increasing rates.

[siolfir]

2 hours ago, Omega-202 said:

No amount of farming is going to drop a Hami.

I farmed SHOs prior to i9 by speedrunning LRSFs with different characters to bypass the 24(18?)-hour drop limit.

I farmed pool C (TF) recipe drops by speedrunning the Tarikoss SF, which was done enough that once merits were added the reward for it was 9 merits.

 

Farming is not always just "kill mobs, get inf, dump way too much inf for item you really want". It just works much better that way on Homecoming since inflation is controlled by - at its worst - the merit vendor's conversion rate of 1 mil = 1 merit. Other than HO/SHOs and Incarnate salvage (which can be farmed other ways) you can buy anything else you want with merits.

[Omega-202]

20 minutes ago, siolfir said:

I farmed SHOs prior to i9 by speedrunning LRSFs with different characters to bypass the 24(18?)-hour drop limit.

I farmed pool C (TF) recipe drops by speedrunning the Tarikoss SF, which was done enough that once merits were added the reward for it was 9 merits.

 

Farming is not always just "kill mobs, get inf, dump way too much inf for item you really want". It just works much better that way on Homecoming since inflation is controlled by - at its worst - the merit vendor's conversion rate of 1 mil = 1 merit. Other than HO/SHOs and Incarnate salvage (which can be farmed other ways) you can buy anything else you want with merits.

We're discussing drop throttling in this thread, which has nothing to do with running TF completions.  When "farming" is being discussed in this thread, its obvious from context that its referring to mob drops.

 

Nobody is going to dispute that farming your way doesn't increase supply, but you have to read the conversation in context.

[DarknessEternal]

This thread should actually be abandoned.  The topic relevant to this thread is already covered and answered.  There is no smart agent checking to see what you're doing that influences drop rates.

[Omega-202]

46 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

o.0  No offense, but how can you possibly believe that going from "no place to spend significant quantities of Inf" to "lots of really cool stuff to spend Inf on" would have no effect on the desirability of ways to acquire Inf?  Economically speaking, that's the equivalent of believing 2+2=3.
 

Which should lead to thinking about why, if all the "old" Inf (accumulated over a period of three years) was gone, did prices continue to rise?  (Especially in a game with steadily declining population.)  That can only happen if Inf continues to flow into the system, and does so at ever increasing rates.

You seem to have misunderstood me utterly and completely.  I never said farming didn't go up.  I said that the "slosh" and accumulated pre-market wealth wasn' to blame for the increase in it.  The fact that there was now a market caused the increase, but the accumulayed wealth didn't have any real effect in the long run. 

 

Please actually read whats typed instead of getting snippy.  Are you just looking for an argument?

[Shred Monkey]

18 minutes ago, Omega-202 said:

You seem to have misunderstood me utterly and completely.  I never said farming didn't go up.  I said that the "slosh" and accumulated pre-market wealth wasn' to blame for the increase in it.  The fact that there was now a market caused the increase, but the accumulayed wealth didn't have any real effect in the long run. 

 

Please actually read whats typed instead of getting snippy.  Are you just looking for an argument?

Um... dudes... Your arguments aren't mutually exclusive.  You're both right.  High prices were caused by more than 1 thing.  

[Omega-202]

11 minutes ago, Shred Monkey said:

Um... dudes... Your arguments aren't mutually exclusive.  You're both right.  High prices were caused by more than 1 thing.  

Mine sort of is with his.  He stated that pre-market wealth accumulation was a major factor that lead to later systemic inflation, while I am arguing that the pre-market wealth was a blip that washed out very quickly and had very minimal long term impact.  

 

I don't think that either of us can easily prove our case one way or the other, and he didn't seem to actually read what I said, so I'm not going to discuss it any further.

[Doc_Scorpion]

1 hour ago, Omega-202 said:

I never said farming didn't go up.

Before you accuse other people of not reading, you might give it a try yourself.   You stated, and I quote, "I'm not sure I buy that it drove the popularity of farming up."  I addressed that statement.  No more, no less.
 

1 hour ago, Omega-202 said:

I said that the "slosh" and accumulated pre-market wealth wasn' to blame for the increase in it. 

1 hour ago, Omega-202 said:

The fact that there was now a market caused the increase, but the accumulayed wealth didn't have any real effect in the long run. 

If you don't believe that the accumulated pre-market wealth had no effect, I invite you to provide a foundation for that belief.

Otherwise, we're back to the economic equivalent of believing 2+2=3.  To repeat what I said above - that accumulated wealth set the bar.  That bar had a social and psychological effect that lasted well beyond the point where the original accumulated wealth had been sunk from the economy.  That's a critical point, and one often missed or misunderstood.

In addition - the structure of the auction house enforces that bar and raises expectations by matching the lowest offer to the highest bid, and then displaying that high bid in the price history.

The equivalent in the real world is an economic bubble (such as tulip bulbs or Beanie Babies).  In such cases expectations and inertia drive demand and prices as much, if not more, as the laws of supply and demand.  The result is self perpetuating positive feedback loop.  That loop is difficult to break (in game) so long as farming provides a fountain of wealth that far outstrips the capability of sinks to remove it from the economy.

The lack of such a bar also goes a long way towards explaining why prices haven't soared to such heights on HC.  Also, due to the lack of inertia and expectations, the brakes built into the economy (merit conversion, enhancement conversion, seeded salvage) have a greater effect.

Edited November 19, 2019 by Doc_Scorpion
Added in discussion of the role of the auction house.

[roleki]

2 hours ago, DarknessEternal said:

This thread should actually be abandoned.  The topic relevant to this thread is already covered and answered.  There is no smart agent checking to see what you're doing that influences drop rates.

Can you say that with 100% certainty, considering there was exactly such a thing on Live?  

[roleki]

5 hours ago, Omega-202 said:

Don't know who you're writing that in response to, but there is a kernel of truth to that for certain drops.  There are a lot of high demand items in the economy that farming does not produce, or does so at a disproportionately smaller rate than the rate that it injects influence into the economy.  

 

Quick example: running TFs or Oro arcs can net a purple's worth of merits in about 30-40 mins.  Farming for 30-40 does not, on average, get you a purple, as shown in one of the older purple drop rate research threads.  Therefore, farming is injecting vast amounts of currency into the system at a disproportionate rate to the drop supply of purples it is producing.  Even worse for things like Hami-Os, some of which are in low supply / high demand and climbing in price.  No amount of farming is going to drop a Hami.

 

Sure, farming is why ATOs are relatively plentiful and standard uncommon and rare IOs are 0.5-5 mil instead of the 100 mil from live but you can't pretend that it doesn't also drive up the price on certain items.

If I am reading this correctly, the reason why Hami-Os are super expensive is because farmers have an abundance of resources?  It has nothing to do with the fact that almost nobody bothers to do Hamidon raids anymore, let alone successful raids that yield such rewards?

 

How, exactly, are farmers driving up prices of HOs?  You have to look DEEP into the farm builds thread to find anyone who slots even one, so it's probably not farmers that are demanding them.  I've got 20-odd alts cooked up to 50, and of the ~1400 enhancement slots that represents, the only HO I've slotted is one I earned on a raid, and honestly I would be better served with an IO there but I kept it because it was novel.

 

Maybe I'm completely wrong and people are just slotting HOs like mad and not sharing their actual working builds, but so far the only builds *I* have seen that slot HOs are theorycraft marvels.  When I am looking at an alt, even with 2BN in my pocket, I would rather pay ~13M to boost a rare IO that hits where HOs do than pay 35M for the real thing, esp when the resulting boosted IO gives better buffs AND lends itself to bonuses.  

 

By and large, MOST farmers aren't out there spending their inf like drunken sailors, especially in a market capped by the Reward Merit system, and the only truly expensive items are those that aren't produced by either Merits or farming.   

 

Do people really think farmers spend hour after hour clearing thousands of mobs out of caves just so they can go blow it all paying crazy rates for stuff nobody wants anyway? 

[MunkiLord]

In CoH the entire problem was supply. Everything is easier to accumulate here on HC, on Live things like PvP recipes were stupidly rare. The merit prices, converter, and seeded salvage demonstrate this. Supply was the cause of inflation on Live. The other things mentioned certainly contributed to that, but they only mattered because of the intentional scarcity of certain items. Which is fine, digital items being infinite resources, all scarcity is intentional. 

 

[siolfir]

32 minutes ago, roleki said:

Maybe I'm completely wrong and people are just slotting HOs like mad and not sharing their actual working builds, but so far the only builds *I* have seen that slot HOs are theorycraft marvels. 

My Ice/Time Corruptor has 4 slotted (2 in Freeze Ray to go with 4 damage procs, and 2 in Farsight to go with the LotG: +7.5%), but they were all drops from MLTF/LRSF runs. To your point, however, I really only added them to the build because I already had them before I made the character.

[roleki]

18 minutes ago, siolfir said:

My Ice/Time Corruptor has 4 slotted (2 in Freeze Ray to go with 4 damage procs, and 2 in Farsight to go with the LotG: +7.5%), but they were all drops from MLTF/LRSF runs. To your point, however, I really only added them to the build because I already had them before I made the character.

Ha!  When I mentioned 'theorycrafting' I was thinking specifically of my Grav/Time build, where on paper I slot 3x Membrane (?) Exposure, or whichever one that does Rech/Def/ToHit.  That's one of a very small handful of HOs that can't be synthesized with boosted one-offs of much cheaper enhancements.  But my example is all theorycraft (to me) because even sitting on a pile of inf, I'm not paying 105M for three enhancements.  

[Doc_Scorpion]

49 minutes ago, MunkiLord said:

In CoH the entire problem was supply. Everything is easier to accumulate here on HC, on Live things like PvP recipes were stupidly rare. The merit prices, converter, and seeded salvage demonstrate this. Supply was the cause of inflation on Live. The other things mentioned certainly contributed to that, but they only mattered because of the intentional scarcity of certain items.

There's no difference between "limited supply of goods compared to cash" and "oversupply of cash compared to goods".  They both mean the same thing.

[MunkiLord]

14 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

There's no difference between "limited supply of goods compared to cash" and "oversupply of cash compared to goods".  They both mean the same thing.

You're right. I just feel the supply issue would be easier to address than the influence issue, that's why I focused on that. 

[Doc_Scorpion]

43 minutes ago, MunkiLord said:

You're right. I just feel the supply issue would be easier to address than the influence issue, that's why I focused on that. 

Good point.  On the other hand, you want rare goods to retain their cachet as that's what keeps people striving for them.  (And the money rolling in.)  And on the gripping hand... when they introduce significant new combat ability, you want to minimize their effects on the overall game.

Balance isn't easy.

[MunkiLord]

 

4 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

Good point.  On the other hand, you want rare goods to retain their cachet as that's what keeps people striving for them.  (And the money rolling in.)  And on the gripping hand... when they introduce significant new combat ability, you want to minimize their effects on the overall game.

Balance isn't easy.

Absolutely agreed. 

[Heraclea]

5 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

There's no difference between "limited supply of goods compared to cash" and "oversupply of cash compared to goods".  They both mean the same thing.

Any unit of currency is a divisor.  That is, the actual purchasing power of any unit of currency can be expressed as V=G/U, where V equals the purchasing power ("actual value") of a unit of currency, G the goods available for purchase, and U the number of units of currency chasing them.  The problem with the old game was that for years currency accumulated with nowhere to go, and throughout its history currency kept accumulating and chased a very small number of goods.  This is why I always preferred buying everything with merits, even when everything cost a lot more merits back then.  Your own drops were too precious to be traded for the dross of inf.  You worked the system for lucky recipe drops, saved even the lesser ones, and bought the salvage you needed with AE tickets. 

 

I still do that to a great extent, and it's a lot easier thanks to the converter minigame.  I think the long term trend is still inflationary.  But where the old game pegged the value of inf to SOs that were obsolete as of Issue 9, today we have floors in the conversion of inf to merits, and the seeding of salvage on the AH. 

[macskull]

17 hours ago, Omega-202 said:

That meant that supply of inf increased disproportionately to the rate of drops for high value IOs, especially ones that only dropped from certain activities (TF end random rolls, mission end, PVP).  That imbalance was directly attributable to farming. 

Farming was pretty much the only reason a supply of PvP IOs even existed. Their drop rate was so abysmally low and the PvP population was essentially nonexistent (PvP IOs were introduced in Issue 14, only four months after the previous issue's mass exodus of PvPers) that the only reliable supply of PvP IOs were from AFK farmers. The developers tried to curb that by adding in a lockout timer for the drops and all that did was push prices even higher to the point where there were at least two PvP IOs that had no supply on the market because they were being sold off-market for 3-4 billion inf each.

[nihilii]

19 hours ago, roleki said:

Clearly, the people at fault for everything being so expensive are the people who dramatically increase the supply of those items.  

 

The only way to fix this is to reduce the supply to a trickle, then the prices will drop!

We did experience the consequences of farming on Live. As it generated influence and all IOs except PvP IOs, this led to PvP IOs spiking to 2B (and above, trading outside the market).

On Homecoming, farming tends to add inflation more than regular play as the typical farming setup is exemplared for 2x inf rewards, whereas you don't generate 2x the drops.