Income Inequality In CoX

[Troo]

51 minutes ago, macskull said:

the answers that are given aren't wrong.

agreed.

52 minutes ago, macskull said:

you have no way of knowing how many of those new accounts are just alts of current players

agreed.

52 minutes ago, macskull said:

forums is a very small subset of the playerbase as a whole.

agreed.

53 minutes ago, macskull said:

79 active forum accounts logged in

I think you're accurate, but it doesn't include everyone looking at the posts.

Many are not logged in and just reading. (Browse > Online Users shows 279 users online)

[MTeague]

It should be noted however, that there's really no need to earn BAZILLIONS of merits. It's cool if that's your thing and all.  

 

I'm definitely in teh "Casual Merit Earner" grouping, doing mostly story arcs, tip missions, and the occasional TF when the mood strikes me. 

I do not farm and have no interest in it.  I do like doing a bunch of Ouro for a few characters redside and a few characters blueside.

 

But I only really need (where need = kinda want, would feel put-upon without them) enough merits to buy about 90-100 converters that I shazam into 30-40 rares that sell for 1-4 mil each. 

As long as each cahracter does that every so often, I have NO trouble buying attuned set pieces of whatever set I want for my next couple of levels.  When the inf piles up to 100 mil or so, I'll either buy some superpacks or winterpacks and mail around or convert the ATO/WinterO's to whichever alt can use them, and then do more story arcs for more merits to start the cycle over. 

 

Sure I COULD focus and earn lots more inf per hour and lots more merits per hour.... but as long as my alts are tricked out with attuned set pieces in every slot.... I don't feel any loss.

[MTeague]

1 hour ago, macskull said:

I left out the part of the post where you listed people who'd recently registered for forum accounts because while sure, someone registering a forum account is a prerequisite to them also registering a game account, you have no way of knowing how many of those new accounts are just alts of current players, and the population of these forums is a very small subset of the playerbase as a whole. As of my typing this post there are 2077 players ingame and 79 active forum accounts logged in - that's less than 4%. Fact is, most people aren't looking on the forums at all, ever, let alone new players who are trying to figure things out. If a new player is coming to the forums and asking for help they're already more interested than the vast majority of players. Besides, it seems like most of these "how to get started" threads are asking for ways to make inf and the answers that are given aren't wrong. Farm, get converters, play the market... people are asking the question and they're getting the answer.

Given how many times I see the same questions to certain things in Help chat, I'm very sure there's a chunk of the playerbase who has never touched the forums or the Homecoming webpage for longer than necessary to register their account so they could play the game. 

 

And hey, I can't call that wrong as such. 

 

I do know I've often said something about "Converter Roulette" and gotten tells from people asking what I mean by that, and then going into tells with them for 5 minutes or so to explain what it is and how it works.  Often the person's mind is blown, they were just totally unaware of how converters can be put to use.  I do point them at the forums after that, but who knows how many read it or not. 

[macskull]

6 minutes ago, MTeague said:

It should be noted however, that there's really no need to earn BAZILLIONS of merits. It's cool if that's your thing and all.  

 

I'm definitely in teh "Casual Merit Earner" grouping, doing mostly story arcs, tip missions, and the occasional TF when the mood strikes me. 

I do not farm and have no interest in it.  I do like doing a bunch of Ouro for a few characters redside and a few characters blueside.

 

But I only really need (where need = kinda want, would feel put-upon without them) enough merits to buy about 90-100 converters that I shazam into 30-40 rares that sell for 1-4 mil each. 

As long as each cahracter does that every so often, I have NO trouble buying attuned set pieces of whatever set I want for my next couple of levels.  When the inf piles up to 100 mil or so, I'll either buy some superpacks or winterpacks and mail around or convert the ATO/WinterO's to whichever alt can use them, and then do more story arcs for more merits to start the cycle over. 

 

Sure I COULD focus and earn lots more inf per hour and lots more merits per hour.... but as long as my alts are tricked out with attuned set pieces in every slot.... I don't feel any loss.

Yep, between the merits from just doing task forces and the marketeering I can do with the resultant converters I have absolutely no shortage of inf.

[Haijinx]

The trick is to not have a "wants" category much larger than your "income" category. 

 

 For example if you are on the lower end income scale you are not going to be able to afford to do "full purple" builds for 50 toons.

 

But really if you play casually bouncing between Radios and Task Forces (make sure to hit the Weeklys!) you can probably afford 1 big budget build without too much time invested.   

 

========= 

 

Which really renders the "income inequality" part moot.   

 

Its already much more fair that live when most causals couldn't afford the high end builds at all. 

[Dreamboat]

6 hours ago, Inheritor said:

At this point inf becomes simply an abstract concept with no practical meaning.

"She knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

[Carnifax]

1 hour ago, Haijinx said:

The trick is to not have a "wants" category much larger than your "income" category. 

 

This. I have 3 fully kitted out 50s where I'm happy and 2 newly minted ones who are pretty close.

 

None of this was via farming or marketeering (other than crafting and selling a drop if it was worthwhile). Mostly from drops and merits from TFs and stories.

 

None of them have purples (actually 1 has 1 set) because the cost per improvement is too much for me, I'm happy just slotting IOs and AT sets mostly.

 

So its easily possible to be in the "lower earning" brackets and tricked out. For example the Citadel Tf earned my level 30 brute 22 mill in 55 mins last night, thats the bones of 3 Luck of the Gamblers, a full Oblit set or 5 Posi IOs with a decent chunk of change.

 

It also made me never want to see a stupid council base ever again but thats more the TFs fault rather than the crafting systems 😀

[nihilii]

What if income inequality was a good thing?

 

In an economy where:

- capital cannot grow passively

- goods can be produced infinitely

- barriers to entry are nonexistent

 

"Income inequality" is really just another way to spell out the long road of betterment you can choose to take (or not, if your interests lie elsewhere).

[Haijinx]

the farming is actually good IMO since it provides lots of recipes for the markets.  

[Heraclea]

You can do as I do, which is to build a supergroup base with max storage chiefly dedicated to salvage and crafted enhancement sharing.  Desirable drops get crafted and put in the kitty of stuff that will actually get slotted.  Less desirable drops get crafted too and put in the gambling kitty.  So do converters, which are saved from mob drops or bought with 'odd' numbers of merits -- i.e.  anything not a multiple of 20, 50, or 100.   I run converters until the yellows turn to corresponding oranges, then the oranges get converted until they land on something someone might want.  Then that enhancement gets moved from the gambling kitty to the keeper kitty. 

 

I try to take all of my level 50s out for a spin every so often to collect their daily catalyst too; those also get saved.  When they exceed my storage capacity I sell a few.  And I try to run strike/task forces often for a reliable income of reward merits.  My characters tend to be merits rich and inf poor.   I do insist that my characters pay their own way on ATOs and purple sets.  It is still easy to build a quite mighty character without either.  Usually that stuff is bought with merits rather than inf.  Inf is something to get rid of.  I will buy stuff from the auctions, but not often. 

[Haijinx]

10 minutes ago, Carnifax said:

This. I have 3 fully kitted out 50s where I'm happy and 2 newly minted ones who are pretty close.

 

None of this was via farming or marketeering (other than crafting and selling a drop if it was worthwhile). Mostly from drops and merits from TFs and stories.

 

None of them have purples (actually 1 has 1 set) because the cost per improvement is too much for me, I'm happy just slotting IOs and AT sets mostly.

 

So its easily possible to be in the "lower earning" brackets and tricked out. For example the Citadel Tf earned my level 30 brute 22 mill in 55 mins last night, thats the bones of 3 Luck of the Gamblers, a full Oblit set or 5 Posi IOs with a decent chunk of change.

 

It also made me never want to see a stupid council base ever again but thats more the TFs fault rather than the crafting systems 😀

Definitely.  For maybe 20% of a "High End" Build you can put together a good build that lets you do a whole lot of things you can't do on SOs.   

 

There is definitely a steep curve between a decent IO build and the most expensive in terms of price per added performance.  

 

I have 7 level 50's, only one has a Price is no object type build with 6 purple sets, etc.  But the others do fine. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Haijinx]

Also its not like there is wear and tear on your IOs so as long as the game is still running, you will get there eventually.  If you want to.  

 

[Lines]

I think OP is making a fair enough observation. Being a casual player, though, somewhere around the second category, I wouldn't say the game urgently needs a rebalance. I like the long haul.

 

The game rewards do still revolve around an SO based economy, so maybe it could be beefed up a little. But that could contribute to inflation, and I can do without that.

Edited February 17, 2020 by Lines

[DSorrow]

I don't think income inequality is an issue at all in CoX for the following reasons:

• You don't actually need almost any inf. Get your SOs (or generic IOs) and you're set for anything the game has to offer outside of silly solo challenges like solo TFs.
• One of the most effective inf generating mechanisms in the game is available for level 1 characters and don't require and doesn't require any skill. That means anyone can successfully leverage it. I'm of course talking about being an ebil marketeer, which works extremely simply: memorize a handful of IO sets that typically sell for a moderate to large amount of money, buy extremely cheap sets and convert them until you have the good sets. I've been doing this since I started on HC and currently have 8 50s with optimized IO builds. My first character had 100M by level 30 and hundreds of millions of inf when I hit 50.
• Even a mix of the less than optimal routes can get you a top of the line build in a reasonable amount of time (less than 100h), allowing you to skip farming (like I do) or marketeering if you find either of them unenjoyable while still getting your game-breaking god characters.

 

That said, I don't think it's fair to expect to get to Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth quickly if you decide to avoid using some of the tools available. 

[Inheritor]

You don't technically need IOs, but all too often I'm on a team of 7 IO'd "squishies" and 1 SO'd brute. The 7 IOs are breezing through the mission taking no damage while the 1 SO is constantly dying. I wonder if that person is having fun. I legitimately don't know, but if it were me, I wouldn't be. I don't think they should be shunned for their "ignorance" or "laziness" because they just wanted to punch nazis in PI with their cow-themed superhero instead of looking up a guide on how to make imaginary money in a dead superhero game, even if the guide is very simple.

[DR_Mechano]

1 hour ago, Inheritor said:

You don't technically need IOs, but all too often I'm on a team of 7 IO'd "squishies" and 1 SO'd brute. The 7 IOs are breezing through the mission taking no damage while the 1 SO is constantly dying. I wonder if that person is having fun. I legitimately don't know, but if it were me, I wouldn't be. I don't think they should be shunned for their "ignorance" or "laziness" because they just wanted to punch nazis in PI with their cow-themed superhero instead of looking up a guide on how to make imaginary money in a dead superhero game, even if the guide is very simple.

Considering last night I explained to someone the Rare Roulette which is the simplest way to make money in Help in about a minute or less (buy cheap yellow recipe that doesn't use rare salvage, craft, convert into rare, spin the rare roulette wheel on convertors until you get something 2-3 million or more and then sell) they don't even have to look at a guide. This isn't WoW where the mystery of the Auction House and all its profits are hidden behind guides or require absurd amounts of knowledge and apps tracking prices (yes really, in order to play the Auction House well the big earners will basically play it like they were stock brokers, closely following the ups and downs of various items).

 

If you want to spend time invested in flipping and all the advanced stuff in CoH AH play, you can and you'll make billions within 3-4 days. Or you can simply chug along and make like a billion inf in two weeks or so.

 

Also those 7 IO'd squishies will probably feature a buffer/debuffer of some kind which means it's unlikely the SO'd brute is going to be dying any time soon since they'll be buffed to the nines. If a team of level 1-20s plus a single IO'd 50 can complete +4/x8 council missions then I think they'd be fine. Hell a full team of 8 50s even in SOs is virtually unstoppable on radio missions and its only when you get up against the tougher content in the game, like say the final mission of the MLTF that you might struggle but what we did was have the tank buy a crapton of purple and orange insps, choke them down whilst taking Recluse whilst the rest worked on the towers in the proper order.

 

The only thing you need a 1.5 billion inf build is for being able to do silly things that are frankly above and beyond what was expected like high end task force soloing. There are budget spines/fire farmer builds which clock in at less than 200 million inf and use no purple or winter ios and only the Brute specific ATOs. They're not as fast as the absurd 1.2 billion inf builds but they're not THAT much slower to be honest.

Edited February 17, 2020 by DR_Mechano

[Gulbasaur]

10 hours ago, Murcielago said:

I don't mean this in an apathetic way but are people still seriously having difficulty buying IOs?

If you don't really read online guides and just go with what the game tells you... yes. You probably won't really have a decent amount of inf until you hit 50 and have been running incarnate content for a while. On a L50 , an hour of farting about with radios and tip missions with some lowbies in tow will get me about 5mil inf, give or take, from memory. The LFG is heavily geared towards powerlevelling (bleh) and task forces (woo) and if you go in as a newbie and get told to grab an XP boost and go and run some radios, that's what you'll do. 

 

I've played with people who are told that the best way to play is to go in and farm because it gets you to 50 quickly and gets you a lot of inf, leading to players who have a highly monotonous experience and then when they get coaxed out into the "real" game find it hard to survive because not every single enemy only does fire damage and how do I get to King's Row? 

 

Nowhere in-game does it really indicate that merits = £$€infdubloons. That's a thing you find out from other players, by asking. I've seen it happen a few times - I've helped more than a few newbies get started and told them that merits are a good way of starting up if you don't want to farm (and I don't want to farm). 

 

City of Heroes has a real problem with tutorials and the lack of them - the Mr Graves/Twinshot missions give you an incomplete tutorial, but if you miss them, which you can do because there is no indication that they're the tutorial, then you're left with no real idea of what to do. It's all word of mouth and sometimes those mouths aren't giving good advice. 

Edited February 17, 2020 by Gulbasaur

[Frostbiter]

 

Thousands of heroes still suffer from lack of LotG Recharge IOs. For just a handful of influence a day you can make a difference in these heroes lives. Don't forget to spay and neuter.

[siolfir]

50 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

Also those 7 IO'd squishies will probably feature a buffer/debuffer of some kind which means it's unlikely the SO'd brute is going to be dying any time soon since they'll be buffed to the nines. If a team of level 1-20s plus a single IO'd 50 can complete +4/x8 council missions then I think they'd be fine. Hell a full team of 8 50s even in SOs is virtually unstoppable on radio missions and its only when you get up against the tougher content in the game, like say the final mission of the LRSF that you might struggle but what we did was have the tank buy a crapton of purple and orange insps, choke them down whilst taking Recluse whilst the rest worked on the towers in the proper order.

First off, I completely agree with the first sentence. Now, the nitpick: you take down Recluse and towers in the MLTF (formerly STF), not the LRSF.

 

Edit to try to not have a completely off-topic post: I think that inf drops at low levels should be looked at; if nothing else it will make it more painful to just use 2xp until you hit 50, and inflation is mostly capped by the merit vendor conversion rate.

Edited February 17, 2020 by siolfir

[DR_Mechano]

1 minute ago, siolfir said:

First off, I completely agree with the first sentence. Now, the nitpick: you take down Recluse and towers in the MLTF (formerly STF), not the LRSF.

Bah my bad, got LRSF on the brain. Corrected

[Bionic_Flea]

There is no influence inequity only a knowledge and desire inequality.  We can teach people how to make billions.  We have.  We continue to do so. 

 

But if people want to run on SOs only, that's cool too.  It's up to them. 

 

Anyone that wants to can have more influence than they can spend without too much time and effort expended.

[Shred Monkey]

I think OP overlooks the biggest group of complainers:

 

Door Sitters
Getting farmed to 50 with 2X exp on  = 0 inf/hour.  Now you have a level 50 with no enhancements, and no INF to buy some, and no merits.  Unless you have an alt to provide inf/merits, you're up the creek without a paddle.  

 

 

Edited February 17, 2020 by Shred Monkey

[jubakumbi]

12 hours ago, Inheritor said:

Ideally, I'd like to see this income inequality reduced, perhaps by dramatically increasing the rewards earned from radios and weekly strike targets. Realistically, the top two classes will always earn too much and there's no simple or even desirable way of reigning them in.

Why?

Why do you want to control people you don't know in a dead MMO running on rogue servers?

Why does the game have to have some unobtainable perfect balance no game has?

Hawkeye and Thor are not balanced.

Not everyone will put the same time and energy into a game and therefore their avatars will not be balanced.

 

Advanced players will play in advanced ways, others may not, this is how games are played by passionate people.

 

The only thing IMO you seem to be saying here is that you think other people can get the free slot machine to produce faster doing things others don't want to do.

Oh well, such is life, there is no such thing as balance, it is an illusion sold to people to make them think life is fair when the opposite is reality.

 

Really, where does this desire to prevent other from earning 'too much' in a video game come from?

[Abraxus]

One of the things I've always appreciated about this game is that it accommodates the serious hardcore enthusiast player (whether that's for INF, or XP, or I/O sets, etc.), as well as the casual player, who just wants to come in, do a few missions, and jump right out again. There was nothing special required really.  For some endeavors, it might take a little more research on how to do it the way you wish, in order to accomplish exactly what you want, but it is almost always possible. 

 

So, advocating that changes be made to accommodate specific play styles is just confusing to me, and I believe counterproductive.  It's all there for anyone to do at the participation, and difficulty level they wish.  The players themselves can determine how they proceed.  So, perhaps I'm missing something.  But, there really doesn't seem to be any reason to change anything if you're looking to maximize INF.  You just concentrate on those things that will do just that.  No coding changes necessary.

[HelBlaiz]

Someone mentioned boosting the drop rates on things. I think that sounds like a fine idea. No real need to overhaul influence gain, you can just boost supply, making it easier for everyone to get what they want. Maybe even seed the recipes on the auction house if that's not a thing yet?