March 31 patch and its effects on the marketplace

[Yomo Kimyata]

  

1 hour ago, The Curator said:

The following change was omitted from the beta patch notes due to a related exploit:

• Influence gain can no longer be increased by disabling XP

We’ve made this change to reduce the influence income gap between players who farm and those that do not. The amount of additional influence gained by abusing level 49 missions simply wasn’t healthy for the overall economy of the game, and generally unfair towards those who play standard level 50 content instead of farming.

 

Additionally, there were various exploits that could be abused in order to further increase influence gain through this option.

 

Overall, we concluded it was best to remove the mechanic. Even with this change farming is still far more efficient than every other method of influence gain.

This is the big one, but I felt that this was a patch that can cause volatility in a number of ways.  Your thoughts?

Edited March 31, 2020 by Yomo Kimyata

[Gremlin]

I'm not aware of any hard data on inf flows in and out of the game so I can only speculate. We're all aware that inflation is a recurring problem in MMOs and the devs are too. Given the care they seem to take over everything else I'm going to guess that they've looked at some data and seen signs that inflation is happening. Reducing the inf generated by farming seems like a sound idea; particularly as they're just reducing the difference between playing normal content repeatedly and playing specialised farming maps.

 

It's seems likely to me that this change will have little visible impact and that's probably the whole point.

 

The devil will be in the detail. We might see some localised changes such as more trading and less farming or the price of red recipes rising. Who knows?

 

In the mean time, it's kind of fun watching people throwing their toys out of the pram. 🙂

[MunkiLord]

I wonder if this will have an impact on the supply of winter and ATO? If the farmers were the ones supplying a significant portion of them, I could see this having an impact. Took this observation from the patch notes thread.

[Gremlin]

I'd love to know what the inf flows are. i.e. how much inf is added to the game in drops, how much is removed by market fees, how much is removed by Winter Packs etc.

[Murcielago]

INF value goes up, prices go side ways or possible up due to more people having more buying power. In either case, I'll still exploit people's need for conveniently crafting enhancements and make a sh!t of INF.

[Yomo Kimyata]

I wonder if the devs even know what the inf flows look like.  In principle, farming inf (and to be honest, earning inf through regular play) was like printing money in your basement and using it to buy groceries.  The question was whether or not the inf generation was more than 10x the value of the associated drops.  I think that it was, but since the cost of creating goods was so low, we didn't see significant inflationary pressures.  Ironically, a lot of talk in the thread on the Patch Notes indicate that people are going to start raising their offer prices, so maybe we will see that inflation after all.

 

I expect there will be less demand for farming build IOs such as Aegis. 

 

Performance Shifters will be harder to come by, since the conversion pool just increased by 150%.

[Yomo Kimyata]

Also, on a macro basis, people in that other thread are predicting supply of items is going to decrease.  The only way I see that happening is if farmers decide to rage quit.  I mean, let's say yesterday a farmer would AFK farm for an hour and generate X inf and get Y drops.  Today, if they farm for an hour they generate X/2 inf and get Y drops.  If they want to keep inf steady, they farm for 2 hours, generate X inf and get 2Y drops.  Is it my imagination or will this potentially INCREASE the supply of drops?

[DR_Mechano]

18 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Also, on a macro basis, people in that other thread are predicting supply of items is going to decrease.  The only way I see that happening is if farmers decide to rage quit.  I mean, let's say yesterday a farmer would AFK farm for an hour and generate X inf and get Y drops.  Today, if they farm for an hour they generate X/2 inf and get Y drops.  If they want to keep inf steady, they farm for 2 hours, generate X inf and get 2Y drops.  Is it my imagination or will this potentially INCREASE the supply of drops?

Honestly though, the games population is such that if some farmers DO decided to rage quit, like a decent chunk of them, we're up shit creek without a paddle. I know I'm personally not going to just slap stuff on the market for 1 inf anymore like I did with all my salvage or level 50 recipes from farming, instead I'm going to raise the prices since I'm going to need to cover more costs in the long run.

[Obus Form]

As previously mentioned, unless farmers rage quit (thus decreasing the supply of IO recipes) I don't think this will influence (hah!) the market much.  

 

1 hour ago, MunkiLord said:

I wonder if this will have an impact on the supply of winter and ATO? If the farmers were the ones supplying a significant portion of them, I could see this having an impact. Took this observation from the patch notes thread.

I wasn't aware that Winter and ATOs dropped from farming.   It was my understanding that Winter and ATOs only came from Packs sold statically at 10 and 25 million?

[MunkiLord]

Just now, Obus Form said:

As previously mentioned, unless farmers rage quit (thus decreasing the supply of IO recipes) I don't think this will influence (hah!) the market much.  

 

I wasn't aware that Winter and ATOs dropped from farming.   It was my understanding that Winter and ATOs only came from Packs sold statically at 10 and 25 million?

You're correct, but I'm wondering how many farmers used their extra influence to buy packs then sell the IOs. It could very well be a statistically irrelevant number.

[DR_Mechano]

Trouble is we are seeing kind of a large pushback against the choice by farmers and...well...people will ragequit if they don't like it. I mean I freaking HATE the change since I was a farmer mostly and a marketeer second now it looks like I'm doing the more 'boring' work of playing the market instead of farming but that's just me.

[Obus Form]

49 minutes ago, Murcielago said:

INF value goes up, prices go side ways or possible up due to more people having more buying power. In either case, I'll still exploit people's need for conveniently crafting enhancements and make a sh!t of INF.

I think (and I maybe wrong) the impact of the farming exploit nerf may or may not increase or decrease prices depends on the population of players farming.

 

If everyone and grandmama were fire farming with exp turned off, assuming all else being unchanged, then the total amount of inf in the market goes down, thereby increasing the buying power of newer players who don't have generational or developed wealth.  This may be true given the high demographic of Spines/Fire brutes per 2020Mar player statistics.  However, in the guild that created the Transportation Base, a lot of people have several AFK farming accounts, therefore, the distribution of Spines/Fire brutes maybe skewed towards top end gamers (anecdotally 15%?).

 

If only the top end gamers (anecdotally 15% of population?) were fire farming, then this would only nerf them, and I imagine this wouldnt really affect the other players buying up our CONVERT CONVERT CONVERT'd IOs.

 

Am i wrong here?

 

 

Edited March 31, 2020 by Obus Form

[Obus Form]

10 minutes ago, MunkiLord said:

You're correct, but I'm wondering how many farmers used their extra influence to buy packs then sell the IOs. It could very well be a statistically irrelevant number.

On this topic, I've noticed Winter IOs being sold at 20 million each.  If Winter IOs (and ATOs) only come from packs, they're selling at a huge loss.  I don't understand?

 

20 million  x  1.2 IOs per pack  x  90% (AH fees) = 21.6 million.  You'd have to assume the additional merits, converters, idea salvage, catalysts, etc make up 3.4 million per pack.  This seems like a net loss in my experience.

 

Edit: I conjecture there are people using merits to straight buy/sell Winter IOs without understanding the only other origin of winter IOs, which is winter packs for 25 million.  Anyone fire farming, I assume, wouldn't Inf --> Winter packs --> CONVERT game --> likely net loss.  

Edited March 31, 2020 by Obus Form
Conjecture

[MunkiLord]

Just now, Obus Form said:

On this topic, I've noticed Winter IOs being sold at 20 million each.  If Winter IOs (and ATOs) only come from packs, they're selling at a huge loss.  I don't understand?

 

20 million  x  1.2 IOs per pack  x  90% (AH fees) = 21.6 million.  You'd have to assume the additional merits, converters, idea salvage, catalysts, etc make up 3.4 million per pack.  This seems like a net loss in my experience.

 

 

I think it's tough to say with Winter IOs because we don't know how many people are still selling off packs they bought during the winter sale.

[Yomo Kimyata]

4 minutes ago, MunkiLord said:

I think it's tough to say with Winter IOs because we don't know how many people are still selling off packs they bought during the winter sale.

I've bought a small number of Winter packs at 20mm over the past few weeks.  People do strange things.

[Gremlin]

11 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

Trouble is we are seeing kind of a large pushback against the choice by farmers and...well...people will ragequit if they don't like it. I mean I freaking HATE the change since I was a farmer mostly and a marketeer second now it looks like I'm doing the more 'boring' work of playing the market instead of farming but that's just me.

Have you tried it to see how much difference it makes? Someone in chat was saying that it only reduced their inf by about 25%.

[DR_Mechano]

15 minutes ago, Gremlin said:

Have you tried it to see how much difference it makes? Someone in chat was saying that it only reduced their inf by about 25%.

Was on me phone since I was out and aboot but I'm home in 5 minutes so I'll log on to my farmer then and see how much it takes in. Pre-nerf I was breaking in about 10 million inf per comic-con BUT I can't speak to whether I was unintentionally using the 'patrol XP = massive inf gain' thing (which I honestly didn't know it did) since most of the time my farmer was sitting there with patrol XP unless I'd recently done a PLing session (since you want to be 50 for PL purposes).

 

Edit: Well I WOULD test it but, lo and behold all the farm maps (namely the standard Comic Con ones, non-level 49) are coming up as MA invalid....

Edited March 31, 2020 by DR_Mechano

[Yomo Kimyata]

Now that I think about it, I wish the devs would create some sort of macro shock like this every few months.  Things in the AH were boring!

[DR_Mechano]

26 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Now that I think about it, I wish the devs would create some sort of macro shock like this every few months.  Things in the AH were boring!

Wouldn't introducing the new IO sets have been enough of a Macro shock?

[Gremlin]

1 hour ago, DR_Mechano said:

Wouldn't introducing the new IO sets have been enough of a Macro shock?

Nah! Small fry.

 

We need to aim bigger. I suggest that the devs should pick one of the following in each release:

• remove all enhancement with an S in the name
• make the AH fee 50%
• merge the uncommon salvage and LotG proc markets
• reduce the drop rate of all melee sets to 10% of the current rate
• get all players to understand basic economics

I think most of them are doable. 🙂

 

 

[Elmyder]

2 hours ago, Obus Form said:

On this topic, I've noticed Winter IOs being sold at 20 million each.  If Winter IOs (and ATOs) only come from packs, they're selling at a huge loss.  I don't understand?

 

20 million  x  1.2 IOs per pack  x  90% (AH fees) = 21.6 million.  You'd have to assume the additional merits, converters, idea salvage, catalysts, etc make up 3.4 million per pack.  This seems like a net loss in my experience.

 

Edit: I conjecture there are people using merits to straight buy/sell Winter IOs without understanding the only other origin of winter IOs, which is winter packs for 25 million.  Anyone fire farming, I assume, wouldn't Inf --> Winter packs --> CONVERT game --> likely net loss.  

Catalyze the winter IOs and sell them at 30 mill. Therein lies the profit.

[Digirium]

1 minute ago, Elmyder said:

Catalyze the winter IOs and sell them at 30 mill. Therein lies the profit.

Not so much any more. With the farming nerf, more farmers will cotton on to cutting out the middle-man i.e. buying the winter super packs themselves, converting them and adding a catalyst. There will be less incentive to flip winter enhancements like this as they won't sell. They won't have as much to throw at inflated cost enhancements as before.

 

Nerf farms = nerf marketeers.

[Elmyder]

Just now, Digirium said:

Not so much any more. With the farming nerf, more farmers will cotton on to cutting out the middle-man i.e. buying the winter super packs themselves, converting them and adding a catalyst. There will be less incentive to flip winter enhancements like this as they won't sell. They won't have as much to throw at inflated cost enhancements as before.

 

Nerf farms = nerf marketeers.

This is really going to depend on how much the average farmer's behavior changes. We shall see. However, if you're correct, I hope it takes some time, because I am still selling around 100 winter IOs at 30 mill a piece lol.

[Troo]

3 hours ago, MunkiLord said:

3 hours ago, Obus Form said:

As previously mentioned, unless farmers rage quit (thus decreasing the supply of IO recipes) I don't think this will influence (hah!) the market much.  

 

I wasn't aware that Winter and ATOs dropped from farming.   It was my understanding that Winter and ATOs only came from Packs sold statically at 10 and 25 million?

You're correct, but I'm wondering how many farmers used their extra influence to buy packs then sell the IOs. It could very well be a statistically irrelevant number.

The packs contained a reward which could be used in the exploit. There will likely be a bit of a drop.

 

Outside of that, no real impact. Many farming folks could be bothered to travel to mission doors much less sell anything other than very high value drops.

 

Edited March 31, 2020 by Troo

[Yomo Kimyata]

21 minutes ago, Gremlin said:

Nah! Small fry.

 

We need to aim bigger. I suggest that the devs should pick one of the following in each release:

• remove all enhancement with an S in the name
• make the AH fee 50%
• merge the uncommon salvage and LotG proc markets
• reduce the drop rate of all melee sets to 10% of the current rate
• get all players to understand basic economics

I think most of them are doable. 🙂

 

 

How about an AH server/email wipe?