Discussion: Disabling XP No Longer Increases Influence

[ivanhedgehog]

8 hours ago, Abraxus said:

In the grand scheme of things, the city will go on, and so will the markets. Ragnarok will not happen.  I will play the game....

Dont say that!! I could use a couple of ragnaroks!!

 

Everyone cannot marketeer. when someone buys at a low price and sells it at a high one, someone has to pay out. If they want to make the markets better for the average joe...increse the purple drop rate. make them a little less scarce and the prices will drop. Inf game was cut for every play style that makes inf, so average joe will be lucky to be using regular IOs much less being able to afford purples.

[Errants]

8 minutes ago, Super Atom said:

 

My initial complaint on converters 

you

me in every other post

 

Maybe your issue is you think I'm referring to people being rich on live? Cause I'm talking about this server not live.  People being rich on this server has basically done a huge chunk of nothing because converters. Maybe that's a good thing by your posts, and I'm inclined to agree with you after our conversation but I still don't see how this has anything to do with influence not being what's controlling the market this time around, as i initially said.

Homecoming is Live, it is the game we play on, now. Legacy what I call the server that ended in 2012.

 

Desired enhancements will have more value. Always. That is the nature of demand - more people want it, there's a limited supply, so value goes up.

 

Hypothetical:

There's an enhancement called A - it drops 1 out of every 52 recipe drops. It is a nearly required piece of a high end build, and gets better the more you have, so everyone wants it, and wants 5 of them (any more don't work).

There's other enhancements in the pool, a, B, b, C, c...all the way to Z and z. Out of those other 51, B/C/D are also useful and valuable because they work with A. The other 22 capital recipe drops are useable... but do nothing that A, B, C, or D don't do better. The 26 lowercase drops? Trash. Useful in edge cases, but generally worthless.

 

In one environment, what drops is what you get. So, everyone farms for A, because that gives the best performance, and in the player market it sells the best. It commands the highest prices as a result. B-D are somewhat valued, as they compliment A. E-Z exist, but you can always find them for sale, because they're not used often, and they're never expensive. a-z are rare on the market, because most players delete/vendor them, but the few that make it sell dirt cheap to lowball patience bids.

 

In the other environment, there's a slot machine NPC - Give them a recipe and a little money (let say 0.5% of what A goes for in the first environment), and they'll turn it into something else. Your cheapest option gives you ANYTHING from Aa to Zz, but is kind enough not to reroll what you gave it... so 51 options. The next option costs twice as much, but you'll only get a capital recipe (A-Z) - can either change a capital you've got, or upgrade a lowercase into a capital. The final option is three times as much as the base one and requires a capital recipe, but will ONLY give you A-H back, again no rerolls. You've got a 50% chance of getting a valuable recipe, and a 12.5% chance of nailing that A recipe.

The result is lowercases suddenly have value, as you can upconvert them to uppercase recipes, and have a small chance of getting something REALLY good. Uppercases also go up, because they're mandated for the limited pool. B-D stay about where they are... there's more of them being made, but there wasn't a huge demand for them without A. A is the real winner here, or those wanting to use it... as now players can change from a 1:52 to a 1:7 chance. Many more hit the market, and prices trend downward.

 

The slot machine pulls money from the game (the fees disappear), lowering the amount people have overall by a small amount. It also lowers the costs of valued goods, because it removes a false scarcity. It does increase the costs of the useless goods, but only to a level, as the market will roughly balanced the costs of purchasing and then playing slots for a recipe, versus buying outright or farming. In short, the slot machine adds possibilities and supplies by taking useless goods and giving them both real (by changing to something useful) and perceived (value as fodder) value. It also devalues exclusive goods, because with a fraction of what a good would cost, you can make it yourself... if the odds are in your favor.

Now, this is an oversimplification of converters, the market, and the Live versus Legacy environment, but it is just an example. And it is possible to lose out on a specific instance, which is why the whole picture, and overall effects need to be looked at.

[Super Atom]

Quote

Homecoming is Live, it is the game we play on, now. Legacy what I call the server that ended in 2012.

 

Well see thats where confusion happens, "Live" generally refers to when the servers were live. Homecoming is usually HC servers, as it's not the only server.

[Yomo Kimyata]

37 minutes ago, Super Atom said:

The more i think about what Eran is saying the more i think I'm getting at what they're suggesting and i might have been reading their stuff wrong not the other way around. Prices being slightly higher isn't being seen as bad because the other prices aren't 100 million. If thats what you're saying, fair enough i get it.

 

I still think converters rule the market and the change to influence being to stop inflation kind of cancel each other out a little.

Converters are ridiculously magic.  If every single player had to take a tutorial about everything converters can do, then there would be peace in our time.

[Number Six]

56 minutes ago, Errants said:

that's being bought by people who see the last 5 and bid at or above it, because they want it now.

Bit of a tangent, but I honestly think that's one of the big problems with the market in general -- the lack of good information. If the interface had something like a graph of sale prices going back even 24 hours, it would be a lot easier for casual players to know what to buy/sell for depending on how quickly they want it. A ground-up rebuild of the AH is on my long-term wish list, but it's a lot of work to do it right.

[Budo]

So here's what I don't get- and this has nothing to do with the patch and that's okay because apparently this whole thread is just gonna devolve into a "z0mg y u h8 me i luv my haxxxo0rzzr0rz ph@rm" post:

 

But....

What is the point of the market and influence?

 

In the days of yore back on live ("Live"), it made sense that people needed to make influence because that's what kept a subscription going, in some way/shape/form. I want to get more purples, so I have to farm more (play for another month, pay my money to the money-god) or I have to play the market-flip game (I gotsta tweak the algorithm and exploit market movement, so I pay my money to the money-god pt. b). 

 

But....now?

Who cares? I would assume the overwhelming majority of the player population is not contributing to the real-life financial viability of this game. 

And if the volunteer-devs are doing this to make money, well congrats because you guys are putting in a lot of work to make very little money. Maybe you should have been teachers instead....

 

Why not just set a cost for a purple (or whatever your recipe d'jour is) and then let the market sort it out. You want that Ragnarok proc? Buy it from the new IO vendor for 25 mil! Or let the market sell it to you for 24 mil...but maybe you'll luck out and get it for 20 mil! Or maybe 18 mil! Or maybe you'll really luck out and get it for a taco and a kind word. Farming (love it, hate it, don't even know about it) becomes little more than a wang-dang-doodle-measuring contest because even if you have 40 billion, you're not going to get much further than those who had enough to buy whatever the ceiling price was at the vendor.

 

I'm not an economist (...or am I?) but I just don't understand the point of not letting people buy any/all IOs from a vendor to set a cap on things. Would this not fix the rampant influence glut- if it exists? People could still "play the market" and exploit inefficiencies, but those who wanted to avoid it entirely could just spend their hard-or-not-hard earned inf on things at the cap and avoid it entirely.

 

I dunno. I'm gonna go back to AP and be mad that a bunch of people are crowded around Ms. Liberty and making it impossible to level up my ice/elec controller and let everyone else ramble on.

[Number Six]

1 minute ago, Budo said:

I dunno. I'm gonna go back to AP and be mad that a bunch of people are crowded around Ms. Liberty and making it impossible to level up my ice/elec controller and let everyone else ramble on.

Back Alley Brawler says stop by sometime, nobody ever comes to talk to him and train up anymore.

[Yomo Kimyata]

1 minute ago, Number Six said:

Bit of a tangent, but I honestly think that's one of the big problems with the market in general -- the lack of good information. If the interface had something like a graph of sale prices going back even 24 hours, it would be a lot easier for casual players to know what to buy/sell for depending on how quickly they want it. A ground-up rebuild of the AH is on my long-term wish list, but it's a lot of work to do it right.

I disagree, but I see your point.  The problem with people using the current AH interface is about 5% lack of good information, 5% display bugs (which really erode confidence in people who are already scared to use it)., 90% pebkac.

 

Currently, the "economy" consists of a lot of people dumping their drops into the AH for 5 inf, a few people spending a few converters and transforming it, and a lot of people buying back their drops for a lot more inf and then complaining about it.  More information isn't going to help them bid better or offer better.  They will still buy it NAO and sell it NAO because NAO, and they will yell at the devs because they can't have everything they want instantly at the prices they want in a player run economy.

 

Honestly, the best thing the devs could do is put together a mandatory tutorial on how to use converters.  Like the crafting one in Steel.  I'm gonna put that on the Suggestions board.

 

 

[Budo]

Just now, Number Six said:

Back Alley Brawler says stop by sometime, nobody ever comes to talk to him and train up anymore.

Oh, he's my new best friend. 

I just have to run over to him, which is like 12 seconds of travel and that is just the most terrible thing to ever happen in the history of humanity.

 

 

Awww dang, I left my sarcasm thingamajig on again. 

[ivanhedgehog]

5 hours ago, Eclipse. said:

We are a long, long, long way off of IOs costing what there merit cap is AFAIK.

Prices would have to go up about 4x before we got to that point, at least for Purples. ATOs were about 10x increase last I looked, but it's been awhile.

They nerfed merit gain by lowering the zone cap number for RWZ and eden/abyss. They lowered the vanguard conversion reward. they cut AE xp by 50%. Now they cut inf by 50%. They seem to love nerfing rewards. Seems to be a theme.

[ivanhedgehog]

3 hours ago, ForeverLaxx said:

I don't agree to anything, but it's very clear you never had the intention of being rational. I'm moving on for that reason.

Thats kind of rude, she was not acting irrational. we can discuss this without falling to that level.

[Errants]

37 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

They nerfed merit gain by lowering the zone cap number for RWZ and eden/abyss. They lowered the vanguard conversion reward. they cut AE xp by 50%. Now they cut inf by 50%. They seem to love nerfing rewards. Seems to be a theme.

All changes that were actually reversions or bug fixes. Eden/Abyss have always had zone caps, they came off accidentally. RWZ got them back on legacy when SSK'ing let any level into the zone. AE exp is returned to Legacy levels, and still retains the options for conventional rewards (which never happened on Legacy). Please take your doom and gloom elsewhere.

[nihilii]

1 hour ago, Budo said:

Why not just set a cost for a purple (or whatever your recipe d'jour is) and then let the market sort it out.

This is actually how it works on Homecoming since these servers went up. You can trade 1M inf for 1 merit, and 100 merits buy you any purple you want. Ergo you can buy any purple for 100M inf. Works for just about any recipe. To fully IO out an alt, you don't ever need to use the market if that's not your thing - but of course, player market prices are much cheaper than straight inf conversion to merits.

[Combat Girl]

I think the devs are doing a fantastic job as always and I love some of the changes.

 

 I do agree with some of the comments around vet levels and there should be a change when you turn xp off, rather than just nothing that we now have. I don't understand why it can't be that when you turn xp off that you don't earn the amount in inf that you were earning in xp and inf?

 

So at the moment you earn 5979 inf (for example) with no xp and you earn 2979 xp and 5979 inf with xp on. It seems logical to me that when you get past 100 vet levels and turn off xp that you can then get 2979 + 5979 as your inf. I was never interested in double inf, but I do think there should be the option to earn the total xp and inf as inf, so make it far more rewarding to get past 100 v levels and turn off xp. I feel as if this is gimped now?? Just my thoughts anyway :)

 

Keep up the hard work guys, you are fabulous x

[RCU7115]

13 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

This isn't directed particularly at you, just this as a jumping off point:

 

People need to remember that using the market does not make inf.  Marketeering is fundamentally different from farming in that it actually removes inf from the game via the 10% AH tax.  And otherwise, the market is just moving the same inf around between accounts.  It does not cause inflation.  Consider this: if we stopped all inf drops, and kept recipe and salvage drops, trading on the market would eventually drain all inf from the game.

 

Farming (not just farming though, all mob defeats etc) actually adds inf to the game, and so is an inflationary force. 

 

Farming and marketeering have diametrically opposite effects on inflation in the game economy.

A nice simple explanation that I honestly overlooked. Thank you.

[Blastit]

2 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

They nerfed merit gain by lowering the zone cap number for RWZ and eden/abyss. They lowered the vanguard conversion reward. they cut AE xp by 50%. Now they cut inf by 50%. They seem to love nerfing rewards. Seems to be a theme.

Incarnate bits and IO sets of even the deepest, richest purple are vastly easier to get than they ever were during the live period. Reductions in the efficiency of farming are to move it closer to ten times better than other play rather than closer to a thousand times better. You're hyperfocusing and losing perspective on how good farming still is.

[RCU7115]

13 hours ago, Houtchmaster said:

As someone who does not have a lot of influence since rejoining the game, and who is trying desperately to save up influence in order to purchase named enhancements for heroes, this influence change hurts me. I don't have billions to draw from, and now it seems, the difficulty of saving up will (to my appearance) be twice as hard =/.

It will be.

 

[DMW45]

16 minutes ago, Blastit said:

Incarnate bits and IO sets of even the deepest, richest purple are vastly easier to get than they ever were during the live period. Reductions in the efficiency of farming are to move it closer to ten times better than other play rather than closer to a thousand times better. You're hyperfocusing and losing perspective on how good farming still is.

That's still not true, though.

 

Marketing gets inf faster and easier.

 

Plus, I never liked the idea of 'things were worse in the past, we can't want things to be better in the present for reasons?'

Edited April 1, 2020 by DMW45

[Blastit]

By "other play" I do of course refer to fighting enemies and completing missions, not logging in and typing the /ah command.

 

 

Rewards objectively are much higher. Reducing how much XP you get from AE missions was done so that levelling in other ways isn't enormously discouraged by the game systems. They even added a custom double XP buff! There are entire zones outside of fire farms and balancing rewards so that there's at least a sane range of disparity between them if not equilibrium is one of the bare minimum things you can do to foster a healthy game environment. Increasing everything else to the level of AE farms would result in blasting through everything unless you manually shut off XP. At that point you might as well have live XP levels but introduce the beta cheat menu to the regular servers. It'd be more practical.

[Grouchybeast]

4 hours ago, Number Six said:

Bit of a tangent, but I honestly think that's one of the big problems with the market in general -- the lack of good information. If the interface had something like a graph of sale prices going back even 24 hours, it would be a lot easier for casual players to know what to buy/sell for depending on how quickly they want it. A ground-up rebuild of the AH is on my long-term wish list, but it's a lot of work to do it right.

Waves frantically!

 

I don't know if anyone is already looking at this, but before giving the AH a full rewrite, it would be awesome if it would be possible to fix the long-standing bug that is screwing up the last five price display.

 

There is a thread about it here, with several examples of cross-wired last five prices.  This is a bug that causes real issues for people using the market, especially people who don't know about the bug who can ended up overpaying, or frustrated that their low bids don't fill.  It would be amazingly awesome if we could get at least an update on dev thinking about the priority of this bug, and whether it's being looked at.  And thanks for all you guys' hard work on the game.

 

[Peerless Girl]

4 hours ago, Budo said:

In the days of yore back on live ("Live"), it made sense that people needed to make influence because that's what kept a subscription going, in some way/shape/form. I want to get more purples, so I have to farm more (play for another month, pay my money to the money-god) or I have to play the market-flip game (I gotsta tweak the algorithm and exploit market movement, so I pay my money to the money-god pt. b). 

 

But....now?

Who cares? I would assume the overwhelming majority of the player population is not contributing to the real-life financial viability of this game. 

And if the volunteer-devs are doing this to make money, well congrats because you guys are putting in a lot of work to make very little money. Maybe you should have been teachers instead....

 

Why not just set a cost for a purple (or whatever your recipe d'jour is) and then let the market sort it out. You want that Ragnarok proc? Buy it from the new IO vendor for 25 mil! Or let the market sell it to you for 24 mil...but maybe you'll luck out and get it for 20 mil! Or maybe 18 mil! Or maybe you'll really luck out and get it for a taco and a kind word. Farming (love it, hate it, don't even know about it) becomes little more than a wang-dang-doodle-measuring contest because even if you have 40 billion, you're not going to get much further than those who had enough to buy whatever the ceiling price was at the vendor.

People didn't really "need" influence on Live either in a lot of ways, and it had no bearing on generating revenue for the game (at least not after Paragon took it Freemium). Back before i9 and the market, Influence was for buying your SOs, paying for your costume changes, and giving it away at costume contests/to newbies, because you had so much there wasn't anything else to do with it. (That's after you got your first high level/50, your first character was always a struggle until/unless you had a sugar momma/daddy to help pay for your stuff (I was lucky in that I did for a lot of my early life (pre-30s on my main in issue 3/issue 4).

 

Once the market went in (and IOs went in around the same time) everything changed, this happened in issue 9 the game had already been around for over 2-2.5 years by this point, also always remember that CoH (though barely) predated the rise of WoW, so there weren't a lot of other examples of MMOs and economies outside of Everquest and Ultima Online, and a few other games to compare to back then. All of those players who'd been around since the Rikti War launch, some sitting on the inf cap, finally had something to do with it all. I was there when the markets launched, and I was in the Closed Beta for the launch of I9, it was insane and nuts, it made Wall Street and the current back and forth thanks to Human Malware look like children selling lemonade. The price of luck charms and the lower level salvage band was in the TENS OF MILLIONS for a single piece, as others have said LotG pieces routinely sold for inf cap (or MORE than Inf Cap) money, with people using multiple characters to "bank" the money to buy ONE recipe. The world we live in now is vastly simpler than that, and the HC devs have market controls in place.

 

Part of it is that Wentworths is a "consignment house" not a true "auction house" (and Paragon's Devs made this very clear at the time). The way the systems work are deliberately (perhaps wrongly by newer modern standards) obfuscated, it's essentially a pawn shop, not ebay. The reason it helps is it's an Inf sink that takes "cuts" out of both ends of a transaction, in a game that had few (the inclusions of the new P2W Vendors and such, and the ability to buy reward merits are other Inf Sinks that have been introduced post live that did not exist at that time, RMs and Hero/Villian Merits were stupid high cost-wise, because part of that was designed to support the "Fremium/Vet Rewards Model" we no longer have running here on HC. Do we NEED the Market? No, probably not. But one of the things it does is help move money between accounts/players in a way that it never was before, and that's healthy for the fun of any game. Is it easier to make Inf marketeering than in other ways? Yes for some people it is, but what many are overlooking is that in using it (either selling or buying) you are taking a portion of the influence out of the game, and helping to stabilize the system, and it's one of the balancing forces against inflation by rate of farming/influence injection by killing mobs. Were it ME I probably would have a lot more inf sinks in game than we do (such as perhaps paying Null the Gull an increasing cost the more times (or at what level you are) to jump sides, and things like that, though I also recognize that that is also needed to stabilize the population of the always-redheaded-stepchild that is Red Side. 

 

TLDR; there are many factors why the market should exist, and many many things the HC devs will need to do to streamline the Inf earning and sinking and XP curves of an older game.

[Abraxus]

Things aren't perfect, the Devs have commented on the fact that they know where the deficiencies in the system and the interfaces for the market are, and that revamps are in their long term plans.  I, for one, am excited to see the game evolve beyond it's legacy (read: live) incarnation, and to see how much better things will get when some of these long term projects see the light of day.  Between new content, and new QoL features, I feel like this version is already much better than it was in 2012, and only getting better as time goes on.

 

To show that I put my money where my mouth is, so to speak, I will be rolling a new toon using the new Electric Affinity powerset, and utility belt power pool.  I LOVE new stuff, and after seeing them in action yesterday, I'm looking forward to trying them out.  I'm also excited to try out the changes to the Dark powerset on my Dark Scrapper.  He has been languishing in the pre-teens forever, because I just wasn't that excited about playing him.  Now, all of a sudden, I am! 

[SwitchFade]

8 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

They nerfed merit gain by lowering the zone cap number for RWZ and eden/abyss. They lowered the vanguard conversion reward. they cut AE xp by 50%. Now they cut inf by 50%. They seem to love nerfing rewards. Seems to be a theme.

That's a pretty severe exaggeration, don't you think?

 

RWZ was glitchy and zerging the GM was clearly broken, good fix.

 

The conversion on vanguard merits was obviously undervalued, good fix.

 

AE was completely trivializing all content, and still does. Not only was this a good fix, but it needs to be brought in line with normal content.

 

An exploit and rampant inflation were brought under control, good fix.

 

Look, before you even go and sit in the house of "you want me to play your way," think for a minute...

 

Why should AE give MORE reward than normal content? They should be equal in rewards. Everyone gets to play their way.

 

Why should RWZ and vanguard merit conversion so drastically dwarf any other reward rate that it causes massive inflation? It should not, that's unhealthy.

 

Why should quadruple inf farming through an exploit, or even a mechanic that doubles inf and drives rampant inflation be ok? It isn't ok, ask Mexico how that went when they though they could just print more money to make everyone rich. That's not how economics works.

 

No argument you can make for the above is valid in a factual, fair way. Now, if you stated plainly that you think those reward metrics that were broken are in fact NOT broken, because you FEEL that all other rewards they trivialized are too slow, then I accept that and respect your opinion.

 

But make no mistake, your feelings about rate of return are just your preference and while I respect them, they are not factually accurate.

[Crysis]

5 hours ago, DMW45 said:

That's still not true, though.

 

Marketing gets inf faster and easier.

 

Plus, I never liked the idea of 'things were worse in the past, we can't want things to be better in the present for reasons?'

You and many others keep saying that Marketeering gets influence faster and easier.

 

This is absolutely false or it wouldn’t have been the reason the Devs nerfed AE influence awards ENTIRELY while exemp’ed.  They didn’t just fix the exploit, they straight up cut out the reward structure for farming.  And they have openly acknowledged that even with the nerf, farming is still the fastest way to earn influence in the game.  They presumably have data to support this and aren’t just firing off the nerf missle for other “social acceptance” reasons.

 

You don’t have to believe me...just re-read their own rationale:

 

 

[arcane]

The influence change simply expands the vast gap between those who flip and those who don't. Poor little farmers never had a shot. 

 

So by all means, change what you will, but don't say it was for the purpose of addressing some kind of economic inequality.