Discussion: Disabling XP No Longer Increases Influence

[Nemesis]

3 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

Patently false.  The market price of salvage is far below the seed caps.

good for you, I never get it for below the seed caps.

[Jimmy]

Something to keep in mind is that historically prices have gone up when more players are active. This can be observed every week by tracking prices on the weekend vs on weekdays. My assumption is that "casual" players (who may have only played a few hours on the weekend) tend to not list most of their drops and are more impatient with their bids, which drives prices up. On the other hand, "core" players (who play far more often) will more frequently be playing already-built characters and will be more tactical with their market interactions (either by being patient or using converters / merits to get what they want).

 

Our average player count has been steadily increasing as everyone has been staying at home, and prices have also gone up (this was occuring before Page 5 released). Casual players are now playing more frequently and in greater numbers, but their interaction with the market hasn't changed, whereas the number of core players likely hasn't changed a great amount. The influx of new Electrical Affinity characters requiring builds will obviously also have increased demand on the market.

[SwitchFade]

3 minutes ago, Nemesis said:

your using real world economics in a MMO. they 2 do not equate. The value did not increase. 1 influence is still 1 influence. While in an ideal world you would be correct, this is a world where I can create many many multiple accounts and have them all farm to offset this change.  The system requirements aren't so heavy that people wont do this. Overall nothing will change, because there are ways around it. Who it will hurt are the casual and non-farmers who will now earn less influence to pay the same prices.

 

Economics is not a real world or not-real-world, thing.

 

It's knowledge. Knowledge about wealth, production, consumption, distribution, disparity and related topics.

 

It's related to Human behavior so it applies.

 

And I'm sorry, but what you're staying is incorrect, economics doesn't work that way.

 

Please read through the numerous posts many of us have made explaining why.

[SwitchFade]

2 minutes ago, Jimmy said:

Something to keep in mind is that historically prices have gone up when more players are active. This can be observed every week by tracking prices on the weekend vs on weekdays. My assumption is that "casual" players (who may have only played a few hours on the weekend) tend to not list most of their drops and are more impatient with their bids, which drives prices up. On the other hand, "core" players (who play far more often) will more frequently be playing already-built characters and will be more tactical with their market interactions (either by being patient or using converters / merits to get what they want).

 

Our average player count has been steadily increasing as everyone has been staying at home, and prices have also gone up (this was occuring before Page 5 released). Casual players are now playing more frequently and in greater numbers, but their interaction with the market hasn't changed, whereas the number of core players likely hasn't changed a great amount. The influx of new Electrical Affinity characters requiring builds will obviously also have increased demand on the market.

Which is exactly why this had to be fixed sooner rather than later.

 

Any economy that reaches a certain critical mass will see exponential increases in detrimental factors, should they remain unaddressed.

 

Rampant inflation is never good for an economy, and this fix was necessary.

[Parabola]

3 minutes ago, Nemesis said:

Again your using real world economic practice that don't work in a MMO.

The game economy works exactly like a real world economy.

 

3 minutes ago, Nemesis said:

good for you, I never get it for below the seed caps.

Are you seriously expecting us to believe that?

[Doc_Scorpion]

3 minutes ago, Nemesis said:

I never get it for below the seed caps.

Given the caps (10,000 for common, 100,000 for uncommon, 1,0000,000 for rare)...  And that nobody else seems to be reporting prices at or near the caps...  Nah.  I don't believe you for a minute that you "never" obtain salvage for below the caps.  (Doubly so since market prices are regularly less than 10% of the cap.)  It's far more likely you just don't realize where the caps are.

[Saikochoro]

4 hours ago, Murcielago said:

I really like this implementation and I know I speak for the minority but I think the devs should take this one step further and put a set limit on how many times you can convert an enhancement. Increase scarcity a little bit.

Why does the market need scarcity?  Who would that help? What purpose would it serve other to increase prices?  A big no from me. The devs have also stated they don’t want to change converters because that would hurt market by driving up prices. 

[SwitchFade]

Just now, Saikochoro said:

Why does the market need scarcity?  Who would that help? What purpose would it serve other to increase prices?  A big no from me. The devs have also stated they don’t want to change converters because that would hurt market by driving up prices. 

Pointedly correct in highlighting the detriment of scarcity. Converters assure all goods are normal goods, all goods are substitutes and converting has opportunity cost, just like not converting has opportunity cost.

[Nemesis]

13 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

Given the caps (10,000 for common, 100,000 for uncommon, 1,0000,000 for rare)...  And that nobody else seems to be reporting prices at or near the caps...  Nah.  I don't believe you for a minute that you "never" obtain salvage for below the caps.  (Doubly so since market prices are regularly less than 10% of the cap.)  It's far more likely you just don't realize where the caps are.

I'll definitely admit when I am wrong. I honestly thought they were different price caps.
Thank you for the information.

[Saikochoro]

4 hours ago, MunkiLord said:

Whether we’re talking this game or real life, an actual free market isn’t a thing.

Im just piggy backing off your comment to express a few thoughts. 
 

While I do whole heartedly think that a capitalist economy is better than a socialist economy, you are correct that even markets dubbed “free markets” have many regulations in place to control the economy to some degree. 
 

The degree to how much governmental intervention is good has been hotly debated for a long time and will continue to be.  But I think we can all agree that regulations are a thing in real world economies whether they are socialist or not. 
 

In response to the individual you quoted, I don’t think we can apply capitalist vs socialist paradigms to this game because it has something that no real world economy has - limitless supply, fungible goods, and magic (converters).  

Edited April 5, 2020 by Saikochoro

[skoryy]

5 hours ago, Murcielago said:

I really like this implementation and I know I speak for the minority but I think the devs should take this one step further and put a set limit on how many times you can convert an enhancement. Increase scarcity a little bit.

There's a soft limit, though:

 

~500k to create a lvl 50 uncommon IO

~90k per converter

Most rare IOs sell for roughly 1 mil.

 

Unless you hit the converter lottery and land on a high demand IO, you're taking a loss once you use more than five converters.  Up to ten (I think) if you're converting lower level IOs.

[Errants]

3 minutes ago, skoryy said:

There's a soft limit, though:

~500k to create a lvl 50 uncommon IO

~90k per converter

Most rare IOs sell for roughly 1 mil.

Unless you hit the converter lottery and land on a high demand IO, you're taking a loss once you use more than five converters.  Up to ten (I think) if you're converting lower level IOs.

Correct on both. 49 IO's are ~250k to craft, crafting costs drop linear from there - yes, 50 IO's are inf sinks. 2 converters for Type conversion (Melee, Ranged, etc) to get the Uncommon > Rare upgrade, then 1 converter per conversion at Rare. So, 2 Type Conversions, or 1 Type and 2 Rarity Conversions, you break even/small loss on a 1 million sale (490k crafting, 25k for the uncommon salvage, 400k for 4 converters, 50k each in list/sale fees = 1,015k inf). If the recipe requires rare salvage, it might not even be worth it to craft.

[ivanhedgehog]

3 hours ago, SwitchFade said:

I feel you.

 

What you may have missed, had you not read the explenations, is that your personal reduction in income will be moot, due to the reduction in the cost of a basket of goods.

 

Example: you made 100 an hour before and a good cost 100. Now, you make 70 an hour and the good cost is 60.

 

Your buying power went up, the value of each unit of currency increased. You can read all the posts explaining why (the thread is growing due to mergers, this will take time) or you can trust me, you will be able to buy more.

are they cutting the price of the packs in half? dint think so. my buying power was cut in half there.

[Arlimes]

On 3/31/2020 at 9:19 AM, Obus Form said:

More efficient than converting/flipping? =O

At this point yes, all of my stuff that was regularly listing at 100k is now listing at 6k and is worth more to vendors while IOs are still setting at 15 mill, now absolutely painful to try to slot a new character out with the sets to make them actually functional. 

[Lines]

2 minutes ago, Arlimes said:

At this point yes, all of my stuff that was regularly listing at 100k is now listing at 6k and is worth more to vendors while IOs are still setting at 15 mill, now absolutely painful to try to slot a new character out with the sets to make them actually functional. 

What exactly are you trying to flip? I can guarantee you there are better avenues than 100k.

[Arlimes]

9 minutes ago, Lines said:

What exactly are you trying to flip? I can guarantee you there are better avenues than 100k.

Eh random recipes, enhancements and such. I was selling a lot of the recipes on my inventory for between 500k and a mill easily last week, but a large portion of them are showing at 6k to 15k now which isnt even worth listing them. I logged on yesterday and posted up my surplus of recipes because I had around 60 of them, all of them are now below 20k a piece when they were worth way more last week. I sold recipes all week last week and was at 73 mill within a day or two, the same recipes, same level, but now drastically lower on what I'm getting from listings on AH, while the enhancements costs have barely changed. I'm at 50, wasnt doing the exemplar exploit, just kept my xp turned off and ran mission teams and traded merits for salvage or recipes for my inf, which was totally fine, but now it's taking me significantly longer to work on the funds to buy all the sets I was working on for my tank. 

[Lines]

3 minutes ago, Arlimes said:

Eh random recipes, enhancements and such. I was selling a lot of the recipes on my inventory for between 500k and a mill easily last week, but a large portion of them are showing at 6k to 15k now which isnt even worth listing them. I logged on yesterday and posted up my surplus of recipes because I had around 60 of them, all of them are now below 20k a piece when they were worth way more last week. I sold recipes all week last week and was at 73 mill within a day or two, the same recipes, same level, but now drastically lower on what I'm getting from listings on AH, while the enhancements costs have barely changed. I'm at 50, wasnt doing the exemplar exploit, just kept my xp turned off and ran mission teams and traded merits for salvage or recipes for my inf, which was totally fine, but now it's taking me significantly longer to work on the funds to buy all the sets I was working on for my tank. 

 

Recipes, I think, will always be a fairly low income, except for the few outliers like LOTGs. Which I suppose is a good thing, as it makes it a viable way to build a character on a budget.

 

I hugely recommend crafting and converting your yellow recipes into rare enhancements and then selling those. Especially if you craft lower level recipes for a smaller crafting fee. I craft my yellows and keep converting until I've got something worth 2mil or more.

Edited April 5, 2020 by Lines

[Ukase]

On 4/2/2020 at 6:43 PM, thunderforce said:

I had a similar idea which was that getting bonus inf when exemplared uses up Patrol XP. No Patrol XP, no bonus inf. That would offer the usual rewards to people like me who just happen to play exemplared a lot, but it would enormously limit the amount that could be farmed out of any given character - I think (perhaps naively) to such a degree that the result wouldn't be a vast stable of rotating farm characters accumulating Patrol XP.

 

Of course, leaving it as it is solves the basic problem and requires no development effort, and I don't think the answer for first characters is to get double inf when exemplared; it's to be told how to sell their merits.

Never underestimate the greedy farmer with a lot of free time. I have an alt account with 3 spines/fire brutes. Sadly, I had no idea that patrol xp had an impact on inf - farms were the only place they played, once I got them all their passive accolades. Candidly, I've always been more focused on recipe drops than earned influence for running a map. A cheap recipe with a few converters would net as much or more than one of the missions (of 5) in a comic con map. 

And for the curious - I have one on each server in case one server goes over the threshold to allow for multi-boxing. 

[Peerless Girl]

On 4/2/2020 at 12:06 PM, jubakumbi said:

You are not the only one.

Rogue servers will continue to have this kind of drama, because they are run by gamers, not game professionals.

My advice is to explore your gaming options and not allow Stockholm sydrome or peer pressure to dictate your COH play-space.

This has nothing to do with HC being a "rogue server". Were you on the Live CoH forums? This same stuff happened there on a regular basis, almost this same way, just that the devs tended to put up with it for less time, and lock threads faster. (Castle and BaBs were notorious for this).

[thunderforce]

7 minutes ago, Ukase said:

Never underestimate the greedy farmer with a lot of free time.

I wouldn't, but... it takes 10 days to accumulate a full load of Patrol XP, which is about equivalent to a level's worth of ordinary XP. In other words if you (for example) devote 250 slots to farming characters, your overall Patrol XP accumulation will make you one full load every hour. I don't know how long it takes a farmer to earn a level's worth of ordinary XP, but it does seem like you'd need hundreds of characters, not 3, or 1 on each server, to have Patrol XP coming in as fast as you can use it up.

[Peerless Girl]

On 4/2/2020 at 2:01 PM, QuiJon said:

I didn't say the sidekick system was not intended to allow varying play levels to play together. What I am saying is it was not intended to be used as a power leveling tool. Which is exactly what it has become used for now. It is much faster and easier to be a lower level toon on a  higher level team because a high level team can run higher difficutly levels and with incarnate and other IO power creep things a higher level team and get away with running 8 man content with only even 2-3 effective characters on the team. (sometimes less but you get the idea) People join RMS raids with level 5s. In the mid 30s how long would it take you to solo 4 levels cause on a level 50+4 ITF team it takes about 45-60 minutes. That isn't power leveling? 

 

What I am saying is that if we are going to start looking at reward per hour or whatever, why are we only looking at money and farmers. Why is there no adjustment for marketeering? After all I don't even need a farm toon or to run a misson. I can make a billion a week now just playing the market if I really want to and not kill a single thing. Why is that not a problem for this evil accumulation of influence that farmers are being punished for? 

 

Ultimately this was not an exploit it was a game mechanic used to advantage and leverage the best returns, just like the sidekick system. If they had issues they wanted to address they should have opened a discussion on the subject of their concerns and taken suggestions and looked at those. But they called it an exploit and then stealthed in changes. This game is not run for profit, its players keep the servers up for our own enjoyment. I think we deserve to have input before a blanket nerf is stealthed into the game. 

 

"We" Always looked at "Reward per Hour or some such" that's exactly how Paragon's devs came up with and tweaked the initial merit amounts for the TFs and such when that system went in. A Merit was deemed to be "worth" x amount of game play time (I don't remember the metric offhand). As average completion times raised, they lowered the merit rewards, as they fell, they raised them. The game was already set up this way. Marketeering isn't adjusted, as has been stated many times in the thread, because it doesn't generate influence in the system, it moves around existing influence (and in fact removes a portion due to market fees). Ultimately this was as exploit making use of a game mechanic. You don't open a discussion on exploits for obvious reasons. Hyperbolic post is hyperbolic. 

[Peerless Girl]

On 4/2/2020 at 3:30 PM, phocks said:

_{(to which, I still maintain that not having that extra incentive for exemplaring is something that needs reexamining later on, but this is besides my point)}

This is about the only thing in this thread that DOES concern me about this change, and I agree it needs to be examined. There should be plenty of encouragement to EX down and help lower level characters.

[siolfir]

8 minutes ago, Peerless Girl said:

 

"We" Always looked at "Reward per Hour or some such" that's exactly how Paragon's devs came up with and tweaked the initial merit amounts for the TFs and such when that system went in. A Merit was deemed to be "worth" x amount of game play time (I don't remember the metric offhand). As average completion times raised, they lowered the merit rewards, as they fell, they raised them. The game was already set up this way. Marketeering isn't adjusted, as has been stated many times in the thread, because it doesn't generate influence in the system, it moves around existing influence (and in fact removes a portion due to market fees). Ultimately this was as exploit making use of a game mechanic. You don't open a discussion on exploits for obvious reasons. Hyperbolic post is hyperbolic. 

It was 20 merits for 1 hour for old content with penalties for frequently farmed content, which is why villain arcs and strike forces were worth so much less initially (there's less of them and even fewer that people ran a lot) and why several trials heroside were later reduced to 2-5 merits (such as Eden, and KHTF being dropped to 8 while simultaneously making it harder to stealth). Basically, you were penalized for speedrunning, which was done initially because you got 1 random recipe per person on completion, and so many of the recipes were garbage that people ran them as quickly as possible to get more chances for something worthwhile.

 

As far as the "buying power has increased" - no, it hasn't yet. Prices are still where they were, income for anyone that had xp disabled was affected has gone down. Prices will follow, eventually, but that is a long term process and saying that your buying power increased when your income was cut in half and everything costs the same amount is just stupid.

Edited April 5, 2020 by siolfir
typo, more examples

[Peerless Girl]

On 4/3/2020 at 6:32 PM, Coyotedancer said:

I'd love to be able to ask Castle or one of the old devs, honestly. That's the only way we'd ever know for 100% certain... But given how long it was around and how it was never so much as tweaked (or even mentioned, as far as I can recall-) I have doubts they saw it as an issue.

As I said a few times, the reason it did that/does that originally is because the XP that you earned that would've gone to pay off any debt you had got turned into extra Influence as a "reward" for your being Ex'd down when you didn't "Need to" (had no debt to pay off) to play with lower level players. It was likely intended at the time, and didn't start to become an issue until the Market existed, and only got worse/became an exploit when Patrol XP and the Vet Level XP system started interacting with it...we definitely need SOME kind of reward-incentive for EXing when you dont "need" to, I just don't know what it is...yet. 

[Vanden]

I don't understand why teaming with other players isn't incentive enough. If you exemplar fewer than five levels you're not even being noticeably reduced in effectiveness, so why would there need to be an incentive?