Discussion: Disabling XP No Longer Increases Influence

[Lines]

Just now, Digirium said:

If converters are locked to characters, then the same goal is achieved: IOs will still end up on the auction house. What won't happen, is the ability to farm converters and flip IOs over and over without limit - you'll only be able to profit from the converters earned on that character.

I'm really not sure I see how your suggestion would change that behaviour.

[justicebeliever]

2 minutes ago, Digirium said:

If converters are locked to characters, then the same goal is achieved: IOs will still end up on the auction house. What won't happen, is the ability to farm converters from the AH and flip IOs over and over without limit - you'll only be able to profit from the converters earned on that character.

You are correct that IO's will still appear in the auction house, but the scale of those IO's would significantly diminish.  That would mean reduced supply for rare IO's and thus increased costs for those IO's.  I'm not sure the plus side of this suggestion of  yours?

[MunkiLord]

Just now, justicebeliever said:

You are correct that IO's will still appear in the auction house, but the scale of those IO's would significantly diminish.  That would mean reduced supply for rare IO's and thus increased costs for those IO's.  I'm not sure the plus side of this suggestion of  yours?

I'd make more influence, that's a plus to me!

[justicebeliever]

Just now, MunkiLord said:

I'd make more influence, that's a plus to me!

But if converters were locked to the character, and thus harder to obtain, you'd produce far fewer rare IO's.  More money on each maybe, but less money overall I would think.  

[Grouchybeast]

Just now, justicebeliever said:

You are correct that IO's will still appear in the auction house, but the scale of those IO's would significantly diminish.  That would mean reduced supply for rare IO's and thus increased costs for those IO's.  I'm not sure the plus side of this suggestion of  yours?

Maybe they have a gigantic stock of thousands of LotG +rech stashed away?  Or possible just a deep sense of nostalgia for paying 75 million each for them on live?

[MunkiLord]

1 minute ago, justicebeliever said:

But if converters were locked to the character, and thus harder to obtain, you'd produce far fewer rare IO's.  More money on each maybe, but less money overall I would think.  

I'd have to change my main way of making influence, yes. But I'd just adjust and take advantage of the higher prices by doing old school marketing closer to what people did on Live. So I'm clear, this would be terrible for the game as a whole. But it wouldn't stop people dedicated to marketing from making loads of influence.

[MunkiLord]

2 minutes ago, Grouchybeast said:

Maybe they have a gigantic stock of thousands of LotG +rech stashed away?  Or possible just a deep sense of nostalgia for paying 75 million each for them on live?

I have about 500 I think! I'd hold onto those for like a year then really make some profit.

[Yomo Kimyata]

3 minutes ago, justicebeliever said:

But if converters were locked to the character, and thus harder to obtain, you'd produce far fewer rare IO's.  More money on each maybe, but less money overall I would think.  

Yes!!!  People would have all these converters they don't know how to use and they'd lie fallow.  Ebil marketeers would starve because they could only convert a hundredth as many as they used to.  Prices would increase towards the soft cap based on merits.  It would be chaos!  AND SO MUCH FUN!!!

[SwitchFade]

Hard puke vote on locking converters. 

[Obus Form]

37 minutes ago, MunkiLord said:

I have about 500...

What happened to the remaining million?

[Obus Form]

37 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Yes!!!  People would have all these converters they don't know how to use and they'd lie fallow.  Ebil marketeers would starve because they could only convert a hundredth as many as they used to.  Prices would increase towards the soft cap based on merits.  It would be chaos!  AND SO MUCH FUN!!!

No daddy no!

 

Don't make me actually play the game!

[ivanhedgehog]

On 4/6/2020 at 4:59 PM, Peerless Girl said:

I'm going to say this again. Market use/Marketeering is NOT the problem here. Market use moves money AROUND it doesn't CREATE IT (i.e. inflation). I think you KNOW that, and are simply pushing your agenda. I get that it impacts your chosen fun, and that sucks. Many things over the years (including ED and the Great Global Defense Nerf and the Invlun nerf have impacted mine. I even threatened to quit (and never did). It sucks when something you like is affected. But this is not the issue, I refuse to believe you don't understand this, because the alternative is....not nice. 

Large pools of inf causes inflation.  1000 farmers generating inf that they arent spending dont cause inflation. People with large pools of cash that are willing to pay any amount to get what they want causes inflation. Marketeers cause what we need to cost more by buying cheap and selling high. So prices rise. That is inflation. cutting out those existing huge pools of inf would cause people to stop spending inf at exorbitant price points. Halving inf gain will do NOTHING to stop people with existing oceans of cash from using that cash and raising prices. The 100 people with a net worh of 30 million or less dont matter, it is the people with 40 billion that are driving the inflation.

[ivanhedgehog]

23 hours ago, Haijinx said:

Im confused by the progression. 

 

There was a mechanic where if people played at level 49 instead of 50 they made almost TWICE as much influence as they would if they played at 50. 

 

This was obviously stupid. 

 

There is no functional difference between a level 49 and 50 character.  

 

It had been originally intended to encourage high level characters to exemp down to play with other players.  Not to farm lots of money.   

 

In MMOs knocking down schemes for players to farm lots of in-game money is a necessary aspect of managing the economy.  

 

So this is a normal fix.  Every MMO ever that survives does things like this.  

 

 

the level 49 abuse was a normal exploit fix. elimination of turning off xp to get double inf was NOT an exploit fix, that was a nerf. The devs just used the cover of the exploit fix to push it through without any input. 

[Obus Form]

3 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

Halving inf gain will do NOTHING to stop people with existing oceans of cash from using that cash and raising prices.

You will now refer to us 11 ebiller's as..............Ocean's Eleven.

[Saikochoro]

3 hours ago, Digirium said:

 

Add:

• how many convert operations are performed, broken down by operation type

Enhancement converters possibly need to be bound to a character, not able to trade, to persuade the recipient to use them. As it is, they are being used to exploit for profit, to extract influence from others actually playing the game, by characters not playing the game and not directly earning influence. Influence has become more valuable than before with the disabling of influence in lieu of experience option. Limiting the use of enhancement converters would help to maintain the value of influence.

Words cannot sufficiently describe how bad this idea is.  Converters do not exploit anything. They literally take trash items and turn them into valuable items. They enable limitless supply and thus reduce prices on all of the high demand items. Making converters bound to characters would do nothing good. Conversely they would hurt the market and anyone who used the auction house at all. This would result in:

• IO prices increasing across the board. Hurts anyone who wants to kit out a character in IOs.
• Merits being devalued as people can no longer convert them to quick stable cash via selling converters. Hurts people who enjoy running task forces, story arcs, trials, etc. 

So, if your goal is to hurt the majority of the population of the game, cause prices to skyrocket, and generally degrade the game, then this would be a good choice. 
 

However, if you actually wanted to help the player base and the market, then this idea is just terrible. 

 

After 40+ pages it’s painfully clear that people do not understand the market or converters. 

[ivanhedgehog]

15 hours ago, Gremlin said:

The evil part of me would love the devs to announce that. Imagine the chaos that would follow. First of all there would be massive panic buying as everyone with spare inf tries to turn it into something that won't be deleted. After the inf deletion, prices would crash hard. Eventually things would return to normal. The ebil marketeers would make out like bandits.

 

... but it would help to curb inflation a bit.

 

 

If you go over to the market forums, you'll find that ebil marketeers do things that don't fit this rather nasty view. For example, we'd quite like to have other in game methods of burning inf. At the moment I'm experimenting with buying and opening Hero and Winter packs. (Buying a Winter Pack extracts about 27.5 million inf from the economy.) People occasionally push the price of some desirable item down. They lose a ton of inf in the process but that's what passes for lol's when you've got more inf than you can spend. Other's simply stop trading because there's no point making more.

 

You say that the marketeers hold most of the inf. There's a lot of confusion and bitterness in that statement. First of all, as others have pointed out, a very high proportion of the player base trade. If they buy low and sell high then they're trading for profit. I suspect that the majority of players do this to some degree. The second misunderstanding is to think that marketeers are significant somehow. Either they "hold most of the money" or "they drive up prices". The thing is, the game economy is absolutely huge. A few billion inf is peanuts compared to the amount of inf that flows through the market daily. Marketeers occasionally try to use their piles of inf to make a splash in the economy. (Losing inf in the process of course.) Even chucking 10 billion into the market tends to just cause a very small ripple that disappears in a few hours.

No confusion or bitterness at all, marketers do have the larger balances within the game, by a lot. just how it is. They arent evil or misguided or anything like that, its just what they do. If the devs really gave a damn about inflation, they would lower the amount of cash in the game. That would curb inflation. Whether its by pruning bank accounts or selling 50 billion inf maguffins. either will have a net effect of removing significant amounts from the economy. what drives the prices is when "Bob" with the 175 billion wants that armageddon proc. there are 5 available and the price posted is 70 million, much more than they are worth. But Bob wants it now and bids they 75 million. the next guy sees the list and historic prices are now 75 million, so he forks it over, you have inflation. Those are just made up numbers, no Bobs were harmed in the making of this post.

[justicebeliever]

10 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

Large pools of inf causes inflation.  1000 farmers generating inf that they arent spending dont cause inflation. People with large pools of cash that are willing to pay any amount to get what they want causes inflation. Marketeers cause what we need to cost more by buying cheap and selling high. So prices rise. That is inflation. cutting out those existing huge pools of inf would cause people to stop spending inf at exorbitant price points. Halving inf gain will do NOTHING to stop people with existing oceans of cash from using that cash and raising prices. The 100 people with a net worh of 30 million or less dont matter, it is the people with 40 billion that are driving the inflation.

That's an oversimplification of how marketing works.  They don't buy rare IO's low and sell them high.  Despite appearances to the contrary in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles, they don't just "fall outta a truck".

 

Marketeers buy Converters, from any source, and salvage that is cheap, and then spend time (time is a cost) to create rare IO's where there were none before.  That means they increase supply, which oddly enough lowers prices on rare IO's.  And despite the demand for common and uncommon salvage for marketeers, the costs remain stable because those markets are seeded in game.  

 

Removing marketeers just means increased IO costs, and a loss of influence for people who don't use converters.

[Grouchybeast]

12 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

1000 farmers generating inf that they arent spending dont cause inflation.

The more people in this thread talk about farming, the weirder it sounds.

[Yomo Kimyata]

13 minutes ago, Obus Form said:

You will now refer to us 11 ebiller's as..............Ocean's Eleven.

Who made the cut?

[justicebeliever]

6 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

what drives the prices is when "Bob" with the 175 billion wants that armageddon proc. there are 5 available and the price posted is 70 million, much more than they are worth. But Bob wants it now and bids they 75 million. the next guy sees the list and historic prices are now 75 million, so he forks it over, you have inflation. Those are just made up numbers, no Bobs were harmed in the making of this post.

This only represents the demand side.  What about Bob's evil brother, Counter-Bob.  Counter Bob sees that the going price of the armageddon proc is 75 million.  He knows there are 4 more on the market, and Counter-Bob makes 20 more crafting and converting.  He could sell them for 75 million, or, as he is more likely to do, since he wants to make some quick money, he sells them for 65 million, and all the people who bid below 75 million know have the armageddon proc.  That's the supply side.

 

And so on, back and forth, until the market stabilizes at a price where supply and demand are both satisfied.  Take away some of that supply and prices will ONLY increase.

[Haijinx]

49 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

the level 49 abuse was a normal exploit fix. elimination of turning off xp to get double inf was NOT an exploit fix, that was a nerf. The devs just used the cover of the exploit fix to push it through without any input. 

"Cover" lol

 

It was the Deep Devs!  

 

-Q

 

 

[Lockpick]

3 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Make converters non-transferrable?  How EVIL!  I LOVE IT!

One of the things I absolutely hated about SWTOR was the bind on pickup and bind on equip mechanic.  The entire time I played SWTOR I was wishing I could play CoH again.  So happy that wish was granted...

[Dazl]

Would there really be a shortage of converters if they were bound? As was pointed out to me earlier, the loss of the xp boost for non farmer and non marketeers wouldn't matter because they could just run a 20 minute Yin TF and make 20 merits and turn that into 60 converters. Then everyone would be happy because they can't turn it into that ebil influence.

[Haijinx]

4 minutes ago, Lockpick said:

One of the things I absolutely hated about SWTOR was the bind on pickup and bind on equip mechanic.  The entire time I played SWTOR I was wishing I could play CoH again.  So happy that wish was granted...

Then they made the game even easier so it no longer mattered.  SW, that is.

[Yomo Kimyata]

2 minutes ago, Crimsonpyre said:

Would there really be a shortage of converters if they were bound? As was pointed out to me earlier, the loss of the xp boost for non farmer and non marketeers wouldn't matter because they could just run a 20 minute Yin TF and make 20 merits and turn that into 60 converters. Then everyone would be happy because they can't turn it into that ebil influence.

Fair question.  In my opinion, absolutely.  I'll buy 1-20k converters a day.  Call it 1bn inf on average that I'm paying to merit farmers.

 

I use those converters to make staples for the market.  Call it 200-500 high demand IOs per day that sell.

 

Now, if converters were bound, and every person who had them used them to create high demand IOs, then maybe there would be no change.

 

But, I suspect, marketeers would have to cut their crafting back a huge amount, which would hurt their profits.  The merit farmers who counted on getting 1bn a day from me would miss their income.  The inf farmers would continue to make inf, but discover supply will probably dry up and prices will rise significantly.  It would hurt everyone!!  Which is exactly why I think it's a great idea.  It'll never happen in our lifetimes on this server, but I can dream of excitement and challenge and change!