Inf cap

[Ukase]

Perhaps this has been discussed, but I'd really like for a given character to carry 2 billion or more. While I have no compelling arguments to remove the inf cap, other than I don't want to carry it in my email and I don't want to create characters just to hold inf, I have no compelling arguments to keep the inf cap in place, either. 

I don't recall what the original Devs position was on keeping it at 2 billion. But that was then...why not raise the cap to 100 Billion? Or even 10 billion? 

[Solarverse]

I swear if I see the word cap one more time...  🤪

[Troo]

if it is too easy, it is unvalued

[Greycat]

I believe the reason for the cap is less a matter of "Let's put a cap at this level" and more "the way it's programmed, this is the highest value it can have."

 

Besides, when the game was created, there were no IOs, no market, and they likely didn't see anyone really *hitting* the cap any time soon.

[Greycat]

3 hours ago, Solarverse said:

I swear if I see the word cap one more time...  🤪

If Steve Rogers wears a hat, is it a Cap cap?

If he did it while firing a noisy toy gun, would he be firing Cap's caps in a cap?

If he made a post about it and typed with no lowercase, would he be talking about Cap's caps in a cap in all caps?

 

🙂

[Outrider_01]

Liquidate that influence to IO and dump in SG storage, hold the popular sets for other toons when you roll one.

[AerialAssault]

I'll take some off your hands if its weighing you down, @Aerial Assault on Everlasting.

[Vanden]

4 hours ago, Outrider_01 said:

Liquidate that influence to IO and dump in SG storage, hold the popular sets for other toons when you roll one.

That's the opposite of liquidating

[Yomo Kimyata]

I respectfully disagree for two reasons:

 

1.  There are so many ways to store influence now.  You can send yourself emails for 999,999,999 each that don't seem to expire and I have not yet found the upper limit as to how many emails you can have in storage.  You can bid up to 2bn on a presumably infinite number of items that are listed in the AH but don't actually exist.  Heck, you can make 5,000 characters per global and store 2bn on each of them for a total of 10 trillion.

 

2. (And this is the important one) There really is no point in having more than 2bn per character in Homecoming.  2bn will buy you top end builds for all three of the layouts for any level 50.  The only point in having more inf than that is to hoard it, give it away, play stupid market tricks, or build more alts.  There is simply nothing to spend it on.

 

I would be incredibly supportive and thankful if the devs were to institute some major inf sink, but the only statement about that I can recall is that they are far more likely to institute small sinks that will affect more people than large sinks that will only affect a small number of people even if the aggregate amount removed from the system is larger in the latter case.

 

I expect stupid market tricks will become more frequent as people get bored.  If so, hopefully they will not negatively impact the entry level hero or villain.

[Hedgefund]

26 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

I have not yet found the upper limit as to how many emails you can have in storage. 

It's 100 (maybe 99).

[Icecomet]

10 hours ago, Ukase said:

Perhaps this has been discussed, but I'd really like for a given character to carry 2 billion or more. While I have no compelling arguments to remove the inf cap, other than I don't want to carry it in my email and I don't want to create characters just to hold inf, I have no compelling arguments to keep the inf cap in place, either. 

I don't recall what the original Devs position was on keeping it at 2 billion. But that was then...why not raise the cap to 100 Billion? Or even 10 billion? 

 

iirc, this 2B max was a coding limitation and the code simply couldn't handle any more than that and the odds of the Homecoming folks recoding the game is about 0.  We're lucky that we get updates to content, settings, etc for a game we all love.  It always seemed strange to me if it could handle this many positions numerically, that 9,999,999,999 should be the limit, but my coding days are LONG behind me so I am not sure what causes 2,000,000,000 to be the magic number.

 

As mentioned above, sure its a small pain to email yourself and login another toon to collect and hold it.  I personally just accumulate it in my e-mail, which  you've stated you don't want to do.  I have 5 toons filled with purple recipes until I reached the same annoyance point you have with influence and I simply stopped saving purple recipes.  I give around 1-2B influence away per week to new people or folks that don't like farming but want to kit out a new build or whatever.  I have some 30B saved in emails and on all my toons so, I try to give away as much as I can.

 

Anyway, the market on Homecoming is stable and as also stated above, 2B will solidly kit out 2-3 builds and if you have so much inf, earning more likely isn't an issue.

 

I know it sucks, but again, limitations of the original code at 2B inf.  I wish the game was recoded to take on more cores and fully utilize the high end graphics cards, but this too is likely to never happen.

 

Icecomet

 

[Lines]

A 4 byte signed integer ranges up to 2,147,483,647. That would be the actual technical cap.

[Outrider_01]

1 hour ago, Vanden said:

That's the opposite of liquidating

Ehh, goes both ways. Don't think of influence as a form of cash, its more like an asset that doesn't take up an IO slot.  Not much else you can do with IO; no lawyers, advertising, rent, bills....influence just sits there in the wallet just as much as an IO in the tray.

[Yomo Kimyata]

16 hours ago, Solarverse said:

I swear if I see the word cap one more time...  🤪

They should also raise the agrgrroo cap while they are raising caps.

 

EDIT:  cap

 

 

Edited September 1, 2020 by Yomo Kimyata
cap

[Icecomet]

On 9/1/2020 at 9:31 AM, Lines said:

A 4 byte signed integer ranges up to 2,147,483,647. That would be the actual technical cap.

 

...and there it is, someone with coding knowledge!  Thanks for that, I was too lazy to research it.  😁

 

Icecomet

[srmalloy]

On 9/1/2020 at 7:31 AM, Lines said:

A 4 byte signed integer ranges up to 2,147,483,647. That would be the actual technical cap.

Since the game prevents you from having a negative amount of inf, it would be theoretically possible to change the field to an unsigned integer, which would double the cap without affecting the space required for the field (an important consideration when there are other parts of the code that expect data structures to be a particular size), but that would still require a cascade of changes through the rest of the code to be able to accommodate the altered type for characters' inf. Basically, every other variable in the game that stored an inf value would need to be changed to an unsigned integer, as well as updating all the relevant database tables to change their field type. A good example of the "you can never change just one thing" principle in programming.

[Lines]

1 minute ago, srmalloy said:

Since the game prevents you from having a negative amount of inf, it would be theoretically possible to change the field to an unsigned integer, which would double the cap without affecting the space required for the field (an important consideration when there are other parts of the code that expect data structures to be a particular size), but that would still require a cascade of changes through the rest of the code to be able to accommodate the altered type for characters' inf. Basically, every other variable in the game that stored an inf value would need to be changed to an unsigned integer, as well as updating all the relevant database tables to change their field type. A good example of the "you can never change just one thing" principle in programming.

I wondered the same thing. For the iddy biddy bit of coding I've ever done, I'd hardly have to think twice about changing something like that but influence is probably anchored in place by all sorts of connections beyond comprehension.

 

I wonder if negative influence was ever going to be a thing, though. That has Jack written all over it. I dread to think.

[srmalloy]

7 minutes ago, Lines said:

I wonder if negative influence was ever going to be a thing, though. That has Jack written all over it. I dread to think.

Since inf is, in game lore, supposed to reflect how readily you can get people to provide you with support based on your reputation as a hero/villain, and while I, personally, would like to see negative inf as a feature for 'heroes' that dive into AE at level 1 and don't emerge until they go to Ouroboros to do Mender Ramiel's arc at 50 to unlock their Alpha slot (the public perception of someone who crawls into their electronic navel rather than building their reputation as being rather laughable, and not at all heroic/villainous), I recognize that my opinion is likely not shared by many people and vanishingly unlikely to be implemented. As an observation of programming practice, though, many languages and databases default to four-byte signed integer for variables that are declared integer unless explicitly defined otherwise, so it may have simply been a case of not thinking about it when the data structures were defined, the devs not thinking that ~2 billion would ever prove to be a constricting limit.

[Bill Z Bubba]

3 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

and while I, personally, would like to see negative inf as a feature for 'heroes' that dive into AE at level 1 and don't emerge until they go to Ouroboros to do Mender Ramiel's arc at 50 to unlock their Alpha slot (the public perception of someone who crawls into their electronic navel rather than building their reputation as being rather laughable, and not at all heroic/villainous),

Ya sure you packed enough insult and condescension in there?

[Hardship]

35 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

until they go to Ouroboros to do Mender Ramiel's arc at 50 to unlock their Alpha slot

Not needed on Homecoming. Alpha slot will unlock from regular (even AE) play.

 

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

1 hour ago, Lines said:

 

 

I wonder if negative influence was ever going to be a thing, though. That has Jack written all over it. I dread to think.

For some reason this reminds me of Taipan!

 

http://www.taipangame.com/negative-interest

[srmalloy]

5 hours ago, Hardship said:

Not needed on Homecoming. Alpha slot will unlock from regular (even AE) play.

Doesn't happen as fast, though, and from what I've seen, the people who PL to 50 seem to have the same "Gotta have it now" attitude exhibited by individuals sporting the sort of scorch marks on their pants caused by the spontaneous combustion of currency.

[srmalloy]

5 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

Ya sure you packed enough insult and condescension in there?

No; I haven't yet worked through my feelings about the chatspam from all the newly level-50 characters in Atlas Park asking how to get to Steel Canyon as they emerge from the AE building, back when AE was introduced on Live. 🤨

[Outrider_01]

48 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

No; I haven't yet worked through my feelings about the chatspam from all the newly level-50 characters in Atlas Park asking how to get to Steel Canyon as they emerge from the AE building, back when AE was introduced on Live. 🤨

Who cares, level 50 rookie side kick touring the city asking why the citizens are out walking them as sprint is turned off and no travel power.  How is that not entertaining?

[Bill Z Bubba]

3 hours ago, srmalloy said:

No; I haven't yet worked through my feelings about the chatspam from all the newly level-50 characters in Atlas Park asking how to get to Steel Canyon as they emerge from the AE building, back when AE was introduced on Live. 🤨

Oh, the horrors you must have seen. Bless your heart.