Everything seems to cost too much influence

[skoryy]

6 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

Well, to be honest, I don't see a lot of value added by an index.  I get that you want an overall "health of the economy" gauge, but there are issues with a price index with a blind auction system.  Namely, what happens when you take the snapshot of rare salvage and you have 4 prints of 406,067 and one print of 10,000,000?  Yes, the 10mm print is probably a fat finger trade, or someone wanting to give away funds, but it certainly doesn't represent the trading value of an alien blood sample.  Similarly, I would read the 406,067 prints as the highest outstanding bid, meaning that it is the low end.  And without big macro events (Winter Event, new issue released) the only fundamental changes would be from an ebb or flow of player activity or from an outlier player or two doing arbitrary things in the market.  I would hate for someone to say "OMG, Trap of the Hunter procs are worth 9mm now!!!" just because I decided to clear out a backlog of inventory for my own inscrutable reasons.

 

But if someone wants to do this, have at it!  I'd be happy to opine on items for inclusion.

 

What you'd optimally need is an API tied to AH history.

[Yomo Kimyata]

3 minutes ago, skoryy said:

 

What you'd optimally need is an API tied to AH history.

 

Well, if this were a much bigger universe with many more active players (and more active traders), I would personally want a volume indicator, as well as a bid-offer spread.  But I doubt the former is even possible based on my understanding of the programming, and the latter would obviate the purpose of the blind bidding system.  So I'm pretty content as things are.  It takes a little thought to figure out what the bids and offers really look like, and I'm totally fine with a little thought being rewarded.

[Crysis]

1 hour ago, Ukase said:

I agree. I really don't know all the IOs that should be included in such an index. I do think for such an index, the big 3 pvp procs should be included. The absorb proc from preventative medicine, maybe the numina & miracle procs. 

The perf shifter +end...in my mind is so commonly used (maybe it's not?) that it should be in every index. But, I've never made an index before. I'd have to do some reading through some old Econ texts. (yawn fest) 

 

-IF- such a “market index” were to exist, like the real world, you’d likely want to stock it up with the blue chip performers like you’ve mentioned, but also you have to realize that the pricing of any IO is very contextually relative to the AT that you are trying to build.  Thus you may need various indices, like the “Defensive IO” index, the “Resistance IO” index, the “Healing IO” index etc etc.

 

But again, this is all a pretty silly exercise in a world where Enhancement Converts exist and are abundant in circulation given the merit reward system.  I can’t tell you how many LOTG Defense recipes/IO’s I’ve ever purchased since I seldom purchase them directly.  There have been many times I -SHOULD- have just outright purchased a LOTG Recharge/whatever because it was actually cheaper than the feeder stock I had been purchasing to flip to a slottable LOTG.  But that was my lack of awareness and just following muscle memory.  

 

But obviously, in the real-world stock market, you can’t just up and buy a stock of one company and craft it into being the stock of a different company.  Mergers/Acquisitions happen, of course, but those typically just move value from one company to another.  Not wholescale fabrication of one stock instrument out of an entirely different one.  Here in Paragon City, however, we write whole guides on how to do it and effectively have created a system where it’s rare that you can’t get any particular IO at all….well, maybe Hami-O’s, but even those can be gotten by just participating in content.

 

Given the very existence of Enhancement Converters, I suspect “Last Five Sales” is about the best we would ever have.  When it’s accurate, of course.  Although some of the wealthy bastards manage to mess with the plebes just playing with those as well..

Edited September 13, 2021 by Crysis

[Glacier Peak]

18 hours ago, macskull said:

 

This is only true if the act of producing those characters generates more inf than those characters will spend on their enhancements, which is definitely not the case. I can farm up a thousand brand-new level 50s but if I don't have the inf to buy enhancements I'm not contributing to demand in any way.

 

TL;DR: The "farmers are ruinin' the economy!" argument only works if farmers are generating influence without also generating supply. This did happen back on live to a point because you earned inf and XP in AE but no drops, but on Homecoming where you're getting drops at the same time that impact is significantly dampened. The "farmers earn rewards too fast!" argument is also bunk - there's already a rewards throttling system in place in the game. Does no one remember MARTy?

Whoa I didn't know about MARTy, nice deep cut there!

[Crysis]

On 9/11/2021 at 9:03 PM, macskull said:

The amount of inf earned PLing a character from 1-50 is far less than the amount of inf it costs to fund a build for that character - even less if the character being PLd is using a 2XP booster. I can crank out all the 50s I want but the act of leveling them alone isn't going to get me the inf I need to pay for their builds.

 

On -average- I spend about 350MM influence on each alt by 50 -assuming- I buy all the IO’s I need -other- than their procs, their ATO’s and any Winter-O’s or Purples.  Those last four categories of IO’s I stockpile.  Everything else I buy at prevailing rates, never so low that I have to wait for the bids to fill and/or I buy indirectly via buy-other-IO-and-Convert to what I need/want.  PL’ing an alt 1-40 (I never take them to 50, usually only 37) takes me just over an hour active farming/longer AFK farming.  The farming toon will net around 40MM in influence today doing that and usually about another 40-50MM in influence from drops I’ll craft/flip/marketeer….another 20-40MM if the RNG gods grant me some purple drops.  This is about half of what it was when HC first launched.  I know many people now run small stables of AFK farmers but it’s just too much upkeep to do this and stay within the multi-box rules.  

 

I’ll routinely setup a day where I have a lot of RL work to do and PL a stable of alts in the background, most with generic costumes and names until I’m ready to pull them out and create playable alts (with fully IO’d builds) with them.  It’s a sickness, I know, but I find it a nice distraction during the day, no worse an addiction than being glued to social media all day.

 

Point is….I farm.  A LOT.  I marketeer.  A LOT.  I still play PVE content upwards of 20 hours per week (I travel for a living, and hotel downtime is when I play, beats the TV).  I know many of the tricks to get top tier builds on the cheap.  But even with all I put into generating influence, and all I put into creating and outfitting alts, I still bet I spend far, far more than I make.  I have maybe 40 ‘naked’ alts sitting in ‘inventory’ right now that need builds, costumes, bio’s and good names before they can go do their level up ‘respec’ and be played.  I can spend the MONEY anytime I want.  I cannot, however, find the TIME to do that all in one sitting.  It’s -my- economy. 

 

And don’t even get me started about the Live days when you’d sometimes be forced to “melt down” an alt for their IO’s via multiple respecs so you could re-use them on other alts.  I don’t even bother to do that now as influence, merits and the means to obtain IO’s is so much cheaper and easier here thanks to quality of life improvements.

 

[arcane]

19 hours ago, aethereal said:

Marketing gives the best rewards in the game.  Farmers prefer to farm because they dislike marketing, not because farming gives better rewards than marketing.

This. If I was focused solely on making the most money, I would marketeer. The only reason I farm is because marketeering bores me to tears. I once managed to make a billion marketeering, but I was screaming internally the whole time.

 

Even if marketeering wasn’t so clearly superior to farming for making money, there are other activities I would also do if the rewards were my sole focus. More hami raids and more WST’s, for instance. As someone that farms so much, I frankly consider myself a relatively slow reward earner.

Edited September 13, 2021 by arcane

[Ukase]

1 hour ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

But if someone wants to do this, have at it!  I'd be happy to opine on items for inclusion.

Yeah, I was thinking about that during my row earlier. Outliers, etc - they'd skew the market. 

I asked myself, though...
Take 3 builds out of each AT forum, tabulate the cost of each build based on history, and I think those outliers would be ...I think the word is Normalized, if I remember my statistics course. That would be tedious as can be, though, and to what end? Just to be able to say, "yes, OP, goods are now 3% higher than they were last year." 

It's just not worth it - at least, not determining it in that fashion. I'll be thinking about it some more, though. I think it would be a nifty metric to be aware of, beyond my overall "feel" for the market. 

[Ukase]

So...my sister is out of work. Has been for quite some time. As we all know, it's a bit scary in the world right now. But there are jobs. I delicately posed a suggestion to her about a potential employer. 
"That would bore me to tears!" 

Well, if you're broke....a little boredom will be fine. But that's real life - and this is a game. We don't want to lose players, we want them to have fun, & keep playing. 
Are these problems of a lack of adequate inf to deck out characters (that seem to only be held by a vocal few) pervasive through the player base? I simply wouldn't know. 
I know in my SG, I pinned a document in our discord outlying very clearly how I get my influence, and these methods are repeatable with very similar results. At least a couple have thanked me profusely, and one said, "There's no way I'm going to spend time doing that". 

 

So, here's some questions: 

1. Is this "our" problem, or "their problem"? Think of the big picture. What do "they" do to keep having fun? 
2. Can this problem be solved with code, without causing more problems? How the heck do we answer that? The future is unknown and unknowable. I can say this for a fact: there are some players that used to play here that now play on Rebirth because they viewed HC's economy as "too easy". They want to work for what they have. They're certainly in the minority, but I see the appeal. Recently, they have made some things cheaper, but things are still a lot more merits & inf than here on HC. I bring this up simply to say that if we just start every alt with 50M or some nominal figure, or make all the p2w toys free...we may as well just play on a test server that's not going to get wiped. Would that be less fun? For some, yeah, probably. Is it 6 in one hand, half dozen in the other? I have no idea. 
3. Would some of us wealthier players giving away our stacks of inf solve anything in the long run? I don't think so. There's always (I hope) going to be some players who are broke. "The poor are always with you...". (Matthew 26:11 for the religious folks who found that familiar)  

For me, I think the problem is one that will always exist, given the market and the way it works. Our HC devs have made converters very affordable, and easy to get. I see no reason why any and EVERY player can't equip their characters with viable enhancements easily. Maybe not the best ones, but they can work towards that if they wish. You don't NEED the market, but it helps. You don't NEED a farmer on a second account, but it helps. 

The CoH universe is your oyster. Get some pearls! 

 
 

Edited September 13, 2021 by Ukase
typo

[Neiska]

33 minutes ago, Crysis said:

On -average- I spend about 350MM influence on each alt by 50 -assuming- I buy all the IO’s I need -other- than their procs, their ATO’s and any Winter-O’s or Purples.  Those last four categories of IO’s I stockpile.

 

I do something similar as well. I pretty much have between 3 or 4 sets of all the purples - Armageddon, Ragnarok, etc, As well as all the AT and winter sets. I have a few dedicated ATs who are more or less living "shelves" for me to store things, both in their inventories, but also on their auction list as well. I put things up, but I simply don't list them. It really is free and safe storage.

 

So here is how it goes with me, when I make an alt. -

I read about a powerset or build and think "Oohh that sounds fun, I'll try that out."

Make alt #4125, spend the obligatory hour or so in the costume editor.

Powerfarm myself, using 2 other accounts. I might use my tanker/brute to do it, or if I am in a rush, I will use my MMs since its faster. If I am afk leveling this can take 6-7 hours in total. But if I am rushing with my MMs, I can get a new fresh shiny 50 in just over 4 hours.

Once that character is 50, I level them up, then swap to one of my living storage alts and pull out what I need.

Play it until I decide I no longer want to, then I pull the Enhancement's back out again using unslotters. Pass them back to my shelves, and back into storage they go.

So more or less, I only pay for unslotters to try out a new build.

I don't have copies of everything, but 90% of the things used in builds I do. The only things that stick out offhand are Defender, Sentinel, Controller, and Warshade/Peacebringer sets because I have yet to play any of those. My favored classes are Masterminds and Tankers, but I have a few brutes and scrappers as well. One Stalker, one Crabbermind, one Dominator.

 

So yea, I am wondering if this might have something to do with the issue as well. I mean, unless you are hard up for money why sell something you might need in a week? You that eager to buy it back at a higher price? I would rather sit on them for when I have an urge to try something out. Plus, its nice to have a fully geared character that you didn't have to spend a single INF on.

 

Anyone else sit on things for alts? Or do most people flip things as soon as they get them/no longer need them?

 

I am also wondering if "time played" on a character is also a factor in wealth. I mean, my main Mastermind I have had for a year now, she is vet level 280-something. I have not had to buy anything for her in quite some time now. The same goes for my other two main support MMs. And I play with those the most, so anything I find just goes into the pile.

 

So I am musing that number of alts made, storing things you arent immediately using, as well as how much time you spend on geared vs ungeared characters are all contributing factors to player wealth.

[Neiska]

3 hours ago, Sovera said:

 

What would happen? Nothing. Nothing would happen. How did people farm before the AE? They picked a mission and would run it over and over. The infamous Dreck comes to mind.

 

The only way to calm down the anti farming crowd (incidentally I haven't received an answer about how inflation did not balloon prices, and neither about how it takes casual play two weeks TOPS to buy all the purples and winters, and half that if a bit more aggressive about playing which seems about right if actively playing a character we are enjoying) would be to instate a GW2 diminishing returns.

 

And it's universally loathed in GW2. GW2 is a game with a lot of grind and hours killing things, so it's HILARIOUS to find the drops slowing and eventually stopping if having farmed a map for more than an hour. The game about grind with an anti-grind mechanic is stupid as can be.

 

 

(Note - I snipped his quote to talk about 2 points)

 

Thank you for your well thought out reply @Sovera. I both agree and disagree with your points.

 

1.) I disagree with your first point, because "something" would happen, its just difficult to predict what. The biggest difference between then and now is we already have people with more wealth than live ever dreamed about. (Just a guess on my part, I did not play during live, nor do I claim any secret knowledge about how much INF people had back then.) And the "farm" would change. I imagine people would be pulling up logs and records of which missions had the best inf/time reward, and the farmers (who only farm for money) would just run those instead. Me personally I would still run AE's for fun, even if they gave me zero drops and wealth, because I like the gameplay. I can fight repeated waves of 100 mobs with little to no downtime - travel, contact juggling, so on.

 

I am honestly thinking about making my own WW2 style "storm the beaches" sort of scenario where a person can fight an astounding number of mobs at a time. Just nonstop wave after wave after wave, unrelenting. Because to me? That's pretty fun.

 

Anyway, the big brains would figure out what the new "meal ticket" is, and then just do that instead. Then people would find out about it, and calls for its nerf/change would be made, and the cycle just repeats itself. 

 

Which leads me to suspect the entire crux of their argument. Because its not "money" that's the problem here. No matter what tools, or implements they enforce, people will figure out the best X>Y situation. I would argue that's a part of gaming culture, and has been for quite some time. But that leads me to your second point.

 

2.) I have never played GW, and I find myself wondering if diminishing returns were character specific or account wide. I mean, lets say they had that here. Every hour you spend active you found less, or whatever. What do they expect players to do once they hit that point where its not worth the effort? I mean, lets say one person only has one account and a single character. Is that player just out of luck? Whoop! You hit your allowable money earned quota for the day! You best go work on skills, costumes, roleplay, or whatever.

 

If they did that here, I doubt it would be received well. I would either play a different character or account, and if it was tied to something else like my IP or whatever, if it was "truly" enforced to "me" as a person, then I wouldn't likely stick around. That is far too much "play your way, but only how we allow or like" for me.

 

Regardless, I don't hear people crying about nerfs to drops themselves, or incarnate materials, or experience. Only money. When farming isn't even the most profitable way to make money for your time, not even close. Which makes me suspect its might be more of a "I want less people running AE's, I want them doing the activities that I approve of" argument.

 

I hasten to add I in no way believe that ALL anti-farmers are like this, many have legitimate concerns. But I also suspect they are not farmers themselves, or invest much time in playing the auction house market, because if they did, if "money" was the sole concern here, I think many of the anti-farmers might be shocked just how much you can make and so quickly, let alone over a period of time, and we might see "Something has to be done about the player market, regulate it" topic posts would be seen on the forum.

 

Anyway, that's me musing while reading the forums at work.

 

[A Cat]

1 hour ago, Neiska said:

I am honestly thinking about making my own WW2 style "storm the beaches" sort of scenario where a person can fight an astounding number of mobs at a time. Just nonstop wave after wave after wave, unrelenting. Because to me? That's pretty fun.

Mission 3 of ITF is awesome for this reason. 

[Crysis]

3 hours ago, arcane said:

This. If I was focused solely on making the most money, I would marketeer. The only reason I farm is because marketeering bores me to tears. I once managed to make a billion marketeering, but I was screaming internally the whole time.

 

Even if marketeering wasn’t so clearly superior to farming for making money, there are other activities I would also do if the rewards were my sole focus. More hami raids and more WST’s, for instance. As someone that farms so much, I frankly consider myself a relatively slow reward earner.

 

What I don’t think most people realize is this simple fact…..

 

Farming has, for all purposes, a ‘cap’ on maximum influence gain/hour.  Once you maximize your kill to death ratio, it’s up to the RNG gods to push you (slightly and very only rarely) past that maximum rate of influence/hr metric.

 

Marketeering has no such cap.  I mean in theory you can’t click faster than the game will allow, and a mouse click in the auction house isn’t technically any different than a mouse click to activate a power in AE.  But a Marketeer effectively has NO cap on influence earned per hour.  Even if you give me situations where you say it’s impossible to gain more than X, I’ll show you screenshots of people who accidentally added an extra digit to a purchase I had up for sale and just like that I earned an extra 600MM influence.  It happens more than you’d think, although it’s usually measured in tens of millions extra and not hundreds.  

 

Further, a Marketeer’s earning power multiplies as their income grows.  When you don’t have much influence, you tend to buy/craft small and sell small.  So you buy recipes for 1,111 influence (many of those are just trash recipes dropped by people with a lot more influence than you), buy/earn the salvage and then craft them.  If you’ve figured out Enhancement Converters, you then flip by rarity and then within category to get something worth far more….and then you sell it.  Multiply that by stacks of 10’s of the same recipe and you get the picture.

 

But any Marketeer with a billion or more in ‘spare change’ can be buying crafted IO’s and skip the whole recipe/crafting approach.  And then with even more influence, they buy hundreds of Winter Lord/Hero Packs at a time and open those and convert/sell/flip the contents.  Or just flat out buy purples, Winter O’s, HO’s by the hundreds and resell them.

 

The point of all this is there is ZERO cap on influence generation in the game for a Marketeer.  There is for farming.  There is also for 8-player teams/32+ member leagues.  Although even those numbers bandied about miss the concept of all those players earning salvage, recipe drops (often multiple within a league) and then moving to Marketeering right afterwards.  

 

Just like in real life….farming isn’t a path to riches.  Path to pay for your house, food, college for the kids, occasional niceties…sure.  But if you want to really make money, you -must- marketeer.  Many of us do both, or did both at one time.  But the Marketeering path of “billions in hours” -IS- possible…..once you’ve got a few hundred million to invest and a little luck and a whole lotta mouse clicking.  You’ll never get that for same effort just farming alone.

[Luminara]

7 hours ago, Miss Magical said:

My comparison was one player farming versus one player on a task force.

 

Your comparison was implied to be a triple-box farmer versus an unstated number of players on the ITF.  This is from your first post in this thread -

 

On 9/11/2021 at 7:43 AM, Miss Magical said:

you can triple-box and afk farm in AE, it's much less practical to do that with story arcs or task forces, and you don't need to spend tine recruiting for a farm

 

Do you frequently have issues recruiting yourself for your solo endeavors and presume that to be the norm?  No?  Then that reference to recruiting indicates that the ITF runner in the comparison is on a team.  Your own words, quoted above, clearly state that the person going through the ITF would be doing so with the expectation of having a team assembled, having had to "spend tine (sic) recruiting".  You failed to specify the number of teammates the ITF runner would have, but as it happens, that number is irrelevant because the math, which is based on the results you provided, indicates that the per player per hour inf* gain is equivalent between the activities in question.

 

Of course, having had your conclusion proven erroneous, again, by the figures you submitted as proof of that conclusion, you're now attempting to change the conditions of the comparison, restricting the ITF runner to a solo environment, disregarding that the multi-boxing farmer is engaging in the equivalent of teaming, and in spite of having previously stated that the ITF runner would not likely be solo.

 

Yeah... no.

 

13 hours ago, Miss Magical said:

You cannot compare the inf generated by a single farmer vs an entire task force, because you are not controlling for the number of players.

 

Yet, you believe you can compare the inf* generated by a triple-boxing farmer to a solo player's results.  Because how else are you going to prove yourself right, if not by arbitrarily altering the parameters and deliberately trying to skew things in favor of the farmer so you can portray said farmer as a bad, bad person?  It's not really a team, just because it's three characters on three separate accounts, so why not pretend they don't exist (except that they're receiving extra inf* and drops and typically aiding the farmer in some way, such as spamming a heal or Speed Boost), right?  Right?

 

Wrong.

 

13 hours ago, Miss Magical said:

I don't know why this needs to be explained.

 

Because none of what you've been saying makes sense when examined?  Because none of what you've said has actually been correct?  Because you're pushing a personal vendetta against farmers and accusing them of causing inflation despite the game showing the opposite to be true?  Because you've resorted to changing the parameters of the comparison to "win"?

 

13 hours ago, Miss Magical said:

Farming creates ex nihilo far more inf per player per unit time than any other activity in the game.

 

A team comprised of a farmer plus two dummy accounts is still a team.  The characters on the secondary and tertiary accounts are still teammates, receiving inf* and drops of their own which is in addition to the farmer's inf* and drops.  The farmer is not creating more inf* than anyone else, as demonstrated in other posts in this thread, he/she is simply keeping more inf* than players who team with other players.  Some farmers might be generating inf* above the curve, others are generating less, just as some *F runners put together optimal teams and blitz through *Fs at blistering paces while others take a more leisurely approach.  It averages out over time.  None of them are generating inf* in such excessive and enormous amounts that the economy is endangered, the farmers are only generating more inf* for their own personal use than the average player, not more inf* than other players can generate via other methods, and that is also not endangering the economy.

 

Any three characters working in concert can make 100,000,000 inf* per hour.  The farmer keeps all of it, the team players share it.  That's the only difference.  Whether it's divided three ways or all goes into one pocket isn't relevant.

 

13 hours ago, Miss Magical said:

This increases the amount of currency in circulation which then leads to higher equilibrium prices.

 

See the paragraph above.

 

13 hours ago, Miss Magical said:

In my original post, which was meant to show how much inf farmers inject into the economy, I indeed did not include the value of the 26 merits. This is not an omission. Merits create tradeable goods out of thin air, not inf (and therefore, do not increase the amount of inf in circulation, and hence do not contribute to higher equilibrium prices, which was my original thesis).

 

If we're comparing overall rewards of different playstyles, which is a separate issue from inf creation and prices, then it would be right to include their value and I did neglect to do that; I may also have been unclear which I was talking about when casually referring to the earnings of farmers vs other playstyles.

 

Yet you felt that non-inf*/non-vendor rewards were important to include as part of the reward structure of farming, to such a degree that you actively disputed every reminder that non-AE content offers more rewards than AE content, or than farming in general.  You made it a point to dispute the claim that farmers couldn't acquire all of the same rewards by farming.  It was important enough that you addressed that more than once.

 

But having merits rewards for completing *Fs/trials/story arcs raised as an example of a reward unobtainable by farming, since farming doesn't complete *Fs/trials/story arcs, requires them to be excluded (now that there's a value attached to those merits).  They're no longer relevant, now that they're relevant.

 

Yeah, that's definitely not a transparent and feeble scramble to maintain an untenable position.

 

But, hell, let's run with it!  If you want to move the goal post from Hackensack to Kolkata, fuck yeah, let's do it!  We'll remove the ~6,000,000 inf* for merits from the earlier calculation.  That still equates to more than double the net earnings for the TF runners when compared to the farmer's earnings in the same time period, 240,000,000 versus the farmer's 100,000,000 after one hour.  That's 30,000,000 inf* per hour per player on the TF (as originally noted by @Bionic_Flea), and at three players, we achieve equilibrium with the triple-boxing farmer.  3 characters on each team, equivalent inf* generation.

 

Do you want to change the conditions again?

 

 

What you consistently fail to accept or admit is that it's not how much a farmer generates, it's how much everyone generates that matters.  Farmers don't park themselves in the AE and farm the same map over and over again because the inf* generation is higher in AE farm maps, they do it because it's easy to build for those maps and the inf* they generate doesn't have to be split 3-8 ways.  It's not more inf* overall, it's more inf* for them, and it doesn't impact the economy to any measurable degree because it's just not relevant in comparison to the vastly greater amounts generated by significantly greater percentage of the population doing everything else.

 

But you categorically refute that because you're completely focused on the individual gains.  The big picture doesn't seem to exist for you.  You just will not see it.  You're so determined to prove that farmers are a cancer that you've thrown away all reason, logic and credulity in pursuit of that goal.

 

14 hours ago, Miss Magical said:

I love this comment because I think it shows what you really see in me: a threat.

 

You've consistently failed to do the most basic math to support your conclusion, and you really should've done that before you posted the first time; your attempts at defending your position have been tantamount to "Nuh uh" and "I'm rubber and you're glue"; you display no facility for deductive or abductive reasoning; and you clearly have a personal agenda warping your perspective on the subject.  You're a threat to yourself, not to me.

 

14 hours ago, Miss Magical said:

So chill, you won't lose your 100 M/hr golden goose.

 

I don't farm.  I mention that in this very thread, but apparently even the effort of reading the thread in which you're posting is too much research work for you.

[GM Flints]

While Homecoming has some changes the economy, from disabling double-inf-no-exp as an option, to ATOs/WinterOs being essentially gold destruction to take INF out of the economy, and seeding/fungibles on the market there are options for every play-style (Except maybe roleplay without costume contests/playing with AE editor only and not playing created arcs) to generate an income in this game;
OPs query got answered pretty early on in page 1 and 2 of this thread, While I'm not going to close this thread just because it's been answered, a debate on how farming, merits, and inf generation of different methods and playstyles - Such as solo merit farming vs market play vs farming vs team farming etc and so forth - is going to be much better suited for it's own thread (and own thread title) for that debate, rather than a player feeling they cannot afford things on their character and players assisting with advice.

Keep being cool,
GM Flints

[Greycat]

12 minutes ago, GM Flints said:

Keep being cool,
GM Flints

 

*gasp*

GMs are biased against fire tanks!

 

😉

[Miss Magical]

5 hours ago, Luminara said:

 

Your comparison was implied to be a triple-box farmer versus an unstated number of players on the ITF.  This is from your first post in this thread -

 

 

Do you frequently have issues recruiting yourself for your solo endeavors and presume that to be the norm?  No?  Then that reference to recruiting indicates that the ITF runner in the comparison is on a team.  Your own words, quoted above, clearly state that the person going through the ITF would be doing so with the expectation of having a team assembled, having had to "spend tine (sic) recruiting".  You failed to specify the number of teammates the ITF runner would have, but as it happens, that number is irrelevant because the math, which is based on the results you provided, indicates that the per player per hour inf* gain is equivalent between the activities in question.

 

Of course, having had your conclusion proven erroneous, again, by the figures you submitted as proof of that conclusion, you're now attempting to change the conditions of the comparison, restricting the ITF runner to a solo environment, disregarding that the multi-boxing farmer is engaging in the equivalent of teaming, and in spite of having previously stated that the ITF runner would not likely be solo.

 

Yeah... no.

 

 

Yet, you believe you can compare the inf* generated by a triple-boxing farmer to a solo player's results.  Because how else are you going to prove yourself right, if not by arbitrarily altering the parameters and deliberately trying to skew things in favor of the farmer so you can portray said farmer as a bad, bad person?  It's not really a team, just because it's three characters on three separate accounts, so why not pretend they don't exist (except that they're receiving extra inf* and drops and typically aiding the farmer in some way, such as spamming a heal or Speed Boost), right?  Right?

 

Wrong.

 

 

Because none of what you've been saying makes sense when examined?  Because none of what you've said has actually been correct?  Because you're pushing a personal vendetta against farmers and accusing them of causing inflation despite the game showing the opposite to be true?  Because you've resorted to changing the parameters of the comparison to "win"?

 

 

A team comprised of a farmer plus two dummy accounts is still a team.  The characters on the secondary and tertiary accounts are still teammates, receiving inf* and drops of their own which is in addition to the farmer's inf* and drops.  The farmer is not creating more inf* than anyone else, as demonstrated in other posts in this thread, he/she is simply keeping more inf* than players who team with other players.  Some farmers might be generating inf* above the curve, others are generating less, just as some *F runners put together optimal teams and blitz through *Fs at blistering paces while others take a more leisurely approach.  It averages out over time.  None of them are generating inf* in such excessive and enormous amounts that the economy is endangered, the farmers are only generating more inf* for their own personal use than the average player, not more inf* than other players can generate via other methods, and that is also not endangering the economy.

 

Any three characters working in concert can make 100,000,000 inf* per hour.  The farmer keeps all of it, the team players share it.  That's the only difference.  Whether it's divided three ways or all goes into one pocket isn't relevant.

 

 

See the paragraph above.

 

 

Yet you felt that non-inf*/non-vendor rewards were important to include as part of the reward structure of farming, to such a degree that you actively disputed every reminder that non-AE content offers more rewards than AE content, or than farming in general.  You made it a point to dispute the claim that farmers couldn't acquire all of the same rewards by farming.  It was important enough that you addressed that more than once.

 

But having merits rewards for completing *Fs/trials/story arcs raised as an example of a reward unobtainable by farming, since farming doesn't complete *Fs/trials/story arcs, requires them to be excluded (now that there's a value attached to those merits).  They're no longer relevant, now that they're relevant.

 

Yeah, that's definitely not a transparent and feeble scramble to maintain an untenable position.

 

But, hell, let's run with it!  If you want to move the goal post from Hackensack to Kolkata, fuck yeah, let's do it!  We'll remove the ~6,000,000 inf* for merits from the earlier calculation.  That still equates to more than double the net earnings for the TF runners when compared to the farmer's earnings in the same time period, 240,000,000 versus the farmer's 100,000,000 after one hour.  That's 30,000,000 inf* per hour per player on the TF (as originally noted by @Bionic_Flea), and at three players, we achieve equilibrium with the triple-boxing farmer.  3 characters on each team, equivalent inf* generation.

 

Do you want to change the conditions again?

 

 

What you consistently fail to accept or admit is that it's not how much a farmer generates, it's how much everyone generates that matters.  Farmers don't park themselves in the AE and farm the same map over and over again because the inf* generation is higher in AE farm maps, they do it because it's easy to build for those maps and the inf* they generate doesn't have to be split 3-8 ways.  It's not more inf* overall, it's more inf* for them, and it doesn't impact the economy to any measurable degree because it's just not relevant in comparison to the vastly greater amounts generated by significantly greater percentage of the population doing everything else.

 

But you categorically refute that because you're completely focused on the individual gains.  The big picture doesn't seem to exist for you.  You just will not see it.  You're so determined to prove that farmers are a cancer that you've thrown away all reason, logic and credulity in pursuit of that goal.

 

 

You've consistently failed to do the most basic math to support your conclusion, and you really should've done that before you posted the first time; your attempts at defending your position have been tantamount to "Nuh uh" and "I'm rubber and you're glue"; you display no facility for deductive or abductive reasoning; and you clearly have a personal agenda warping your perspective on the subject.  You're a threat to yourself, not to me.

 

 

I don't farm.  I mention that in this very thread, but apparently even the effort of reading the thread in which you're posting is too much research work for you.

In light of the GM’s post I will make this my final reply.
 

Look, there are two separate issues I am bringing up:

 

1) farmers increase the amount of inf in the economy, and this leads to higher prices.

 

2) farmers gain vastly more rewards (considering both inf and non-inf rewards) than players of other playstyles.

 

Merits should be considered in 2), but not in 1). Does that seem clear now?

 

Beyond that, your argument rests on nitpicking and technicalities like considering a multiboxing farmer a “team” of 3 players, a stretch of the definition only possible with the elongation control power set. You say that what matters is how much inf the entire playerbase is generating. True, but why are conclusions from individual reward rates not able to be extrapolated to the playerbase as a whole? If farming generates more inf per unit time per person, and increased inf supply leads to higher prices, every player who farms instead of participating in some other playstyle leads in a small way to higher prices. The absolute size of the effect would depend on how prevalent farming is (anecdotally, very), but farmers would be the largest cause of inflation on a per capita basis. You’re free to prefer the former metric if you please, but you’ve disproved nothing.

 

You claim it’s long been proven that farming does not cause inflation, and yet you don’t supply any proof of that, despite your lofty talk of proof, research etc. Are you talking about the conclusions of discussions from back when this game was still a live service game? If so, I don’t see how they are relevant. As I understand, the market back then was vastly different (P2W store goods were previously part of the game’s monetization scheme, etc.). You can’t draw conclusions from that economy of long ago, and apply it to this one.
 

You accuse me of having some agenda against farmers, despite the fact that I have said in this thread that there is nothing inherently wrong with farming. Just for the record, there will always be players attracted to repetitive grinding, and that’s completely fine. My problem is with the balance of rewards and the idea that certain playstyles deserve vastly more rewards than others. It doesn’t matter what playstyle that is.

 

Finally, if you dispute that comparing reward per player is relevant, that’s fine. You don’t have to agree with me. But when you distort commonsense definitions of what a team is, open and close your posts with personal attacks against my intelligence, and fling all kinds of wild and unproven accusations against me like disinformation and spreading FUD, an argument in good faith is impossible. Next time, if you actually have any facts, leave your condescension and toxicity at home.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Miss Magical

[Bionic_Flea]

15 minutes ago, Miss Magical said:

In light of the GM’s post I will make this my final reply.

LOL!

 

 

Edited September 13, 2021 by Bionic_Flea

[macskull]

I took the advice of @GM Flints and started a new thread. Come join me!

[golstat2003]

12 hours ago, arcane said:

This. If I was focused solely on making the most money, I would marketeer. The only reason I farm is because marketeering bores me to tears. I once managed to make a billion marketeering, but I was screaming internally the whole time.

 

Even if marketeering wasn’t so clearly superior to farming for making money, there are other activities I would also do if the rewards were my sole focus. More hami raids and more WST’s, for instance. As someone that farms so much, I frankly consider myself a relatively slow reward earner.

 

Interestingly enough I do the TFs,  Hami raids, and Mothership raids so that I can earn Merits, which I then use to buy converters so that I can marketeer.

 

The great thing about this game is that there are multiple ways to make inf.

[GM Crumpet]

I don't farm for inf, when I do farm it's just for levelling up an alt I like. Some hit 50 and incarnate, others I find aren't as much fun as I thought so I do a respec, sell all the enhancements, recipes, inspirations, salvage, then convert the merits to converters and sell them. Once everything possible is converted to inf I email it to my global then delete the alt. It's amazing how much inf is tied up in unplayed toons. I also do the "craft recipe/convert it to something profitable/ sell on the auction house" thing. It doesn't really take that long. I currently have around 800 million inf in my email inbox and to fully IO set a level 50 costs somewhere in the region of 30 million inf. Sometimes a lot more if I'm really going for a specific thing like permadom, but on most toons it can be a lot lower. I always buy attuned, as some great sets become available really early (I think level 7) like Blessing of the Zephyr. Inf is available for those who want to spend a (not that great) amount of time actually making it.

[skoryy]

5 minutes ago, GM Crumpet said:

Some hit 50 and incarnate, others I find aren't as much fun as I thought so I do a respec, sell all the enhancements, recipes, inspirations, salvage, then convert the merits to converters and sell them.

 

Maybe this is a discussion for another new topic, but I can't bring myself to razing alts I've found disappointing.  I've put some time and effort into them, and there's always the possibility the disappointing bits get improved down the road.

 

(Staff fighting and controllers, hint hint. 😉 )

[Without_Pause]

42 minutes ago, skoryy said:

 

Maybe this is a discussion for another new topic, but I can't bring myself to razing alts I've found disappointing.  I've put some time and effort into them, and there's always the possibility the disappointing bits get improved down the road.

 

(Staff fighting and controllers, hint hint. 😉 )

I don't mind revisiting something later on, but I find I tend not to. I had a list of 30 characters, and decided I didn't want to invest in all of them in terms of IOs, Incarnate, etc, so I picked 10 and got rid of them. I might trim more later on. I concede I took a long break, but once characters start to see 400-500 days of not being logged on, I'm okay with moving on. I strip them as well, and move onto things I want to actually play.

 

And yes, this by default makes it easier for my other characters to become rich as 2-3 million is pretty easy to get transferred. One build I axed had two purple recipes I made sure to keep.

[Apparition]

I have stripped and deleted more characters than I have total characters at the moment.  The vast majority of which are melee, as I just find it much less enjoyable on Homecoming than I did on live, but I keep on trying.  I suspect part of my lack of enjoyment of melee is due to my disagreement with the Issue 26, Page Four Tanker update and part of it is just preference change on my part over the past ten years.  I have one Brute ATM that I never play, one Tanker ATM that I'm really itching to strip and delete, and a Stalker that I only play at Hamidon raids since they're usually lacking in melee damage for some reason.

[Bill Z Bubba]

I'm in the purge/recycle group. Makes loading up new alts easier and faster when you keep your bins full of the expensive stuff.

[arcane]

1 hour ago, skoryy said:

 

Maybe this is a discussion for another new topic, but I can't bring myself to razing alts I've found disappointing.  I've put some time and effort into them, and there's always the possibility the disappointing bits get improved down the road.

 

(Staff fighting and controllers, hint hint. 😉 )

My Traps/AR who has been gutted and later reslotted and still kinda sorta blows cuz AR... feels this feel