Is farming an imbalanced method of earning ingame rewards?

[skoryy]

14 minutes ago, Crysis said:

Meh....can buy it nao for not a lot more than recipe +crafting components.

 

Bingo.  Flipping just isn't profitable here.

[skoryy]

2 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

This is reminding me of all the time I spent on live flipping yellow salvage when AE exploits were in full swing.  It was never outstandingly profitable, considering how much time it took, but it was oddly hypnotic watching the stacks of salvage simultaneously filling and emptying.

 

The real money was in buying and flipping rare oranges at first, then purples once you had enough money.  I was able to outfit two of my 50s with purple IO'd builds before sunset, but boy howdy the tracking I had to do on spreadsheets...  oof.

[lemming]

8 hours ago, skoryy said:

 

You'd get more selling it at a vendor, though.

Yea, but it's quick to drop it on the market and gets some easy $$$ to someone just starting.  It's not like I need 40k inf when I have full salvage

[Neiska]

Personally unless I am penny pintching I tend to sell en masse. Multibox farming 3 characters fills up a lot of inventory fast, even things like converters. So I usually wait for a good time to sell in bulk. The majority of my day to day inf gain is from just selling stuff like piles of white recipes to vendors, but I've put up 30+ orange salvage before, and so on. 

[Col. Kernel]

8 hours ago, roleki said:

It's hilarious to me that there are numerous people in these forums who proudly identify themselves as market manipulators, and yet folks continue to lay the blame for the high cost of everything at the feet of the farmers... whose only involvement in this scheme is the delivery of more product for the marketeers to fiddle with.  

 

"If we only cut off the supply, everything will be cheaper!"  

 

I'm glad to see that some folks in this game understand basic economics.

[TraumaTrain]

Yay PvP!

[Apparition]

42 minutes ago, TraumaTrain said:

Yay PvP!

 

Forum PvP is the best PvP.

[Hew]

11 minutes ago, Apparition said:

 

Forum PvP is the best PvP.

Forum Marketing? 

 

Come get yer post here! We cater to offend your target audience with laser precision!

[Blackbird71]

17 hours ago, Bionic_Flea said:

Would you tell us the actual increase?  Because going from 1,000 inf to 3,000 inf is a 300% increase, which is negligible.  I would even consider 10x or 100x from the starting point to be negligible as well, but some may not.

 

I mentioned it in the other thread, but enhancements that I regularly sold for ~1M Inf now easily go for 2M-3M or higher.

[Xeres]

No.  I don't believe the chances of getting rewards is increased in farms per mob, percentage-wise.  The only way it may be imbalanced is the number of mobs.

[tidge]

29 minutes ago, Blackbird71 said:

 

I mentioned it in the other thread, but enhancements that I regularly sold for ~1M Inf now easily go for 2M-3M or higher.

 

Can you be more specific? I regularly see ±1MInf variation in all sorts of random places with small sample sizes. Don't worry about revealing your secret niche, my first reaction to "ZOMG 1MInf!" was:

 

 

EDIT: I should add this note: In a market niche where I routinely made ~6Minf for certain pieces, the market fell such that I'm lucky to make 4Minf, and routinely the pieces go for low enough prices that I make much less.

Edited September 15, 2021 by tidge

[nihilii]

Edit: on second thought, I can't phrase this diplomatically and I don't see the point in antagonizing people.

Edited September 15, 2021 by nihilii

[Luminara]

8 minutes ago, nihilii said:

farming is anywhere from 3x to 100x more efficient than normal play

 

Provide data, please.

 

9 minutes ago, nihilii said:

The expectation is to be able to go from level 1 to 50 in 2 hours at will.

 

Farming is not power-leveling.  Power-leveling is not farming.  They are two distinct activities, neither reliant on nor requiring the other.  A player can power-level to 50 by side-kicking with teams running story arcs at level 50.  A player can farm with a level 50 character and no sub-50 characters on his/her farm.  Conflating the two is a mistake.

 

12 minutes ago, nihilii said:

- no, your farmer dumping recipes on the market does not increase supply, because your influence gain is greater than your supply generation relative to normal play. Ergo you're actually worsening inflation and contributing to price hikes.

 

Data required.

 

13 minutes ago, nihilii said:

Other arguments: "through farming I team with people" - that same pool of players would be available for normal teaming.

 

Can you provide any evidence that farmers would team with you and play through your preferred activity if you take away their preferred activity?

 

18 minutes ago, nihilii said:

you can tweak the rewards curve. You could stop abominations like the moonfarm, heck you could use the nuclear option and make AE give no xp/inf, period

 

Those restrictions didn't farming in the past.

 

24 minutes ago, nihilii said:

or you could even go with a more interesting route and make it give XP but no influence/drops at all, giving a fast leveling route but leaving the need for the game proper to get influence

 

Again, farming isn't power-leveling, power-leveling isn't farming.

 

Also, accounts are free now, and Gmail accounts are unlimited, anyone could set up ten or twenty or fifty accounts to farm and/or power-level and easily work around your restrictions.

 

31 minutes ago, nihilii said:

"If you stop farming, I will leave" - most people who loudly claim to leave never do. And most people who leave don't loudly claim to, incidentally: we'll never know how many people gave up on CoH because they weren't into farming.

 

Do you have any data to support these assertions?

 

32 minutes ago, nihilii said:

I'm actually one of the people who benefits most from farming. Likes solo play above all, likes making endgame builds against challenge stuff. I've maybe farmed 50 level 50s for every single character leveled normally.

 

Magnificent.  You're perfectly positioned to provide exactly the type of information necessary to determine the impact of farming on the game as a whole.  Everyone reading is dying to see real evidence of anyone pulling down 3,000,000,000 inf* per hour farming with a single character (one hundred times the 30,000,000 inf* someone can make playing the ITF for an hour), and you just volunteered to provide that evidence.  👍

[TheZag]

[Neiska]

At this point I think it's clear that not everyone is going to agree, as people have different objections or goals. Not everyone is going to like all playstyles either. Personally, I am at the point where I power level more than I farm, mostly to try out new ideas or builds. Inf isn't even really a concern to me anymore.

 

But what does make me perplexed is how the crux of the disagreement here, is how some people are efficient with their play, and that seems to irk other players. Honestly it's starting to feel like a home owners association, with someone measuring my front lawn and going "Hey! That's too much!" when my next door neighbor has a veritable forest, they are worried about my lawn being a quarter inch higher than theirs. When "your boi" over there is planting entire forests. 

 

And I am genuinely curious as to where people get their data from. Do people actually have proof that farming does X Y and Z, have access to player numbers? Some sort of secret inner working knowledge or access to the numbers? Or are they going off what they think, feel, or suspect? (Opinions are not facts.)

 

Personally I go off my own experience. I know what I make how fast I make it and how fast I spend. And I have noticed far less farmers now than there were a year ago. (it seems to come and go with playtimes as might be expected, but overall, it just seems lower to me.)

 

Anyway, best wishes to everyone, if you are a fellow farmer or not. Just please be kind to one another, even if you disagree. Its okay to disagree, just please be respectful about it. This community is already small enough.

[Glacier Peak]

I'll just leave this here for others to discuss (emphasis added in gold)

 

On 3/31/2020 at 7:27 AM, Jimmy said:

We’ve made this change to reduce the influence income gap between players who farm and those that do not. The amount of additional influence gained by abusing level 49 missions simply wasn’t healthy for the overall economy of the game, and generally unfair towards those who play standard level 50 content instead of farming. Additionally, there were various exploits that could be abused in order to further increase influence gain through this option. Overall, we concluded it was best to remove the mechanic. Even with this change farming is still far more efficient than every other method of influence gain.

 

Edited September 15, 2021 by Glacier Peak

[Bionic_Flea]

I'm not sure if it was in that thread or another, but Jimmy has also stated that marketing does not create influence, it transfers it between players and has a deflationary effect of removing 10% influence per transaction.

 

So yes, farming is faster than street sweeping or running TFs and story arcs to create influence, but marketing is still a faster way for a player to accumulate (not create) influence.

[Glacier Peak]

19 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

I'm not sure if it was in that thread or another, but Jimmy has also stated that marketing does not create influence, it transfers it between players and has a deflationary effect of removing 10% influence per transaction.

 

So yes, farming is faster than street sweeping or running TFs and story arcs to create influence, but marketing is still a faster way for a player to accumulate (not create) influence.

I know exactly what you're talking about, but I can't seem to find it either! And agree on distinguishing the semantics, creating is different than accumulating. 

[Ukase]

There is one thing that occurred to me this morning about a legit difference (as far as I can tell) between AE farm rewards and other content. 

Back on live, I had two farms: the famed Dreck map, through Unai Kemen, and Harvey Meylor's Demon map. And why? 
Because the freaks dropped tech salvage, and the demons dropped arcane. I would often run dreck, then run the demon map a couple of times because it was smaller, hoping to get the required salvage so I wouldn't have to travel to W...I can't believe I've been using AH so much, I've forgotten that W stands for Wentworth's! 

But, oddly, in AE maps - at least Briggs' - the mobs drop both types. I realize in game, there's some mobs that will drop both, but by and large, freaks drop tech, CoT drop arcane, etc. 

To me - that's a HUGE difference, just in the time it saves me not having to buy salvage. 

[Yomo Kimyata]

1 hour ago, Glacier Peak said:

I know exactly what you're talking about, but I can't seem to find it either! And agree on distinguishing the semantics, creating is different than accumulating. 

Accumulating, stealing lollipops from babes.  To-may-to, to-mah-to.

[Mezmera]

1 hour ago, Bionic_Flea said:

I'm not sure if it was in that thread or another, but Jimmy has also stated that marketing does not create influence, it transfers it between players and has a deflationary effect of removing 10% influence per transaction.

 

So yes, farming is faster than street sweeping or running TFs and story arcs to create influence, but marketing is still a faster way for a player to accumulate (not create) influence.

 

It's like hosting a poker game where anyone can gamble and quit at their leisure but the dealer takes 10% of every pot.  Nothing is being generated, values are just transferring.  Ultimately the 10% of monies is being removed from the table to not be seen again, unless you start looking around at all of Jimmy's new toys.  Jimmy is 100%.  

 

The house always wins.  Always....

Edited September 15, 2021 by Mezmera

[Without_Pause]

1. Can an economy which has inflation be healthy? Real life says yes.

2. Does CoH's economy swing toward such a high inflation to where it is being deemed "broken?" Case in point, if a build costs 500 million two years ago, does it cost a billion now?

2. Would a zero sum economy be healthier? If yes, then far more than just farming needs to be fixed. Players would only be able to generate at what they could spend elsewhere, ie market offers, etc.

 

FYI, I made a new character. With zero farming and outside help at level 6 they had 8.9 million. I can see being at 20-30+ million at level 8 once things get sold.

[Grouchybeast]

2 hours ago, Glacier Peak said:

I know exactly what you're talking about, but I can't seem to find it either! And agree on distinguishing the semantics, creating is different than accumulating. 

 

They're hard to find because of all the thread merging and moving that went on, but @Jimmy addressed farming and marketing here, here, and here.  There are other GM/dev posts in that monster thread, but those seem like they cover the main points of HC's views on farming and the market.

[tidge]

I suggest reading some of the posts by @SwitchFade (in that thread, or elsewhere) on economics.

[InvaderStych]

On 9/14/2021 at 8:06 AM, Blackbird71 said:

Did I ever say it was anything but anecdotal?  It's my own personal observation, and therefore nothing but anecdotal.  Frankly though, all the other claims here that "the market is stable" are likewise the same.  No one has presented any actual data in this thread or the other.

 

In the absence of such data from a reliable source (read: HC devs), I can only go with my own personal observation.

 

Actually, you know what, that's fair enough.  What I infer isn't necessarily what someone means to imply and all that.  But I still have a question or two:

 

  

7 hours ago, Blackbird71 said:

I mentioned it in the other thread, but enhancements that I regularly sold for ~1M Inf now easily go for 2M-3M or higher.

 

Over what period of time?

 

How certain are we that inflation is the only source of price increases on individual items?  Did recent changes to powers (RoP) or new powers (Combat Teleport, et al) make any particular enhancements more or less desirable and thus impacting price via natural supply/demand? Perhaps not the ones to which you are specifically referring, although I would be surprised if powers/FotM/etc changes had no impact on prices.

 

Are these prices higher or lower than prior to the removal of 2xINF?  That change happened a week or two after I discovered HC, so I cannot speak to pricing trends before that point.

 

While all of that is academically interesting, the real question for me is more experiential.  Personally, my experience with the HC economy has been quite smooth, easy, and with enough reliable ways to turn Reward Merits into Inf that pricing fluctuations and the current state of inflation have not impacted me negatively.

 

So here's my version of the question:

 

In the current state of the HC economy, are you having a pleasant or frustrating experience?  In a vacuum, not comparing your bankroll to someone else's because this is not a competitive game and outside of PVP there's really no such thing as "competitive advantage."

 

This is the reason I'm not worried about it and that I believe, firmly, that whatever is happening in the market really doesn't impact me as a slightly-more-involved-than-casual player.

 

 

On 4/1/2020 at 10:37 AM, Jimmy said:

The economy is not a one-dimensional beast, we have different tools and options available to us to tweak different parts of how it functions. The primary goal of this change was to reduce inflation and adjust the balance of earning influence - because earning influence is what creates buying power, and ultimately drives pricing in the market.

 

Emphasis Mine. 

 

The best I can say is that, to date, I have had a positive experience with both the rate at which various Fake Money Units drop on my toons while playing the content of my choice as well as the effectiveness of those Fake Money Units acquiring the Bits and Pieces to build the toons I want to build. I have never found myself in a situation where I felt compelled to alter (or forced into) one particular play-style or other simply to accumulate Fake Money Units.

 

Would I benefit from Dev intervention in AFK and Multi-Box farming?  Probably.  Do I need them to do something about it to enjoy the game and accumulate Fake Money Units at a satisfactory rate?

 

Nope.