Is the in-game economy weird and broken?

[Zombra]

I'm glad to be back in CoX after 15ish years away 🙂

 

However I feel really overwhelmed by what's going on with the economy now.  I'm being told "read my newb guide, this is the way you're SUPPOSED to progress.  Farm these task forces for merits, then take the merit rewards to the worktable and turn them into splanges, then sell the splanges for a billion inf each at the auction house, then use that inf to buy shoobadoo enhancements, then break those in half and smear peanut butter on them, then ...."

 

Like, I just want to run missions and get a little inf, and buy enhancements appropriate to my level.  But I feel like I'm doing it wrong and the economy is only set up to support billionaires.  I don't remember the early/mid levels being this rough, contacts don't even sell enhancements any more even though they all say they do, can't even afford DOs for my level 15 characters when I finally get to the zones that have stores.  The auction house looks like a Wild West of "exploit or die".

 

So .... what's your take?  Is the economy perfectly fine if you don't do these weird exploits people are talking about?  Or should I give up on fun and L2Farm?

 

Thanks in advance for any perspective.

Edited February 1 by Zombra

[Lockely]

You don't need to farm merits, just sell your salvage (itll fill up quick!) and recipes and you'll have enough to slot DOs and SOs (they sell from Quartermasters) until you decide you want to dive into Inventions and attuned IOs and ect.

 

If you get lucky enough to get a single prismatic aether, you'll be set for INF until the 40s.

[Zombra]

Interesting!  Thank you @Lockely. 

Edited February 2 by Zombra

[Psyonico]

The market is *way better* than it was on live, it's not perfect, but you can make things work.

 

Simple way to make inf: do normal contact missions and task forces.  Take the merits you get from that and change them into converters (you get 3 per merit) these sell on the AH for anywhere from 50-75k a piece.  You're not going to get rich this way, but you can self fund an SO/common IO build pretty easily by just running story arcs and task forces. And the best part, it doesn't take a ton of time out of actually playing.   

 

Also, yellow and orange salvage should be sold on the AH.  It sells for way more than you get at a vendor.

 

The other thing when you're new to the economy: double XP is not your friend, you don't get a ton of inf early levels, but every but helps, and double XP means no inf gain.

[Monty Haull]

In my opinion the economy is way better now than in live.  There are safe guards in place to prevent an out of control market like on live.  The common, uncommon, and rare salvage have been seeded with common being maxed out at 10,000, uncommon 100,000 and rare at 1,000,000. (I think those are the amounts)  This means that is the most you would ever pay for these items.  Now those items are no where near these prices which is great.  This keep the cost of set IOs in check.   

 

When starting out it can be tough because you have nothing.  Once you get your first 50 which then can feed your alts.  

 

Just play the game, learn the auction house if you want, have fun.  It not a race.  

 

In regards to enhancement being sold by contacts, you want to select contacts that match what you picked.  Natural, science, etc.  usually you are guided when being introduced to a new contact.  They will tell you that this contact specializes in tech or magic.  You also have to complete a mission or two in order for the contact store to become available.  

 

I hope that helps with your questions.

[SeraphimKensai]

Yeah on live it was not uncommon to hear about 12 billion influence builds. Here most expensive builds end up around a billion, so it's definitely better than live. There's also more ways to make influence, so it seems easier across the board to build characters out.

 

That said the game was tuned for SO's so IOs and Set IOs are just icing on the top of the cake.

[sbloyd]

1 hour ago, Zombra said:

So .... what's your take?  Is the economy perfectly fine if you don't do these weird exploits people are talking about?  Or should I give up on fun and L2Farm?

 

Thanks in advance for any perspective.

 

The economy is fine. Nobody NEEDS to do all those things... it's just that we're always so happy to see new faces (SO MANY new faces, now!) and we want people to prosper, so everyone's got their ONE STUPID TRICK (Arachnos hates them!) to instant riches and wants to share that trick with all the new folks so they can be rich and buy my Performance Shifters and my Panaceas.

[sbloyd]

PS - buy my Performance Shifters and my Panaceas.

[Skyhawke]

1 minute ago, sbloyd said:

PS - buy my Performance Shifters and my Panaceas.

 

I'm swimming in Performance Shifters...<.<....>.>.....how much for the pancreas?

[Clave Dark 5]

1 hour ago, Zombra said:

I'm glad to be back in CoX after 15ish years away 🙂

 

However I feel really overwhelmed by what's going on with the economy now.  I'm being told "read my newb guide, this is the way you're SUPPOSED to progress.  Farm these task forces for merits, then take the merit rewards to the worktable and turn them into splanges, then sell the splanges for a billion inf each at the auction house, then use that inf to buy shoobadoo enhancements, then break those in half and smear peanut butter on them, then ...."

 

Like, I just want to run missions and get a little inf, and buy enhancements appropriate to my level.  But I feel like I'm doing it wrong and the economy is only set up to support billionaires. 

My take is the players who were here when all the new folk showed up had curdled into speed-run freaks who were here only for the farming, which is offputting for new players (mainly I argue this as it's just flat-out dull and hampers one's play style, but anyway).  And Zombra here is a good example of that.

 

Zombra, do whatever the heck you want to.  Your play style is my play style.  Don't farm, it's boring, you'll burn out on the game; I never run the Maria Jenkins arc anymore because of that.  Play whatever you want, however you want.  Slot however you want too. 

 

You're best bet for now is to PUG; even a half-slotted character can contribute and help a team, especially in lower levels.  Keep playing, keep playing, keep playing.  By the time you're reaching say 40th level you should have things straightened out well enough for your character, and then keep playing.  When you hit 50, keep playing with that character for a bit and I swear that Inf will roll in pretty quickly. 

 

Think of this new cashless toon as a car.  It still runsd and will easily get you get wherever you need to be in, don't let everyone else tell you you need to drive a pimped out Lambo to play the game.  That "received wisdom" is junk.

[macskull]

1 hour ago, Zombra said:

So .... what's your take?  Is the economy perfectly fine if you don't do these weird exploits people are talking about?  Or should I give up on fun and L2Farm?

These aren't "weird exploits," these are "easy and beginner-friendly ways to make inf so you can buy stuff."

 

If we're talking about ingame economy and how to afford things, here is some perspective:

• Inf gain from defeats, mission completion, and arc completion is still about the same as it's always been.
• The cost of pretty much every item on the auction house is orders of magnitude lower than it was back on live. You can complete an entire character's build for what would have been the price of one single purple enhancement. A PvP IO which might have sold off market for 3-4 billion inf is closer to 15 million inf now. It is so incredibly easy now to afford things compared to 15 years ago.

Edited February 2 by macskull

[Snarky]

17 minutes ago, Skyhawke said:

 

I'm swimming in Performance Shifters...<.<....>.>.....how much for the pancreas?

the vahzilok pay decent money for pancreas and kidneys, as long as they are somewhat fresh

[Lockely]

1 hour ago, Psyonico said:

Take the merits you get from that and change them into converters (you get 3 per merit) these sell on the AH for anywhere from 50-75k a piece.

 

I don't super love this advice for new players because it stunts their ability to get their attuned class set IOs off the merit vendors. Something like an early Stalker's Guile is incredibly game changing (especially with the next patch), and if lowbies are burning through merits converting them to INF, they're going to be left having to grind for it rather than be able to earn it naturally in a position where it'll help the earliest.

[Yomo Kimyata]

This economy is incredibly democratic.  Cheap and easy converters plus a little knowledge gets you whatever you want.  I mean that directly -- you can literally make whatever you want, although it's markedly easier to buy it with the proceeds from other things you make.

 

But the fundamental issue, and this hasn't changed since Live, is that your very first character will almost certainly be a cash drain until it hits its 40s.  Once you have a character at 50, and if you want to play it at 50, you will generate an incredible amount of inf by vendoring the enhancements and recipes that drop.  Getting that first character past the scarcity challenge is awkward, but you, like everyone else, only have to do it once at most!

[Snarky]

4 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

This economy is incredibly democratic.  Cheap and easy converters plus a little knowledge gets you whatever you want.  I mean that directly -- you can literally make whatever you want, although it's markedly easier to buy it with the proceeds from other things you make.

 

But the fundamental issue, and this hasn't changed since Live, is that your very first character will almost certainly be a cash drain until it hits its 40s.  Once you have a character at 50, and if you want to play it at 50, you will generate an incredible amount of inf by vendoring the enhancements and recipes that drop.  Getting that first character past the scarcity challenge is awkward, but you, like everyone else, only have to do it once at most!

you still doing your "thing" or should i stop referring people?

[Yomo Kimyata]

37 minutes ago, Snarky said:

you still doing your "thing" or should i stop referring people?

until Leap Day!

[Andreah]

29 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

until Leap Day!

Leap Day will be cancelled this year!

[Andreah]

4 hours ago, Zombra said:

I'm glad to be back in CoX after 15ish years away 🙂

 

However I feel really overwhelmed by what's going on with the economy now.  I'm being told "read my newb guide, this is the way you're SUPPOSED to progress.  Farm these task forces for merits, then take the merit rewards to the worktable and turn them into splanges, then sell the splanges for a billion inf each at the auction house, then use that inf to buy shoobadoo enhancements, then break those in half and smear peanut butter on them, then ...."

 

Like, I just want to run missions and get a little inf, and buy enhancements appropriate to my level.  But I feel like I'm doing it wrong and the economy is only set up to support billionaires.  I don't remember the early/mid levels being this rough, contacts don't even sell enhancements any more even though they all say they do, can't even afford DOs for my level 15 characters when I finally get to the zones that have stores.  The auction house looks like a Wild West of "exploit or die".

 

So .... what's your take?  Is the economy perfectly fine if you don't do these weird exploits people are talking about?  Or should I give up on fun and L2Farm?

 

Thanks in advance for any perspective.

Another basic method to get a million Inf even at low levels and if you are dirt poor is to pick a zone, like Atlas Park, that you can get around in easily.

 

Explore it and find the eight exploration badges in it. This will award you an accolade badge for exploring the zone, and that badge in turn, will reward you with five reward merits. 

 

Take those five merits to a merit Kiosk, like the one just inside City Hall and off to the left. Trade those five merits in for 15 Enhancement Converters. 

 

Type "/ah" in on your chat bar, and this will bring up the Auction House.

 

List one of those 15 converters for sale, for 1 Inf. This will cost you 5 inf for a listing fee, and that converter will sell instantly for at least 60K. If it sells at 60 K, you'll have a profit after the  sales fee is paid of 54,000 Inf.

 

Now post the other 14 converters for sale. Pick a price you are comfortable with. You'll pay an up front 5% listing fee, and the balance of 10% of the sales fee when they sell and you get the money out.

 

If you sold them all at 60K, you'll have made 810,000 Inf from this process, just from atlas park. If you got lucky, and they sold for 75K, you'll have a cool 1,012,500 Inf burning a hole in your super-pocket. 

 

Don't get greedy this early -- don't try to post high, just let them sell. You can become a Billionaire later. This will get you enough cash to get some goodies from P2W and to buy your first low level enhancements that will get you onto the missions and teaming train, no problem.

 

If you run low, pick out another zone and explore it for a badge. Hollows, Kings Row, Perez Park and even Skyway City of Steel Canyon are easy zones to explore.

 

If you don't know where the badges are, you can ask people or get the map overlay that marks them all. We have very helpful people who'll help -- some might even offer to take you on a badge tour!

 

[FFFF]

The converter economy makes self-funding characters really easy and makes farming not really necessary. It almost works too well, to the point that the abundance of IOs may contribute to balance issues. 
 

I play some on Rebirth and soloed a Tanker to 50 there. The  influence scarcity issue was as rough as I remembered it on Live. Over there, the low level market is dead so that cool orange recipe that could be sold for millions here is vendor trash. 

[macskull]

3 hours ago, Lockely said:

 

I don't super love this advice for new players because it stunts their ability to get their attuned class set IOs off the merit vendors. Something like an early Stalker's Guile is incredibly game changing (especially with the next patch), and if lowbies are burning through merits converting them to INF, they're going to be left having to grind for it rather than be able to earn it naturally in a position where it'll help the earliest.

You could use the 100 merits to buy the enhancement outright, but you could also use those merits to buy unslotters to sell and then buy the enhancement on the AH while still keeping an extra 14 million or so towards whatever else you want.

 

Both methods get you the enhancement you want, but only one gets you a bunch of extra inf.

Edited February 2 by macskull

[InvaderStych]

3 hours ago, Lockely said:

I don't super love this advice for new players because it stunts their ability to get their attuned class set IOs off the merit vendors.

 

ATOs are vastly more expensive to buy from a Merit Vendor than the value of the Merits if used to sell Boosters. Converters/Unslotters are the more common route, but unless they are selling at an unusually high value, Boosters are the better play. The pricing on those tends to swing less often and less widely as well.

 

For the 100 Merit cost of an ATO you can purchase 20 Boosters that, on average, will sell for 700k-1.2mil depending on market conditions. Standard ATOs will sell on the market for between 7-12mil depending on the ATO and market variables.

 

At 100 merits you're basically spending up to 20mil Inf for a standard ATO, or approximately double the going rate on the market.

 

In general, a good rule of thumb is that 100 merits should net somewhere between 18-25mil selling Special Salvage like Unslotters, Converters, or Boosters. I like to call this the "I don't care for marketing or crafting" route to a usable amount of Fake Money Units. Marketeering is still the greatest gain, but I'm too lazy for all that.

 

@macskull beat me by a few seconds. 😛

Edited February 2 by InvaderStych

[Lockely]

1 hour ago, Andreah said:

Another basic method to get a million Inf even at low levels and if you are dirt poor is to pick a zone, like Atlas Park, that you can get around in easily.

 

Explore it and find the eight exploration badges in it. This will award you an accolade badge for exploring the zone, and that badge in turn, will reward you with five reward merits. 

 

Take those five merits to a merit Kiosk, like the one just inside City Hall and off to the left. Trade those five merits in for 15 Enhancement Converters. 

 

Type "/ah" in on your chat bar, and this will bring up the Auction House.

 

List one of those 15 converters for sale, for 1 Inf. This will cost you 5 inf for a listing fee, and that converter will sell instantly for at least 60K. If it sells at 60 K, you'll have a profit after the  sales fee is paid of 54,000 Inf.

 

Now post the other 14 converters for sale. Pick a price you are comfortable with. You'll pay an up front 5% listing fee, and the balance of 10% of the sales fee when they sell and you get the money out.

 

If you sold them all at 60K, you'll have made 810,000 Inf from this process, just from atlas park. If you got lucky, and they sold for 75K, you'll have a cool 1,012,500 Inf burning a hole in your super-pocket. 

 

Don't get greedy this early -- don't try to post high, just let them sell. You can become a Billionaire later. This will get you enough cash to get some goodies from P2W and to buy your first low level enhancements that will get you onto the missions and teaming train, no problem.

 

If you run low, pick out another zone and explore it for a badge. Hollows, Kings Row, Perez Park and even Skyway City of Steel Canyon are easy zones to explore.

 

If you don't know where the badges are, you can ask people or get the map overlay that marks them all. We have very helpful people who'll help -- some might even offer to take you on a badge tour!

 

 

This is all great info, but I can't help but laugh that it's literally is the point of his initial post where it feels like an overwhelming twelve hundred step program to funding a character initially. 

[Water]

If you are struggling with INF, then my best way to earn is to make up the recipes I get and sell them for the going rate on the AH. Purples and PvPs are affordable now, they were out of reach for most on live. I have found that in EVERY GAME that I have ever played over multiple decades of gaming the best way to accumulate game wealth, be it currency or items, is to play the game. The more I play, the more I get.

 

Edited February 2 by Water

[Yomo Kimyata]

14 minutes ago, Lockely said:

This is all great info, but I can't help but laugh that it's literally is the point of his initial post where it feels like an overwhelming twelve hundred step program to funding a character initially. 

 

You are correct, but again once anyone gets a character to 50, then that character can easily fund all subsequent characters with all kinds of goodies.

 

The problem here is that they want to fund that initial character, whether that be with SOs or top of the line sets.  And I think that most people who have been on HC for awhile will tell you it's extremely easy to play a character on SOs only, or even to only slot what your enemies drop.  And that's solo.  On teams, it's pretty trivial to level all the way to 50 without having a single enhancement slotted.  You may laugh, but some people do that.

 

I'm not saying that everyone has to suffer and play their first character out as a punishment build.  What I am saying is that if one doesn't want to do that, one needs to find a way to fund the enhancements they want (and I say want, not need).  Some of those ways take some work.  It's a lot less work than leveling solo from 1 to 50 using only what drops.  A lot less.

 

Sometimes all you have to do is find someone to give you a wad of starting cash.

[nihilii]

3 hours ago, Lockely said:

This is all great info, but I can't help but laugh that it's literally is the point of his initial post where it feels like an overwhelming twelve hundred step program to funding a character initially. 

Indeed, yours is the best summary of the whole dynamic.

1) the economy is fine

2) the range of options can be overwhelming for newcomers

I think the best path is to just play and not worry about it. Discover things slowly, make mistakes, refine your patterns bit by bit.

The core tenet of this economy is you cannot mess it up. There's hardly any reward exclusive to anything, and prices have been heavily smoothed. Remember the Live days of gladiator armor selling so high people went offmarket to bypass the 2B influence cap? On Homecoming if you screw up and overpay for anything, the next IO is 1 hour of play away at most.

Given that no mistake can be catastrophic, there is room to experiment.

 

On my first Homecoming character, I traded merits for LotG +recharge IOs. Then for other rare IOs. Then I traded empyrean merits for merits and got more IOs. To be fair in those very first days the market lacked supply, but it was highly inefficient regardless. Still got me a fully slotted character in a reasonable amount of time.

The system works. Devs have done a good job balancing this out so you can reach the highest heights simply being a player. Gone is the need to engage with activities like farming or playing the market to fund a top build.