A controversial topic: is it time to make all items free?

[SableShrike]

I’m gonna vote “Yes” on this.

 

I’m pretty sure Merits could be adjusted or something to replace most market things (as I’ve seen done on other servers).

 

The reason I vote “Yes” is for one reason only:  New players.

 

The market and inventions represent a significant time sink that most newer players do not understand or know how to leverage.

 

You can say that this is for hardcore players, but if you’re gating power increases behind something only 5-10% of folks know how to really use…  Well that’s just bad design.

 

Many of us are older.  How much time do you want to spend sitting in front of auction menus?  Wouldn’t you rather be playing the game?

 

This game as a Live Service grind is dead; I say we let the vestiges of that time die with the Live Service model.

[El D]

1 hour ago, SableShrike said:

I’m pretty sure Merits could be adjusted or something to replace most market things (as I’ve seen done on other servers).

 

The market and inventions represent a significant time sink that most newer players do not understand or know how to leverage.

 

You can say that this is for hardcore players, but if you’re gating power increases behind something only 5-10% of folks know how to really use…  Well that’s just bad design.

 

Transferring Homecoming's economy to function around merits would grind it to a halt, unless the rate at which merits were earned was vastly increased. If the rate at which merits are earned is vastly increased so that players have enough of them to spend... then they've just taken out influence to kitbash its role onto what was a perfectly functional supplementary system. Said system now doesn't fulfill its original use anymore, so that would mean having to create another currency or kitbashing another system to do what merits used to do. That also means there's tons of players - the vast majority of Homecoming's user base - that now have mountains of a worthless currency. There is no degree of trade-ins, alterations, or transfers that will make that pill easy to swallow. Even the perception of making the game's primary currency worthless is Not A Good Idea.

 

Branching off of that, why is the argument in-favor of 'new players' always the proposition that any 'problematic' system or mechanic must be dumbed down, minimized, and or outright removed 'because they don't know how to use it?' Of course they don't know how everything works when they first join, that's the whole point of the game and/or community providing room for them to learn. Also, to that point, the market is not gated. It's accessible to literally any player who has the inf to buy or sell the items they want, which is not remotely hard to reach. Inf is the easiest resource to gain in CoH, by a wide margin and by deliberate design because it's the primary currency. Yes, new players who just start out won't have the same resources as 5+ year old-timers, but that's how starting a new game works. I also don't get the whole 'tiny group of elite marketeers' thing, with them apparently being the sole true beneficiaries of Wentworths. In my experience, the max level characters with tons of inf are the ones who either hang out in Atlas and drop multiple thousands onto random new characters or run massive contests and give literal millions or billions of inf away.

 

With that in-mind, if 'new players struggle when they start and can't catch up' is the core issue of this whole thing... why is the suggestion 'uproot/rewrite the game's entire economy and potentially piss off tons of the active playerbase' instead of 'give new accounts an investment bundle of inf when they start out?'

Edited 10 hours ago by El D

[SableShrike]

The economy in this game is an afterthought, though.  It was not designed with or launched with it!

 

The Market and IOs were tacked on after the fact and drastically changed the game’s landscape.  (I would argue the IOs are solely responsible for power-creep problems, but that’s another story).

 

And while I don’t know what might be a good replacement, I hesitate to say getting rid of the Market is a “dumbing down”.

 

It’s more I find a lot of it to be fiddling with stacks and menus when I’d rather be playing.  Can we not see a future where old systems aren’t holding the game back?

 

Fiddly does not equate to better, which is why I stopped playing Stellaris.  After a while I felt it was just wasting my finite time.

[Zombra]

I would venture that new players who don't want to learn pesky economic systems don't have to and have never had to.  All you have to do is not turn up your difficulty to continue enjoying the game for a long time without ever touching the AH.

 

These new players who supposedly don't want to learn don't want to stay with the game anyway - they want to hit 50 ASAP, 'win' the game and move on.  Kids these days!

 

Slashing away optional systems that many players already enjoy is no way to build a community.

[UltraAlt]

1 hour ago, El D said:

With that in-mind, if 'new players struggle when they start and can't catch up' is the core issue of this whole thing... why is the suggestion 'uproot/rewrite the game's entire economy and potentially piss off tons of the active playerbase' instead of 'give new accounts an investment bundle of inf when they start out?'

 

And this happened for me. Not because the "game" itself dropped an email to me in-game with influence, but another player a gave me like 10-30 million - which was my capital seed.

I, in turn, as they say "paid it forward" and have given far more than that to others in the game over time. Heck, pretty often I gave some influence to players when they comment on not having enough or just email them an item sometimes (as the character on am on happens to be crafting what they are looking for).

 

If someone reaches out to the other heroes in-game, heroes tend to come to the rescue. At least, that is my experience.

 

 

[Darmian]

2 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:

 

And this happened for me. Not because the "game" itself dropped an email to me in-game with influence, but another player a gave me like 10-30 million - which was my capital seed.

I, in turn, as they say "paid it forward" and have given far more than that to others in the game over time. Heck, pretty often I gave some influence to players when they comment on not having enough or just email them an item sometimes (as the character on am on happens to be crafting what they are looking for).

 

If someone reaches out to the other heroes in-game, heroes tend to come to the rescue. At least, that is my experience.

 

 

Yep. Paying it forward is the way.

[UltraAlt]

On 7/14/2025 at 10:47 PM, skoryy said:

[UltraAlt]

1 hour ago, SableShrike said:

The economy in this game is an afterthought, though.  It was not designed with or launched with it!

 

It was launched with an in-game economy.

The game always had "influence" and the purchasing of enhancements and insps from venders. And the game was released with a request channel; which is defined in the original CoH manual as "This channel is reserved for those that wish to trade, buy, or sell." 

 

I agree it wasn't launched with the /ah market system which was launched when IO crafting was released. 

[tidge]

2 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

And this happened for me. Not because the "game" itself dropped an email to me in-game with influence, but another player a gave me like 10-30 million - which was my capital seed.

 

I really liked this idea, until I realized that there would be a new class of farming to create alts just to collect the seed money. As I noted, I typically seed all my new characters with Inf, so this was the source of the initial appeal.