A controversial topic: Is it time to make items scarcer or cost more?

[ZeeHero]

3 hours ago, Forager said:

TL;DR Raising prices hurts poor people more than rich people.

Facts, brotha

[Major_Decoy]

13 hours ago, Troo said:

The downside where players are self limiting infamy/influence gain is simply ignored. Maybe it's easy to ignore because $$ is so easy to get. 

I'm still stuck on this. If you level from 1 to 12 with information gain on, you'll get somewhere around 84k infamy. At level 12, that's enough influence to get four or five single origin enhancements.

 

84K infamy is about 6 bosses at level 39 and about 1.5 level 54 bosses.

 

It's not like fighting a boss is any easier at level 8 than it is at level 50, so influence is not awarded for effort. And you don't get infamy from grey enemies, so it's not like information is awarded for the status of the enemy. There is neither Doylist nor Watsonian explanation for why influence is awarded the way it is.

 

But at any rate, turning off infamy at low level is no sacrifice not because infamy is so easy to get, but because turning it on doesn't really get you more information anyway. At level 8 you get 433 influence for a Lead Brick. A level 10 Visor (Accuracy Dual Origin) is 4,214 Information. A level 10 Awakening: Improved Accuracy is 12,672 Information. A level 50 Insight of Grey (Accuracy Single Origin) costs 57,852 Influence.

 

Influence costs do not scale the way Influence does. 

 

I would argue to either give everyone level 50 influence gain no matter what the level or make Single Origin Enhancements free.

[skoryy]

38 minutes ago, Major_Decoy said:

I'm still stuck on this. If you level from 1 to 12 with information gain on, you'll get somewhere around 84k infamy. At level 12, that's enough influence to get four or five single origin enhancements.

 

Even before that, just doing the Savior of Atlas Park arcs will get you nine merits.  That's at least one mil in inf from cashing them in for converters to sell at the AH.

[MoonSheep]

i wont be happy until the average player is walking around atlas park bare foot wearing burlap sacks whilst me and @Yomo Kimyata are lighting fat cigars and eating LoTG’s like caviar 

[Major_Decoy]

1 minute ago, skoryy said:

 

Even before that, just doing the Savior of Atlas Park arcs will get you nine merits.  That's at least one mil in inf from cashing them in for converters to sell at the AH.

You can do that with Infamy turned off and a 2x experience boost active. I am talking about the information that you get by "sacrificing" 2x experience gain.

 

By playing at level 39 instead of level 50 you're effectively taking a 65% infamy gain penalty. 

 

But yes, a person familiar with the game and the market can make ten times more infamy just by visiting badge markers and the auction house on a level 1 character than someone can earn running content from level 1 to 12.

[Skyhawke]

33 minutes ago, skoryy said:

 

Even before that, just doing the Savior of Atlas Park arcs will get you nine merits.  That's at least one mil in inf from cashing them in for converters to sell at the AH.

 

I agree and do this regularly, but...

 

28 minutes ago, Major_Decoy said:

... a person familiar with the game and the market can make ten times more infamy just by visiting badge markers and the auction house on a level 1 character than someone can earn running content from level 1 to 12.

 

Familiarity is something far too many players don't have. Watch the Help channel for awhile and the knows and know nots disparity shows. I fear I'm bringing my whacking stick awfully close to a horse with one hoof in the grave with this but hosing the many for the sake of the few is lame, douchey and just plain wrong.

[Major_Decoy]

5 minutes ago, Skyhawke said:

Familiarity is something far too many players don't have. Watch the Help channel for awhile and the knows and know nots disparity shows. I fear I'm bringing my whacking stick awfully close to a horse with one hoof in the grave with this but hosing the many for the sake of the few is lame, douchey and just plain wrong.

 

Yeah, every so often I wonder how I'd do a tutorial mission to introduce people to things like "Go to the Merit Vendor, buy this salvage, put it on the auction house. This is how the auction house works and what the fees are"

[Biff Pow]

One thing I've always noticed on the forums, I imagine because it's mostly powergamers that post here, is the auction house is always thought of in terms of buying, not selling. Higher prices means a sellers market and for a lot of people that's good news. Rare salvage selling for one million (for example) would make it really easy to keep your character in fresh SOs and eventually some basic Invention Sets.

 

The question is how many players want the maxed-out builds, and how many are content with pretty good builds? I really don't know the answer, I assume since this is an old game it's mostly just diehards that are still playing, so a good percent want the max builds. 

 

But overall I think the economy is in a decent balance so it's probably not a good idea to mess around with it.

[Neiska]

Here's the thing that I rarely see brought up in discussions such as these - there are other factors other than how much money/currency someone can earn, and how much things cost.

 

To my mind the other factors are -

 

1. How many alts/ungeared characters a player has - basically, the more ungeared alts you have, the more money you need to bankroll those alts. If you only have 10 characters, and only play those 10 characters, you may not need very much. And let's not forget that once a character is fully kitted out, anything/everything you make is a net positive gain. Basically, the longer you play your 50s, the more money you will make/have saved up, to the point if you play 50s long enough you may not to farm "at all" in order to fully purple out your next character. Aside from buying new things, or crafting new things, there is actually very little "upkeep" costs in this game. No "rent" to pay. No repair costs. No INF penalty for death, etc etc. No money sinks at all besides the AH/NPC stores. Thats literally it. So lets not forget that either.

 

2. How long a person plays - different players have different amounts of free time to enjoy a hobby. Someone may have all week to play. Someone else may only have a couple hours after work each day. And yet another person may only have a couple hours an evening on the weekend. But I think everyone would agree that essentially the more time you have to play, the more money you "can" make. Not a guarantee though, that can also mean the more you spend. But time played is also a factor to be considered when balancing an economy.

 

3. If you have lots of old characters you dont play anymore, it might only cost you the amount of the unslotters to move things over. I actually use 3 characters as "stuff holders" because there isnt enough space in storage. I use mail, auction house, etc all as storage. When I make a MIDs build, I have an "empty crate" that I use for "character prep." I search through all the stuff im sitting on or have spare, before I spend anything. I won;t buy things unless I need to. And ill put everything in the "prep box." Then Ill use unslotters on old characters, or converters to get the part of the set I want, etc. Only after i search through all my stuff, all my characters/unplayed alts, and if i find im still missing something, then do i go buy it.

 

Honestly if you are diligent and organized, you may not need much money at all once you have a selection of alts. Not ever new character needs a "fresh" set of stuff, if you have stuff you aren't actively playing on other characters. 

 

If you juggle these methods - play your 50s for awhile, and use old 50s you don't want anymore to gear up new 50s, well, all you really need are the unslotters. Which are essentially free if you use merits. So, technically, once you have a page or 2 of 50s, you may not to actually buy anything if you are willing to spend the time moving stuff around. To me, simply not spending the INF you get is the REAL money-maker that people don't seem to talk about. 

 

Now if you are contantly making new 50s every few days, then ya, you are going to need to fund them. At least if you want them all purpled up. But I think many of us have 50s that are years old now, I know I still play a few of my oldest ones. And since I dont actually need anything for them, anything I make goes right into the pile. So its really kind of win-win.

 

Personally, if people are concerned about market balancing, I think the biggest fix wouldn't be to adjust prices/inf earned, but to turn on stuff like Base Costs. That alone would be a regular bill that many would have to bankroll. And it makes sense - big bases should/would cost a lot to maintain. (Even super heroes get an electric bill etc.) I would support something like that before reducing the INF people get, which has been adjusted several times already. But there quite literally is no moneysinks/reoccuring costs in this game at all.

Edited Saturday at 12:51 AM by Neiska

[tidge]

32 minutes ago, Biff Pow said:

The question is how many players want the maxed-out builds, and how many are content with pretty good builds? I really don't know the answer, I assume since this is an old game it's mostly just diehards that are still playing, so a good percent want the max builds. 

 

I'm never in a rush to 50... but around level 12 I'll start slotting. My older characters have usually made some ATO and sub-20 pieces. As I've written elsewhere, it is pretty easy to have a previous level 50 get a new character set up with some gear.

 

I am remind that on Live, the one thing that made the biggest impact for me was the prestige (subscriber) powers. They really smoothed out the play experience for a lot of my characters.

[Mopery]

5 hours ago, battlewraith said:

Earlier in this thread you described yourself as someone with no life outside the game. If people are willing to spend all of their leisure time playing this game, indefinitely, then I think the claim is true. People should not be spending all of their leisure time playing this game.

Oh, wow. You took me seriously?

You really are trying too hard to find random faults to assault, while completely avoiding the conversation at hand.

[battlewraith]

1 minute ago, Mopery said:

Oh, wow. You took me seriously?

You really are trying too hard to find random faults to assault, while completely avoiding the conversation at hand.

Sorry, some people are actually like that. I've known some.

I'm avoiding the conversation at hand because I've spent days on the other one, about making things free. 

[Andreah]

13 hours ago, tidge said:

The economy is both quite stable and somewhat deflationary, so I don't understand what the advantage of raising prices (by whatever currency: Inf, Merits, Aethers) would provide.

I would go the other way and slightly increase Inf drops from mob defeats; maybe by 5% or 10% -- just to combat that slow deflation we have. I don't think this is a serious problem, but imo our deflation is from a lack of inf in active circulation, not an overabundance of supply.

 

A lot of that inf gets eaten up by market fees or goes into those non-circulating Scrooge McDuck Money-Bin stockpiles of Inf. Another way to combat it would be to lower market fees, but that might have other side effects (such as magnifying flipping which many people dislike). Finding a way to get wealthy Scroogers to spend their Inf in ways that put it back into other players' pockets would help, but honest, I'm keeping my Money Bin -- it's so pretty!

 

Again, the deflation is slow enough it's not really a problem, and there are plenty of firebreaks already.

[BlackSpectre]

21 hours ago, Troo said:

This is a semi-serious question, curious if anyone has thoughts or maybe a quick plusses and minuses. Making things scarcer likely wouldn't work well and could just increase farming.

 

Is there a flip-side to @Yomo Kimyata's question on making all things free?

 

It's easy to make inf, maybe too easy.. which makes things dirt cheap for many. 

Is there really any point to earning more once we can buy everything we want instantly for dozens of characters?

You thinking from a veteran's perspective. If you consider a new player's situation, you have to conclude that things are pretty expensive. If you don't know any better and find out about the Double XP boosters, you'll hardly be earning any inf at all. It's an easy way for new players to unintentionally gimp their gameplay. 

 

That said, spending that hard earned inf to buy those shiny new enhancements or temp powers is part of what makes the game fun. So I hear you, but can't agree due to new players.

 

As for veterans, no one would think it was fair that as soon as you hit level 50 that everything would then increase 10x in price. Player would in essence be punished for reaching the max level. I used to be really into playing the market and earning inf, but once I hit 9 billion saved, I just kind of lost interest. I pretty much mastered the market, and I definitely don't need any more inf, so it was time to move on. That said, it might make you happy to know that there are still a few cost prohibitive items in this game.... mainly, the mini costumes and other Aether Prestige Rewards. I've only bought 1 because that one cost me half a billion inf! Buying just 14 of those would reduce my current 7 billion inf to zero real fast. 

 

 

21 hours ago, Troo said:

 

The expectation these days seems to be leveling to 50 in a handful of hours (maximizing 2xp, patrol xp, special xp tuned missions) and then getting a complete build immediately while starting to build out incarnates. If this is way off, I'd be happy to hear it.

Well, for veterans who have the wealth and time to design specialized farming and power leveling builds, then yeah. That's the expectation, if that's what you want to do. However, although I have done all of that, I think my next play through will be with double xp turned off. I want to have the thrill of getting to the next level and that next power again. Right now I fly through levels and end up skipping over that joy and skipping over a lot of missions I haven't done due to oztlevelng them so quickly.

[mechahamham]

Please allow me to add a tangent to the arguments here. By tangent, I mean 'only tangentially affected by/affecting the economy'.

 

When IOs first went in on Live, I was delighted because it meant that 'tradeskilling' was coming to CoH. You could craft in game, right?

 

Except, no. Even if you got a recipe drop, chances were it just wouldn't sell once it was crafted. Even if you did manage to get something worth selling, you had extremely limited inventory.

 

People crafting for the badges and the inventory space bonuses that came with them meant that ingredients for pre-40 IOs were difficult to obtain and then the common IOs you crafted with them wouldn't sell well, if at all, because the market demand simply couldn't accommodate all of them.

 

Converters changed that a *little*. Suddenly, the crap recipes were a little more worthwhile, and prices evened out on the market somewhat. You were still severely limited by inventory.

 

As another poster put it above, Homecoming unfucked the economy. The increase in supply for ingredients means that players can reasonably work for or trade for the enhancements they want. Builds can be expensive, but they are not unobtainable.

 

Importantly for me, it means that Recreational Crafting is FINALLY a thing in CoH. It makes financial sense to craft enhancements and sell them to fund my own characters. If the supply dries up, if converters go away, it doesn't just mean that items are harder to get. It means the effective death of a fun part of the game experience.

[TheMoneyMaker]

I don't play twenty-year-old game for the competitive experience of trying to beat out other players in PVP, marketplace acquisitions, daily or even weekly raids, badge count, or any other bragging rights area. I play the game to relax and enjoy the nostalgia. You know what ruins relaxation and nostalgia? Coming up short on properly equipping my characters so that I get to a point and can't hold up my end on a team because I'm relying on basic IOs or even in some cases SOs.

 

Make it harder by making items scarcer? Screw that and everyone that supports the idea.

[GM_GooglyMoogly]

4 minutes ago, TheMoneyMaker said:

Coming up short on properly equipping my characters . . .

 

But . . . you're TheMoneyMaker.  You make the money.

[tidge]

6 hours ago, BlackSpectre said:

 I think my next play through will be with double xp turned off. I want to have the thrill of getting to the next level and that next power again. Right now I fly through levels and end up skipping over that joy and skipping over a lot of missions I haven't done due to oztlevelng them so quickly.

 

I will skip 2XP, and I will often turn off XP altogether, just so that I can do more arcs. I find it practically impossible to do all of the Hollows with XP turned on, Faultline is a balancing act. Red side.... fuggedaboutit with XP turned on. The game doesn't start at level 50! (*1) Even without turning off XP. I rarely get a character to 50 without it having something on the order of 600 merits, and then playing it at 50 is when the drops really start to accumulate.

 

13 minutes ago, TheMoneyMaker said:

 You know what ruins relaxation and nostalgia? Coming up short on properly equipping my characters so that I get to a point and can't hold up my end on a team because I'm relying on basic IOs or even in some cases SOs.

 

I am unaware of any player being kicked from a team, or being looked down upon because of the way they've built their character, except in the self-confessed cases of the fragile team leaders who kick because they are mentally offended by Kheldians, MMs, knockback, whatever. I've been doing low level content where level 50s have apologized because they haven't got their characters "slotted" yet, and our teams have had to apply some assurance to those players to believe...

 

 

(*1) it is of course possible to spend bank on characters below level 50 (ATO, Winters, PVP are all decent sets that can be slotted quite early in a career)... but without the slots, and things like Beginner's Luck and all the personal buffs available,  there is less immediate need (in my experience) to slot anything until about level 15. With a SG base, I find it trivially to store pieces (like attuned PVP sets) for reuse, as those recipes drop across pretty much the entire content spectrum of the game.

[Erratic1]

12 hours ago, Neiska said:

3. If you have lots of old characters you dont play anymore, it might only cost you the amount of the unslotters to move things over. I actually use 3 characters as "stuff holders" because there isnt enough space in storage. I use mail, auction house, etc all as storage. When I make a MIDs build, I have an "empty crate" that I use for "character prep." I search through all the stuff im sitting on or have spare, before I spend anything. I won;t buy things unless I need to. And ill put everything in the "prep box." Then Ill use unslotters on old characters, or converters to get the part of the set I want, etc. Only after i search through all my stuff, all my characters/unplayed alts, and if i find im still missing something, then do i go buy it.

 

My soul is screaming in pain at the thought of using unslotters to remove enhancements from unused characters.

 

Respec unslots everything, and unless you respec a whole heck of a lot more often than I do on a character, you probably have some on just about every character you've ever made. And for the cost of using 15 unslotters to get less than a quarter of your enhancements unstuck, you could just buy a respec recipe and make it (or of course run the trial for free to get one).

[Yomo Kimyata]

14 hours ago, MoonSheep said:

i wont be happy until the average player is walking around atlas park bare foot wearing burlap sacks whilst me and @Yomo Kimyata are lighting fat cigars and eating LoTG’s like caviar 

  
Little known fact:  LotGs are made from the tears of filthy casuals.*
 

*No filthy casuals were harmed in the making of this post.

[Krimson]

I had six 50s on Live. Two of them were slotted and neither had purple anything. I was passed over for teams from my own crew quite a bit because I couldn't afford to slot toons. If you want to make people feel even more isolated in this alleged MMO, this is the way. I'm not going to discourage it, alienation and gatekeeping is a defining aspect of game communities. You're not playing a proper game unless players are leaving in frustration. So go for it!

[Azari]

As someone who suffered through the FUBAR AH market on Live, with insanely inflated prices, hell no.

[RCU7115]

19 hours ago, Neiska said:

Here's the thing that I rarely see brought up in discussions such as these - there are other factors other than how much money/currency someone can earn, and how much things cost.

 

To my mind the other factors are -

 

1. How many alts/ungeared characters a player has - basically, the more ungeared alts you have, the more money you need to bankroll those alts. If you only have 10 characters, and only play those 10 characters, you may not need very much. And let's not forget that once a character is fully kitted out, anything/everything you make is a net positive gain. Basically, the longer you play your 50s, the more money you will make/have saved up, to the point if you play 50s long enough you may not to farm "at all" in order to fully purple out your next character. Aside from buying new things, or crafting new things, there is actually very little "upkeep" costs in this game. No "rent" to pay. No repair costs. No INF penalty for death, etc etc. No money sinks at all besides the AH/NPC stores. Thats literally it. So lets not forget that either.

 

2. How long a person plays - different players have different amounts of free time to enjoy a hobby. Someone may have all week to play. Someone else may only have a couple hours after work each day. And yet another person may only have a couple hours an evening on the weekend. But I think everyone would agree that essentially the more time you have to play, the more money you "can" make. Not a guarantee though, that can also mean the more you spend. But time played is also a factor to be considered when balancing an economy.

 

3. If you have lots of old characters you dont play anymore, it might only cost you the amount of the unslotters to move things over. I actually use 3 characters as "stuff holders" because there isnt enough space in storage. I use mail, auction house, etc all as storage. When I make a MIDs build, I have an "empty crate" that I use for "character prep." I search through all the stuff im sitting on or have spare, before I spend anything. I won;t buy things unless I need to. And ill put everything in the "prep box." Then Ill use unslotters on old characters, or converters to get the part of the set I want, etc. Only after i search through all my stuff, all my characters/unplayed alts, and if i find im still missing something, then do i go buy it.

 

Honestly if you are diligent and organized, you may not need much money at all once you have a selection of alts. Not ever new character needs a "fresh" set of stuff, if you have stuff you aren't actively playing on other characters. 

 

If you juggle these methods - play your 50s for awhile, and use old 50s you don't want anymore to gear up new 50s, well, all you really need are the unslotters. Which are essentially free if you use merits. So, technically, once you have a page or 2 of 50s, you may not to actually buy anything if you are willing to spend the time moving stuff around. To me, simply not spending the INF you get is the REAL money-maker that people don't seem to talk about. 

 

Now if you are contantly making new 50s every few days, then ya, you are going to need to fund them. At least if you want them all purpled up. But I think many of us have 50s that are years old now, I know I still play a few of my oldest ones. And since I dont actually need anything for them, anything I make goes right into the pile. So its really kind of win-win.

 

Personally, if people are concerned about market balancing, I think the biggest fix wouldn't be to adjust prices/inf earned, but to turn on stuff like Base Costs. That alone would be a regular bill that many would have to bankroll. And it makes sense - big bases should/would cost a lot to maintain. (Even super heroes get an electric bill etc.) I would support something like that before reducing the INF people get, which has been adjusted several times already. But there quite literally is no moneysinks/reoccuring costs in this game at all.

Bases use Prestige to pay rent, but that function is turned off.

[RCU7115]

6 hours ago, Erratic1 said:

 

My soul is screaming in pain at the thought of using unslotters to remove enhancements from unused characters.

 

Respec unslots everything, and unless you respec a whole heck of a lot more often than I do on a character, you probably have some on just about every character you've ever made. And for the cost of using 15 unslotters to get less than a quarter of your enhancements unstuck, you could just buy a respec recipe and make it (or of course run the trial for free to get one).

Exactly,  unslotters should be used to replace just a few enhancements.

[Greycat]

On 7/25/2025 at 2:43 AM, Troo said:

The expectation these days seems to be leveling to 50 in a handful of hours (maximizing 2xp, patrol xp, special xp tuned missions) and then getting a complete build immediately while starting to build out incarnates. If this is way off, I'd be happy to hear it.

 

*Whose* expectation? Certainly not mine. I know I *can* do that if I want to, sure. But there's an entire game out there I enjoy playing at the levels the content's meant at, because that's what the challenge is tuned to. I've run godmode cheats in other games for a no-stress-blow-off-steam run and they generally make the game less fun for me. 

 

On 7/25/2025 at 2:47 AM, MoonSheep said:

if people want an instant lvl 50 fully slotted out they can build those all day long on the beta server, something we weren’t able to do on live

 

People don't play on Beta not because things are free, but because it's beta and subject to massive change and/or getting wiped at any time - and that's warned about. I wouldn't want to play there and have hundreds of hours on a character just to have "New patch, beta's had to be wiped" hit it.