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

[tidge]

1 hour ago, Greycat said:

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. 

 

Asking for a friend: Is this "hundreds of hours" played on a character all at 50+, or is it leveling up a character from level 1? I've been suggesting the Beta server to the players that only want to play at level 50, immediately slotted with a full-kit that they don't want to pay for, and who have more-or-less said that a hundred hours is something they wouldn't accumulate for a long time, certainly not on only a single character.

[The Witchfire]

Scarcer and more expensive...  Well, that would be a great way to drive off new players; make them unable to acquire or afford anything.

[Neiska]

12 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).

 

Also very true! Quicker and easier. But my main point was to re-use enhancements from characters don't play anymore. If all you do is buy then yea, you gonna need lots of inf. But if you recycle? Not so much! Just takes bit of time to keep stuff organized.

[Excraft]

4 hours ago, Greycat said:

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. 

 

You can just re-copy the character to BETA or re-roll it with all the bells and whistles in a few minutes.  It's not like you'd need to level up the character running all the content from scratch again.  I think it's more people don't play on BETA because of the low population and most do want some feeling of progression.

Edited yesterday at 02:40 AM by Excraft

[Zombra]

I'm confused.  How would costs be increased?  Everything I buy, I buy from the market with prices set by player vendors.  Increase the listing fee?

[Greycat]

6 hours ago, tidge said:

 

Asking for a friend: Is this "hundreds of hours" played on a character all at 50+, or is it leveling up a character from level 1?

 

If I'm playing a character, it's from level 1, and then playing them, RPing them and more. Which, again, is not something I would think anyone would want to do on a server that is at risk of being wiped or changed at any time. Thus "Nobody plays on beta." Because nobody's going to want to spend time on a character that could just go away at any time. 

[Greycat]

3 hours ago, Excraft said:

 

You can just re-copy the character to BETA or re-roll it with all the bells and whistles in a few minutes.  It's not like you'd need to level up the character running all the content from scratch again.  I think it's more people don't play on BETA because of the low population and most do want some feeling of progression.

 

... which means you're probably spending most of your time playing it on live, not beta. 

[ThatGuyCDude]

42 minutes ago, Zombra said:

I'm confused.  How would costs be increased?  Everything I buy, I buy from the market with prices set by player vendors.  Increase the listing fee?

Increased scarcity of item drops (salvage, recipes, and I assume enhancements), as well as the removal of enhancement conversion items, will make the game cost more INF to gear up.

This is because the drop in supply will consequently result in an increase in demand, raising costs and subsequently raising prices to justify the time and energy to create said items.  Suddenly what you would expect to pay 3 million inf for will cost 300 million.  The removal of conversion items will make the values skyrocket even higher, as important enhancement pieces are further rendered scarce by the inability to roll them from less important ones.  The auction house will empty out as the players who already have that kind of INF to throw around clear all the listings, and that would be the end of it.

As many others have said, it would also drive off new players (even veterans from the live version of the game) because the investment of both time and virtual currency to set up a build would be too high for the benefit.  It would cause cascading collapses as group activities drop off to make time for more influence and salvage and recipe farming, and a large percentage of the already quite small population of the game would drop out.

[Zombra]

11 minutes ago, ThatGuyCDude said:

Increased scarcity of item drops will make the game cost more INF to gear up.

 

Ah OK, thank you.  I was confused by the OP - seemed to be talking about reducing drops and increasing costs as two separate issues.

 

If they are one and the same, then absolutely not.  Decreasing drops would simply further concentrate wealth to the "haves", the farmers, the efficiency experts.  Part of what I really enjoy about the current economy is that every player has a good chance to get a really valuable drop once in a while.  As a more casual hero, those occasional big ticket drops help keep me interested in participating.  Dampen my economic leverage and my interest in building sets will decline proportionally.

[MoonSheep]

11 hours ago, tidge said:

 

Asking for a friend: Is this "hundreds of hours" played on a character all at 50+, or is it leveling up a character from level 1? I've been suggesting the Beta server to the players that only want to play at level 50, immediately slotted with a full-kit that they don't want to pay for, and who have more-or-less said that a hundred hours is something they wouldn't accumulate for a long time, certainly not on only a single character.

 

i agree with you. server wipes are pretty rare as shown below. plus, IOs can be loaded in from a mids build

 

 

 

the beta server is a good way for people to explore alts before committing to them

Edited 23 hours ago by MoonSheep

[TheMoneyMaker]

21 hours ago, tidge said:

 

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...

 

It is possible that things occur without you personally experiencing them. I've joined teams and was told "you've got no set bonuses" and stood around waiting for an invite from someone recruiting for a TF and ignored outright, only to be sent a tell by someone on the team after they've left telling me to finish my build.

[tidge]

45 minutes ago, TheMoneyMaker said:

It is possible that things occur without you personally experiencing them. I've joined teams and was told "you've got no set bonuses" and stood around waiting for an invite from someone recruiting for a TF and ignored outright, only to be sent a tell by someone on the team after they've left telling me to finish my build.

 

Who wants to play with such people? 

[MoonSheep]

5 hours ago, Zombra said:

I'm confused.  How would costs be increased?  Everything I buy, I buy from the market with prices set by player vendors.  Increase the listing fee?

 

by removing some of the measures that were introduced to reduce prices such as: 

- rare salvage is seeded at a certain price

- IO’s can be converted into other sets

- all IOs are the same level on the market, if you put a lvl 25 IO up for sale and a lvl 50 IO for sale, both will show as 2 available

- and, not necessarily a market measure but a contributing factor: triple boxed AE farming and AFK farms allowing for a much higher generation of purples compared to live

[TheMoneyMaker]

On 7/26/2025 at 8:29 AM, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

 

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

And I work hard for the money

[Excraft]

6 hours ago, Greycat said:

... which means you're probably spending most of your time playing it on live, not beta. 

 

Well, yeah.  I don't disagree.  That's what I was getting at.  All I was saying is that it's not a huge chore to recreate a character on the Beta server.  You don't need to spend "hundreds of hours" playing it again and again to get back to whatever level progress you were at.  You can recreate any character at any level within a couple of minutes.  No need to even transfer it from a live server.

[Excraft]

2 hours ago, TheMoneyMaker said:

It is possible that things occur without you personally experiencing them. I've joined teams and was told "you've got no set bonuses" and stood around waiting for an invite from someone recruiting for a TF and ignored outright, only to be sent a tell by someone on the team after they've left telling me to finish my build.

 

I can second that this does happen.  It's not common, but I do see the occasional request in LFG for people running Aeon or ITFs that are requiring people to have "multiple IO sets" in order to join.  There are a couple of really bad SGs that require people to have completely ridiculous builds created by one of the officers in order to run content with them.  Any deviation from the build is allowed.  

[Erratic1]

30 minutes ago, TheMoneyMaker said:

And I work hard for the money

 

I guess we'd better treat you right.

[Andreah]

13 minutes ago, Excraft said:

 

I can second that this does happen.  It's not common, but I do see the occasional request in LFG for people running Aeon or ITFs that are requiring people to have "multiple IO sets" in order to join.  There are a couple of really bad SGs that require people to have completely ridiculous builds created by one of the officers in order to run content with them.  Any deviation from the build is allowed.  

I have honestly never seen this on my server. The only times I have ever people levy requirements for build is when they're doing 4-Star hard modes.

[The Witchfire]

I was on a phone last night, so I didn't have the ability (desire) to write a longer reply here BUT...

 

As somebody who just came back to COH after not having played since the original servers closed down....  Raising prices is bad all around.  Inflation is just as bad in a game as the real world.  Leveling a toon, even more so multiple toons, gets expensive and at lower levels it seems enhancements need upgrading every time you turn around.  Absolutely no bug deal if this is your 15th alt and you have 14 level 50s that have been playing for 6 years to bankroll your advancement.  Completely different animal when you're new and completely broke.  This is half the reason MMO games stop getting new players; newbies can't keep up. 

 

Bad for veterans in the long run also.  Eventually all but the most hardcore are priced out of the top tier content and an elitist subculture sets in.  It's been mentioned in a few posts here (you don't have the right build) and I've left a couple games because it's popped up elsewhere also. 

[Solarverse]

On 7/25/2025 at 3:47 AM, MoonSheep said:

it won’t be a popular suggestion but i think things are far too cheap. CoH isn’t the sims, it’s a progression based MMO

 

i would remove the ability to convert IOs and remove seeding from salvage so that the economy can have some natural elements reintroduced 

 

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

 

the HC population looks to be sufficient to sustain a free market

 

Not according to what everyone on here has been telling me. According to the players on these forums, this game is a casual game for a casual player. introducing anything in to this game that makes it more of a challenge to obtain things in general is frowned upon. So good luck with that.

[Solarverse]

15 hours ago, The Witchfire said:

I was on a phone last night, so I didn't have the ability (desire) to write a longer reply here BUT...

 

As somebody who just came back to COH after not having played since the original servers closed down....  Raising prices is bad all around.  Inflation is just as bad in a game as the real world.  Leveling a toon, even more so multiple toons, gets expensive and at lower levels it seems enhancements need upgrading every time you turn around.  Absolutely no bug deal if this is your 15th alt and you have 14 level 50s that have been playing for 6 years to bankroll your advancement.  Completely different animal when you're new and completely broke.  This is half the reason MMO games stop getting new players; newbies can't keep up. 

 

Bad for veterans in the long run also.  Eventually all but the most hardcore are priced out of the top tier content and an elitist subculture sets in.  It's been mentioned in a few posts here (you don't have the right build) and I've left a couple games because it's popped up elsewhere also. 

 

Playing ESO, since I have not been hard core in that game, the hardest of content is beyond my reach, because of this very reason, "You don't have the right build." Even worse, if you don't build to what everyone else wants, you aren't invited. I appreciate difficulty, what I don't appreciate is a game set up to make you build to a specific way to appease other players. At least this game you can build the way you want to and generally nobody will say anything about it. Other games not so true. This game may be face rolling easy, but at least the Devs here seem to be working to introduce harder late game content that doesn't require you to purposely gimp yourself just to feel challenged. These Devs have done a LOT wrong IMO, but they have also done a LOT right. I have actually been considering returning at some point. I'm just giving it more time.

Edited 3 hours ago by Solarverse

[Sovera]

On 7/26/2025 at 1:29 PM, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

 

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

 

They didn't say that they were good at it though 😄

[srmalloy]

9 hours ago, Excraft said:

It's not common, but I do see the occasional request in LFG for people running Aeon or ITFs that are requiring people to have "multiple IO sets" in order to join.

And there is the ongoing solicitation for multiple-star-difficulty TFs, where the post in LFG always has "Essential: must have Tier 4 Barrier", setting up gear checks. People found that a continuous rotation of Barriers is a way to successfully complete the TF, so because a single solution was found, it has become the only way to complete the TF, with no one interested in trying to find out whether there are other ways to succeed. Objectively, I find the canalization of approaches to beating TFs disappointing. But I'm not the one organizing the runs, so I'm not in a position to tell them they can't do it that way.

[MTeague]

2 hours ago, srmalloy said:

And there is the ongoing solicitation for multiple-star-difficulty TFs, where the post in LFG always has "Essential: must have Tier 4 Barrier", setting up gear checks. People found that a continuous rotation of Barriers is a way to successfully complete the TF, so because a single solution was found, it has become the only way to complete the TF, with no one interested in trying to find out whether there are other ways to succeed. Objectively, I find the canalization of approaches to beating TFs disappointing. But I'm not the one organizing the runs, so I'm not in a position to tell them they can't do it that way.

 

This is among the reasons I wish incarnate powers had never been enabled outside of iTrials / arcs / missions specifically designed as incarnate content. But who knows. Perhaps the Law of Unintended Consequences says that if I were to ever get my wish, it would make other aspects of build-demand even more widespread. Either way, I'm unlikely to ever find out. 

[Ukase]

On 7/25/2025 at 12:28 PM, battlewraith said:

Just play the game and you'll get whatever you need.

Sure, I might get a level 53 Accuracy SO. But that's not really what I'm after. I don't play to get what I need. I play to get what I want. There's a clear distinction. I don't mind jumping through a hoop or two to get it. But I'm not going to grind for weeks/days/hours to get what I want.