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

[battlewraith]

13 minutes ago, Ukase said:

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. 

 

A 53 SO? Dang that's rough. There's this rich dude that keeps telling me that all I need to do is play the game and it's like raining merits. There is no grind and nobody cares about your build and everything is wonderful. Sounds like you're not buying it either. 

[Greycat]

16 hours ago, Excraft said:

 

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.

 

For many of us, there's more to a character than just the numbers.  Again. Beta gets wiped. Someone who *plays on beta* for whatever reason now has to recreate the characters, recreate the SG, hope anyone they played with feels like recreating characters on beta, re load up his AE (I don't *believe* beta shares the AE database with live, for obvious reasons) and the like.

 

And the comment that started all this was basically "play on beta," not "transfer a character." The two are different.

[Excraft]

8 hours ago, Greycat said:

For many of us, there's more to a character than just the numbers.  Again. Beta gets wiped. Someone who *plays on beta* for whatever reason now has to recreate the characters, recreate the SG, hope anyone they played with feels like recreating characters on beta, re load up his AE (I don't *believe* beta shares the AE database with live, for obvious reasons) and the like.

 

And the comment that started all this was basically "play on beta," not "transfer a character." The two are different.

 

I understand that the Beta server is subject to frequent data wipes.  Again, I don't disagree with you.  All I said was recreating a character on the Beta server isn't going to take the "hundreds of hours" alluded to.  

[TheMoneyMaker]

On 7/27/2025 at 7:23 AM, tidge said:

 

Who wants to play with such people? 

That isn't the point. The point is why enable those type of people by making things more scarce, which will only hurt the casual gamer more?

[skoryy]

Has anyone won the forum PvP yet? Y'all know this has a zero point zero chance of ever happening here, right?

[Mopery]

 

[roleki]

Has anyone suggested just creating characters on Beta server yet?  Because that's a dumb fucking idea.

[ThatGuyCDude]

On 7/27/2025 at 2:28 AM, Zombra said:

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

Sorry, I should have stated in my post that I believe increasing scarcity would be the only way to change how much INF the game costs to play.  Increasing the cost of enhancements simply buffs farming because players vendor them off.  Decreasing INF gains has no effect--as demonstrated by XP boosters--because most INF is generated through vendoring and farming (and reductions don't make farming go away, they just make it happen more).

If the goal is to get the players out of the farms and back into the game, honestly the suggestion to go with is decreasing or removing the cost from DO and SO enhancements and IO recipes (the 'everything is free' model contested in the original post).  It indirectly harms farming because players will not be able to profit from vendoring, and it facilitates players gearing with SO enhancements as they level (the model around which the difficulty of the game is balanced).  Demand for crafted enhancements would thus go down (but not much), dropping prices there, but INF would be harder to come by so the market would quickly reach a new equilibrium.

Still, any change to the game's economy would be met with a tumultuous period of instability and with community backlash, so the question really becomes is it worth the strife to change the balance?  Honestly, I think not.  Torchbearer has a user posting 100 mil 'bounty' raffles for players who participate in the two rounds of Hamidon raids; players are thus encouraged to participate and the winner can take that windfall to the market to get enhancements or prismatic aether for cosmetic rewards.  A lower level of INF generation would put the mockers on incentives like that.

[lemming]

6 hours ago, skoryy said:

Has anyone won the forum PvP yet? Y'all know this has a zero point zero chance of ever happening here, right?

something something the only way to win is not to play something something

[srmalloy]

3 hours ago, ThatGuyCDude said:

If the goal is to get the players out of the farms and back into the game, honestly the suggestion to go with is decreasing or removing the cost from DO and SO enhancements and IO recipes (the 'everything is free' model contested in the original post).  It indirectly harms farming because players will not be able to profit from vendoring, and it facilitates players gearing with SO enhancements as they level (the model around which the difficulty of the game is balanced).  Demand for crafted enhancements would thus go down (but not much), dropping prices there, but INF would be harder to come by so the market would quickly reach a new equilibrium.

It's a highly unpopular position, what with the perception of inf as just a currency (and has functionally zero chance of ever being implemented -- maybe when AE was originally rolled out, but certainly not now), but if you go back to the original definition of what inf was -- blueside, influence was your reputation as a hero making people willing to support you, redside infamy was your reputation as a villain making people want to give you what you want so you'll leave them alone, and goldside information was having dirt on people to coerce them into doing things for you -- then changing AE missions to provide no rewards except experience and tickets would put a damper on farming. No inf dropping, because going to an AE building at level 1, crawling into your electronic navel, and coming out at level 50 would leave you with no reputation in Paragon City or elsewhere; no one would know you from Adam's off ox, no matter how skilled you'd become at using your abilities. Similarly for mobs in AE missions dropping enhancements,  salvage, and recipes -- you're inside a virtual world; nothing there carries back to the real world but the experience of using your abilities you get from completing the missions. Tickets are AE's reward for performance in AE missions; they would remain, and would probably need to be bumped up to partially counteract the loss of 'tangible' rewards, and you would still be able to use tickets to buy salvage, recipes, and enhancements to use or sell.

 

But that ship has long since sailed, and there's no chance of the AE rewards being axed that hard, just to make the lore of what AE is and does link up with how the game lore defined its 'currency'.