Prevent artificial inflation, please.

[Bionic_Flea]

2 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Man I haven't seen anything near that!  I have a 50 at +3, a 45th level and a 32nd level, all of whom have been teaming, a lot, with groups lead by 50s (and even the odd farm), for hours and hours and hours and I've only gotten 3 purple drops since the game came back.

Have you run the Market Crash Trial?  It's new, has a guaranteed purple drop your first time through (per character), has a couple of badges, and is fun as hell.

[Clave Dark 5]

1 minute ago, Bionic_Flea said:

Have you run the Market Crash Trial?  It's new, has a guaranteed purple drop your first time through (per character), has a couple of badges, and is fun as hell.

Oh yeah, I have heard about that, but not had the chance to run it.  Fair enough point.

[GM Sijin]

Quote

Asking because I'm checking the math. Is this just due to the auction house fee or is there more to this?

Yes, just the AH cut.

Quote

Unlike online games like Team Fortress 2 or Diablo 3, we don't have a third party tracking site that shows a market trend hour by hour across multiple months. That means the players can't, and shouldn't, have to learn the market memory for the item they're buying before the purchase. You're overlooking something here. In the scenario we were discussing I can show you why what you're saying about the market memory isn't actually a fact. I'm arguing that players should be able to show up to make a one time purchase without knowing the market memory already and without getting ripped off due to either insufficient knowledge or a market-inflated price. Right now that is happening. Can the full purchase histories for Set Enhancements (at least) be logged and posted somewhere conspicuous? If this was done I would totally agree with you.

Fair. It's probably possible but not currently feasible, but I don't know for sure. I also don't know if the team has any desire to expand on the current system.

Quote

The amount of Influence awarded can be tracked per X.P. earned. That's your baseline for every other calculation. This amount should be roughly consistent, and should be easily trackable. The amounts earned through other means (except X.P. Boosters) are generally proportionate. The X.P. Booster just needs to be clear that the player is giving up their Influence awards for double X.P. instead.

Yes and no. If you do content that is almost nothing but minions you'll get proportionately less influence per XP than if you do content that is higher in LTs and bosses. If you level via generic monsters this disparity becomes even greater. (inf:XP is roughly 1:2.14 for minions, 1:1.25 for LTs, 1:1.2 for bosses, and 1:3 for Monsters - this is general and might vary by specific enemies. Also mission completions give 1:1) I'm sure you could still aggregate, but this adds another level of variability.

Quote

There are other Influence awards worked into the game, like the N.P.C. victims around Atlas Park (and other low level zones). If you wait for them to walk back up to you there's a trivially small Influence bonus as they say something like, "thank you, thought they would kill me." Are there any other rewards after level 20 that are not paired with an X.P. award but are statistically significant? (I didn't think of any; is this a thing?)

I don't believe so. Some clickies in missions are worth negligible amounts of inf but I think most of those are pre-20.

25 minutes ago, Some Random User said:

Without a recipe I can only craft an I.O. or buy something. If we're saying I may as well sell Enhancement Converters and buy stuff that's a very different conversation from using them to get the Sets I'd want. If we want both to exist that's lovely. Most of the participants in this thread want to use them and I would prefer not to. I'm concerned I have to if I want to achieve anything beyond Common I.O.s that I craft myself. If that's the baseline, nothing but a full array of level-even Common I.O.s I craft for myself, I can achieve that, but I'm doing so by selling everything I find and buying Salvage to craft with. (We do that all through Wentworth's, which is fine if that's what we're supposed to do, but I'd rather be able to use N.P.C.s' shops.) I want to point out what that means for me:

1. Level up a character to level 50.
2. Get all of the crafting Badges on them.
3. Sell everything my other toons find at either an N.P.C.'s store or Wentworth's (depending on volume of purchases for the item).
4. Send the Influence to my "crafter" toon.
5. Make I.O.s and e-mail them back.

Is this undesirable?

Undesirable? Depends on the person in question. That is definitely one way to go about it, one that isn't entirely uncommon as well. I, personally, can't be bothered to mess with the whole email thing so I make the inf needed to support generic IOing characters at 22 on higher level ones. After that influx (usually about 1.5-2M inf) the characters tend to be self-sufficient moving forward via drops, at least for generic IOs. And, speaking of that, my quote for 45-50M inf is based on level 50 IOs, which is a very cost inefficient way to go about it. You can cut the price tag by more than 50% (close to/more than 60% I think) if you opt to go for level 45 IOs instead. Half the cost for a loss of 5% effectiveness on the IO. You can up that to ~75% cost reduction by sacrificing another 5% effectiveness and going with level 40 IOs. And that effectiveness loss is based on individual IO performance. If you're slotting 3 of them the effective less is less than 2% for level 40s vs 50s.

 

The point of all that: It's very possible to keep a character self-sufficient for generic IOs. The hardest part is that initial hurdle. You typically won't make enough influence by then to cover the cost from influence rewards alone. It's very easy to cover, however, by spending reward merits and/or from cashing in on some decent drops. This problem also evaporates once you have a level 50 since 2 million influence is, even with very casual play, easy to get.

 

In short: I don't personally perceive any issues with the system as-is as far as keeping a character viable. The only problem I might say exists is that the methods to do so can be difficult for a new player to discover organically. In general players are more than happy to explain things if people ask, so I haven't been terribly worried about it.

 

If you want to run the actual math on it, and compare it to the price of generic IOs, by all means. Perhaps something can be adjusted slightly to accommodate to new players better. Just keep in mind that price decreases on generic IOs contributes to increased currency inflation by way of reduced deflation.

Quote

I feel this will lead to there being one or two Enhancements that will always be in extreme demand because the money you have left over will go toward buying them on many toons, over and over, because they're generically applicable to many different builds (like with Luck of the Gambler right now).

Yes, but that's more a symptom of global recharge being generally very desirable (see also +recovery/end procs/globals) than what you outlined above. But via converters (which I acknowledge you said you don't want to use) and merits you have routes other than straight buying what you want. Merit recipe purchases are not currently cost/time efficient, but if you opt out of the more efficient route for personal reasons that's the price you're paying right now. Even if you opt out of using converters, everyone else still can, which increases supply, which helps keep price inflation in check. These mechanics were not as available in live, and supply was very much more finite than it is on Homecoming. Combine this with the fact that the AH amalgamates IOs of different levels and we have a system that's much more friendly for keeping the price point of things much more consistent and much, much lower than on live, while influence is as easy to create, and easier to accumulate. The overall experience is far less time intensive. Currently the price cap on most things on Homecoming is far less than it simply went for liveside. Are the caps low enough? Well, let's start actually consistently heading that direction first before we engage in that highly subjective conversation.

 

A trend I have noticed is that supply will drop, price will increase, this will be noticed by those playing the AH, who swap their efforts towards this opportunity, which increases supply and competition, driving the price back down. Market's going to vary, but since the servers have come up prices declined to roughly where they are now and have remained somewhat consistent recently, despite much more influence being present. Concentrated efforts by players can certainly have an effect, but maintaining artificially inflated prices is a lot of effort in the current system, and a focused effort by even a small percentage of the community to combat it would be difficult, if not impossible to overcome.

[Mr. Vee]

4 hours ago, Some Random User said:

Yes, I can. That literally used to be my job. I can also tell you how much things would cost if our goal was to optimize for any of several scenarios. I would do this by using math to show you how much Influence someone earns through normal gameplay as they level a character, and how many Merit Rewards they usually "accidentally" find as they do so. Then I would show you what the guides and Archetype forums say a normal level 50 build looks like, then I would work backwards to see what reasonable builds in the 20-25 range and level 35-40 range look like. I would say: "This is your budget in this level range, that build should cost an amount that pays attention to your budget. You can set things so they have to come up sort if you want them to work harder, or you can set things so they have extra flexibility. Once you've set your standard anything higher is either because you want the players to have to work more, or is an inflationary market fluctuation you didn't account for. If you have inflation you need to address that with market intervention/controls."

In your job did you arbitrarily not count assets? Because you're continually speaking as if the standard of earning should be based on vendoring prices but the standard of purchasing should be based on buy it nao market prices. The 'inflationary market fluctuation' can work in your favor too if you don't just limit yourself because of idk, rp? I don't get this insistence that a standard be set either. From what I can gather from hearing about the pre-market days there was never really a standard - people couldn't even afford to fully SO their toons until they got a 50 and could farm to get them and fund alts. In general though I just don't see the problem you're having. This economy is closer to a chicken in every pot than anything you're likely to come across in an mmo, much less in the real world. 

 

Also note re the cost to generic IO that with so many trying to get their crafting badges you can get a lot of the crafted IOs on the AH for cheaper than the cost of the recipe at the crafting table. Level 50 ones are like 300k.

[Some Random User]

4 hours ago, GM Sijin said:

Yes and no. If you do content that is almost nothing but minions you'll get proportionately less influence per XP than if you do content that is higher in LTs and bosses. If you level via generic monsters this disparity becomes even greater. (inf:XP is roughly 1:2.14 for minions, 1:1.25 for LTs, 1:1.2 for bosses, and 1:3 for Monsters - this is general and might vary by specific enemies. Also mission completions give 1:1) I'm sure you could still aggregate, but this adds another level of variability.

Hold up, because of how the spawn rates are calculated, I don't think that adds a meaningful amount of variability. I don't think we're on the same page about how mobs-per-spawn and their tier is calculated, and this could be something that changed at some point or I have a misconception about, so I'll point out how I thought spawns were populated.

 

My understanding of how the game decides on a number of bad guys for a spawn and what their mix is follows: The game's given a number of points, then multiples that by the number of players, then converts the points into a mix of mobs for the spawn. (My understanding is that spawns outside instances are varied based on guidelines for the zone or the last time they were killed instead of Notoriety/team size.) The rates of Minions per spawn versus Bosses per spawn is based on multiplying the number of players, but is usually consistent, right?

 

If my understanding is accurate, that means per level of X.P. we should be working with a fixed baseline of Influence, right? Am I misinformed about how spawns are populated?

[Some Random User]

5 hours ago, GM Sijin said:

In short

Thank you for taking the time to meaningfully expound on each of these issues. This was exactly the sort of discussion I was hoping for.

[Some Random User]

4 hours ago, Veelectric Boogaloo said:

Because you're continually speaking as if the standard of earning should be based on vendoring prices but the standard of purchasing should be based on buy it nao market prices.

We have N.P.C. shops that currently function as a n00b punisher. This is a video game. We are not trying to keep our population employed, we are trying to design a superhero game. In a video game there is no reason to use money at all unless you're fungifying awards so they can be spent on the vendoring prices.

[GM Sijin]

12 minutes ago, Some Random User said:

Hold up, because of how the spawn rates are calculated, I don't think that adds a meaningful amount of variability. I don't think we're on the same page about how mobs-per-spawn and their tier is calculated, and this could be something that changed at some point or I have a misconception about, so I'll point out how I thought spawns were populated.

 

My understanding of how the game decides on a number of bad guys for a spawn and what their mix is follows: The game's given a number of points, then multiples that by the number of players, then converts the points into a mix of mobs for the spawn. (My understanding is that spawns outside instances are varied based on guidelines for the zone or the last time they were killed instead of Notoriety/team size.) The rates of Minions per spawn versus Bosses per spawn is based on multiplying the number of players, but is usually consistent, right?

 

If my understanding is accurate, that means per level of X.P. we should be working with a fixed baseline of Influence, right? Am I misinformed about how spawns are populated?

Generally speaking, yes that sounds right. There are a few instances where this matters:

Mostly, team sizes below 4 will encounter few bosses and only moderate LTs. Soloing on x1 will result in almost no bosses and few LTs. Exact spawning mechanics can also vary based on enemy group and even by specific mission.

 

However it's also possible to override spawn settings in AE. I'm not terribly familiar with the system but I do know I've run a boss-only map before.

 

The effects of these cases on an aggregate are probably fairly minimal, admittedly. It's still good to be aware of edge cases.

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

5 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Man I haven't seen anything near that!  I have a 50 at +3, a 45th level and a 32nd level, all of whom have been teaming, a lot, with groups lead by 50s (and even the odd farm), for hours and hours and hours and I've only gotten 3 purple drops since the game came back.

While I cant be 100% I am fairly sure you have to be lvl 50 for purples to drop. And what can I say Ol Berk kills like a fish swims. One of my go to places to stress test my build, and have fun easy acting is the Storm Palace. Not just the zone but the actual big sphere on the map. I go there and just do laps wiping out the groups of brutes, eyeballs and wisps.  I just never seem to get tired of killing them maybe because so many seem to fear fighting them especially the usually fearless tanks and other ATs who depend more on being hard to hurt.

 

I go do that for an hour and almost always have a purple, a few E cats, and a healthy chunk of E cons as well.  Or some times I just go street sweep in the RWZ taking on large groups of rikti, Id guess I average around a thousand kills in an hour and almost always again get a purple.

 

Also I dont know why but often when I do lead something like a PI radio team I swear it feels like the first mish in I often get a purple drop. I really chalk that up to pure RNG but have a theory maybe leading has been given some kind of drop rate buff as a way to reward those who run groups rather then just solo farm.

[Some Random User]

2 minutes ago, GM Sijin said:

Mostly, team sizes below 4 will encounter few bosses and only moderate LTs. Soloing on x1 will result in almost no bosses and few LTs.

I didn't realize the result was break points happened that sharply based on numbers of players. When we're talking about large amounts of Influence those numbers are definitely important. I'm going to think about this a bit.

[Some Random User]

3 minutes ago, Bentley Berkeley said:

I really chalk that up to pure RNG but have a theory maybe leading has been given some kind of drop rate buff as a way to reward those who run groups rather then just solo farm.

Worth checking.

[_NOPE_]

Posting in a unnecessarily dramatic thread.

 

Pretendy Fun Time Games.

 

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

11 minutes ago, GM Sijin said:

Generally speaking, yes that sounds right. There are a few instances where this matters:

Mostly, team sizes below 4 will encounter few bosses and only moderate LTs. Soloing on x1 will result in almost no bosses and few LTs. Exact spawning mechanics can also vary based on enemy group and even by specific mission.

 

However it's also possible to override spawn settings in AE. I'm not terribly familiar with the system but I do know I've run a boss-only map before.

 

The effects of these cases on an aggregate are probably fairly minimal, admittedly. It's still good to be aware of edge cases.

Oh I can say for sure more bosses equal a much higher inf average. Hell just killing bosses will greatly increase that.  When I run my stalker at 50 I tend to street hunt bosses exclusively. Run in AS boss smoke bomb, ditch the trash and move on. Doing that will gain  pure inf in far greater numbers then wiping whole groups on my blaster who has to spend a few moments single  targeting bosses down. However the drops of recipes and other things Ill AH will def be in greater numbers on my blaster. Id never want to depend on just mob inf rewards meself.

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

To the OP I am going to give you the same advice I give every player I come across who struggles to amass the inf needed to build a serious IOd set build.

 

1. Convert all merits to E Cons, Not to use, but to sell I dont gamble ever. That is what using them is gambling. I grew up in nevada so I know gambling, and gamblers and how its an addiction to avoid giving in to. Considering some have told horror stories of burning E cons worth 30 or 40 mil trying to chase a mega jackpot conversion I know ultimately the RNG will always favor the house not the player.

 

2. Sell every recipe, do not craft. not outside certain cases like common IO recharges for hasten and similar powers.

 

3.Buy Attuned IOs. because they level with you, if you invest in cheaper sets attuned multi effect bits, you can cheaply amass a collection of attuned set bits to franken slot powers with, espeiclaly if you favor say melee ATs or ranged ATs , once you cap a toon and upgrade powers to proper sets you can pass the franken sets on to lowbie alts. While upfront this tactic may seem a bit pricey in the long run you will save so much by not crafting, and just selling your rare drops on the AH you wont have to spend precious game time on crafting.

 

4. Take the time to make one fully decked out lvl 50 incarnate with strong AOEs. Ol Berk and my choice to adopt the name as my new global instead of my old main on live demetrios vasilikos was entirely based on that. A single target AV killer while tons of fun, is not going to have the earning power of a steam rolling mass murderer. Ive got likely a billion or close to it invested in Berks build. That took me about 3 weeks when I first came to the HC servers. I was extremely pleased by how much easier it is on HC CoH to get good drops, and between that and the xp boosting to get to 50 faster makes it very easy for anyone even a more casual player like me to deck out a build in a modest amount of time 3 weeks to cap and perfect a build is nothing compared to live.

 

Now maybe you like crafting? If so cool but frankly while I did have a master crafter on live I now view it as a newb trap time sink. almost all my game time now is spent either actively playing content or casually RPing with my SG and friends.

 

Every player I have taught the above to has thanked me profusely because they rapidly see the effects on their characters.

 

Also to be frank earning merits isnt an accident it should be what guides your content choices while leveling. The hollows arcs, Posi part 1 and 2, the faultline arcs, synapse, who will die part1, penny yin, first 2 striga arcs, moonfire, who will die parts 2 and 3, citadel, striga arcs 3 and 4, Hess, and so on. I make sure to hit those every alt on top of doing a myriad of arcs based on theme  for given character. That is a lot of merits, more then enough once liquidated into Econs to get a pretty tricked out build of attuned IO sets that will make you pretty much covered till 50 and the serious earning and setting begins.

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

1 hour ago, Some Random User said:

We have N.P.C. shops that currently function as a n00b punisher. This is a video game. We are not trying to keep our population employed, we are trying to design a superhero game. In a video game there is no reason to use money at all unless you're fungifying awards so they can be spent on the vendoring prices.

they are not newb punishers. A great many less popular IO recipes sale for so little on the AH the vendors are the go to place to unload them. There is a shop right near the AH in steel, makes it easy to check their market value and decide if its better to AH them or vendor them.

 

SOs are the baseline power the game is balanced around. As has been pointed out several times. So you dont have to ever touch the AH nor craft to make a viable build. Incarnate powers will give your capped SO build enough extra oomph to not feel useless on I Trials or running lvl 45+ content via flashback in a group with a decked out build like I run.

[Some Random User]

17 minutes ago, Bentley Berkeley said:

they are not newb punishers. A great many less popular IO recipes sale for so little on the AH the vendors are the go to place to unload them.

You can instead sell stuff that would go on the A.H. for far more. That is why I'm calling them a n00b trap.

[_NOPE_]

[GM Capocollo]

5 minutes ago, The Philotic Knight said:

 

I understand if you think this conversation's getting too serious, but so far everyone's been civil so it's okay.

[_NOPE_]

Just trying to make sure that everyone realizes that we're talking about pretend money in a pretend world, and that nothing REALLY important is on the line here. I hope everyone keeps some perspective. Sure, let's talk about things and make things easier/better for everyone, but not at the cost of civility. And in my opinion, SUR's tone hasn't been totally civil in this thread, at the least a bit... abrasive.

 

Let's try to keep things civil, if not jovial, please. I don't want to have to ignore anyone here. I hate doing that for anyone but obvious trolls/jerks.

Edited August 1, 2019 by The Philotic Knight

[nihilii]

It's hard to see a problem with anyone buying a bunch of LotGs for his alts or for any misguided attempt at market manipulation. Misguided - because the opportunity cost is immense, because there are faster income sources with less risk, because the entire economy is tied together through easy merits and converters; hence any price discrepancy is an opportunity for other players to fulfill the difference, and the price comes back to whatever baseline we had within hours. Sure enough, I bought 10 LotGs instantly today at the price of 7,011,111.

Frankly, there's a tendency in us to claim intelligent design when there is chaos and randomness. This plays out big time in the real economy, and it happens even more in MMOs because they are deterministic systems (but player behavior with, like PK says, pretend money in a pretend world, is chaotic). On the old forums, we had marketeers alluding to their wealth, going on and on about the "equilibrium price" and other econ 101 notions, and claiming to corner the market here or there. Well, I toyed with the market, and I never had trouble buying anything, or inserting myself into a niche. This cabal of evil marketeers was about as effective at price manipulation as hellions are at mugging those Atlas Park ladies.

This isn't the real economy, for a BIG reason, well two of them: we've got a literal infinite supply of resources, and there's so little gatekeeping you might as well say there isn't. The most "difficult" items to get ingame would be HOs, for which you have to do the specific task of STF/LRSF or being alive in The Hive while a raid is going on. Anything else? Run a couple TFs, and you have the merits to generate whatever you want out of thin air.

If anything, I think the previous interventionism of HC devs was pointless and only closed off possible venues for players to fill the gap. As you can see now, rare salvage is down to 500k (even dropped all the way to 266k today), uncommon salvage is way below 100k, and common salvage is rarely above 2k. This is because players are selling enough salvage at that price to meet the demand. The seeding quickstarted the process, artificially, and from an economic standpoint, unnecessarily.

You COULD argue this was necessary for player perception, and there's a strong case to be made for that. Heck, you could make a hundred additional unnecessary changes to the perfectly working game economy for the sake of player perception. It's a video game about superheroes, not a market simulation.

But really, it's easy enough to earn our way through with all the i25 additions. At some point, this becomes less about improving the experience and more about gutting an optional part of the game for no good reason. Number progression is paramount in action RPGs. It's a video game about superheroes, not a real life economy! Worries about inflation from transposing mental models built in real life will not yield meaningful conclusions (not to mention the entire field of economics has a terrible track record on a long enough time horizon, when one looks at the forecasts and not the rationalisations after the fact; but that's another topic).

[Mr. Vee]

In general it just seems like the OP is requesting unnecessary changes be made to the economy such that it conforms to a personal standard yet to be made entirely clear for reasons yet to be made entirely clear. I wonder if this isn't all more about the p.v.p. pen and paper stuff OP mentioned than any actual issues with HC - i.e. in a previous situation OP successfully adjusted a bad economy so now looks to adjust other economies in a similar manner whether they're broken or not? Hammers, nails, the whole bit?

[Obitus]

I don't have much to add to any of the excellent economic arguments in this thread.  But I think the OP is making two errors with regard to character builds, and how easy it is to kit them out:

1.  He underestimates how much INF a player can earn just by leveling normally.  It isn't unreasonable, for example, to expect a player who solo-levels to acquire some 500 merits by level 50, just from story arcs.  That's 150 million influence, which isn't far off the average cost of a what I'd call a great non-purpled (non-ATO'd/WinterO'd) build.  To put it another way, you can usually achieve perhaps 80-90% of peak performance for about 200 million; purples and so forth really aren't as important as you might think.
2.  He overstates the significance of the high-end builds posted on the forum.  Such build posts are usually aspirational, designed to show what is possible, not what every character should be running from the moment he hits 50.  Regardless, they don't represent an unreasonable long-term goal in an MMO context.  Just because extremely expensive builds are common on the forums, it doesn't follow that they are, or should be, representative among the playerbase at large.

Related to #2, you could argue that the OP misunderstands what really goes into high-end builds.  Earning the influence to buy a high-end build takes far less time than acquiring the knowledge to design a good one.  We post builds to judge how well they're put together, not how much they cost.

 

Anyway, given the absolutely immense difference between prices on the live server and prices here, it seems ridiculous to argue that the Homecoming devs are less interested in maintaining a healthy market than the live devs were.  "You're not following the economic guidelines that gave us PvP IOs at 2 billion inf," just doesn't pass the laugh test.  No offense.

Edited August 1, 2019 by Obitus

[Omega-202]

1 hour ago, Veelectric Boogaloo said:

In general it just seems like the OP is requesting unnecessary changes be made to the economy such that it conforms to a personal standard yet to be made entirely clear for reasons yet to be made entirely clear. I wonder if this isn't all more about the p.v.p. pen and paper stuff OP mentioned than any actual issues with HC - i.e. in a previous situation OP successfully adjusted a bad economy so now looks to adjust other economies in a similar manner whether they're broken or not? Hammers, nails, the whole bit?

I have to agree here.  I am not sure that the OP is intentionally arguing in bad faith, but the inflation problem doesn't exist.  We even have a GM post saying that they looked at the price trends and OPs entire premise is false.  For all of his anecdotes about LotG manipulation, anybody who tracks the market knows that was a blip that solved itself real quick.  

 

I don't want to speculate, but the way OP is discussing their "resume" so much, this seems more like delusional ego stroking than a true suggestion thread.  

[DSorrow]

15 hours ago, Some Random User said:

Then I would show you what the guides and Archetype forums say a normal level 50 build looks like

Just saying, using what the archetype forums say a lvl 50 build looks like is showing a Ferrari catalogue to demonstrate what a normal car looks like. The archetype forums are the high-end store for builds that are crafted by and for the more hardcore crowd.

 

Anyways, other people already went through a lot of why manipulating the market is impossible so I won't go into that, but rather discuss the time value of builds and what I consider reasonable when looking at them. Most importantly, anything in the game can be run on SOs or generic lvl 25 IOs which cost maybe 4-5 million for a fully loaded level 50. Anything beyond that is gravy and we already have soft price caps (P2W vendor gives you 1 merit for 1M inf plus the whole converter<>catalyst<>booster relation). Also it's notable that these soft caps are significantly lower than item prices we had on live. Back in the day I paid 1-2 billion inf several times for a single PvP IO, here that price is capped at 100M for anyone reasonable enough to investigate loot sources. Same with purples, some of those used to go for 100M+ while they're effectively capped at 100M here.

 

Now if we look at the time cost of lvl 50 builds on a theoretical level, you get 24 powers + 67 slots to spread around + 2 base slots in health and stamina, so most builds have 24+67+2=93 slots they want to fill with something. I don't think we have to go through the math to establish the low price point of ~5 million for lvl 25 generic IOs / SOs, so let's move on to the high end. If you want to fill every slot with ATOs, purples and PvP IOs, your build will then cost 93*100 = 9300 merits assuming you get nothing as drops or from AH. You can very easily and consistently earn 1 merit / min from many TFs and Ouroboros so completing the ludicrous theoretical build is going to take you around 9300 minutes or 155 hours of gameplay which I think is incredibly lenient when compared to pretty much any MMO out there.

 

If we consider a much more realistic high-end build that's actually built to achieve goals rather than to include as many expensive items as possible such as the perma PA, soft capped R/S/L Ill/Cold I have, we're looking at 24 purples, 2 PvP IOs, 6 ATOs, 46 rare IOs, 13 uncommons with the rest being generic IOs. Getting this build just from merits would require 5760 merits or 96 hours of efficient merit farming. So basically, 100 hours of gameplay for an extremely optimized top end character that can solo LRSF.

 

Considering that merit farming is not your only option, it's actually going to take significantly less than 100 hours to complete this. I also want to note that I'm talking about efficient merit farming hours because I don't think "hours of regular gameplay" is a meaningful metric when we're talking about achieving a top-end build. In all other MMOs I have played it's literally impossible to get top-end gear unless you're willing to move away from "regular gameplay" and into raids or hardcore PvP, so I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a little from the player to get there in CoX. If you don't want to learn marketeering or farm, you have the absolute freedom to make that choice as you can just use generic lvl 25 IOs and play just fine, but it just rings of entitlement if you want the high-end stuff without going through the steps of earning it.

 

EDIT: For the record, getting all those pieces of stuff for my Ill/Cold took me less than 10 hours of gameplay in the AH which is incredibly time-efficient and something anyone else could do, too.

Edited August 1, 2019 by DSorrow

[Some Random User]

13 minutes ago, DSorrow said:

The archetype forums are the high-end store for builds that are crafted by and for the more hardcore crowd.

You're getting to the party late, so I'll spare you some time by summarizing what was discussed later. You're making an argument for labeling the Archetype subforums as something to be avoided by the newer players, and that would leave them with nowhere realistic to go. (No, asking in /help in the game is not the solution.) A new player needs to be able to see a guide that just explains things like, "here are things you should skip, here are things you should add, here are your math-y goals, these Sets and these slots are your priorities."