Prevent artificial inflation, please.

[GM Capocollo]

I don't set economic policy and I'm not responsible for making any decisions about what things sell at.  I'm just describing the current systems in place and how they are helping achieve the goal you're asking for.

[Bionic_Flea]

Huh?

 

Look, if you don't want to use converters that is entirely your choice.

 

You can choose to pay the fixed merit vendor cost.  You can choose to pay the buy-it-now price at the market.  You can choose to place a lower patient bid of a price that you think is fair.  You can choose to buy the recipe and craft it yourself.  You can choose to only slot things that your character obtains as drops.  Play however you want.

 

All items ARE infinitely available if you are willing to wait.  The market is churning just about every item every hour multiple times.  If what you are looking for isn't there, come back later or leave a bid and wait for it to fill.

[HelenCarnate]

9 minutes ago, Some Random User said:

I can see you didn't read the entire post and the ensuing responses I've made, and there are others who are also just skimming then responding, so I'm going to edit the title of the thread to better reflect what I'm talking about.

 

The staff decided to anchor the prices in a way that doesn't represent the prices the live devs wanted for goods.

I did read the entire post.  You are complaining about a non existent problem and demanding the problem be fixed by having everything handed to you is my take on what you are saying.  There have been plenty of times I needed that 1 winter IO that has 0 for sale to complete my build.  What I did was put in a bid for a price that I thought was reasonable based on my desire to have it and previous selling points and I went to bed.  When I came back the next day my purchase went through.  I could have also used 100 merits instead had I been impatient as I have plenty of those but that would be less cost effective.

[Vanden]

6 minutes ago, Some Random User said:

The history shown in the auction house is only for the five prior purchases. Cornering the market is just a matter of affecting six purchases.

If that were true the 12 million inf price point on LotGs you were talking about wouldn't have nearly halved almost immediately.

[Bionic_Flea]

6 minutes ago, Some Random User said:

The history shown in the auction house is only for the five prior purchases. Cornering the market is just a matter of affecting six purchases.

No, it isn't.  Cornering the market means you own all of an item and can demand whatever price you want and people have to pay it if they want it since you are sole source.  That is impossible to do in this game.  If someone bought all of the LoTG's as you claim they cannot maintain that.  Someone will come along and post it at a lower price.  Even if they could sustain it, people can just buy it from the merit vendor or convert it from something else.

[Some Random User]

24 minutes ago, GM Capocollo said:

I don't set economic policy and I'm not responsible for making any decisions about what things sell at.  I'm just describing the current systems in place and how they are helping achieve the goal you're asking for.

Thank you. I've visited the OuroDev site. They have guidelines for how the auction house should be seeded, but Homecoming doesn't follow those guidelines. Can you point me to what guidelines were used to set the values currently in use?

[GM Capocollo]

We're not Ourodev.

[Some Random User]

25 minutes ago, HelenCarnate said:

You are complaining about a non existent problem and demanding the problem be fixed by having everything handed to you is my take on what you are saying.

Just because someone is talking about economics doesn't mean they're being political.

 

Homecoming isn't following the guidelines used by the live devs. Homecoming isn't using the guidelines suggested by OuroDev, either. The in-game economy is not the offline economy. Unlike the real world a player turns a fixed amount of profit for the amount of XP they've earned so far. The game's prices are also essentially fixed, and they used to be fixed in a very different way.

 

If you have more money that's great. Let's have a conversation about what a reasonable build is and how different the cost for one is from what we earn when leveling.

[Some Random User]

6 minutes ago, GM Capocollo said:

We're not Ourodev.

That's fine. That's also not the question I asked. Can you point me to what guidelines were used to set the values currently in use?

[GM Capocollo]

No, I can't.  I don't know what you mean by "guidelines".

 

If you're asking what's seeded and for how much:

• common salvage, 10k inf
• uncommon salvage, 100k inf
• rare salvage, 1m inf
• series 1 and 2 super packs, 10m
• winter series super packs, 25m

Edited August 1, 2019 by GM Capocollo

[Some Random User]

33 minutes ago, Vanden said:

If that were true the 12 million inf price point on LotGs you were talking about wouldn't have nearly halved almost immediately.

You're implying they didn't quickly sell out at the 12 000 000 cost, only to be replaced by new examples, which is what they did. That speculator made the history look like 12 000 000 was the expected price, and saying that only a few players were conned doesn't un-scam them.

[Vanden]

4 minutes ago, Some Random User said:

You're implying they didn't quickly sell out at the 12 000 000 cost, only to be replaced by new examples, which is what they did. That speculator made the history look like 12 000 000 was the expected price, and saying that only a few players were conned doesn't un-scam them.

How were they scammed? They paid a price they were willing to pay.

[Some Random User]

6 minutes ago, GM Capocollo said:

No, I can't.  I don't know what you mean by "guidelines".

What I'm asking is what those values you just listed were based on. If the costs were pulled out of thin air, instead of being based on anything, that wasn't what I expected. If that is what's going on that might explain why these values are causing issues if we aren't printing infinite money for ourselves.

[GM Capocollo]

OK. I appreciate that you have questions.

[Some Random User]

3 minutes ago, Vanden said:

How were they scammed? They paid a price they were willing to pay.

This provided me an insight into how you're approaching this. This shows me that your way of evaluating the interaction is based on consent.

 

When I look at this I'm seeing an attempt to budget for a set amount of funds. I don't spend every day on the auction house, so I have no way to know when a spike is going on. There is no transparency about what the rates are "supposed" to be, so if a player has to just compare against Reward Merits all the time that's the only guideline they have. Doing the math based on that the builds that are in the community's guides are insanely expensive. I don't get how someone can afford them, and whenever I ask I'm told I should be spending my time speculating on the auction house instead of playing a superhero game.

[Vanden]

I don't spend every day on the auction house either, I just sell my drops and play merit-awarding activities and I've fully IOed six characters. It can be done. There's no need for more safeguards on the market.

[Some Random User]

17 minutes ago, GM Capocollo said:

OK. I appreciate that you have questions.

I'm not trying to embarrass or call anyone out. Back on live we had a guideline that was set by the live devs. To be fair, I've been on software development projects before, both as a hobbyist and professionally. For all I know OuroDev could be pulling numbers out of their butt. I made a couple presumptions about how the Homecoming staff does things, and I don't know how your staff are organized, what the culture is, etc. What I presumed was that the Homecoming staff were mostly either professionals of a techy sort who had been computer science majors once upon a time, or were current computer science students who thought the project was neat, and that the natural consequence of that would be someone being assigned to spend an afternoon sitting around and applying their one or two economics courses to this question. If that wasn't done then, in the spirit of being a good neighbor, to paraphrase Hayek, I want to warn you that "economics is hard."

 

I and others I've spoken to in-game feel there's a problem. Others feel there's a way to climb up to a position of relative wealth and are willing to invest the time doing that. Once they're there they don't see a problem. That is a result of anchoring and survivor bias. I feel presuming that one group invalidates the other isn't the best way to decide if there's a problem in the first place.

 

Maybe before we can even have this conversation we need to ask the staff to reach some sort of guideline for what a build is supposed to look like.

Edited August 1, 2019 by Some Random User
elaboration

[Vanden]

7 minutes ago, Some Random User said:

I'm not trying to embarrass or call anyone out. Back on live we had a guideline that was set by the live devs.

We didn't, though. Prices were set entirely by the players. Homecoming has far more safeguards in place to prevent inflation.

[Some Random User]

9 minutes ago, Vanden said:

I don't spend every day on the auction house either, I just sell my drops and play merit-awarding activities and I've fully IOed six characters. It can be done. There's no need for more safeguards on the market.

That's good news. That doesn't match my experience. I'm willing to start private messaging build links for Pine's so we can have a conversation about this. Maybe we'll figure out details we don't realize are causing our different perspectives.

[Some Random User]

4 minutes ago, Vanden said:

We didn't, though. Prices were set entirely by the players.

Things may have started out that way, but regarding live devs, they made regular posts on the forums (later on) focused on fixing the initially broken in-game economy.

 

The guideline they came up with was the idea that by level 50 your build should be finished, and that should be reachable through normal leveling, with the auction house only existing as a place to move Enhancements around (so that builds could be rounded out). They repeatedly stated they viewed grinding as different from speculating at a sort of pure finance game.

[Vanden]

5 minutes ago, Some Random User said:

Things may have started out that way, but regarding live devs, they made regular posts on the forums (later on) focused on fixing the initially broken in-game economy.

 

The guideline they came up with was the idea that by level 50 your build should be finished, and that should be reachable through normal leveling, with the auction house only existing as a place to move Enhancements around (so that builds could be rounded out). They repeatedly stated they viewed grinding as different from speculating at a sort of pure finance game.

I don't believe they ever posted anything to that effect. If anything they were simply talking about the then-new Merit Reward system.

[GM Fiddleback]

I learned to program basic BASIC on an Apple IIc.

 

Does that help?

 

10 Print "Whee";

20 Goto 10

30 End

[justicebeliever]

We are spinning here on a few different things, whether you mean for us to be or not

 

1.)  Whether you like it, or don't like it, steady inflation is not happening.  The price controls prevent this.  Inflation, by definition, is a reduction in the purchasing power of money.  The price controls set by the dev's (seeded salvage) help prevent this.  The fact that there are no finite resources in the game also prevent this.

 

2.)  This is not now, or on Live, ever been a free market.  A free market exists wihout controls.  This is not a command market...as the Dev's do not set the prices.  This is in between.  It is a combination of both...

 

3.)  The live dev's can make all the posts they want, but you make it sound like this was a problem they had licked.  There was frequent hoarding on live...Hoarding, leads to inflation.  Since new product is introduced daily into the market, hoarding is not occurring.

 

4.)  You've mentioned how different this is than live...on live, the recipe/salvage drops were lower than HC...thus, resources could not keep up as well with demand as well as they can here.  When demand lowers compared to supply, prices drop.

 

I've noticed some inconsistencies you've mentioned here, and I'm not sure you are doing it intentionally:

 

You've mentioned several times that the Live dev's wanted it to be possible for you to make your build without ever going to the AH.   What has changed?  Any market speculation only happens in the market.  As I said, the drops are better here, so this is factually easier than live

 

You've mentioned inflation several times, and have yet to provide an example.  Is this just a hypothetical exercise or is their a real concern.  If so, please provide evidence

 

You've mentioned that the dev's are setting the rates, but they are not.  Regardless of a command or free economy, Supply and Demand will alaways set rates.  That is a fundamental staple of economic theory.  In a free market, there are few if any comtrols over supply and demand, and lots of controls in a command economy.  But regardless, if supply is high, and demand is low, then prices drop.  But I am unclear what you are asking for...more supply, more demand, more controls, less controls...

 

[Some Random User]

30 minutes ago, GM Fiddleback said:

I learned to program basic BASIC on an Apple IIc.

 

Does that help?

 

10 Print "Whee";

20 Goto 10

30 End

QBasic, here.

[justicebeliever]

52 minutes ago, Some Random User said:

What I presumed was that the Homecoming staff were mostly either professionals of a techy sort who had been computer science majors once upon a time, or were current computer science students who thought the project was neat, and that the natural consequence of that would be someone being assigned to spend an afternoon sitting around and applying their one or two economics courses to this question. If that wasn't done then, in the spirit of being a good neighbor, to paraphrase Hayek, I want to warn you that "economics is hard."

This sounds very much like you are suggesting that if the pricing in the game isn't working to your satisfaction it's because no one else on this thread understands economics.  That may not be your intent, but if it is, that's extremely condescending and I’m unclear what you hope to gain by that...