This is just ... naive.

Quote:

Slows down game economy by requiring exclusive 1 on 1 trades you will not see the rampant inflation that makes some games absolutely unplayable because nobody can afford that special drop everyone wants.

In response, traders just spam the public channels hawking their wares.

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Inflation that little pink thread you need for your costume does not get godly expensive

Instead, it becomes obtainable only be the chosen few. Supply vs Demand ruins this notion.

Furthermore, this is usually a result of an overly "balkanized" itemization in the game, where you wind up with thousands (if not tens or hundreds of thousands, or in World of Warcraft's case, millions!) of items that can be listed on the auction house. And naturally, some of those things are going to be more difficult to obtain than others, driving the supply and demand curves. Anytime you start seeing low volume movement of a particular item, if demand outstrips supply then the price on that item is going to go up (and up and up and up). Why? Because it's a seller's market, not a buyer's market.

Quote:

Encourages people who start in the game early to farm for what they need, and lowers inflation rates

This makes no sense. It's as if you're trying to say that preventing an Auction House will prevent farming which will in turn reduce the rate at which players generate resources. Your effect is not a result of the cause you are asserting. Correlation does not equal causation.

Quote:

Rare items get extremely expensive when people spend all their time buying and selling instead of grinding for it

And here I thought it was because rare items are ... rare ... and the laws of Supply and Demand do ... you know. Also, are you actually trying to push the game towards a Grind For It Suckah! design motif? If we wanted that, there's any number of Korean grindfest games on the market that cater to that better/instead.

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Gold Farmers show up and profiteer on a game that installs an automated AH every. single. time.

Again, your Cause and Effect are not as tightly bound as you're asserting.

[b]GOLD FARMERS show up to profiteer in EVERY SINGLE GAME.[/b]
Full stop.
Period.

There were Gold Farmers (and Magic Farmers) in Diablo II. It didn't have an auction house. Didn't stop the gold farmers from establishing themselves in that game.

There were Gold Farmers (and Magic Farmers) in Diablo III. The game DID have an auction house, but the farmers would have shown up anyway. Blizzard just made it easier for them to farm and generate Real Money Transfers, in effect sanctioning the Gold Farming "trade" in the game.

There were Gold Farmers [i]on the first day of Head Start for the launch of The Elder Scrolls Online[/i] for crying out loud, and that game didn't have an auction house. Heck, it technically STILL doesn't have an auction house! Didn't stop the Gold Farmers from showing up and spamming every channel they could find ... until Wildstar launched and then they all migrated over to Wildstar (because they weren't skimming enough profit out of ESO to make it worthwhile).

TERA has an auction house ... but they don't exactly have trouble with Gold Farmers over there.

Star Trek Online has an auction house ... but the game isn't overrun by Gold Farmers.

So as far as I'm concerned, your "Just Say No!" campaign against auction houses is misplaced and misguided.

Sweet Miss Skaldi wrote:

The brilliance of NPC shops is that you keep the amount of money flowing around in the game relatively low which means you don't see too much inflation...

Not sure I follow this. If I take an item to an NPC and vendorise it, there is now that much more cash in the game. If I sell it to another PC, the cash I get is equal to the amount the other PC loses. And if I do it through an auction house that takes a cut, the amount I get is actually lower than the amount the PC I sold it to loses, and there is a net reduction in the amount of in-game currency. Auction houses that act as a cash sink reduce inflation.

Empyrean wrote:

I hope they find a way to fit it better into a Superhero theme--the Auction House was kind of immersion breaking--but they need to have it or something like it.
Black Market was WAY better theme-wise.

[IMG]http://i555.photobucket.com/albums/jj477/fuzzygnome01/University_zpsecea252f.jpg[/IMG]

Universities have labs, workshops, gyms, libraries (possibly including occult grimoires), places to meet with colleagues or teachers, and Internet connections (though perhaps too crippled for superhero use in an attempt to stop students from playing games and watching porn the whole time). Everything a super needs to improve his abilities. Supers who wouldn't be caught dead at MIT could have the same sort of thing in their lairs, including the means to buy/sell/trade fighting techniques on the Internet.

I've always hated player-driven auction houses..far too easy to manipulate and just an all-around waste of time. They completely destroy immersion and do nothing but facilitate gold sellers, which leads to monopolizing of mobs that drop rares. What I would propose is an expansion of what the OP was talking about, where you sell your goods to an NPC and the price changes depending on his current stock. When he buys from you, what you sell is actually added to the vendor's inventory (ala Guild Wars). Vendors would offer more for items that are actually in their realm of expertise: for example, you wouldn't want to unload a magical artifact at a high tech store unless you were desperate for quick cash or just didn't have time to visit the Mystical Emporium. Every so often (perhaps hourly) a vendor would "sell" some of his excess wares to unknown NPCs, creating a steady but reasonable item sink. If the shop was sold out of something it normally stocks it would "buy" a few from the ether during maintenance. If the store was being flooded with a specific item the vendor would stop offering to buy it at some point - this would be a hard cap on supply set by the devs. Individual vendors might be slightly influenced by the prices of the ones nearest them but not at all by those in another city or distant zone. This would present day trading opportunities for those willing to travel long distances between shops. Faction standing might affect how much a vendor offers for your goods and in some cases unlock higher quality items for purchase.

Empyrean wrote:

So, ok, it does ACTUALLY have to be auction, but make it thematically something that fits.

The Super Market!

Xnarl wrote:

Empyrean wrote:
So, ok, it does ACTUALLY have to be auction, but make it thematically something that fits.
The Super Market!

[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e1hZGDaqIw]Um ...[/url] {blink blink}

Darth Fez wrote:

Empyrean wrote:
I have no problem with something that WORKS like the Auction House, but fit it into the theme better. Name one Superhero who used an auction of any kind to improve his powers. And if somehow you find one single valid example, I dare you to find another.

An idea that came to me is to use this premise in the game. Have several companies that provide 'services' (i.e. enhancements) to superheroes, complete with an unofficial (and largely unregulated) 'market' for trading referrals, favors, services, etc. Have there be an in-game debate for people stating that any such 'market' should be regulated, especially considering the nature and power of the people involved. Have others argue that superheroes are heroes, after all, who do a great service to the city, and anything that helps them curb-stomp evil can only be good for the city.
Also, can we stop with the "this MMO isn't a comic book"* stuff? It's becoming a little trying. Thank you.
* There were a great many superheroes who used an auction house (of some kind) in CoH.

I like your ideas. There was, for example, Damage Control in Marvel that specialized in preventing/repairing Supers battle damage. And, if I understand your last comment correctly, I understand where you're coming from.

It seems to me a balance is needed. This is a Superhero themed game, so we should cleave strongly to the genre and not too lightly break from it's common conventions. But, we also aren't limited to what has happened in comic books or any other Superhero medium for that matter.

So, touche (sincerely) about my "I dare you to find another" comment. But I did personally find the Superhero tailor, auction, and store to be a bit immersion breaking. Why do they have to exist in the world? I'd personally rather just have it exist outside the "world" but inside the "game" in a window, like the way Boosts will be handled.

But, then again, I'll be grateful for the game and happily play however the Devs decide to handle it.

Just my meager 2 inf in the economy of opinions and ideas.

Empyrean wrote:

So, touche (sincerely) about my "I dare you to find another" comment. But I did personally find the Superhero tailor, auction, and store to be a bit immersion breaking.

As with so many things, in this kind of situation, it becomes a question of taste and preference. "The Incredibles" was (arguably is) a setting with a relatively large number of superheroes. It has Edna 'E' Mode. Was she immersion breaking?

It is worth considering whether the perceptions / paradigm one is applying are one's own, based on expectations born of comic books and other related, but also incompatible, media or whether these expectations are based on the needs, requirements, and realities of the setting / medium / game.

At the end of the day, it may be nothing more than a question of how ably the devs present the in-game reality. Why was Wentworth's the superhero clearinghouse? Who is Wentworth? What is Wentworth's? I used it because it was convenient, of course, but, in terms of the game and the lore, to me it was pure deus ex machina. Yes, a certain amount of suspension of disbelief (even given that it is a superhero setting) is necessary, but not everything ought to be written off to that alone. Internal consistency remains king.

Xnarl wrote:

Redlynne wrote:
Xnarl wrote:
Empyrean wrote:
So, ok, it does ACTUALLY have to be auction, but make it thematically something that fits.

The Super Market!

Um ... {blink blink}

?

I was rather hoping it would turn out to be an old commercial for Ralphs (the [u]Super[/u] Market). But it was just Elmer doing whatever Daffy told him to do...

I was unable to find such a commercial, myself. But I do remember them.

As with anything involving people, inflation and the market can be tough to control. However it CAN be done if the Devs are willing to institute some strict measures:

Limit selling: If you limit the amount of stuff that can be sold to say twice what can be reasonably earned in a single day's play then nobody will go out farming/buying stuff to flip because they won't be able to get rid of it. If they really want to waste slots building empty characters to sell the stuff then let them. Every empty character is one less one they can use to actually earn stuff.

Limit buying: Once the character progression and crafting things are set, limit each character to buying as much as they need to completely rebuild their character once. Yes, that might be a lot of stuff, but if anyone legitimately does a total respec then they're going to need a rebuild. It will prevent people from buying 25 stacks of ten of the same thing, cornering the market and hampering new players just trying to have fun.

Cash sinks: This was one where CoH got caught flat-footed because as was mentioned before they had 2 years of play in before the AH went live and you can only spend so much on costumes. So some characters had billions of Inf saved up. If there are more places to spend cash then players might be less inclined to horde it and inflation can be held down. You want a base? Small one is cheap...big one is expensive. Want cool stuff for it? Pay up. Forget the Prestige system (stupid from the get-go IMHO). You want all that really neat stuff for your base? Pay cash for it. You could even let characters use cash as bribes to contacts for an extra mission or something.

Alternate sources: One reason stuff went astronomical at the AH is because the players directly controlled the inventory. If nobody went out fighting enemies under lvl 25 then less Alc Silver was generated and the supply went down. Demand never went down so prices soared. The AE helped because you could farm for an hour, convert tickets to stuff you needed and sell the rest. But all of this seemed very clunky to me. My idea is The Devs would set the AH inventories to auto-refill when they got down to a certain level. The items would be sold at set prices (with some variation) based on rarity. The very last one would be astronomically expensive but if you REALLY want it then it's yours. When the counter hits 0 the system sets up say 5-10 to 'sell'. What this does is it guarantees that you can always find one of something to make that recipe you just got. Now if the item is common the price will be fair. If it's rare then you'll pay the premium. However there will NEVER be a situation where there are none.

The prices set by the system would set the 'cap' because any players trying to sell above that would be undercut by the system. This would limit the amount of cash changing hands.

Many players expect an AH and I fear the game might not do well without one however I'm staunchly against 'Market PvP' in any form.

I like an AH in a game. The fact that there will be randomized item drops requires you to be able to do something with the ones you get that you don't want. I like Comicsluvr's ideas about restricting some of the shennanigans people used to perpetrate on CoX's AH though. I like the idea of limiting how many of one item someone can try to buy and sell per day in order to stop people from cornering the market. I think almost all salvage (to leave it in CoX terms) should be available from NPC vendors at a really high price whereas you might be able to do better on the AH when looking for something like that. And the recipes, like in CoX, could be purchased for merits or something like that. Those same NPCs should buy that kind of stuff for REALLY low buy prices too, encouraging, but not forcing people to try to do better on the open market, but providing a safety valve for when the market get's demand-heavy.

I also agree that they need to have the AH system in place before everyone has a billion Inf in unneeded wealth saved up and collecting dust.

I also agree that things in the game, like SG bases, personal lairs, etc can and probably should have some kind of rent, upkeep cost, etc. I don't want it to be impossible for people to trade sharp and make influence over time, just not immediate, obvious, and so broken that everyone's a billionaire within a year.

If there is salvage, I think they ought to make it non-level specific. I mean, in CoX one problem was that LOW level salvage was harder to find than HIGH level salvage because the majority of people were doing stuff with their level 50 toons a lot of the time and the leveling was so fast that you didn't get much of a chance to generate a lot of level 10-20 stuff.

What I mean is this: Salvage acquired from random drops is not in any way tied to your level or the level of the badguys you're fighting that are dropping it. Period. There's no such thing as "level10-20 salvage" all salvage is just salvage. Bosses drop more rare salvage, sure, but there's no level attached to it. I personally think the way CoX actually worked was that people stuck to SOs or generic IOs until they were close to 50, then started kitting out with IO recipe sets, purples, etc. Apart from some desirable low level recipes (the ones you put in Super Speed to add +Stealth, etc) you could pretty much avoid IO sets until you hit the cap, if you wanted to. There was therefore almost no reason for recipes to exist at lower levels, especially since many of the lower level sets were lousy anyway and got replaced by better stuff later. Just make everything "good stuff for the level capped" (like IO sets and purples in CoX) or "low level generic jank" (like SOs and generic IOs in CoX) and let everyone stick with low level jank until they get to the cap.

I was under the impression that most people slotted the "sweet spot" of level 35 IO sets (whether they waited until the level cap or not to slot in sets). This was done to give a wider range of effectiveness while exemplared down without greatly hurting your level capped experience. To be fair, in ancillary powers going with level 40+ was good choice since you were generally not going to have access to them while exemplared down below level 40. This is why level 35-40 versions of recipes went for more (often significantly more) than 45-50 versions on the market. Purples, of course, are a different matter with their own rules and many players never even bothered with them.

I guess what I'm saying is, people should not get salvage from mopping up large groups of "grey" lowbies, but the salvage that does exist should all be the same, regardless of the level you are when you got it or the level of the mob that dropped it. Instead of having "Gold" and "Alchemical Gold" and so forth at different level ranges, make all of the recipes craft using one universal set of salvage that drops for everyone at all levels. So if you defeat a boss at level 12, you might get a piece of salvage that you can use to craft something for one of your level 50 toons, or you could sell it and use the proceeds to buy some SOs to fill out your powers, or you could store it for later use when you hit the cap and want to start making stuff for yourself, or you could mail it to another toon, etc.

syntaxerror37 wrote: "I was under the impression that most people slotted the "sweet spot" of level 35 IO sets..."
This is true, but they did that when they had the Influence to afford it (after hitting level 50, or using funds from another toon who was level 50) and they did it to improve their exemplaring or PVPing at lower level ranges with a level 50 toon. When I was leveling a toon from 1-49 I largely ignored IOsets except for a few uniques and procs I knew were level-independant (or more desirable to have in low level form, for exemplaring etc) and then kitted my toon out when it got to the cap and was spending its time on iTrials.

I don't know anyone who crafted a low level set to use it, then slotted it out when they got to level 50 in favor of a different one, because that seemed like a waste of time and influence. You could just get by with SOs and generic IOs until you got to 50, then rework the build in MIDs and figure out what you wanted to acquire at that point. Leveling was so fast you didn't have TIME to really kit out a build at levels 1-30 anyway, and you were constantly adding powers and slots to the point that no build was ever stable, things were constantly changing, so just throwing an SO in there seemed like the simpler, easier thing to do, for the brief time you needed something to fill a slot befroe you got to 50 and could think seriously about a long-term build.

So, hunt a million 'greens', but those 'grey' ones hit the diminishing returns, so there's no reason to slaughter them.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Radiac wrote:

I guess what I'm saying is, people should not get salvage from mopping up large groups of "grey" lowbies, but the salvage that does exist should all be the same, regardless of the level you are when you got it or the level of the mob that dropped it. Instead of having "Gold" and "Alchemical Gold" and so forth at different level ranges, make all of the recipes craft using one universal set of salvage that drops for everyone at all levels. So if you defeat a boss at level 12, you might get a piece of salvage that you can use to craft something for one of your level 50 toons, or you could sell it and use the proceeds to buy some SOs to fill out your powers, or you could store it for later use when you hit the cap and want to start making stuff for yourself, or you could mail it to another toon, etc.

Just to comment I don't have a problem with the idea of having just one set of salvage for the game rather than the low/middle/high level salvage system in CoX. It could also help open up crafting to people who were confused by the salvage system CoX had (I know they existed because I spent time explaining it to other players in game).

Quote:

syntaxerror37 wrote: "I was under the impression that most people slotted the "sweet spot" of level 35 IO sets..."
This is true, but they did that when they had the Influence to afford it (after hitting level 50, or using funds from another toon who was level 50) and they did it to improve their exemplaring or PVPing at lower level ranges with a level 50 toon. When I was leveling a toon from 1-49 I largely ignored IOsets except for a few uniques and procs I knew were level-independant (or more desirable to have in low level form, for exemplaring etc) and then kitted my toon out when it got to the cap and was spending its time on iTrials.

Baring something like a Karma KB global, I would start slotting IO sets at level 32, continuing on as I got powers and slots opened up. I didn't feel like waiting for my bonuses. I generally didn't power-level characters, but I did like to gain levels quickly, the extra boost I would get from the IO sets helped with that. Having a large supply of banked salvage allowed me to purchase the recipes instead of crafted IOs and save a lot of Inf. Also having all of the memorization badges on my main let me whip up any generic IO I needed on the cheep as well.

Quote:

I don't know anyone who crafted a low level set to use it, then slotted it out when they got to level 50 in favor of a different one, because that seemed like a waste of time and influence. You could just get by with SOs and generic IOs until you got to 50, then rework the build in MIDs and figure out what you wanted to acquire at that point. Leveling was so fast you didn't have TIME to really kit out a build at levels 1-30 anyway, and you were constantly adding powers and slots to the point that no build was ever stable, things were constantly changing, so just throwing an SO in there seemed like the simpler, easier thing to do, for the brief time you needed something to fill a slot befroe you got to 50 and could think seriously about a long-term build.

Yes below 30 I was using SOs and generic IOs. I will be the first to admit IO sets should not have started until level 30 given the semi-permanent nature of enhancements in CoX. That is definitely a "what were they thinking" part of the game. I was never a MIDS user. I built my characters organically around how I played them, so I didn't need to take time to plan*. Not to mention since (baring any purple-ing) the slotting early on would save me time down the road. It also helped that I had plenty of resources on hand (inf, salvage, enhancement storage, and base crafting table).

*I'm not knocking people who planned out their builds with MIDS or any other method. The mechanical side of character building (in any game system) is something that comes so naturally to me I had a hard time understanding how essential planning was for other players for several years.

Segev wrote:

Part of the reason for having vendors have limited inventories refilled only over time by various means is to allow vendors to play the market - in whatever form it takes - with their own currency and goods. Buying ones that they can sell for a profit and selling stuff that will profit them. Their goal will be accumulating currency (which they can use as part of their strategy to play the market). But any currency owned by the vendors can be invisibly flushed out of the economy by the humans running the game. When we see the vendors have a stockpile of currency that is so large as to be problematic (a threshold we'll establish through experience and firm decision-making on how much currency we want in the game per player, most likely), we simply delete the excess. We don't have to rob any players, and yet the currency becomes more scarce.
This won't solve every problem, but it provides one way for the AH to actually help flush the spontaneously-generated currency from the system just as spontaneously.

I like it.

How about adding an inf requirement to some mission lines, or character progression. It wouldn't be for all missions, but if you were working in an uppity mission line, they or the mission may require that you "buy" something expensive just to earn trust, or go undercover. Possibly if you want your character to become CEO of "Worlds Biggest Corp" you may have to buy your way in to certain aspects. I cant really imagine an endgame CEO virtually penny-less.

Just some thoughts.

Segev wrote:

Part of the reason for having vendors have limited inventories refilled only over time by various means is to allow vendors to play the market - in whatever form it takes - with their own currency and goods. Buying ones that they can sell for a profit and selling stuff that will profit them. Their goal will be accumulating currency (which they can use as part of their strategy to play the market). But any currency owned by the vendors can be invisibly flushed out of the economy by the humans running the game. When we see the vendors have a stockpile of currency that is so large as to be problematic (a threshold we'll establish through experience and firm decision-making on how much currency we want in the game per player, most likely), we simply delete the excess. We don't have to rob any players, and yet the currency becomes more scarce.
This won't solve every problem, but it provides one way for the AH to actually help flush the spontaneously-generated currency from the system just as spontaneously.

Excellent! Regulating the market via (I assume) multiple design features as well as a dynamic, in-game mechanic such as what you have here is a fantastic approach IMO.

On AH and immersion. I definitely agree that BM >>> AH when it came to immersion...though I often thought that maybe the BM should have been relocated issue-to-issue, so as to simulate some degree of secrecy or evasion : )

I think that one of the challenges with simulating an AH for a pleasant immersion experience is its diverse application requirements. How do you satisfy the somewhat emotional requirements of all the RPers, reasonable and simple (maybe!) requirements of the non-RPers, and whomever else?

About a year ago, when I first stumbled into the MWM/CoT world, I had a pretty whacky idea...

Scenario: Training and/or acquiring augments and boosts
Questions: Where do you go? How would you get there? How do you visit or interface with that person once there?

Back then, I didn't know what would become of the 5 character origins, so they were rolled into the deal.

[b]Natural[/b] toons
Level <=14: Go to Joe’s gym via a jet pack
Level 15-30: Go to the Titan City health & wellness center via a mini-copter
Level 31-45: Go to American Star’s Elite Athletic Performance Center via an Osprey (the military aircraft, not the bird!)

Your char is not actually traveling. Each mode of transportation is simulated (i.e., very similar to CoX’s team transportation power…which was a Sky Raider boss flying machine IIRC).

[b]Techs[/b]
Your char always logs-in to the “SuperGeeks R Us” portal
Level <=14: via a laptop
Level 15-30: via a PDA
Level 31-45: via holograph (CoX-style)

Each has its own animation and thematic U/I pop-up in accompaniment

[b]Science[/b]
Your char always interfaces with Titan Laboratories via…
Level <=14: Thumbprint reader
Level 15-30: Retinal scan
Level 31-45: Neural-link

Each has its own animation and thematic U/I pop-up in accompaniment

I never got around to the magic and mutant options heh. For magic, maybe a different type/style of occultist would appear before you and grant your power to you. Each would have its own unique animation, etc.

Radiac wrote:

I take this to mean there will be no auction house window like CoX had, just players clicking on different NPCs to buy what that NPC might have or sell whatever they're buying, is that right? And then the NPCs apparently will interact with each other in the buying and selling of stuff on some kind of market, which will not be accessible to us, the players, at all? Or is there really just one NPC vendor window that handles all the buying and selling for everyone and tries as much as possible to buy low and sell high, and availability is based on what they've managed to buy from other players across the whole game so far?

No, there will be an auction house. It's just that the NPC venders will be playing the market alongside the players.

Quote:

Also, in CoX there was the ability to trade player-to-player. No market, just me and you standing near each other swapping stuff around until we both clicked on "do this trade" or whatever. Is this going to be possible in CoT? I ask because this gives the players the ability, in a somewhat non-scalable way, to trade freely with each other with no "posting fee" required. That said, the fact that it's awfully hard to do that on any kind of macro-economic basis prevents it from being a driving force in the economy, I think. Still, trading my PVP recipe for your 2billion+ is a large money move, as far as the economy is concerned, even though its not a transaction that's happening involving many many people or any kind of high trade frequency. Given this, people could arrange such trades in various ways (forum posts, etc) and bypass the NPC vendors that way. This was always possible in CoX, but nobody did it that much except for very big ticket items, as far as I know.

Players trading/gifting items and currency between one another directly is such an established part of mmo structure that I would be beyond shocked if it was not a part of CoT in at least some form*.

*Arena net dropped the trading interface from GW2, but you can still mail gold and non soul/account bound items to each other.

Nadira wrote:

The problem with auction houses is not so much their existence, nor the fact that they anonymise the players to a fair degree (though that in and of itself is a huge problem with modern MMOs that have become so casual as to be essentially single player games you happen to have others on at the same time). The biggest problem is that MMOs are notoriously bad to implement the faucet-drain model. The influx of resources is huge compared to the drain of them.

This is a very good point. Anyone who worked on getting the IO crafting badges will tell you how worthless mez and de-buff enhancements were on the market. It's not that they were bad enhancements, but things like Accuracy, damage, recharge, etc. went into way more powers, including the powers that took mez or de-buff.

Drop rates did not reflect how useful the drop in general was. For example: you had the same chance of getting a recipe for Thunderstrike as a recipe for Enfeebled Operation (both uncommon, same level range), but there was a huge difference in value (and available quantity) on the market for each. There was much greater call for a ranged damage set over an immobilize one. It didn't even matter how "good" the set was in terms of bonuses. Weighting the drops based on how useful they are apart from rarity would have done a great deal to stabilize the market, and not just for IO recipes.

You know, I played CoH for 8 years and even my 50s didn't have anything like a billion inf. I never got a Purple that I could use and the couple-or-three that I did get were not worth anything on the market. Which made perfect sense to me, since the bonuses on Purple sets were awful.

I don't doubt that there were egregiously wealthy players, nor that they casually bought whatever they wanted, regardless of how unreasonable the price appeared to the rest of us. I admit that there were plenty of times when I wanted a particular thing from the AH, only to find the prices completely out of my reach. Between Merits and Tickets, I could often get what I wanted, eventually, but that only highlighted the flaws in the system.

That said, I never felt like there was a need for a drastic overhaul of how we earned rewards. One thing that I did want, was a way to get the rewards that I specifically wanted. A way to say, "I want This particular Enhancement" and get it, without too much fuss. A way to spend my 'excess' influence with purpose.

Be Well!
Fireheart

The problem, I think, was that the value of influence, by year 8, was SO low that even if you DID have 1 billion Inf, you might not be able to readily afford the purple or PVP recipe you wanted, if it was actually available at all, which was another problem. By then the server population was lower and people were reverting to the option of just keeping the Purples etc that they did get instead of selling them for Inf, because the actual recipes and IOs would go up in price over time and the Inf became less valuable due to inflation.

I was by no means a market pro, I never abused AE for tickets, I never cornered the market on anything, heck one time I accidentally bought a Radioactive Isotope salvage piece for 444million instead of 44,000 because of careless typing in the AH interface. I got it back in a few weeks. I had stopped playing actively for a like 2 years, but then came back when the game went F2P, then almost immediately got hooked again and paid for a year of VIP, which expired like a month before the game went dark (they let us keep VIP until the end, which was nice). I played that last 12 months of CoX starting from almost scratch, I had some level 50s with maybe one of them almost fully kitted out with IOs, and the rest a shambles. By the end I had like 2 billion inf and a stockpile of unused rares and purples in my SG base, plus accumulated Incarnate swag on my 6-7 toons that were 50 at the end. I got this mostly by making a Mastermind and running through Alignment missions with him every afternoon for like one entire summer in order to get Hero Merits to trade to B.U.T.L.E.R. for rare recipes I wanted, then I used the accumulated inf and salvage from all that mission running to get the salvage I needed to slot the rares, and buy others.

But by the end it was clear to me that influence was not very useful. You might have wanted a really cheap uncommon recipe, and you weren't able to find it because nobody was selling them. People would just delete them or hand them to NPC contacts for the quick cash. Also, stuff that was available was being sold for like 1-2 billion inf. The Inf itself was so low in value that prices were sky high and people were acting as they do in a high-inflation economy, they were avoiding money in transactions and trying to just accumulate actual stuff. Stuff was useful, inf was mostly not. And this was despite the fact that you could still use Inf to basically kit out a newbie toon and keep them swimming in SOs until they hit level 50, if you wanted to. All you needed for that was about 150million inf (which was what I'd mail to my new toons whenever I made one) as I recall.

I used to just give new players like 50million inf just because I ran into them in public areas. I felt cheap in that it wasn't more than that.

TO/DO/SO's where cheap. :p IOs cost 50k-500k depending on the IO and the market flux (at least on Virtue, but I believe the AH was global).

Hopefully we don't do the whole expire thing with CoT.

I'll admit my estimate for needed Inf above was way too high, I just now realized that usually bought at least one Super Speed +Stealth for the new toon as well, anyway going back to the Eve Online thing, I think there's a double standard being applied in terms of people's expectations.

One the one hand, Eve is a game where you build ships which you know are going to get destroyed, but you acquire loot, build ships, get them destroyed in fun space battles, then rinse repeat as you get more loot and build more ships, etc. Okay, the expectation there is that you'll be able to get loot and then spend it on ships, which will not last forever. Great, you've got a source, you've got a drain, add in a gate of some kind, and call it a transistor (*rimshot* but seriously folks... semiconductor device joke). Here you've got "on-flavor" economic forces at work. People expect to make money somehow and they expect the have to spend it on stuff that won't last forever.

On the other hand, in CoX, the deal was you do missions and defeat baddies and get influence (our version of fake money), which you could then use to buy stuff. The stuff you bought never went away, and the value of that stuff went up over time (as measured in influence) as the influence itself lost long-term value to inflation. Here there's a great source, but no drain. So you say "The Eve model won't work, because the drain there is totally 'on-flavor' with the way the game is set up, nobody expects their ships to be indestructible, so they understand that they'll lose fake money over time as things get destroyed and need to constantly earn to keep playing and break even/get a ahead a little.".

This was only impossible in a game like CoX because there nobody expects to lose inf in the form of stuff getting destroyed. Therefore, I submit to you that people in CoX-like games don't truly have any "on-flavor" reason to expect their hero toons to earn fake game money for everything they do either. Why should there be oodles of fake money being earned every time you arrest a gang member or defeat a villain trying to take over the world? They don't get money for that in the comics. In the comics, even Captain America, who is presumably paid by the U.S. Government, doesn't get a commission on every badguy arrested, he likely just gets a salary (or backpay from WWII adjusted for interest and inflation, which would be a lot maybe, I don't know).

So while it's true to say that the sink is not "on-flavor" in a game like CoX I posit the idea that the SOURCE of the fake money is equally "non-flavorful". Thus, I think that generally defeating mobs and doing random missions etc should NOT, by default, result in getting fake in-game money, as a general rule. Maybe put in some special missions (dailies?, trials? TFs?) that DO earn fake money in a "flavorful" way, like working temporarily for the various goodguy and government organizations, or just rich companies that need help on the up-and-up if you're a hero. On the villain side, its far easier to justify that they WANT fake game money, but equally difficult to justify just causing every goodguy you defeat in PVE to drop fake money when defeated, I mean it's not like the cops or the FBI give criminals money when they get eluded or defeated. So villains would need stuff like this too. Working paid arson jobs, robbing banks, doing corporate espionage, etc.

So what about that, make the in-game fake money something that has to bearned by doing SPECIAL missions, not just every mission. Other missions would still award XP (maybe the money missions would not, I don't know). There might need to be a limit on how many money missions one could do in a day, etc. Details would need to be worked out.

Of course the other option is just to keep unrealistically awarding Inf for everything, like CoX did, but then charge inf for everything too (whether that's "on-flavor realistic" or not is debatable), like making superpowers cost inf when activated (an idea I posted about somewhere, maybe this thread maybe a different one, I forget), and/or making IOs charge an upkeep cost to maintain them (again, another idea I posted about somewhere).

The problem with having too much source and not enough drain is that the fake money itself loses value over time. It FEELS like you're rich when you have 2billion Inf, but in reality you'd be better off converting all your cash to IOs that you feel you'll need in the future (really popular stuff, +Stealth procs, the uniques that went into Health, popular purples, etc) because their prices are going to go up between now and then.

1) In reference to my use of the word "realistic" I should point out I meant that in the "flavor" sense, not in the "the gamers will like it" sense. I If you object to the word "realistic" then we should maybe backtrack and talk about the post where Nadira mentioned Eve Online's "faucet/drain" characteristics, because in THAT context, it was mentioned by either Nadira or someone else that such drain effects which Eve has, though they work okay for Eve, would NOT work for CoX because they were not the common expectation one has when one immerses oneself in a game like CoX. In other words, building ships feels like it should cost money and sending them out into space battles feels like it should end up destroying the ships, so both the source and the drain, in that game, are perfectly "immersive". CoX on the other hand, was not a game about making and destroying ships, so that doesn't work, because nobody expects to get their superpowers destroyed. I merely posited the notion that, in my opinion, while it's true that you can't really get people to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the draining of the Inf in some models that have been proposed, in my opinion nobody really immersing themselves in CoX ought to expect that each and every mob will drop Inf like they did either, so in that context, BOTH the source and the drain are "immersion breaking". In short, if people insist on an immersion-breaking source, I think they ought to accept an equally immersion-breaking drain, and if they can't accept the latter on the grounds of "immersiveness", we ought to be allowed to remover the former with it on the same grounds.

2) I think you're assuming that just because there is the possibility that the costs might be steeper than the rewards, in some cases, that this must end up being true in the general case, or that the devs can't simply tweak the reward and cost numbers to make it work reasonably well. I believe there can be struck a balance there, if one tries to. Some builds may be "inf hog" builds and so forth, while others might be more "stingy" or whatever, that's part of the build process at that point.

3) Everyone wants low inflation, because they don't want the value of the money they've accumulated to erode over time, but each individual person wants more money than the other guy, and want's to have their cake and eat it too, which causes inflation. It sounds like your only acceptable solution to this is "so let us have our cake and eat it too, and we'll live with the inflation", which is what CoX had. You're entitled to that point of view, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. As long as we can both agree that Spider-Man, who is generally described as being "middle class" would be a billionaire today if he got money for every time he defeated Doc Ock. This system is not appealing to any sense of "immersion" but rather just catering to the average player's perceived greed.

Sounds awesome.

This. I loathe grinding. I struggled with it to get Incarnate stuff, and even then the vast majority was forced into existance by converting threads and purple awards and whatever into whatever else.

If I had to grind for a particular drop, or a particular raid for a particular purple, forget it.

I looted a grand total of 8 purples during my main's career. I bought 5 on the AH. I used none of what dropped, but sold 2 (kept the others in storage for other chars who never materialized.)

I love the idea of earning actual special drops from battles. I hate having to run 100 particular raids to do it.

I don't know a solution, but running raids from different groups of raids (e.g. incarnate) allowed fun variation.