Infamous Influence

[dvandom]

Every so often, someone complains about high auction house prices (i.e. 60K for a common salvage). Goldfarmers are brought up. Someone else tsks, pointing out it's wrong to simply blame the influence sellers when there's other reasons for high prices (like supply being lowered by more players being in AE where there's no drops, then coming out of

Comments

[redcomet7]

Price control leads to higher prices and less supply. Look at what when Nixon put in price control, USSR, and recently what happen when Chavez put in price control in his nation.

[dvandom]

Other than the auction house, we have price control. I don't see the stores running out of SOs.

[redcomet7]

I was talking about WW/BM not the stores.

[redcomet7]

And I got almost 1.5 billion INF and about .5 billion IMF just working the markets without buying from the goldfarmers. And there are folks on the main boards that explain how to do it. It's not hard to do.

[redcomet7]

I had guildmates that were sitting on the limit on money to have before the markets were brought in game. And now they are sitting on the new limit on four toons now. That where alot of the cash is coming from. Check the main boards for info on this.

[syrusb]

I am still reading your post, but I do have to point out something.

Before the markets, I never had any real trouble outfitting lvl 50s on any high level toon, save one who spent their entire life in SG mode and handing out spare inf whenever they could to the less fortunate SG members. This was before the change to INF earning in SG mode.

Ahh the days when you were forced to respec to afford new SOs. :]

But yeah, once you got to 35ish, barring starving yourself in SG mode, buying SOs was pretty trivial.

Unless you were a costume addict.

[syrusb]

I will fully agree that goldfarmers are a problem, and how nice it would be to get the outta the game forever. I imagine by now if they did go permanently poof we'd still be looking at a game with an inflated economy.

But they're not the only ones creating inflation. And there are plenty of players out there with vast stores of wealth that didn't get it by buying INF with cash. As linenoise pointed out to me the other day, this game doesn't really have any money sinks that regularly pull INF out of the system

[quasadu]

And it's worth emphasizing that it has been building up for six years without any meaningful sinks. It didn't just appear when inventions and the markets showed up, it was only that it took those things to give us something to spend our inf on. By that time we had already been generating influence for three years and infamy for over a year and a half, with nothing to spend it on. There was already a LOT of money out there. And that same money is still in the system, along with the other money that's been generated in the following 3 years.

There's a shitload of money out there and until they give us some meaningful sinks, it's not going anywhere and only gets added to. It doesn't take RMT to do that. Yes, I don't think they help. No, I don't think they are the root of the problem.

[redcomet7]

Do not forgot you can use the AE tickets to get salvage and IO recipes that will sell in WW/BM for funds. I think you forgot about that too.

[saintnicster]

As someone who has been here since launch+1 month, I'm gonna call bull on the "scrimping and saving to afford DOs at 50".

[derekl1963]

Even though I'm just past my three year mark, I have to agree. His whole argument falls apart because he doesn't realize just how much money was sloshing around the game *before* the auction houses came in.

He also fails to account for player farming - of which there was and is an an awful lot of.

[patrickat]

Ditto. The turning point "back in the day" where a Hero went having to eat Top Ramen to dining on caviar happened somewhere in the upper Level 30s. I remember having no trouble slotting full sets of Level 40, 45, and 50 SOs at the earliest possible level.

[crossfire]

I gotta agree. With careful planning, I could slot out my toons with DOs fairly soon after they could use them, and the same with SOs. I haven't tried since the market opened so I don't know if it's still possible, but I used to do it regularly.

[veazey21]

You get money every time you defeat an enemy (that grants xp). You only get something worth money (enhancements, salvage, recipes, or inspirations) some of the time when you defeat an enemy. Thus inflation, because there's always more money than there is things to buy with that money.
It has nothing to do with gold farmers, specifically, though they have exacerbated the problem, but with the fundamental nature of the system.