The supply of influence being so insane was the core reason I was highly opposed to AE farming, because I knew that it tended to send a very disproportionate amount of influence into the market. Power leveling from it was one thing as one could stop at 50 but all the 50s doing it see were gaining hundreds of millions of influence in far far less time than anywhere else.
Now, this was something that never made sense to me about AE missions. Inf -- influence, infamy, or information -- was abstracted as your ability to get other people to do things for you because of your reputation. Out of respect for your service to the city, for influence; out of fear of what you might do to them, for infamy; in response to the leverage it could be used for, for information. But all of these represent how the
other people viewed your character. AE missions happen entirely in a virtual world; none of the events that occur in an AE mission affect the 'real world'. Completing a mission inside AE gives you practice in the use of your powers, and would thereby gain you experience. But if a new hero went into the AE building at level 1 and did nothing but AE missions, when they came out to get enhancements, nobody would know who he was; as far as they were concerned, he'd never done
anything to protect Paragon City -- in the 'real world', he wouldn't have any influence, because he hadn't
done anything in the 'real world'. It doesn't matter how many times you crawled into your electronic navel and soloed Emperor Cole, or Reichsman, or U'kon G'rai; none of that was
real. Tickets, sure; that's the AE system's internal reward system to encourage you to participate. But gaining any sort of reputation from defeating virtual ghosts? Not a chance. Level from 1 to 50 inside AE, and you come out and try to play on your reputation, and people are going to ask who you are; they would never have heard of you, except perhaps in a news story about the victims of AE addiction.
AE missions should give you XP and tickets; if you want to earn inf, you should have to go out in the 'real world' and do things that other people can
see you doing to build your reputation.