New efforts!

[Super Firebug]

When CoX comes back, is it possible that we could get the expanded costume creator that's in Icon, with the pieces that were restricted to the devs' use? Or would it be like before in the game? I want a real construction-worker hardhat, but only the NPCs were allowed to have them. :/ And painting a military helmet yellow just looks silly.

[darkgob]

When CoX comes back, is it possible that we could get the expanded costume creator that's in Icon, with the pieces that were restricted to the devs' use? Or would it be like before in the game? I want a real construction-worker hardhat, but only the NPCs were allowed to have them. :/ And painting a military helmet yellow just looks silly.

If we get anything, it's an image of the Issue 23 server that was live at shutdown.

[Super Firebug]

At least my former-construction-worker-turned-earth-dom can hope. My private eye wants a cloth trenchcoat, because the leather one just plain looks wrong, but I don't think a cloth one exists in the game. And my cowboy would love some holsters and a gunbelt.

[Cailyn Alaynn]

At least my former-construction-worker-turned-earth-dom can hope. My private eye wants a cloth trenchcoat, because the leather one just plain looks wrong, but I don't think a cloth one exists in the game. And my cowboy would love some holsters and a gunbelt.

Trenchcoats... I have a love/hate relationship with the CoH trenchcoats...

[Vee]

At least my former-construction-worker-turned-earth-dom can hope. My private eye wants a cloth trenchcoat, because the leather one just plain looks wrong, but I don't think a cloth one exists in the game. And my cowboy would love some holsters and a gunbelt.

Are you trying to recreate the village people?

[JoshexProxy]

When CoX returns I'll have alot of work to do making characters and annoying world chat with often senseless humor spawned while on a good tank and remembering the icon for the perfect zinger, and the proc name chance for psionic damage.

it just brings out a foul taunts especially to AVs.

something makes me wonder if project bane will be necessary when CoX has returned. The whole purpose of project bane was to crash the MMO industry by releasing something loads better (I know, it's far from that at present), kinda out of spite for them shutting down our game.

I suspose because CoX will never get new content new Super Hero MMOs are necessary, but the more I work on it the more I realize how tough it's gonna be to match the level of quality/consistency CoX had content-wise.

Out of all the super hero universes I have ever heard of, CoX was both one of the most expansive hero and villain universes and managed to do the impossible; avoid retcons.

that's a huge achievement to tie together a whole universe without any plot or story inconsistencies. it's also one of the things I worry about for any successor project, mine included, it means every story practically needs to be thought out in advance to avoid retcons.

I remember back in the days now, when the first retcon I noticed ruined a series for me, it was when Metroid Prime was being made, at first I was like "ah, so someone dug up R1 & D2's Metroid 64 draft eh?" and they were like "nope we're doing a whole new thing between Metroid 1 and 2, and I was like

"Oh nice something to cover the 4 year gap, but it wont contain metroids cause samus already said she didn't encounter any metroids between 1 and 2, it'll probably be something like 'Samus Aran: Space Hunter' and we get to go to multiple planets and defeat space pirates and save people blah blah it'll be neat to see more of the metroid universe"

nope, flat out retcon. there are metroids in prime (though they look more like mocktroids to be truthful), and then they announced it'd be first person and I was like "nah they'll put in a 3rd person mode, I'll just switch to that." then I played it and I was like, lets see samus's signature acrobatics LEAP YOU GRACFUL.... wait thats only 3 feet why are you falling? oh.. they made you heavy and clunky like typical FPS games.."

Retcons aren't always just plot oriented sometimes they effect art, or even game play. no matter what though it never seems to have the same atmosphere as the originals.

[MM3squints]

Trenchcoats... I have a love/hate relationship with the CoH trenchcoats...

The only problem I had with trench coats was there wasn't an option to put an emblem on the back. That would have been nice.

[Brigadine]

Well, on to page 2000 lol

[Dev7on]

Happy 1,000th page of this thread!!!!!!  ;D

#Hypefornothing

[Power Gamer]

Hooray!  ;)

[MM3squints]

For some reason I was thinking about inflation in the game when people start farming. With the limited amount of sinks in CoX, is there a way to control inflation (going back to when the game was active and a Purple Apoc was going for 100 million+ inf) The only two sinks I know of for at least end game was the inf to prestige conversion and the % of commission from the AH. Since barley anyone uses the prestige conversion, couldn't we raise and lower the % of commission from the AH to try tamping down on inflation? Kind of the equivalent of  Fed Reserve raising interest rates to  tamp down on inflation, while lowering interest rates to encourage more free capital.

[Arcana]

For some reason I was thinking about inflation in the game when people start farming. With the limited amount of sinks in CoX, is there a way to control inflation (going back to when the game was active and a Purple Apoc was going for 100 million+ inf) The only two sinks I know of for at least end game was the inf to prestige conversion and the % of commission from the AH. Since barley anyone uses the prestige conversion, couldn't we raise and lower the % of commission from the AH to try tamping down on inflation? Kind of the equivalent of  Fed Reserve raising interest rates to  tamp down on inflation, while lowering interest rates to encourage more free capital.

Freedom seemed to be significantly reducing prices in many areas: I don't think it was around long enough to know what its ultimate impact on prices was going to be.

Its unclear what the impact of prestige conversion was because of the way the economy worked.  Influence tended to flow overall towards high end sellers (usually farmers of some kind), so there was some influence concentration at the top.  And those were also the "barely anyone" that was performing prestige conversion, that sink could have been destroying a lot of influence.

I'm also not sure the "barely anyone" was quite so small.  There were a small but not insignificant number of players with personal bases, and those players probably used prestige conversion.  Depending on base size and storage goals you could be looking at billions of inf per player per base converted to prestige.

There's also the fundamental thesis that prices were heavily inflation-driven.  I don't think that's been demonstrated: in many cases there's evidence that inflation was only a small factor in overall prices.  For example, in the case of the melee purples prices rose very fast from the 50 million mark to the 500 million mark and then largely leveled off.  Inflation can't explain that, because the money supply didn't remotely follow that curve.  In those cases, it seems psychology was driving prices: they went up based on players' willingness to pay more over time.  That willingness grew fast, so prices grew fast.  But if that price increase was inflation-driven, we should have seen those prices continue to increase past 500 million to a billion inf and more.

Probably more demonstrative were prices of mid-range IOs like Numinas.  Those also rose quickly from the launch of I9 into the 30-50 million mark, and then generally hovered in that area from that point on.  There appeared to be no inflation pressure to increase the price of those much beyond 100 million except for short spikes.

The problem with trying to use influence-sinks to bring down the prices of the most desirable stuff is that because it is so desirable its not enough to reduce the average amount of influence in the system: you have to reduce the total number of players with sizeable influence amounts.  And the problem is that those are the hardest players to drain influence from.  I had several hundred million influence at the release of I9, with no farming, obviously no marketeering; just (a lot of) play.  Compared to 99% of players I was ginormously rich.  Compared to the actual 1% at the time though, I was a pauper: players already had billions and even tens of billions of inf - at a time when there was literally nothing to spend it on.  Those players already had the means to bid up purples into the hundreds of millions long before they had the ability to *really* earn influence.  I don't see how you could add enough influence sinks into the game to unwind the influence clock back to literally Issue 8, and even if you could I don't know how you could do that in a way that didn't disproportionately bankrupt the less than rich at the same time or place them at severe disadvantages.

Its not the absolute price that really mattered: it was the disparity between the richest bidders and everyone else.  Suppose I wave a magic wand and divide everyone's influence totals by 100.  Even with that enormous reduction in influence, you'd *still* have players with billions of inf able to bid hundreds of millions on stuff.  But even the stuff that reduced in price to the millions of inf would be too expensive for the average player, because their tens of millions of inf would now be hundreds of thousands.  The real problem is this: if you are a player that has 100 million inf and you believe that purples should only cost tens of millions so you can buy them, how do you suck out the tens of trillions of inf that everyone richer than you has, without actually reducing your own stockpile? 

To put it very bluntly, how do you make everyone ahead of you lose, so you can win?

[Arcana]

every story practically needs to be thought out in advance to avoid retcons

Probably the most disappointing moment in every writer's life, when they realize hands don't arrange words properly without brains.

Every writer except Dan Brown, of course.

[Vee]

For some reason I was thinking about inflation in the game when people start farming. With the limited amount of sinks in CoX, is there a way to control inflation (going back to when the game was active and a Purple Apoc was going for 100 million+ inf) The only two sinks I know of for at least end game was the inf to prestige conversion and the % of commission from the AH. Since barley anyone uses the prestige conversion, couldn't we raise and lower the % of commission from the AH to try tamping down on inflation? Kind of the equivalent of  Fed Reserve raising interest rates to  tamp down on inflation, while lowering interest rates to encourage more free capital.

Don't worry too much about inflation. Between enhancement converters and everyone's altitis (which as far as i can tell has only been intensified by the shutdown) there shouldn't be any purples or premium enhancements on the market at all for a good long while.

Oh, and as to the prestige sink. I had 5 fully functioning (i.e. a dozen or more storage bins and all teleporters) solo bases on various servers/sides and never dropped an inf on prestige. Just leaving sg mode on and altitis was plenty. Then again I wasn't one for decorating. I imagine it was the hardcore base builders who were converting prestige, along with the people who just wanted to destroy inf.

[Artillerie]

A thousand pages of kickin' bass and takin' names.
Also, page 1000! Woot!

In honor of this most joyous occasion...
I will take this opportunity to announce a special, exclusive piece of information regarding Revival.

Revival...may, or may not... have potentially maybe possibly something related to having fun in the game. I can't confirm it at this time... but the ability to have fun may potentially be in the game.
;D

Sounds intriguing, i will look forward to more news about this - if things go well.

[Felderburg]

If the game comes back in maintenance mode, won't inflation sort of not matter, since everyone will eventually get the "best" stuff anyways? Since there won't be updates to create sinks or better stuff to get?

Aaaand now I have the chorus from Tom Petty's "The Waiting (Is The Hardest Part)" stuck in my head.

Aaaand now I have the chorus from Tom Petty's "The Waiting (Is The Hardest Part)" stuck in my head.

[Arcana]

couldn't we raise and lower the % of commission from the AH to try tamping down on inflation?

If the commission costs of the exchanges become too high, they become higher than the convenience of using them and players will just go off-market to sell high priced stuff.  The same thing happened for different reasons with the PvPIOs due to the fact they were valued more than the 2 billion inf cap.

In economic terms the commission from the exchanges are a form of economic friction, which would tend to reduce the number of transactions.  Increasing them pay increase the amount of inf destroyed, but if we are analogizing to real economies it can also reduce the amount of inf destroyed by reducing the number of sales.  Its difficult to state with certainty which way things would go.

Also, consider a thought experiment.  Suppose we decide that the price of Lamborghinis is too high and we want to bring that down.  Is it possible to do so by reducing the money supply in the economy?  Not really: you could cause wholesale macroeconomic chaos if you reduced the money supply enough, but Lamborghinis would still cost a lot and average people still wouldn't be able to afford them.  Why is that?

It has to do wit the fact that only so many Lamborghini's are made every year, and rich people have more relative purchasing power and thus are in a better position to buy them.  Nothing you do on a macro scale will ever make Lamborghinis inexpensive enough for less well-off people to buy them.  You won't have a Lambo in every garage.

On the subject of cars, at the turn of the century the average price of a car was something like a couple thousand dollars.  Extremely cheap in modern dollars, but hugely expensive in circa 1900 dollars.  In absolute terms inflation has increased the price of a car almost ten-fold.  And yet, a $2000 car in 1900 was a very expensive proposition.  A $15000 car today is an economy car.  Inflation didn't just make the price of a car higher, it also made the price of everything else higher, and it made the money earned from making those things higher, and it increased wages as a consequence.  When you tinker with economies, even game economies, its important to note that almost every change you make is likely to have some negative side effect affecting players.  Decrease the price of things by some arbitrary mechanism and they become more affordable, but you also reduce the amount that players can make selling those same things.  To make the change you want, you generally have to tug on many different strings simultaneously to nudge things in the right direction.

I think if someone really wants to study how to engineer a better in-game economy for the long term, the thing to study very carefully is salvage drops.  In City of Heroes, low level uncommon and rare salvage drops were extremely valuable to all players, but particularly higher level players.  Low level players could not make as good use of them.  This created a situation where low level players could sell drops that were relatively easy for them to get for very good returns, and then spend that money on things like enhancements and inventions which high level players dropped like rubbish for nothing.  High level players still made more influence overall, but there was an economic mechanism that valued low level play in such a way that they got disproportionately large benefits from the system without actually earning *more* stuff.  Just stuff that other players found valuable.

A healthy economy generally works that way, with most participants contributing valuable things to it and extracting valuable things from it.  Expanding the system in careful ways that increase these cycles benefits everyone.  You still might have expensive purples, but you might create more paths to earning them within the economic system that are achievable.

[Arcana]

If the game comes back in maintenance mode, won't inflation sort of not matter, since everyone will eventually get the "best" stuff anyways? Since there won't be updates to create sinks or better stuff to get?

I think this is all hypothetical myself.  I think the bigger problem will be absolute supply of stuff.  There just won't be enough players for the system as it was designed to make enough stuff.  Think red side, only smaller.

[MM3squints]

Freedom seemed to be significantly reducing prices in many areas: I don't think it was around long enough to know what its ultimate impact on prices was going to be.

Its unclear what the impact of prestige conversion was because of the way the economy worked.  Influence tended to flow overall towards high end sellers (usually farmers of some kind), so there was some influence concentration at the top.  And those were also the "barely anyone" that was performing prestige conversion, that sink could have been destroying a lot of influence.

I'm also not sure the "barely anyone" was quite so small.  There were a small but not insignificant number of players with personal bases, and those players probably used prestige conversion.  Depending on base size and storage goals you could be looking at billions of inf per player per base converted to prestige.

As Vee stated I had several bases in which I turned on into a City as a SG base. I thought the gains from blowing inf for the prestige was not a good conversion (even when I considered inf pretty much worthless with the amount I had) and just went into the market for any purples I needed at the moment if I didn't have enough Hero/Villian tokens.

There's also the fundamental thesis that prices were heavily inflation-driven.  I don't think that's been demonstrated: in many cases there's evidence that inflation was only a small factor in overall prices.  For example, in the case of the melee purples prices rose very fast from the 50 million mark to the 500 million mark and then largely leveled off.  Inflation can't explain that, because the money supply didn't remotely follow that curve.  In those cases, it seems psychology was driving prices: they went up based on players' willingness to pay more over time.  That willingness grew fast, so prices grew fast.  But if that price increase was inflation-driven, we should have seen those prices continue to increase past 500 million to a billion inf and more.
Probably more demonstrative were prices of mid-range IOs like Numinas.  Those also rose quickly from the launch of I9 into the 30-50 million mark, and then generally hovered in that area from that point on.  There appeared to be no inflation pressure to increase the price of those much beyond 100 million except for short spikes.

I think that was around the time Hero/Villian Merit came into effect. Besides the other merit to get the Miracles, LoTG, etc, now you have a new avenue to get the rare IOs. You really didn't need to market to get purples (or PvP IOs) unless you just wanted to blow inf (and at time, a farmer would have accumulated so much any price would be trivial, but to a casual player that didn't farm as hard, that would suck)

Also as a farmer I can contest to this, the large fluxuation in prices is due to farmers gambling by knowing how the system works. The market system will sell the IO to whoever has the highest set price and I would check of how many is available. So If people see an IO last bid was 100 million and there is 0-1 in stock, they are more inclined to try paying 100 million or higher for that bid. With this knowledge, I would be foolish to set the IO to 100 million because you are getting taxed for putting it up, then taxed again when getting the profits. Based on this simple analysis, I would set the price at only 50 inf forgoing the first tax and 99% time getting the asking last price or even more. Dose this always work? Nope, but 99% of the time it did. (99% is a made up statistics let's just say I only got burned 3x when doing these exchanges and I made hundreds of transactions like this) When you see a certain dip in prices then level it out, more than likely people were passively doing what I did and whoever was the highest bidder set the trend for the next price. It ends up costing more to the farmer to try and fix the prices even with scared quantities. This is because you can't just do it for one time, you need to have 8 or so IOs and set the price you want in order to make the history of the price you set. Getting 8 of the same IOs is time consuming enough, then paying the initial tax of setting the price makes it more costly.

The problem with trying to use influence-sinks to bring down the prices of the most desirable stuff is that because it is so desirable its not enough to reduce the average amount of influence in the system: you have to reduce the total number of players with sizeable influence amounts.  And the problem is that those are the hardest players to drain influence from.  I had several hundred million influence at the release of I9, with no farming, obviously no marketeering; just (a lot of) play.  Compared to 99% of players I was ginormously rich.  Compared to the actual 1% at the time though, I was a pauper: players already had billions and even tens of billions of inf - at a time when there was literally nothing to spend it on.  Those players already had the means to bid up purples into the hundreds of millions long before they had the ability to *really* earn influence.  I don't see how you could add enough influence sinks into the game to unwind the influence clock back to literally Issue 8, and even if you could I don't know how you could do that in a way that didn't disproportionately bankrupt the less than rich at the same time or place them at severe disadvantages.

Its not the absolute price that really mattered: it was the disparity between the richest bidders and everyone else.  Suppose I wave a magic wand and divide everyone's influence totals by 100.  Even with that enormous reduction in influence, you'd *still* have players with billions of inf able to bid hundreds of millions on stuff.  But even the stuff that reduced in price to the millions of inf would be too expensive for the average player, because their tens of millions of inf would now be hundreds of thousands.  The real problem is this: if you are a player that has 100 million inf and you believe that purples should only cost tens of millions so you can buy them, how do you suck out the tens of trillions of inf that everyone richer than you has, without actually reducing your own stockpile? 

To put it very bluntly, how do you make everyone ahead of you lose, so you can win?

This is actually interesting because this reminds me of a debate that was between Milton Freidman and a student. The student posed a question asked how can one who doesn't have as much wealth as someone gain to same status as who has more and started with more, the person with more wealth will always has an advantage over the one that didn't have as much wealth (well the guy that was asking had more a pretentious tone.) Long conversation short, Dr. Freidman said:

"There is no justice in the redistribution of income wealth, and I would never argue there is. Those who are wealthy don't deserve to be wealthy as any more than those who are poor deserve to be poor. It's pure accident (this with the student saying being born into a rich or poor family is like a lottery) but if you start to look at things that way, you will go down the wrong line, because you will get back in this kind of situation of destroying the good things. Destroying what is possible, in search of an impossible idea. The only way you can effectively redistribute the wealth is destroying the incentive of having wealth."

This was actually achieved pretty well in CoX. What was the incentive of farming? (at least for me) To gain IOs. Before the merits system what were the avenues of getting Purple IOs? RNG and the market. Because of this, Purple IO were pretty limited except those who farmed a lot. After the merits system, there was a new way to get IOs. After the Hero/Villain Merit there was another way to get purples and other IOs, it almost became a non-issue. This unfortunately did leave a lot of inf on in the bank, and pretty have the side effect of inflating market prices for not just IOs, but mats (100k for Lucky Charms O.o)

Interestingly enough CoX did accomplish what Dr. Frieldman did set out to achieve in terms of the game's scope. The market itself is unregulated and free (with a commission price) If someone wanted to corner the market, they can, but at the end (I knew several people who tried and failed) the cost of trying to corner the market ended costing more and just strait selling it. There are alternative means to get the incentives you needed. Maybe the initial proposal about controlling inflation was just one part of the statement. I probably should have wrote, put in some justification to make inf somewhat more valuable that the current state it was when the game closed.

[Eskreema]

Only ten times this many pages to get the zoo keeper bage but with Rikti monkeys on typewriters