I was referring to the overall total amounts of influence entering the market was obscene. I recall getting 5-6 million influence in a span of a few minutes in an 8 man team. When you had dozens of teams doing this you had way to much influence entering the market all at once. People were buying things at whatever price they saw cause they could "just get more influence". But I still saw people farm AE specifically for the influence/experience rates they provided, cause it also let them get tons and tons more prestige. And it was still far faster in my experience than the normal farms(in the few moments I did anyhow).
I'm not sure what "too much" means. But what I can say objectively is that before I9 the vast majority of players were poor: relative to the cost of living (i.e. buying a reasonable set of level-appropriate SOs) they had far less influence than they need to achieve that goal. After I9, the average player was or could trivially become rich: relative to the cost of the basics, it was easy to purchase all of those things and then some. And the reason was both a longer ladder of commodities and a higher amount of influence in circulation.
Its important to realize that every single sale was a transfer of influence from one player to another. And most sales of extremely high value were from players with lots of influence to players with less influence. While its true that a few things became very expensive, the vast majority of things became cheap relative to the amount of influence in circulation.
Influence farmers did only three things with their influence. They destroyed it (like by converting it into prestige). This had no effect on the economy. They kept it. Sequestration also had no impact on the economy. Or they spent it, and every time they spent it they were transferring that influence to other players. If it could be demonstrated that the players benefiting from those transfers were an elite minority, then that would be bad. But all evidence was that it was everyone that benefited.
What's more, as I keep repeating, there's absolutely no evidence that runaway inflation was occurring on the markets. In fact price were relatively stable in the aggregate after the first year or so of the market. Individual items would come in vogue and go out of vogue, causing prices to rise then fall, but for the most part what you paid for a Numina's in I11 was what you paid in I16. So as influence spread throughout the player population, the net effect was for effective prices to drop - there were many instances of normalized
deflation in the game. Consider Crushing Impacts. At one time, they were worthless. Then they became the in-vogue thing to use for various builds (because of the recharge set bonus) and their prices skyrocketed, from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions per piece. Then that wave passed and they dropped in price into the single digit millions. All evidence shows their prices were affected almost solely by supply/demand pressures, and not by influence supply-driven inflation.
But more significantly and to my point is the fact that when they stabilized in the mid millions, that would still mean that getting a few sets would cost in the tens of millions of inf. That's a level of inf that pre-I9 only the richest 1% of players were likely to have. But in I17, say? That level of influence was considered trivial for any player to reasonably get through basic, simple market activities (i.e. just sell stuff you get as drops). That situation simply doesn't occur without strong liquidity in the markets, and that strong liquidity was buoyed in large part by players with lots of influence, however they got it.
In a world where everyone only makes influence and has to buy everything, the few players making a lot of influence hurt everyone else by making everything cost more. But in a world where everyone is also a
producer of items, the equation changes. In simple economic terms, when you're a buyer you don't want rich people increasing prices. When you're a seller, you do. When you're both a buyer and a seller, the rich people help you when you're selling more than you're buying, and hurt you when you're buying more than selling. This means, in net effect, rich players tend to help the poor through their activities, and only start to hurt them when they become rich enough to compete with the rich players for the most expensive stuff.
Its not as simple as eliminating influence farmers would make everything cheaper.
