Arguably the most pronounced affect was on the market. Things that were deemed "desirable" cost billions of influence, more than a non-farmer could ever hope to earn unless they were extraordinarily lucky and happened to get a desirable drop that they could sell. Unfortunately, that was extremely rare.
A couple of points. First, its true that without farming you wouldn't have seen the same amount of multi-billion inf purchases on the markets. But that doesn't mean all would be peachy for the non-farmers: they would have just been disadvantaged by a completely separate group of players: the extremely long-term high volume players. When Issue 9 released, I had about 480 million inf on my main alone. That's literally a zero-farming influence base, and what's more I gave a lot of inf away because back then I had nothing to spend it on. There's literally no way more casual non-farmers would have had any shot at the expensive stuff, its just that instead of being outbid by billions, they would have just been outbid by tens of millions by players like me who simply accumulated influence at a vastly higher rate through sheer gameplay.
Second, even if they got lucky and got purple drops, they *still* wouldn't gain a significant advantage over me because they wouldn't get billions for that drop. Remember without farming you wouldn't have the same amount of influence sloshing around: when you lower the price of items to make them cheaper to buy, you automatically make them less profitable to sell. That's automatic. So that lucky purple drop would only help about the same amount it actually did anyway.
Its important to realize that it doesn't matter by how much you get outbid, only if you get outbid. If things are selling for 500 million inf and you only have five, you're not going to get it. But if the prices dropped down to 25 million, you're still not going to get it. And if the prices come down because you nullify the strategies for earning high amounts of influence, then that 25 million gets a lot farther away because you won't get there by selling.
When we're talking about "billions" of inf, the only things that ever cost that amount really were the PvP mitigation IOs, and casual non-farmers were never going to get them unless a friend gave them one, period. No change to the economy short of selling them like inspirations was going to change that because they were simply too rare and too valuable: only those who farmed them and those with the highest buying power - no matter what that was - would be able to get them. Most of the rest of the purples were in the tens of millions to hundreds of millions of inf and that's where eliminating farming would lower the amount of influence chasing items, lowering their costs. But that would also mean players who did get lucky drops would have been getting less influence for them, not only reducing their ability to bid for those high end items commensurately but also reducing their ability to bid for anything at all.
As it was, the imperfect system we had did create a huge gap between the haves and the have-nots, but it also made the have-nots able to be have-mosts. They couldn't buy the absolute best stuff, but they were never going to be able to. They were, however, able to buy pretty good stuff because so much of the drops they did get sold for far higher prices than you'd otherwise expect. This made SOs instantly go from difficult to get to trivial to get. It eliminated the problem of common IO pricing, which you might remember was a significant theoretical problem in I9 beta. And it meant that a large amount of set IOs which were deemed "not worth it" by the power players became easy to get for everyone else, meaning set IOs became open to everyone and not just the rich - many set IOs were even cheaper than common IOs and were yet more powerful.
I believe that the system as a whole was a rising tide that lifted all boats. Sure, some players were cruising in mega-yachts with helicopter pads and others were just in that boat from Jaws, but the sheer mass of stuff raining down on players, even the most casual ones, was part of what made CoH's power levels so inviting to newer players. Compared to the richest players, they were ants. But compared to the standard content, they were giants. That's not an experience you can get in any other comparable MMO, and I'm not sure you can be certain that eliminating farming in its entirety wouldn't have had unintended consequences that were bad for the very people it disadvantaged. What we all know for certain is what the power available to casuals was like in I8 before the invention system and the markets, and what it was like in I10 after the markets had become firmly established, and it was night and day. Some of that was the actual creation of the inventions themselves. But a lot of it was due to the ability for players to participate in that system, because it wasn't monopolized by the very rich. The very highest levels of it were (things like Numinas at first, purple offense later), but not the vast majority of it.
In the same way the devs themselves didn't set out to make the game we eventually got, and much of what we eventually came to love was a happy accident, I'm not saying the farmers set out to help the world with their farming. But I believe there was an unintended consequence of the high levels of influence sloshing around and that was that it didn't just trickle, but poured down on players through selling almost anything on the markets. At one time, a million inf was a lot of money. After I9, even a casual player could get that in a day or two if they participated in the markets. And I think a large part of that was the fact there was just so much influence chasing stuff in the invention system. Much of that came from farming.
For all of its bad influences on the game and its player culture, I believe its one good side effect might have been a really big one, and almost a definitive one for the game. The devs made their first huge "mistake" in creating a system where players could amass ridiculous amounts of power in theory - what any other MMO team would consider game breaking. The invention system, the markets, and the huge amounts of influence the devs allowed players to earn indirectly unlocked a lot of that power for the masses. What we think of when we think of the casual-friendly nature of CoH comes in large part from the game post-I9, when we were no longer chasing power 10 SOs and even the player that joined last week could ask how he could soft-cap his invuln scrapper and there was a way to get most of the way there with just a few weeks work. In a hypothetical game in which farming is somehow eliminated, I'm not convinced that would have still happened to anywhere near the same degree.
None of this excuses poor conduct on the part of farmers or anyone else. Its just my take on the macro-economic large scale effects of farming on the game as a whole.
