Fulmens

This is brilliant. We might want to name them "Ex-millionaire" and so forth.
I would add the "Inf Cap" badge (comes with a costume part!)

All it costs is 2 billion influence.

Optionally, adding a badge ("SG benefactor") for converting ... I don't know, 10 million inf into prestige? Back in issue 8, I could generate 10 million surplus playing the SO game to 50. It's hard to argue that it's an intolerable amount of inf to create.

I don't know how much screaming there would be from the badgers, though. Probably quite a lot. . . although farming enough badguys to get other badges creates large sums of inf ANYWAY. Is there still a badge for farming two billion inf? The wiki says "yes", but I don't know if that was one of the ones they lowered.

I don't know if a lot of people are storing their cash this way- 0.1 % sounds right- but people tend to store cash by the billion that way. I don't bother putting up a level 53 bid for less than about 500 million. Doesn't come up THAT often, but I do run a Fake Money Transaction business exchanging currency, influence for infamy, and my clients tend to want to move inf by the billion. Sometimes the billions all end up on the same side and the same server.

Here's the thing: There are people out there with ten or twenty or fifty billion inf each. Top .1% would make it a hundred of them or so. It's kind of a power series- the top 1000 players (1%) have a billion each, the top 100 have ten billion each, and the top 10 have 100 billion each. I don't know how high the stack goes, but I moved (over a few weeks, as people moved money back and freed up my working fluid) around six billion from someone and he said he had fifty billion heroside. I see no reason to doubt him. People have posted their 20-billion-inf screenshots.

So let's make up some numbers. There are 10 people with 100 billion and 100 people with 10 billion. Half of that is stored in billion or 2-billion inf bids. That's a trillion inf. Let's say the devs get rid of the level 51-53 bids and let's say that 80% of the people get their money back. 20% despair or don't bother or don't notice or whatever.

You're getting rid of 200 billion influence, bam. And now people can't "safely" store their 2-billion-inf amounts. They can bet on weird stuff, like level 48 Intangibility DO's. But what they're probably going to do is buy and sell more stuff. So maybe half of 1.8 trillion is now sloshing around the system, losing 10% here and there as it goes.

(Interestingly, that power series puts the total inf in the system at around 3 or 4 trillion, which is roughly where it stood in I9. I may have to up my numbers of gazillionaires.)

Pretty soon you've got a lot less stored cash. Prices in the short term go up... I wonder if people will invest in tangibles, like respec recipes?

EDIT TO MAKE MY ORIGINAL POINT:

... I think that Going Rogue will only have a way to destroy inf if they can make people think it's cool or fun. The Devs seem to only care about the economy in terms of "can people get the stuff they want?" which is part of the global goal, "Only frustrate people with intentionally hard content." I think they maybe had TOO many giveaways in general, but I'm old and cranky.

I may have sensed hostility where none was intended, and responded with hostility. Let me rephrase.

Your argument seems to work like this:

There are two types of people: those who sometimes have problems on heroic, and those who beat +4/+8 settings. Obviously there aren't very many people who beat +4/+8, so their experiences are not relevant to the vast majority of people. Clearly, all your opponents are max-difficulty-beaters so you don't actually have to refute their arguments.

The problem here is that we ARE talking about how difficult the game, and certain enemies within it, are. I don't know, and I am pretty sure you don't know either, how good the "middle of the bell curve" players are. I think that high level content should be challenging in some way; the introduction of radio missions which let you skate by on Council and Thorns annoyed (and annoys) me. Do I think some of the mez is over the top? I do. Do I think the solution is to trivialize 80% of the mez in the game? I do not.

Issue 9: I buy an Alchemical Silver for 30K. One week later, an alchemical silver drops from a mob and I sell it for 30K.

Issue 14: I buy an Alchemical silver for 55K. One week later, an alchemical silver drops from a mob and I sell it for 55K.

I don't see the problem here.

( It was, in fact, IMPOSSIBLE to sell a single alchemical silver for 30K at Wents in issue 14, if I recall; the flippers set the buy line at 40K or something like that. )

I'm happy to buy alchemical silvers at 55K, just as happy as I am to sell them at 55K. If it's 30K tomorrow, I'll do that too.

I can STILL outfit a level 33 character for under ten million inf, with IO's that are good from now till the servers go down, and nearly Hami-O levels of goodness.

I can STILL make that ten million by level 33, playing normally and slotting SO's just like I used to.

Let me back that statement up a little bit... I can still have the money for my first set of SO's five or ten levels before I need it, instead of five levels afterwards.

This is pretty much the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where the hens lay soft-boiled eggs and so forth.

Buy a turkey the size of Tiny Tim, of course.

It's been a while since I played with an average team, I guess. The top end of team performance that I have personally experienced was a 2-minute Dominatrix on one regular team, and several 60-second AV's on another regular team.

I've seen a three person team drop a +2 freak tank in four seconds from the time it got back up. I don't know if that's fast or not. So that's kind of high-end performance.

I'm trying to think of "normal" perfomance. I've been on PuGs in the last 6 months that failed an STF and that failed an ITF (that one was just a perfect storm of people leaving, mostly melee left, and killing Rommy with the healer Nictus out of rez range.) I don't know how fast you solo, but even those teams went through normal enemies PDQ.
May not be"pure PUG" because it's usually me and the Amazon, so that's 2 out of 8 high-end players at least.

Good thing you don't have to, huh?

There are two disagreements I have with your statements.

1) " You could always end up with an Edict of the Master." Anecdote is not proof, but when my last character hit 33, I had 250-300 merits and rolled 'em. I got three very, very good recipes (two LoTG,one Numina) which I turned into a quarter billion inf. They really HAVE weighted the drop tables. I understand that 240 merits into 1 recipe gives you exactly what you want, at the level you want it, as if there were no market; however, I think that 240 merits into 12 recipes provides BOTH more good things for other people AND more good things for you- whether that be "more things you can use" or "more things you can trade for things you can use."

2) There is a considerable difference between using inf for long-term wealth storage and using inf as an intermediate step in short-term trading. If, say, you got nine things you didn't want, that nobody wants, you could turn them into inf and then buy something tangible to store in your base- or could buy something tangible to slot on your character. If, on the other hand, you have some issue with the actual act of buying and selling, that should be the basis of your argument.