Farming killing the RMT'ers?

I'm not going to sit here arguing with someone who is so dug in that they defy logic and common sense with such tripe. I've already posted the simple provable ways in which farming hurts the game, as if it's not obvious enough to anyone with half a brain that on every conceptual level, it's not a good idea to have people exploiting your game--any game--in such a manner.

I'm not going to act like no one should ever farm at all. Everyone does it at least a little in every MMORPG, getting a little extra "oomph" to get to that next level or to rack up the currency to acquire the next cool widget, and to some extent, that's not a bad thing. But everyone knows--yes, you too--that those who take it to excess make the game less fun for everyone else. In City of Heroes, this manifests itself in ways such as farming spam, RMT spam, grossly imbalanced PvP, inflated market prices, and deteriorated image of the game and its community. It's not a question of whether or not excessive farming is good or bad for the game.

It's bad, period. Repeatedly explaining how and why is like repeatedly explaining why shooting yourself in the head is bad for your health, it's that obvious. Yes, there are nuts out there who will swear up and down that there was once a guy who had such bad migraines that he tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head, but he lived, and the bullet took out the part of his brain that was causing the migraines, and he lived happily ever after. You're worse than one of those nuts, because in the analogy, you're actually using such crap to justify why shooting yourself in the head is actually really good for your health.

The developers know it's bad as well, which is why they have repeatedly taken steps to curb farming activities over the years. This is the part where you'll deny that they've done anything, as most farmers I run across insist that the devs either don't care about farming or actually encourage it, in spite of so much evidence to the contrary that it makes such claims look foolish. Or maybe you'll scream about how these steps have all spelled DOOOOM!!! for the game, in spite of it going stronger than ever more than five years later.

The only real questions are how far people like you are willing to go, how much you're willing to exploit the game, how crazy the stuff you say is, to justify the selfishness of farming excessively, no matter how much it hurts the game or its players, and what the developers will do to curb your farming activities.

I have a hard time believing that you'll still be around in a year or two as the developers continue to curb farming. I have a hard time believing that you've ever actually studied economics, or for that matter, given it more than a few second's worth of thought. I have a hard time believing that you actually think you're helping the City of Heroes community with a "yay, it's a farming game!" philosophy.

Oh, so you want to compare transcripts? I have formal higher education in economics (micro- and macro-), a minor degree in business (computer science was my degree major), and received a 4.0 grade point average in all of my business classes. Funny thing, I also have formal higher eduction in nuclear physics. But I digress; the point is that I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about. What have you got, other than a proven willingness to talk out of your *** to justify selfish practices so that you can continue maxing out your uber-leet characters? If you want to argue about sports, art, or literature, then maybe you'll catch me out of my element and win.

As it is, though, I tire of this thread. The question has been answered repeatedly, and non-farmers (which is most players) know that it's correct. No, farming is not killing the RMTers, it is helping them. As farming increases, in-game inflation increases, thus there is increased pressure on non-farmers (which is most players) to seek other sources of influence, which drops them right in the hands of RMTers. As supply of influence is increased and more efficient means of farming are developed, it lowers the cost for RMTers to acquire the influence they sell, thus lowering the prices on their sites. These two factors mean that the more people farm, the more wonderful RMT spam we can count on getting, barring the developers clamping down on it more, which they have demonstrated a willingness to do in the past.

By all means, please do continue arguing with other people who will indulge your farming delusions.

I'll leave the farmer to TonyV, but I will say that I'm not starving other players of drops they might be able to use. I'm giving them to other players who will use them. They just happen to be my SGmates, not strangers.

'Other players' wasn't an accurate statement- I apologize.

Starving the market is what I should have said.

Hoarding was a large part of the pre-MA red side market travails.

While hoarding and trading with your SG mates is great for your SG & friends, it delivers no benefit to the community at large.

I'm sorry you're so threatened by logic and reality.

You haven't answered any of my questions in this thread.

But the old "I've already explained why I'm right, so bug off!" tactic is a beloved one among people with no real argument to make.

I'll condense my curiosity into a single question:

How does a demographic (farmers) who's existence is predicated on generating surplus supply and listing it on the market for influence decrease supply and increase price?

Just answer that question in a way that can withstand logical scrutiny and I'll personally deliver a gilt-edged apology on 80lb hand laid paper to your SG base.

One question to answer.
Your response (or lack thereof) will make the quality of your logic apparent to all.

It's "economists" like you that are screwing our real life economy all to hell. KNOCK IT OFF!!

No. I just wanna hit 50,000 posts before the end of the year.
Get with the program.

It isn't?

Padding your post count???!!! Gasp, who would ever do that????

Mind reader

is right!

Farmers produce far more than they consume, which gives them a disproportionate impact on the market.

If I16 lures them back out of MA as I expect purple prices will drop again.

Most farmers are level 50. Playing on your level 50, and killing lots of enemies, also produces a disproportionate amount of Inf relative to other characters.

Ahh, but producers of what?

This thread is full of examples of farmers who say they horde the good stuff for themselves, delete the trash drops and only sell what is going to get the best return. All the while earning inf that in turn fuels market inflation for the more desirable IOs.

Yet the price of purples - as you mention - is the thing that keeps going up. This is because farmers aren't just selling those purples to the market, but hording them or giving them out to SG members.

Also, purples aren't generated in isolation - they are generated alongside inf with inf being a lot more common. MMO economies continually end up in mudflation situations because so little currency actually leaves the game compared to what goes into it.

They might earn you inf, but that is nothing compared to the inf a farming team can pull out of an optimised farming mission.

If salvage is worth something, then the farmer will keep it to sell in the market. If it isn't, it is deleted as trash. Besides that, the 'casual gamer' might see some hypothetical common IO go from 10k to 20k in price, but that is nothing compared to having to spend 10m to 20m on the recipe they'll want to use it on.

Deleted recipes have no downward impact on the price of those recipes in the market. They don't make anything cheaper. So how are farmers driving prices downward again outside of a handful of good return-on-time recipes like the same ones people keep bringing up?

Because it is easier to generate inf than ever before? Inf supply is at an all-time high so cost per-inf-generated decreases. Hence lower prices for inf across the board.

I've also seen more spam since I14 than I can remember in a long time. Used to be that I'd have to delete about 3 messages when I logged in once a day or so, now I'm seeing 10 or more in the same time period.

*This post was written with the full knowledge that in a contest between trying to convince Nethergoat about something or bashing a brick wall down with your face, you'd have more success on the brick wall*

There is inflation, of that, there is no doubt. People are walking around with more money than ever.

In the real world, this would mean that anyone who had a modest income before, would now be unable to afford anything.

However, in this game, the modest income people can still afford everything, because the prices of everything that doesn't grow on a farm are still the exact same.

Very little influence is leaving hands when its traded over the Market. Its just exchanging hands.

Since we don't pay any "taxes" we're just going to be overflowing in influence really soon.

You have not proven a single thing. Much of what you are claiming is provably false in game. The fact that RMT prices have dropped by about 80% being one of the biggest pieces of evidence against you.

I have a very hard time believing you have any kind of degree in economics, as you haven't demonstrated any knowledge of the subject. Someone who did have a degree in economics would know you cannot cherry pick which factors you're going to use in your economic model while ignoring all others.

While I realize that much of science today is "if I believe it and I can convince enough other people to believe it then it's true" rather than actual hard evidence, your higher education is doing you a disservice if that's what it has taught you.

Rather than spend 3 paragraphs attacking the messenger, another simple reason why external RMT prices have dropped is that inf is now stupidly easy - especially for farmers using AE - to get so the actual $-per-influence exchange rate has seen a huge drop. External RMT farmers can get more inf-per-hour than ever before and can help pass those savings onto the customer.

As another anecdotal data point, I've seen gold-selling spam rates go up, which certainly doesn't suggest that the external RMTers are hurting due to farming. If selling inf in CoH/V wasn't financially viable, the external RMTers would leave.

I think you are drawing the wrong conclusion. AE farming isn't quite hurting the infleunce peddlersthe way you think.

The ease in generating funds might have some effect--but thei ncrease in players who are too inexperienced (or lazy, whatever you want to judge them as) to exploit the market has increased.) AE babies who never leave AP are not going to spend a lot of time crafting and marketing, which is what you have to do if you want to get a billion influence anytime soon.

So AE may have increased the amount of infleunce out there, but I think its also increased the supply of the type of player who would stopp to using an infleunce seller.

The decrease in prices you see also comes from the following factors.

Competition: theres more than 1 influence peddler

Inflation: A Billion influence used to buy a lot of stuff--you could fully kit iout a ton in the rarest of sets. Check out purple set prices now. It takes more infleunce to do that--and theres a limit to just how much you can get from players: if a players realizes "Heck, I'll need 300 to 500 bucks just to get my sets", they will be far less inclined to do it that "hmm, I only need to spend 50 bucks--or farm and market for weeks..50 bucks it is). Also just provides a quicker source for influence peddlers to generate, then sell influence. So the supply of influence a peddler can generate has inceased as well. And as peddlers are more effective at raising influence (thats all they focus on)..they'll do better than 99% of the normal player base at raising influence.

And, another reason wy you won't see the disappearance of the influence sellers: there hasn't been a single significant impediment measures to influnce peddlers implemented yet.