What the POE2 economy needs is not better drops, ITS ACTUAL CRAFTING!

This "small" forum entry will have two parts, the personal impressions, some simple economic ideas and some rants. From now on "they" refers to "GGG".

Personal Impressions:

What makes PoE1 so special in a sense is, besides the complexity, it was the different ways you could craft (or learn recipes to craft); most of them require some grinding and planning, but they were rewarding enough. Although map grinding was the main option, there were some other ways to farm materials for crafting, like Blight (and it was FUN, at least to me), or you could go Syndicate or Breaches, adding to the fun and varied things you could do.

PoE2 seriously lacks in the fun department (and crafting). This will bring me to the basic market part.

Offer and demand:

Sooner or later the economy will destroy itself in PoE2 again, doesnt matter how good or bad the currency drops are, doesnt matter how they work around the Magic Find, doesnt matter how they give better or worse gear from bosses, because most people are either hoarding or trading Divines or Exalted for gear, I would risk to say that most of the gear found in poetrade is not crafted from blue items, something that was the wish of GGG when they announced PoE2 EA. But that will never happen, since PoE2 is more about gambling or trading with the currency than actual crafting. And no, you are not crafting when you slam an Exalt or Alchemy to an item, you are GAMBLING for mods, and your chances are pretty low to get what you want by the way.

The main point of currency is to be consumed for crafting, not for trading (that is what we do since there is no better use for Exalted and Divs at the moment). Although we do use Exalted for maps and the occasional godly rare (or blue) where we slam a Regal and Exalted on it, most people (or the casuals) dont even consider that, because they desperately need exalted for gear (the main trading currency), in other words, most players dont use the currency for their intended use... which is CRAFTING.

If we made a comparison to the real world, Exalted Orbs = Dollar, Divine Orbs = Gold.

In summary, the currency offer overwhelms the demand too much and that is why there is inflation, or in other words, there is too much currency for the amount of consumption or need for it there is.

Recommendations:

As much as I would like to have Harvest v.2 I hardly doubt GGG will implement it in PoE2, so I would suggest the following:

- This game URGENTLY needs a crafting bench like the one in PoE1:

a) same with recipes, learnt by doing the campaign (like finding a recipe in one of the houses in Act 3 :P), while mapping, events (like Delirium, Breaches or any new content that you might add). This will promote currency usage and will definitely help the casuals craft their own stuff in safety without having to go to poetrade and spend the little exalts they can find.

b) same with currency consumption, using Transmutations, Augmentations, Alchemy, Regals, Exalts or Divines. This will increase the demand.

c) I would add this, allow the player to adjust the amount of currency used to improve the chances to get better results, for example, a player wants to craft Chaos Resistance into a Ring, lets say to get a result in the range from 4 - 9 %, it requires 10 Exalted, then, since the crafter wants a better result, they can double the exalted to increase the range (if allowed by the amount of mods in the ring) from 10 - 16 %, and then tripe the exalts to get to perfect %, just an idea of course.

- This game also needs something to give the player something to aim for besides pinnacle bosses or end game content, Delve, even Syndicate or (yes yes, I know) Blight would be wonderful, something fun and different to do than mapping mindlessly until the end of time.

Rant:

I honestly got bored of mapping all the time, when I wasnt getting disconnected. Got my Grenadier to a decent level (89), and getting the Atlas points has been a chore to be honest (got 24), way better than the old method yes, but still a chore, it takes too long to find corruption nexuses or, even worse, the unique maps, and... the server disconnects, I lost one run to a corrupted nexus and, of course, couldnt get the Atlas Points, I was done in that moment.

I really hope GGG announces any type of crafting concept in the next biggest patch they do, because this game seriously lacks that.

I guess most havent catched it yet but theres masive RMT-ing going on.
Selling and buying curency / items for real money.

This is why the ''economy'' is the way it is.

Just a speculation but i suspect the game is the way it is. No drops items or curency in order to push players in to these 3rd party sites to buy for real money. Id say some people at GGG are filling thery pockets.
Thats the way i see it anyways.
Theres 2 reasons for an RPF to not have drops.

1- Artificialy increase playtime.

2- Push players to buy with real money.