Thoughts on why the market inflates beyond sanity and lessons forgotten.

So, i've thought quite a bit on why the market is in its current state, and i think we can absolutely understand what's going on when we compare and remember what lessons POE1 had gone through over the years. Before you get to your high horses, this is completely uncorrelated to the gameplay itself. You can absolutely keep the vision of slower and more meaningful gameplay while fixing what i'm going to lay down here. I'm going to talk about endgame here. While campaign drops has its issue, campaign stays a minimal portion of the lifecycle of a character and thus has very low impact to market economy.

First some facts need to be established :

First : low end currency (transmutation and augmentation) have absolutely no value. Every player has hundred of them by endgame if not thousands. They have no value because we do not sink them for crafting at a pace nearly corresponding the amount we drop. (this goes both for juicers and casuals)

Second : Magic find in its current state increases the amount of interesting (valuable) currency and lowers the amount of valueless ones. Since the amount of low end currency you drop have no value and thus no meaning, it means that MF functions factually like quantity in POE 1.

Third : MF + character power is multiplicative loot. More power means more mob killed per hour, more MF means more valuable currency per mob. Regular players need to choose between those two factors. Juicers and whales do not. They have both high MF and high clearspeed. Since they multiply between each other, They obtain unreasonably more value currency than other players for the same amount of time spent.

Now let's look back a bit. Why doesn't this happen in POE1 ?
It's not the unreasonable difference in power between casual and hyperjuicer (you can look for any empyreangaming clip from any past 4 league launch to see how ridiculous their loot was). But these kind of strats couldn't really be reproduced by a lot of players (they were always based on exploiting group play loot multipliers). Note here, keyword is "multiplier". So it's exactly the same as MF in POE2, except in POE2 you don't need a full group to do that, you can do it alone, meaning a lot more ppl are doing it, having a much wider impact on market.

But there's another factor. In POE1 we have alteration orbs. These orbs have proper sinking value because any crafter worth its damn will need to use hundreds if not thousands of these bad boys as a crafting step. That mean that these low quality orbs keep their value (mostly because hyperjuicers loot-filter them out to not loose absurd amount of time picking them up) This means that if you doing regular farming, you obtain regularly orbs that have inherent value, which is a good way to make bank even if you're still low in your farming journey. And this value transfers linearly to augmentation and transmutation because you can exchange through vendors transmutation into augmentation, then augmentation into alterations.

So how can we fix that ? Well the simplest answer would be to bring back alteration orbs. But i see a lot of pushback for that so we need to find another solution. The only other solution i see is to bring back vendor currency exchange. Have transmutation be turnable into augment and augment be turnable into exalts. That way we ensure the low end currency will keep a market value and will bring back some purchasing power into slower farmers. This however might not be enough and might end up decimating the market value of exalts toward divines. I don't know, i'm pretty sure about the cause of the problem, but you (GGG) have to figure out a solution.

On top of that, you need to remove MF working on currency quality. You will never be able to balance a multiplier to loot. That's the reason item quantity was removed in POE1, it's a no-solution situation.

I think there's also another important factor you didn't mention. Most players don't understand how to optimize endgame farming. What you have to do is find an area with 3 overlapping towers, place 8 tablets with irradiation + boss nodes in them and finish them with Visions of Paradise unique tablet to double dip your juiced maps. You run maps with +rare monsters, rarity/quantity on them and you get gigaloot. You can also do rarity/quantity on towers but you have to put irradiated on your maps.

GGG is saying they will look into the loot drops and presumably change them for the next update but that just gives someone who is optimizing mapping even more gigaloot, so if you're not doing it and I am, I will be so far ahead of you that you will never catch up.

I don't think knowledge-based reward is wrong and I don't think PoE 2 has loot problems, the loot drops just fine if you understand the mechanics. What PoE 2 is doing wrong is not communicating the possibilities to a starting player. I think a setup of starting 3 tower setup maps already done for the player with account bound (untradeable) Visions of Paradise would give them a taste of the mechanics so that they are not confused and spamming forums asking GGG where the loot is.

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Summoner#7705 wrote:

I think there's also another important factor you didn't mention. Most players don't understand how to optimize endgame farming. What you have to do is find an area with 3 overlapping towers, place 8 tablets with irradiation + boss nodes in them and finish them with Visions of Paradise unique tablet to double dip your juiced maps. You run maps with +rare monsters, rarity/quantity on them and you get gigaloot. You can also do rarity/quantity on towers but you have to put irradiated on your maps.

GGG is saying they will look into the loot drops and presumably change them for the next update but that just gives someone who is optimizing mapping even more gigaloot, so if you're not doing it and I am, I will be so far ahead of you that you will never catch up.

I don't think knowledge-based reward is wrong and I don't think PoE 2 has loot problems, the loot drops just fine if you understand the mechanics. What PoE 2 is doing wrong is not communicating the possibilities to a starting player. I think a setup of starting 3 tower setup maps already done for the player with account bound (untradeable) Visions of Paradise would give them a taste of the mechanics so that they are not confused and spamming forums asking GGG where the loot is.

so every region of the atlas without 3 overlapping towers is completely worthless if you want loot. Peak visionary game design.

There are two major factors to high inflation.

1) RMT traders source their divines from somewhere that isn't playing the game. Even 100 people in a sweatshop can't create 100 divines out of thin air in a day when they only drop once every couple days for people actually playing the game, especially not so early in a season.

2) Lack of utility and currency sinks. We would need much more currency to drop for the game even to be functioning as intended during campaign and early endgame. However there comes a point when people no longer have a use for themselfes and can farm them for anything but actually using them. At a higher rate too with almost finished builds.
To avoid those extra currencies just accumulating in the market there need to be more use cases especially in the deep end game.

To simplify:

Crafting is broken. No one crafts. Crafting is the currency sink. With no one crafting, the amount of currency in circulation is constantly growing. The word for this is “inflation.”

To fix this, there needs to be currency sinks. Either crafting that uses up ex and dv orbs or something to spend them on (eg a new vendor). Poe 1 didn’t have this problem because it didn’t have gold and crafting consumed huge amounts of currency.

That process takes way too long. When I load up an Arpg, I want to play my character. I don't want spend an hours setting up maps, trading for currency and high tier item mods. I want to play the dam game!

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I think there's also another important factor you didn't mention. Most players don't understand how to optimize endgame farming. What you have to do is find an area with 3 overlapping towers, place 8 tablets with irradiation + boss nodes in them and finish them with Visions of Paradise unique tablet to double dip your juiced maps. You run maps with +rare monsters, rarity/quantity on them and you get gigaloot. You can also do rarity/quantity on towers but you have to put irradiated on your maps.

Map setup is basically map juicing, it was present in POE1 and again it didn't have that much of an inflation problem (it did, but so much slower)
But that follows the problem i was pointing on with MF being a loot multiplier anyway.

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1) RMT traders source their divines from somewhere that isn't playing the game. Even 100 people in a sweatshop can't create 100 divines out of thin air in a day when they only drop once every couple days for people actually playing the game, especially not so early in a season.

that's a weird take.. you're suggesting that RMTers hack the game and create or dupe divines ? I'm not saying it's impossible but i really don't think that's actually happening. Massive botting / sweatshopping doing hyperjuicing with mirror gear + massive MF seems much more likely to me. Again POE1 also had RMT for ages and it didn't result in hyperinflation

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2) Lack of utility and currency sinks. We would need much more currency to drop for the game even to be functioning as intended during campaign and early endgame. However there comes a point when people no longer have a use for themselfes and can farm them for anything but actually using them. At a higher rate too with almost finished builds.
To avoid those extra currencies just accumulating in the market there need to be more use cases especially in the deep end game.

That i absolutely agree with, that's what my post is about, in part.

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xDARKKNIGHTx09#9267 wrote:

That process takes way too long. When I load up an Arpg, I want to play my character. I don't want spend an hours setting up maps, trading for currency and high tier item mods. I want to play the dam game!

This is the basic problem of a trade-based game. I hate the fact you have to trade. But in this game, it’s trade or be unable to progress.

It's very simple why everything is soon inflated.
The RMT sites have endless currency.
They have bots on trade site that buy any piece of useful gear.
This is being done super aggressive this league.
This is why the trade site is so bare and if you do find things it is just at insane prices.
So you then need to either suffer, quit or head over and spend some cash.
It's literally 100% the RMT sites/bots making this game absolutely unbearable right now.

Even simple crafting items went from like 20-30 ex a few days ago are now over 200 ex.

This is all easy to manipulate when you have unlimited currency and can just buy everything in the currency exchange.

If GGG doesn't address this happening it really won't matter what they do to try and fix the game. Nobody will want to play it.

Of all the ideas I've had to fix the lack of exalts without bluntly increasing drop rate, I never considered a vendor with the option to convert augs into ex. I don't know if that's the right play but I love that idea.