Are new players happy with market availability?

Communist!

But seriously, GGG is going to have to figure out a way to stabilize prices or stabilize the rate of price changes over time. If deflation is inevitable because of the increasing availability of items in Standard, there needs to be some way of ensuring that the prices for the highest-end stuff also drops accordingly; otherwise, mirrored gear become more and more out of reach for new players and the goalposts keep moving for the rest of us. In this distopian scenario, only the wealthy could afford to make more wealth, while the rest of us struggle to build up enough chaos to trade for 1ex - yes, the occasional currency drop or great item drop would help out the odd player here and there, but most of us would be stuck in our economic "class" based on when we began playing.

The fact is great gear needs to be cheaper for the economy to be viable long-term, and I fully expect hate for that statement because that will make the game easier for poor players. Oh no.

The market just is.

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demon9675 wrote:

The fact is great gear needs to be cheaper for the economy to be viable long-term.

agree, actually the way ggg goes is producing more uniques to close the gap between high tier and other items.

imho not a bad attempt.

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the market is not necessarily providing needed low-end items to those who need it

This really isn't true in Standard league. You can gear pretty much any character for maps on a few chaos worth of trades.

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Garr0t wrote:

Frankly, I believe it is a matter of quantitative easing.

I touch upon it indirectly here.

What I see functionally is that currency orbs are extremely illiquid as a result of their scarcity. It is a learned behaviour of the player base to hoard currency orbs till end game, which means the orbs are not actually being used to trade lower value items during the early/mid game, nor are they being used as utility orbs to actually craft/roll incremental upgrades as a player progresses.

What this means is that the market is stagnant due to no movement of wealth. Wealth isn't moving because the orbs placed in the game to be used as a trade currency have become associated with arbitrarily high value due to scarcity. Gear is currently priced according to orb scarcity and not a reflection of actual crafting/rolling costs, which would actually represent a more balanced valuation (i.e. production/manufacturing cost versus luxury goods items that have artificially constrained supply, creating exclusivity and wealth imbalance). Currency orbs, instead of a trade commodity with utility value have actually become precious stones to lord over.

I believe one solution, albeit a very dramatic and drastic one would be to vastly increase orb supply (i.e. bump up drop rates substantially). The item market is mature enough to absorb this inflation because there are already BiS items available ('Mirrored gear'). Power creep will be negligible due to how broken the skill gem system has become (AoE one skill crit spam). Solo players will rejoice. Traders will have a field day with arbitrage. Newer players will not feel the hard gear checks anymore (they will become mere speedbumps). High fives all around!

While I disagree with bits of the argument's reasoning here and there, your conclusion is sound and I support it. Specifically the higher end currency items that were meant to be utilized in crafting purposes (looking at you, eternals and exalts, chaos at least has a recipe) have lost almost ALL of their crafting value and are used exclusively as currency exchange due to their scarcity. (A similar problem shared by Gemcutters prisms. How many GCP's have been used vanilla on a gem that's lower than 17% quality, I have to ask...I guarentee the percentage is astonishingly low...)
Yes, the arugment that "making more currency won't mean items get cheaper" is correct. But it's invalid. Increasing orb droprates isn't meant to decrease prices, it's meant to make currency useable again.
The bottom half of the orbsets are fairly well supplied, all the way up to augments have a sufficiently high droprate to sustain normal consumption and alterations and chaos are commonplace enough from vendoring loot once you get above level 60 so you can generate your own cashflow to a greater or lesser extent.

Everything else though is premium. Fusings are only in adequate supply when you run the Elreon/Vorichi upscaling of alterations into fusings, and that requires both of them to level 6 before you can do it, and every orb above a chaos (with the exception of Science Orbs, because Science) is scarcely ever used for it's intended purpose because they're so hard to get their hands on. I have 1 exalted orb sitting in my stash right now, and the thought of using it as an exalted orb hasn't ever crossed my mind. It's value is infinitely higher than what it does. If I were to guess it's droprate from looking at it's function, I'd say it would be even more common than orbs of augmentation. Aug's you only use once per item. Exalts can be used up to 4. Does the drop table reflect that assumption? Lol...

Don't even get me started on GCPs...

EDIT: In addition, the argument that "rich players wouldn't have enough stash tabs for all their extra orbs" is such a first world problem that even Bill Gates doesn't sympathize with it.

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tackle70 wrote:

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the market is not necessarily providing needed low-end items to those who need it

This really isn't true in Standard league. You can gear pretty much any character for maps on a few chaos worth of trades.

This is so true, plus the default league for new players is always the temporary SC league so even less of an issue.

The game FOR SURE doesn't need to be made easier for new players by increasing the drop rates, so many more options GGG can do to help new players rather then increasing orb drop rates.

Also, I feel the need to point out that this is implies something incredibly fallacious:

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Gear is currently priced according to orb scarcity and not a reflection of actual crafting/rolling costs, which would actually represent a more balanced valuation

Gear will ALWAYS be priced below the actual crafting/rolling costs. Always. That's just PoE economy 101. The only scenario where that is not the case is if orbs are so common that any player can literally craft anything in a trivial amount of playtime, such that trading is never necessary.

Increasing the drop rates of orbs would not have the desired effect at all in this regard.

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tackle70 wrote:

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the market is not necessarily providing needed low-end items to those who need it

This really isn't true in Standard league. You can gear pretty much any character for maps on a few chaos worth of trades.

Yep, definitely not true for standard. In fact you can say there is already a form of easing that occurs regularly, when temp leagues end and standard gets dumped on.

You want more frequency of orb drops, item drops in temps, fine by me , leave standard out of it, each league has their own different economy. For standard the economy is way too big and complex, any GGG intervention or big changes like drop rates can cause havoc. We've got enough of market chaos with nerfs, legacies and temp league dumps... dont need to add more with 'QE'. Less intervention the better, let the market do its own free thing. Want to 'stimulate' the standard economy when its been deflated for a while now? Fix the demand side of things, which GGG should worry about most...best hope for that is act 4.

i dont see a problem with market availability for mid term items the problem is gggs politic with mapgating

void battery is my go to example for shitty mapgating i gathered ~40ex in beyond in the 2nd month of the league and there was no battery i checked every day spammed trade ect i finally got one for a mjolnir in 1:1 trade in the 3rd month

mjolnir is not gated shavs inst gated koams isnt gated why build enabler like battery or voltaxic ? makes nno sense to me

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ventiman wrote:

i dont see a problem with market availability for mid term items the problem is gggs politic with mapgating

void battery is my go to example for shitty mapgating i gathered ~40ex in beyond in the 2nd month of the league and there was no battery i checked every day spammed trade ect i finally got one for a mjolnir in 1:1 trade in the 3rd month

mjolnir is not gated shavs inst gated koams isnt gated why build enabler like battery or voltaxic ? makes nno sense to me

If every item was available outside of maps (some technically that are restricted technically are) then what purpose would pushing through maps be, just XP?

They very briefly had shavs and kaoms gated behind maps, which lead to outlash.

You can always chance prophecy wands and hope you get a void battery, like all non-atziri (and zana, except when in her map) uniques you can chance the bases whenever you want.

Void batterys weren't for sell because they were extremely popular during beyond for shockwave totem builds and\or shatterchunk.

So you compare a unqiue that is already behind maps (high level maps) to unqiues that can drop from ilevel 60 for what reason? Because they are extremely rare they get placed in the same category?