Dr. McB explains the economy in Path of Exile

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harddaysnight wrote:

@Early in a league, I'd contend that gear flows from left to right, as much or more than it flows from right to left. Top tier players know the value of the gear, and the value of currency. They know what will advance them. A lower tier player gets a drop with some moderate demand. They sell it to a higher tier player. The lower tier player trades one thing they don't know what to do with, for another thing they don't know what to do with.

The higher tier player knows exactly what the value is in terms of progression. The gap between the left and right did not close, it widened. The lower tier player continues on their merry way in ignorance, gaining very little to nothing from the trade. While the higher tier player progresses. Sure, the lower tier player has the currency from the trade, but it either sits in their stash doing nothing, or it gets wasted on crap gear with a small likelihood of advancing them in the game.

First off, I did not say gear flows exclusively from right to left, I said if you add all trades together it flows from right to left. So there are some cases where gear flows "backwards." What there is NOT is this idea that this kind of thing happens as much or more than the direction of flow I described.

Second, I think it's a little ridiculous to treat people with less wealth as if they're too stupid to know how to use it. The main contributor to the tiers I described, more than anything else, is the raw amount of time spent playing the game. There are lots of smart poor players and stupid rich ones.

The smart poor players are your solo SF'ers and minimalist buyers like myself.

My contribution to your economy is so small it cannot be measured in your scale. I spend less than 5 chaos in trading per league.

While i did enjoy the Wraeclast economics lesson, i think it's still to broad to be useful beyond a curiosity.

Assuming player's progression in leagues fallow a normal distribution (and not a "bell curve") is meh
typical economics' know-it-all

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DorenAlexander wrote:

While i did enjoy the Wraeclast economics lesson, i think it's still to broad to be useful beyond a curiosity.

It is surprising how often these concepts come up in feedback threads, etc.

"I want crafting to be more profitable" - impossible unless trying to make something better than what you can already trade for

"What if orbs were account-bound" - okay, then what would be the new currency? Maps?

SFL: "trading is an overpowered advantage" - for the top and bottom quartiles of the economy, maybe, but not for the middle two quartiles

"No one uses currency" - nonsense, it just flows to the top

Etc

Also "normal distribution" and "bell curve" are synonynous.

Good post, except for one topic: the idea that currency should only be used by the top tier.

This may be the case in POE, but it is one of the reasons this game annoys me. In diablo 2, runes were the main currency, and anyone could use them to make good items.

The main difference in D2 with runes as currency, is that a "mid bellcurve player" could get a few good rune and make a good item, whereas a top tier player could get 100 runes, and continuously re-roll to get a "perfect" version of the good item.

In POE, using a few exalted orbs is idiotic, whereas in D2, as a "mid bellcurve type" you could use a few high end, rare runes and make something awesome, and yet there was stil something left for the top tier players: a "perfect rolled" runeword.

I think what you are missing is discussing why an economy would exist in a video game, especially one like a diablo2 clone with no persistent world.



gaming happens in three stages:

stage 1: noob level, everything is new and daunting. Progress is slow, demand to learn is very high. Very likely to quit in frustration, nothing really makes sense, everything seems to one shot you. As a developer, You want gamers to experience this stage on set, to make learning about the game feel so much more enjoyable, but you want them to progress past it fairly quickly as well, these are your 'at risk' audience to use a higher education term.



stage 2: You understand the fundamental and learning the nuances, your player skill is climbing fast. You are completing challenges that seemed impossible through a better understanding. You 'know the maps' and the angles now, checking the likely spots, heading to the right to find the next area etc. Progress is fast and character growth is rapid, players enjoy the game intrinsically in stage 2 experiences, the game is fun and engaging. This is the sweet spot for the gamer, they Cant Wait to get back to playing.


stage 3: You have mastered the learning curve. All that is left is grinding for negligible changes and extrinsic rewards, .05 seconds faster on your best time trial, looking for that .01% drop chance. The game is obviously enjoyable to you, but you have done just about everything there is to do, the extrinsic rewards need to be interesting to keep you motivated. The inevitable conclusion to successful stage 2 experiences. Gamers will eventually learn the final points of the game, will complete the content.



As a game designer you want to keep your players in stage 2, perpetually. But that is a huge huge demand on the developer, your choices are very limited, produce content and learning curves faster than players can tire of them or the infamous 'Artificial Difficulty'. YOu not only burn yourself out but basically lose stage 1 gamers totally due to fast changes or 'unfair challenge'. Which means you are going to have players enter stage 3. It has to happen. And you need a game/reward structure for your stage 3 gamers. And thus we have ideas like economy. To enrich the experience of gamers that have destroyed everything else. To give them reason to search for the .01% drop, to Grind for it.

A negative about economy is it does allow for players to shortcut the developer desired stage progression. If you get killer gear but know squat about the game, there is a good chance you are still going to do well, but possibly with huge glaring gaps in understanding what is happening and why.

Basically economy exists to give players a reason to play the game above and beyond slaughtering enemies. The players the economy is designed for have slaughtered the enemies, more times than they themselves even found healthily fun. It is to be a reward for continuing to seek out knowledge about the game.

As such, it makes sense that stage 3 players accumulate the economical advantages, it is there to reward them by design, which translates to most likely retaining more players in every stage.

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elitedesolator wrote:

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johnKeys wrote:

to position (thousands of? millions of?) inputs on a graph, you need to be able to compare any two inputs.

I am starting to think you don't have a good understanding of statistics.

and I'm starting to think you are deliberately misreading my explanations.

neither of us know the actual distribution of the Path Of Exile RNG, but let's assume for the sake of simplicity, it is a beautiful, symmetric, Normal Bell Curve.

this does not imply the graph of players and their "wealth" is Normally Distributed.
in fact, given only the variable of RNG, it's not even a graph because you need more information to compare "player wealth" and actually draw its outline.
I have repeated this 3 times by now, so please pay attention.

this extra information, is Economy. Scrotie's flow. items to Orbs (currency).
with it, you can quantify "wealth", compare it, and watch it change per player, group of players, and the player-base as a whole.
so you can draw the graph. and NeroNoah and I claim it's not a Bell Curve, but rather a Pareto.

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Hey can you somehow work Pie charts into this please? I understand them better than all these fancy parrot-charts and Bell swerves

sure, here's a Pi

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Khoranth wrote:

Good post, except for one topic: the idea that currency should only be used by the top tier.

This may be the case in POE, but it is one of the reasons this game annoys me. In diablo 2, runes were the main currency, and anyone could use them to make good items.

I feel this is a misconception. Runes were essentially very popular and conveniently stored form of gear, not a well-designed currency.

The primary currency of D2 LoD was gems. Any player, no matter their wealth, could collect gems to cube up. Trading inventories full of perfect gems for mid runes was a common practice. And these gems were eventually consumed by rich crafters in pursuit of well-rolled crafted items.

Gold was also a currency in the game. Players could gamble gold at Gheeds by the millions. The ease of farming gold made it appear worthless to some, but there was a trade market for it.

The issue was these currencies, especially gems, were not convenient to store. High runes and SoJs, in contrast, were convenient to store. As a result, these were used as placeholders of value in stashes. However, both items don't perform currency functions. High runes and SoJs are not found by low-level players. Neither are useful for consumption by the player who "has everything." (Well, SoJs kind of were, thanks to Pandemonium event.)

To use a PoE example, let's say there were no Mirrors or Eternals in the game, and the max stack size on Exalts and Divines was 1. Stuff like 6L Shavronne's Wrappings would become the de facto most efficient means to store value per square of stash space. As a result you'd see stashes full of 6L Shavs just so rich players can jam as much value per square as possible. But that wouldn't really make Shav's into a currency; it would still be just a placeholder. There is no left-to-right flow, it would just drift about, aimlessly.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Your assumption is that wealth is the goal... because in the real world, wealth can get you quite a bit of what you want.

In this game, however, only a minority of players see wealth as the goal where you presume all of the are. Many players are looking for items that would make their game more fun... rather than items they could trade for more exalts.

As always there is a big logic fail in your post. People seek wealth in online games to have fun. The same reason people seek wealth in the real world. Being able to afford nee and interesting builds in PoE has the same motivation of buying a fast sports car in real life. It is fun.

Wealth for wealth's sake is only the goal for a tiny minority of people. The majority offline and on gather wealth to give themselves a better life, or to support a certain level life style.