Dr. McB explains the economy in Path of Exile

This thread is in a class of its own.

here is your upvote!
perfectly discribing a general economy ;)

When is Dr. McB's next lecture scheduled?

Bless you scrotie.

Enjoyed reading some of the post's in this thread, to no surprise given the OP.

Peace,

-Boem-

I feel like I should really revisit this.

"

NeroNoah wrote:

Given the time dependence for getting wealth and the fact that getting good gear allows you to have better tools to advance and profit from initial scarcity (in temporal leagues) I would say that the curve follows a Pareto distribution:



So the people with junk gear is more than it would be in a normal distribution, and the people in the middle are not necessarily a majority.

Also, it can be said that people prefer crafting materials over currency, so if orbs flow upwards, the system is not as fun as it could.

And the whole "economic masters controlling the economy" can be achieved via price fixing and monopolies (I remember one post of a member of a group of people describing that basically won a league that way, so the evidence exists).

Anyway, I agree about the whole "not going paranoic with rich people" thing anyway, but let's not be conformists.

I actually really like the Paretto distribution and I do believe it does apply here. However, the key mistake NeroNoah makes here is thinking it is the whole picture, when more accurately it is half of it. In fact, precisely half.

Imagine you took a (IRL) mirror to the vertical line in NeroNoah's image, such that that vertical line represented the 50th percentile, completely average economic participant. (The angle of the mirror relative to the paper would vary with league age.) This would be a more accurate representation than the bell curve in my opening post. It would still be, essentially, a bell curve, but the spike at the center would represent both the speedy catchup of Tier 4 players and the Tier 2 hump which average players have difficulty overcoming.

So I agree, Paretto is amazing. But in this case it applies both coming and going, rather than just one way. And also, once you do hit that 50th percentile, the path forwards does look very Paretto indeed.

Fair enough? :P

The equality between all the players in a league (a precondition to a normal distribution) can only be true at the beginning, then the evolution of the league reshapes that.

It was mostly a nit pick. Honestly, it wouldn't be any problem, given that not too much gameplay is locked for those at the lower percentiles (I think that for most players, midtier maps and maybe Atziri should be relatively achievable, and most builds too).

Wealth should be a Spike player thing. Also, it should be more correlated to killing rather than being a commerce master, although that's mostly an ideal, :P

Related: In Defence of Mirrors

im more in the self found side of things, but great read and looks spot on to me.

Thanks. :)

Nice post, especially the crafting part