Re-Rethinking Gold as a Currency
"Bah, I found what it was, but I completely misread it. Thinking about it, it makes no sense to have each currency roughly equal. Even still, 1 gold per would be currency drop doesn't work for me. Let's say currency has a drop rate of 10% per drop. So out of 1000 drops, we get 100 currencies. Out the currency drops, 1% are Divine. So 1 in 100 currency drops are divine. If we change every currency drop to gold, in order to keep the same ratio we'd need to collect.. well, it's late and I don't feel like doing that math. Point is, it's a lot of unnecessary balancing. "I'm not derailing this thread anymore than you. I believe I brought this discussion back ON topic twice after finding it derailed. You? Last edited by FaceLicker#6894 on Dec 21, 2011, 11:22:40 PM
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"There's no reason to think the devs can't make more than one of a given item drop at once if they wanted to. |
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I will give it another try and try to explain this currency approach in a (hopefully) more cleary arranged way.
1 - Downsides of the current currency system 1.1 - Orbs are impractical for trading Currently we have 20 different currency items. Each of them has a different utility. Therefore one and the same currency item has a different value for each of us. Some may have need for Fusion Orbs others may have need for Gem Quality Upgrades. This makes trading harder than if we had only a single currency. I want to give an example for this: Player1 offers an item in the chat. Player2 and Player3 are interested in it. Player1: Give me your offers! Player2: 1 Alchemy Orb Player3: 2 Alchemy Orbs Player2: 1 Alchemy Orb and 1 Fusion Orb Player3: What? Is that offer even higher than mine? Player1: Hum... Ya for me it is better. Player3: okay, 1 Alchemy Orb and 1 Exalted Orb then Player2: 1 Alchemy and 2 Exalted Orbs. Player1: Sorry guys, i do not need Exalted Orbs. As you can see they have a hard time to trade because they have multiple currencies. Either the seller has to ask for an exact amount and type of orbs or the seller has to explain his value ratio for each of the 20 currency items. This would be far easier if there would be only Alchemy Orbs. Everybody could just say how many Alchemy Orbs he is offering and the bidder offering the most alchemy orbs wins. But of course this is no solution because we don't want to lose all the other orbs. 1.2 - Inflation still exists As the game progresses we will see inflation. Probably not for every single currency item but at least for some of them. At some point of the game some of the currency items will become nearly worthless. A good example for this are the portal scrolls which are already useless once you get your hands on a portal gem. Other orbs might still be usefull but monsters will drop them more often than a player has need for them. An example for this are the Orbs of Transformation and Transmutation. They drop quite frequently and can enhance white and blue items. At some point of the game you only want at least rares for your quipment except flasks. So you only use them for flasks. But they drop so often that you will get more of them than you can use. Then these orbs are worthless, too. But lets be fair. There will always be at least one of the currency items which is still usefull. So trading with some currency items will still be possible if the devs manage to set proper drop ratios and keep the usefullness of at least one of the 20 currency items. This is the advantage of our current system compared to traditional single currency approaches of most games (gold). If the gold becomes useless or you get more of it than you need then gold fails as a currency and players have no trading currency at all. 2 - Why most single currency systems fail In 1.1 i have shown that a single currency is more practical for trading. But at the end of 1.2 i have shown that it is risky to rely on a single currency. We have often seen gold failing as a single currency in many games. A popular example for this is Diablo 2. Why did gold fail in Diablo 2? One problem for a gold currency is that a player has no direct use for it. A Player wants his character to be as strong as possible. Unlike items gold does not help directly to improve your character. So why should players use something useless as a trading currency? Because it helps to improve your character indirecly by buying things that help to improve your character in a direct way. This is were gold in Diablo 2 failed. Gold was not usefull to improve your character directly or indirecly. In D2 you were able to buy magic and nonmagic items with gold. These items were worthless. Everybody wanted rares and uniques for his character. It was even possible to gamble for rare and unique items but gambling took even more time than going into the dungeon and get the items you wanted from monsters. And of course killing monsters was more fun. You also needed gold to buy potions, scolls and to repair your equipment. These are the infamous gold sinks. You had to repair your items to play the game at all. But that was just annoying and took away precious fun-time in the dungeons. If gold was necessary to play the game why did it fail as a currency? Because you had more of it than you needed. Gold had to drop more than you needed for the gold sinks (repair etc) becasue these were required to play the game in a proper way. So gold had to fail in D2 because you could not do anything usefull with it and you had more of it than you needed. In other words the supply was constantly greater than the demand. This lead to inflation and gold failed as a currency. 3 - How can we improve our current system? 3.1 - Making it trade-friendly So GGG provided a good system. We have no annoying gold sinks like repair costs or potions or scrolls. We have usefull currency items because they improve our gear and we will always want to improve our gear. So the demand for the currency items is there. If GGG does not screw up the drop ratios for the currency items the supply for least one of the currency items will not be higher than the demand in the long run. So we will always have a currency to trade with. One problem that still exists is that the trading is harder because we have so many currencies. So we want one currency for trading but we want to keep all our orbs. Here comes my suggestion for this: We create a single item that represents all of our current currency items. -Orbs do not drop any longer. -Gold (or whatever name you like) drops. -Vendors are selling orbs for gold in town. Buying orbs from vendors or players is the only way to get orbs. -I suggest to keep the drop rates very low to ensure picking it will not be annoying. -I suggest to set the range of the gold amount dropped at once very large to keep randomness. So people are as happy when they find a large amount of gold as if they find a divine orb. By doing this gold is directly linked to our current currencies. Gold will always be scarce and valueable because orbs are valueable. Trading can be done in a single universal currency. People who prefer to trade in orbs can still do that. We achieved a trade friendly currency and kept all the pros of multiple pseudo currencies (our current system). 3.2 - Positive side effects of my suggestion Currently the devs have to manage the drop rates for 20 currency items. The devs have to anticipate the demand for each of these items to set a proper drop ratio. It is even hard for them to make adjustments because it is hard to guess how the demand for each item was in the past. With the addition of the new trading currency there is only one droprate and it is nearly irrelevant. What now matters is the prize of each of the 20 current currency items. But setting proper exchange rates is far easier than setting drop rates. The devs can keep track of how much gold was used by the player population to buy each orb. If nearly no gold was used to buy Orbs of Transmution and nearly all gold was used to buy Orbs of Fusion they can lower the prize for Orbs of Transmution and raise the prize for Orbs of Fusion. If the devs would set the prizes for the orbs equivalent to their current drop rates (an orb that has a 0.1% dropchance costs 10 times as much as an orb that has a 1% dropchance) they would quickly see the flaws in the current drop ratios. We would probably see players spending all their gold for alchemy and fusion orbs because the demand/supply ratio for these is currently the highest. They could react quickly and raise the prize for Alchemy and Fusion Orbs. But this is fine because if we had no gold and the game would go on for year we would probably see players trading only in Fusing and Alchemy Orbs and every player would have more stacks of Transmution Orbs in his stash than he needs. The devs can also see very quickly if one of the orbs is not usefull enough (or too usefull) and needs to be buffed (or nerfed) or replaced by a completly new orb. If transmutation orbs can be bought for a very low prize from a vendor and people still do not buy it might be an indicator that this item has become useless. The item itself and prize might still be fine because it only usefull for a small portion of the players (low lvl for example) and no adjustments are required. It also works in the opposite direction: If all the players only use their gold to buy Orbs fo Awesomeness despite the insanly high price this is an indicator that either the prize is still not high enough or it is just too powerfull. Another minor effect is that gold requires no (or 1?) slots in your inventory or stash. Less inventory handling. Having a single trading currency is also by far better if we want to have a marketplace/AH. 4 - Downsides of this suggestion Like every adjustment it requires ressources to implement this. These ressources could instead be used for more urgent things. Last edited by Baki#5652 on Dec 22, 2011, 7:25:23 AM
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"It's absolutely relevant. Why would people trade in something that is worthless unless it had valuable backing or a governing agency approving it as currency? This never happens in real life. Even in ancient times when people used seeds or coconuts as currency, they did it because they were inherently valuable. People didn't start trading in worthless stones just so they could have a uniform currency. In modern times, fiat currencies are commonly accepted because they have government backing. Why would the people of Wraeclast trade in a specific item to get the goods or services they want? There has to be a logical reason in the lore. "It is a fiat currency. It has absolutely no inherent value. It would only be currency because we're told it's currency. This is exactly what fiat currency is. Being directly redeemable for something else? Well, that's what all currency is, isn't it? Look at a dollar bill (or similar bank note). It's worthless without the government backing it. I have Iraqi money from Saddam's government; it's absolutely worthless as currency because it has no government backing. "Again, it is. You're using a currency with no inherent value to purchase something with inherent value. "Trading is part of the game, so it's not taking away from playing the game. Once we get a proper trading system (there will be one, after all) spamming the chat won't be a requirement. "How? The proposed system requires gold to drop directly in place of each orb. This means differing amounts of gold per drop to equal the value of whatever orb would have dropped. It would be harder to balance because you could save up all your low drops and buy a higher orb from the vendor (who presumably has all of them for sale), which damages the economy since there would be no way to restrict the inflation of each orb individually. There would be infinite supply of orbs since the vendor would always have to have them all in stock. Your 9 gold drop is worth a Divine Orb, so the vendor better have it in stock, right? But you don't need a Divine Orb's drop to buy a Divine Orb... You can use 18 Alchemy Orb's worth of drops instead. That's not balance; it's flooding. "Perception. I know what the values are, but it's still more exciting in games to see awesome drops instead of X amount of gold. "Couldn't tell you, because I've never had to do that. I understand that getting exactly what I want is very unlikely (much like in real life), so I post my item and ask for offers. As I mentioned above, there will eventually be a trade system of some sort so we don't have to spam chat. Look at the long-term plan instead of what's good right now and what's not. "Then why do governments have currencies? The US dollar hasn't been backed by gold for over 30 years, but it's still our currency because the government backs it as our currency. Anyway, I wasn't talking about governments dictating the value of currency. I believe in capitalism, after all. I was talking about a governing agency dictating that the currency has value. In America, our governing agency says the dollar is our currency and that it has some amount of value. In Wraeclast...? Who says gold (or X currency) is valuable just for trade? No one has any use for gold, because it has not inherent use. It can't defend you, you can't eat it, and you can't ride it off the island. It's useless; no one would want it any more than they would want pocketfuls of rocks. At least rocks are useful for basic defense against zombies. Closed Beta/Alpha Tester back after a 10-year hiatus. First in the credits! Last edited by WhiteBoy#6717 on Dec 22, 2011, 12:28:39 AM
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Their whole point is not to make it easy, fast or accessible to trade.
The intended result is the opposite. The point of this system is to make it so the majority of items are worthless and we leave them on the ground to prevent inflation, making hard to trade we prevent people from progressing multiplicativelly faster at the rate of everyone elses generating awesome gear to trade with us. Thats why they didnt gave us an universal currency, or provided us with a trade windows or an auction house, that would ruin the purpose of the system. Would they want our collective generated good to be used by everyone, they would atleast have a trade system. Would they want us to interact with npc, they would atleast make their store refresh every 15 minutes. The intention is clearly the opposite guys. It is working. For you to benefit from your work and for you to benefit from other people's work, you are supposed to build a bridge yourself, slowly, or be dependent on your own drops for gear progression. I understand their philosophy, I know it works as intended. *Am Im being serious or sarcastic?* "It feels like holding my breath under water constantly." Me about the limited "life expectancy" of the inventory space on Path of Exile and frequent needs to go to town to unload. Last edited by Interesting#4599 on Dec 22, 2011, 1:31:44 AM
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" Well said Thank you berialSD for the key
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Gold is not needed.
Auction house is easy job. Like someone said ,its barter system so the value of orb varies from player to player. So you give every player table with each curreny item. The players imput values to them ,in example: - alchemy orb = 5 - scouring = 2 - mirror = 25 And so on ,till you put points in all curreny items ,put 0 in curreny if you dont accept it in the trade. The table will be saved for your account or character, so you need to imput it only 1 time ,with possilbity to edit whenever you want. Then you put item in the auction house and put 2 values, in example: - minimum biding = 8 points - buy now = 15 points Now whenever someone wanna buy your item he will open your table of values and invetory where he can put currency items and see their total value. They can even overpay for it ,for example item cost just 10 ,but they dont have combination of currency that match the 10 ,but 12. They can still overpay for it ,though will need some warning popup. The only problem would be in this to make search by lowest/highest price. Though we could put unchangable value for one orb. Like alchemy will be always of value of 10 ,you would need to imput all other currreny items values according to it and your desire from 0.1 to 1000 or so. So if you will see item by value of 50 ,you can buy it for sure for 5 alchemy orbs. Additionaly to that as noob-friendly system ,AH will show you during making your table ,lower/highest/avarange price set by players for each currency items. Last edited by herflik#4390 on Dec 22, 2011, 1:50:48 AM
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You could solve the "search for lowest price" problem if both buyer and seller could set their value ratio for each currency item.
But these preferences will change often and therefore trading with one currency would still be easier and less complicated. Edit: I see you solved your "seach for lowest price" problem yourself while you edited your post. Still, a single currency is more comfortable and less complicated imo. Also a single currency is definitely more practical for chat trades. Also, how do you want to implement listing fees (usefull vs flooding and scamming)? Last edited by Baki#5652 on Dec 22, 2011, 2:10:33 AM
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" This game won't need listing fees, because the time needed for executing a trade is working as such, which you funnily criticized. |
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Scamming and flooding exists in other auction houses without fees. Obviously this is a proof that the required time to try a scam does not prevent it.
funnily you couldn't think about that yourself. I gave it a try, welcome to the internet i guess. bye. Last edited by Baki#5652 on Dec 22, 2011, 3:40:31 AM
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