On the subject of Gold.

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ness wrote:

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zeto wrote:

Likewise, the value you gain should be approximately equal to the value you lose, on average, over time... accumulation of wealth DEMANDS inflation, unless it's spent in a way that doesn't increase your accumulating ability... therefore this philosophy should be used in games to guide creation of viable long term sinks.

Accumulation of wealth is denomination of players' progress.
Accumulating ability must rise as players are progressing, if not game will not be rewarding. Bigger challenge - bigger rewards it can't be any other way.
How do you want to replace that?
With achievements?

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zeto wrote:

Finally, the realization that both systems are equally liquid under those restrictions leads one to assume that GGG will impose a non-liquid schism between various currencies...

And how players would react to this?
What's the point of using a currency when you are unable to tell its value? (rhetorical question...)
They will use some other ingame currency or/and some 3rd party option (PoE jsp).

Some noobs (sorry for term :P) might use currency items in trades but all those folks who will play the end game will not.
Majority of wealth in arpgs (and in real life too) is always owned by small most advanced group of ppl, hence we will end up here with the same shit as in D2, or even worse since gold is far more convenient to use for some basic applications like vendors.

In theory everything's fine.
In practice it sucks.

Accumulation of wealth is a hallmark of progress, but it's not the only one, and at the end of the day it's less important than playing new, potentially harder, and more diverse content (but this runs out whereas accumulation doesn't.) So yeah, content and achievements are the alternative, however they end much faster.

The second portion just is what it is... and it's why I posted that I feared that everyone will turn to dollars as their liquid currency (more than in gold economies.)

The fact that those that play better or longer are more wealthy, and the more wealthy you are the more power you can buy, and the more power you can buy the more wealthy you get... this cycle of wealth is unavoidable in these systems, and it has nothing to do with the currency item system.

I've often talked with friends about how to create incentives to accumulate wealth and then spend it on something that doesn't increase your wealth accumulating capacity.. it's a tough subject though.

"Nothing is new under the sun."- some old dude

But it is refreshing for people of an INTELLECTUAL SORT to see things in a DIFFERENT WAY every now and then. Imagine if you ate Carrots every day for every meal, the flavor would quickly become BLAND and DISTASTEFUL... SICKENING... MADDENING! You would KILL FOR MEAT! That is the "Gold system", it's EVERYWHERE and it is FLAVORLESS which is merely an opinion held by at least a few people that realize they could just install Diablo 2 if they wanted that experience... again.

"True Ignorance is the desire to avoid different experiences."- another old dude

"If the world is flat why sail to the edge?"- some moron that probably asked Columbus this question (you know people at that time were retarded and unthinking)

"If she floats she is a witch and she shall come back here to be burned at the stake, if she is innocent she will drown."- witch hunters, ignorant of air capacity in lungs forcing floatation, willing to KILL innocent people to "prove" a point

These are points of view while you may NOT agree with them they still exist.

"You're Ignorant because you do not share MY beliefs" is entirely unfair, unjust, inconsiderate and unthinking. I know some people may think I am addressing this statement at them, there are occasions where this applies to ALL of us.

"We are all wrong therefor we are all correct, by admission of fault"

"Jumping out of a plane is stupid, jumping out of a plane with a parachute is dangerous, jumping into marriage is suicide."- A joke, please everyone open your hearts and feel the hippiness in you all die as you are surrounded by enemies on the "Path of Exile" and are forced to harden your heart, kill, maim and destroy or have that brought down on you.

Edit- grammatical error fixed

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cybrim wrote:

That is the "Gold system", it's EVERYWHERE and it is FLAVORLESS which is merely an opinion held by at least a few people that realize they could just install Diablo 2 if they wanted that experience... again.

The reason I want gold is because I DON'T want trading to be like D2!

There is nothing revolutionary with PoEs currency system. It's a bad, old system.

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cybrim wrote:

"You're Ignorant because you do not share MY beliefs"

You are ignorant about this topic. That does in no way insult your intelligence, it only means that you lack basic knowledge about economics.

You made that very clear with this statement:

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cybrim wrote:

GOLD WILL EVENTUALLY BE WORTHLESS...

There is simply no logical reason to think that gold will eventually become worthless.

As I said to some other guy, ""Gold is bad because it is bad to use gold in way X" is a complete and utter fallacy."

I see a reason to assume gold will eventually become useless, it became useless in every game I have ever played, eventually, outside of the sinks.. like repairing.

True, that's not deductive.

Could there be more interesting sinks? sure.

Do we need gold? No.

Will there be gold? Don't really care either way.

Why? Because the "economy" of the game has no bearing on the fun I have with the game, because I am in no way forced to participate in said economy... and niether is anybody else.

So all that's really going on here is a debate between people who want to trade, but prefer different systems.

You can have a perfectly functioning economic system without a standardized currency, particularly if said system is employed on a very limited population who all have access to the exact same goods.

Either way, PoE will have a base currency regardless.. the orb that drops the most will have the least value and that will be what's used as a rubric of value against other orbs, and that process will repeat at certain interval plateaus.

The problem now is that the population is so low, and drop rates are being tweeked, so nobody really has a clue about what is worth what (outside of what it's worth this week).

So I'm going to redirect this thread a bit so Sickness has something to do... I really don't want to see more of the non-productive posts.

Gold has always become useless in games... Why is this? How can it be solved?

Clearly the mechanism to making gold worth something is held within NPCs giving it intrinsic value. GGG's attempt to solve this was to give currency intrinsic value without the NPCs, but it suffers from liquidity problems. How could this be solved in a gold system?

A major problem is running out of stuff to spend money on.

What constitutes a sink large enough to continue to force everyone at all stages of the game to have significant opportunity costs to every penny they own?

I'm now at the end of the game... I have 1 billion coin... everyone else that has great items also has 1 billion coin... I want to get UberItem from someone. What mechanism would allow this to happen?

The reason gold becomes worthless is because the point of the game (this genre of game) is to kill big bad boss X and then kill the bigger boss Y and so on until the last guy is in the grave.

usually those last guys drop the best gear. makes sense, they are the last guys.

The purpose of the game is to get the best gear.

So, eventually, money becomes worthless because the top tier items are always found through drops. No point in having gold when you have the best items, so at most you'll trade your uber drop for someone elses, but not for gold.

one effective way of minimizing this is through crafting systems (not slot machines like PoE). Crafters level their.. craft.. by sinking gold into materials, to craft items that usually end up being the same tier as high level mob drops. These can then be sold, for an actual amount of gold, because the builder want's to recoup his losses and produce more items to sell.. so he can continue the cycle.

Unfortunately, that doesn't fit this game at all, or at least not with the systems they currently have in place.

Maybe, you could sacrifice crap orbs (or just orbs you have a lot of) and in exchange you could receive an orb that you use on orbs, to raise the quality of them. So.. just like flasks, but with orbs, and the higher the % the more likely you are to get ideal mods.

-or-

Maybe you could combine like/like orbs together and accomplish the same effect. combine 10 fusing orbs (or whatever) and gain a super-fusing orb that has a +60% chance of giving 4 or higher links... or something like that.\

In this way you have a reason to hold onto less valuable orbs, to use as boosters for what you want. you could also sell those boosted orbs for top-tier gear as the time needed to produce the orb would be comparable to the time needed to find the gear.

if any of the above doesn't make sense, I apologize.. kind of drunk atm.

I personally reject the concept that all actions must result in progress. This is what basically everyone expects... eg. combine 10 orbs get 1 super orb, or sell 10 crappy items get 1 good item.

I think that thinking leads to a broken system that perpetuates the paradigm of out of control power inflation. Gambling with a chance to get a worse deal out of what you have is a reasonable fix.

One thing that I believe solves some major issues with the current MMO economic system is item decay. All items should decay over time until they are simply unfixable. This significantly changes the economic dynamic, and is extremely appropriate for an ARPG where item finding and utilization is core. The current systems where you gain with no actual loss of resources is putting more stuff in, without taking stuff out.

I like the idea of no gold. The only reason the idea of "gold" came into existence anyway is so people could acquire wealth without the loss of their own goods or work.

With the way things are, if you want something, you have actually work for it...

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zeto wrote:

So I'm going to redirect this thread a bit so Sickness has something to do...

How considerate!

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zeto wrote:

Gold has always become useless in games... Why is this? How can it be solved?

That is not even true.

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zeto wrote:

Clearly the mechanism to making gold worth something is held within NPCs giving it intrinsic value. GGG's attempt to solve this was to give currency intrinsic value without the NPCs, but it suffers from liquidity problems. How could this be solved in a gold system?

A major problem is running out of stuff to spend money on.

What constitutes a sink large enough to continue to force everyone at all stages of the game to have significant opportunity costs to every penny they own?

I'm now at the end of the game... I have 1 billion coin... everyone else that has great items also has 1 billion coin... I want to get UberItem from someone. What mechanism would allow this to happen?

If gold will always become worthless, then all orbs will always worthless. The same principles apply to both.
It's all about managing supply and demand. That is not rocket science.

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somerlot wrote:

I like the idea of no gold. The only reason the idea of "gold" came into existence anyway is so people could acquire wealth without the loss of their own goods or work.

With the way things are, if you want something, you have actually work for it...

You are wrong.

Why would you not have to work for gold?