I don't understand how stuff is priced

I don't understand how the prices of rare and unique items are arrived at. Some of them just seem bizarrely low to me. I see all of these unique items going for a small number of chaos or alchemy orbs and I just can't imagine wanting to sell them for that much. I feel like I could grind for that much currency in the amount of time it takes to complete the trade in many cases. I don't understand how unique items that hardly drop could go for a small amount of currency that can be easily and reliably grinded for. What's going on here?

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kjykjy1985 wrote:

What's going on here?

Supply and demand, really. You got tons of players playing the game and dropping items, but only a small fraction of them will want one specific Unique. All the rest of them don't want it and try to sell it to the small fraction. A bunch of them will want to sell faster than others, so they lower the price until the small fraction are willing to buy. Since the small fraction are so few, it's more likely that you'll find impatient buyers who really just want to get rid of their stock as soon as possible.

Be wary, when the price of an item on poe.trade is low, sometimes the posters are "scammers" -- people who will attempt to get you to pay for something and then swap out the item you want before executing the trade.

As has long been known, "If it sounds too good to be true, it likely is."

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Supply and demand, really. You got tons of players playing the game and dropping items, but only a small fraction of them will want one specific Unique. All the rest of them don't want it and try to sell it to the small fraction. A bunch of them will want to sell faster than others, so they lower the price until the small fraction are willing to buy. Since the small fraction are so few, it's more likely that you'll find impatient buyers who really just want to get rid of their stock as soon as possible.

Then how am I supposed to meaningfully participate in the economy? I don't want people harassing me with one chaos orb offers and I don't want to ignore potentially valuable items because I have no immediate use for it or already have one. I don't understand how any trading really happens.

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Be wary, when the price of an item on poe.trade is low, sometimes the posters are "scammers" -- people who will attempt to get you to pay for something and then swap out the item you want before executing the trade.

As has long been known, "If it sounds too good to be true, it likely is."

How does this work exactly? It can't be easy to pull off with unique items as most of them have very distinct artwork, and it seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through to scam someone out of a chaos orb or two.

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kjykjy1985 wrote:

Then how am I supposed to meaningfully participate in the economy? I don't want people harassing me with one chaos orb offers and I don't want to ignore potentially valuable items because I have no immediate use for it or already have one. I don't understand how any trading really happens.

You can't meaningfully participate via item sales if your personal valuation of these items is significantly higher than market price. The more you play the game and the more Unique items you drop, though, I suspect the more your personal valuation of each item gets lower and lower until it reaches market price or below (I don't like dealing with people, so I often just vendor Unique items instead of bothering to sell them). Trading happens where willingness to pay equals or exceeds willingness to sell at a particular moment for two particular people; most people participating in the economy probably have much lower willingness to sell than you.

You can still meaningfully participate as a buyer. I personally take the "poor man's wages;" this includes finding and vendoring 3L RGB items and 6-socket items for Chromatics and Jeweller's Orbs respectively, and doing the unid chaos recipe* for chaos, then spending those chaos on items I like. Poor man's wages are inefficient for optimised wealth gain inside the economy, but are a strong way to gear up for those of us who really don't like trading that much - we can simply kill monsters, acquire loot, turn loot to wealth, and use wealth to acquire desired items.

Of course, you may occasionally find one of this big-ticket items that you'd normally buy, and then you can participate as a seller as normal (Cadiro was offering a Mortal Hope for ~1200 coins, and I saw via lowest priced offers on poe.trade that Mortal Hope sells at a minimum for 46 chaos, while 1200 coins can be obtained for 10 chaos. Since I valued 46 chaos higher than I valued Mortal Hope, I sold it to other players for juicy 46 chaos revenue (36 profit net of the Perandus Coin cost)).