Exalted Orbs: The Nickelback of POE

OK, so we keep talking about "the economy" like it's some vaunted thing that cannot be altered for fear of sending the whole thing crashing down. Let's keep in mind that we're talking about pixels here, and a "ten-year plan". If the economy is a little zany for 3 months in beta but comes out right on the other side, all is forgotten and everyone wins. It isn't like talking real world economy, where people's lives and well-being depend on a stability.

But we might as well apply the same principals since the term keeps cropping up.

My thesis: Exalted Orbs are insanely expensive given their intrinsic value, given GGG's steadfast refusal to implement anything approaching "gold" in the economy.

Using an Exalt for its intended purpose is pretty much crazy at this point unless you have a godly piece of gear and a few Exalts to spare. Even before we got the two new garbage mods, using an Exalt was only done if you had an excess. The risk of turning up a mod that doesn't fit what you're trying to do at all makes it really tough to use on that 5 modded 5L chest that is missing one of three vital stats you need. Or you could roll thorns, which as we all know is pretty much useless to everyone. Now we have two more mods in that pool, which makes Exalting an item even riskier. So if the intrinsic value of the Exalted Orb is becoming diluted, it seems reasonable to expect it to lose value to a point where its value would be more commensurate with its use(somewhere in the neighborhood of Blessed and Regal, imo). Hopefully this would signify to GGG that its drop rate should be altered or its mechanics need work. If they are paying attention to the builds people are using looking for irregularities, I'm confident they look at economic markers in game.

Given that, (I, anyway) would assume that another currency or two(Divine, GCP) would move up to the value of an Exalt, which would drop down to the level of a GCP. It isn't like we're talking dollars and cents here, we need things to maintain value as a place holder. A 1, 5, 10, and 20 unit currency, if you will. Alch->Chaos->GCP->Exalt(and equivalents, obviously) provided that service very nicely(yes, I know, 1,2,6,30. Whatever.) and the economy was reasonably stable.

Somehow, despite the fact that they are a completely random element in the much maligned crafting system(so they are actually generating bad PR for themselves and associates), Exalts keep going UP in price. When will they stop? 15 GCP? 20? Who knows. People are rabid for them. Why? I can't believe that they're using them, so they must be buying stuff with them. But they have the accepted equivalent currency already(9, 10 GCP, whatever. or crazy amounts of random orbs(WTT 28 Alch + 7 Chaos + 5 Regret + 1 Regal for your Exalted Orb). WHY?! What are you going to do with it?! Mount the MF'er?!), and they're increasingly willing to shell out more and more! WTF?

So Exalts were worth 5 GCP until about, what... the beginning of last week? Which means that any item worth 3 Exalts was worth ~15 GCP. Now the same item is worth 3 Exalts, but 30 GCP? Really? Did anyone else notice that's weird? Nothing moved up to the vacated spot, either, so now we have a 1, 5, 10, and 100 unit currency, and anything that costs more than 40 bucks costs a hundred.

We all seem to pretty much agree that Exalts are completely devalued intrinsically, and GGG wants to make perfectly clear: THEY ARE NOT GOLD. So if they aren't a pure currency, they're a product. But we all agree they're an over-valued commodity given the benefit recouped from their use. Let's call Exalted Orbs the Nickelback of POE. They inexplicably rake in cash despite the immense, yawning pit of their absolute failure to produce meaningful results. How in the name of GOD does this happen? In the real world, there is no one looking down on the world saying "Man, this music sucks. Nickelback cd's now cost five cents." In POE, there is a team of people whose goal it is to do just that.

Please. PLEASE. Fix your system. Either make Exalts more useful by restricting garbage mods at high level, make them more common to devalue them so they can be used more freely, or introduce new orbs that allow for some localized customization on an item.

I'm sure someone will come in here and split hairs or nit-pick in an attempt to contend your overall point, but I think this is a very good post and concisely points out a very real issue right now. Exalts are the premier display of the issue, but many, if not all of the orbs except for trans/alt/aug/chroms, currently suffer from the same exact problem: their intrinsic value based on the power of their effects seems to have no bearing on how scarce they are. To put it bluntly, most of the orbs suck ass and yet they're scare as hen's teeth, even with high IIQ. Take this scarcity, mix it with it's weak, wide ranging and random effects on gear, combine with huge stat spreads ranging from trash to godly, and add useless mods like light radius, and you get a look at (not counting socket color, socket amount, links) just how many layers of RNG people have to fight against to get anything worth while.

I don't think the games economy is in its current state b/c of exalt drop rates. My money is on the chaos recipe nerf. Up until that point, the botters and multiboxers had a way of farming currency they could sell easily. Chaos orbs. Now they are only able to turn their currency into fusing at best. Nobody wants to buy fusing for real money.

So, my theory is, these real money traders are responsible for the current game economy. They have driven the price of exalted orbs sky high because their resources are endless while they are allowed to bot. The best way for these guys to make real money is to sell currency that is highly sought after, i.e. exalts.

Because these guys have a limitless supply of alterations and fusing they can pay any price people demand for exalted orbs, driving the price up. They are causing a huge demand for exalts resulting in limited supply for the rest of us.

I do not think increasing the drop rate on exalted orbs will have the desired effect most people think it will. I think it will make things worse. These botters will continue to pay any in game price for exalts to sell to people for real money b/c in game currency for them, is endless.

While increasing the drop rate would make exalts easier to find, I think the actual price of them will continue to skyrocket endlessly until these RMT scum are dealt with. And we are talking about the games economy here, not the accessibility of exalts.

I am also curious how much people farm? I see so many posts about exalts being so rare that most people have only found 1 or 2 when I myself have found over a dozen, and have used them on less than "godly" gear.

Just my observations. But I personally am highly against increasing exalted orbs drop rates. Fix the problem at its source, rather than put a band-aid over it. In real life, if someone is robbing banks, the solution isn't to increase minimum wage.

"

Dragon585 wrote:

I don't think the games economy is in its current state b/c of exalt drop rates. My money is on the chaos recipe nerf. Up until that point, the botters and multiboxers had a way of farming currency they could sell easily. Chaos orbs. Now they are only able to turn their currency into fusing at best. Nobody wants to buy fusing for real money.

So, my theory is, these real money traders are responsible for the current game economy. They have driven the price of exalted orbs sky high because their resources are endless while they are allowed to bot. The best way for these guys to make real money is to sell currency that is highly sought after, i.e. exalts.

Because these guys have a limitless supply of alterations and fusing they can pay any price people demand for exalted orbs, driving the price up. They are causing a huge demand for exalts resulting in limited supply for the rest of us.

I do not think increasing the drop rate on exalted orbs will have the desired effect most people think it will. I think it will make things worse. These botters will continue to pay any in game price for exalts to sell to people for real money b/c in game currency for them, is endless.

While increasing the drop rate would make exalts easier to find, I think the actual price of them will continue to skyrocket endlessly until these RMT scum are dealt with. And we are talking about the games economy here, not the accessibility of exalts.

I am also curious how much people farm? I see so many posts about exalts being so rare that most people have only found 1 or 2 when I myself have found over a dozen, and have used them on less than "godly" gear.

Just my observations. But I personally am highly against increasing exalted orbs drop rates. Fix the problem at its source, rather than put a band-aid over it. In real life, if someone is robbing banks, the solution isn't to increase minimum wage.

I don't think his point was along the lines of "omg everyone wants exalts for items now, they need to drop more so I can buy stuff!"; rather he means that their rarity should have some correlation with their power and efficacy as a crafting item. The crafting aspect of this game is far and away the most flawed and in dire need of help, and that is what the OP is talking about. People shouldn't be wanting to hoard exalts to use as some sort of surrogate gold, they should be wanting them for their on use effects, and therefore when people got them they'd almost always want to burn them up on maps and equipment rather than save them as some sort of bartering chip. Thus why he advocates making them more common ,because their effects, at absolute best, are useful only some of the time to a very small amount of the populace, and at worst, brick items. Alternatively they can stay as rare as they are, but have their mechanics revised to make their power and chance to be useful have some relation to how rare they are; the same is true of nearly every other orb type in the game. Either make currency more common, or keep the current drop rates and review their mechanics and effects.

"

Dragon585 wrote:

I don't think the games economy is in its current state b/c of exalt drop rates. My money is on the chaos recipe nerf. Up until that point, the botters and multiboxers had a way of farming currency they could sell easily. Chaos orbs. Now they are only able to turn their currency into fusing at best. Nobody wants to buy fusing for real money.

So, my theory is, these real money traders are responsible for the current game economy. They have driven the price of exalted orbs sky high because their resources are endless while they are allowed to bot. The best way for these guys to make real money is to sell currency that is highly sought after, i.e. exalts.

Because these guys have a limitless supply of alterations and fusing they can pay any price people demand for exalted orbs, driving the price up. They are causing a huge demand for exalts resulting in limited supply for the rest of us.

I do not think increasing the drop rate on exalted orbs will have the desired effect most people think it will. I think it will make things worse. These botters will continue to pay any in game price for exalts to sell to people for real money b/c in game currency for them, is endless.

While increasing the drop rate would make exalts easier to find, I think the actual price of them will continue to skyrocket endlessly until these RMT scum are dealt with. And we are talking about the games economy here, not the accessibility of exalts.

I am also curious how much people farm? I see so many posts about exalts being so rare that most people have only found 1 or 2 when I myself have found over a dozen, and have used them on less than "godly" gear.

Just my observations. But I personally am highly against increasing exalted orbs drop rates. Fix the problem at its source, rather than put a band-aid over it. In real life, if someone is robbing banks, the solution isn't to increase minimum wage.

All that is true, but that doesn't change the fact that the actual function of an Exalted Orb is in no way reflective of its rarity or price. I'm more interested in fixing the crafting system than the economy, tbh, but I feel like capitalism is being turned on its head here. WE are responsible for giving Exalts their value. If you're trading currency for Exalts that you aren't going to use, you're helping set the price because you're going to expect a return on that investment when you go to sell. No one is going to craft with an Exalt at this time because the opportunity cost is too high to justify the risk of winding up something useless on anything less than a GG item.

The botters may well be causing the scarcity, but we're talking about demand-pull inflation. If we quit paying such insane amounts for the orbs, the botters won't have such incentive to depopulate the pond, so to speak. Or if supply suddenly exceeded demand(which, let's be honest, is approximately that of a Regal orb for its intrinsic value and getting less and less with each patch) then the botters would again lose their incentive to play with the market. They may well pick a different item, say Divine Orbs. While cool, Divine's aren't good enough to be worth 10 GCP either, so this same thing will occur. The most intrinsically useful currency item that is also rare is the GCP, and they have a vendor recipe. If botters tried to buy up all the GCP and all the quality gems in existence, well, they'd stay damned busy.

I find all of the currency useful. They each have their own use and I use each of them daily with the exception of some of the more rare ones. Exalted orbs add a random stat to a rare. What more could you want them to do?

And if you increase the drop rate, the prices will just go even higher. Making your only option of obtaining exalted orbs... finding them yourself. How many impatient people are gonna be ok with that?

I don't buy exalts. When the prices began to skyrocket I took a stance and refused to sell or buy any of them. And since, I have found at least 4 which I used on my 2 rings.

The games economy didn't become a problem on its own. It was working just fine. Only recently has the price of exalts become questionable. And it happened so fast that it is very suspicious to me. Normal inflation takes time. This seemed to happen over night and continues to escalate.

Again, my thoughts and opinions, but I would like to state that I am STRICTLY against increasing the drop rate of currency as I feel this would solve absolutely nothing.

We aren't the ones paying the huge prices, they are. They can afford to pay any price demanded. And so they will. If we all decided to stop paying for exalts, it would have no negative effect on the RMT scum. The reason they are buying exalts is not to horde them and wait to sell them for a profit. They are buying exalted because those are the easiest to sell for real money, since that is the most widely accepted form of in game currency in trades.

I'm curious what you would change exalted orbs to do?

"

Dragon585 wrote:

I find all of the currency useful. They each have their own use and I use each of them daily with the exception of some of the more rare ones. Exalted orbs add a random stat to a rare. What more could you want them to do?

And if you increase the drop rate, the prices will just go even higher. Making your only option of obtaining exalted orbs... finding them yourself. How many impatient people are gonna be ok with that?

I don't buy exalts. When the prices began to skyrocket I took a stance and refused to sell or buy any of them. And since, I have found at least 4 which I used on my 2 rings.

The games economy didn't become a problem on its own. It was working just fine. Only recently has the price of exalts become questionable. And it happened so fast that it is very suspicious to me. Normal inflation takes time. This seemed to happen over night and continues to escalate.

Again, my thoughts and opinions, but I would like to state that I am STRICTLY against increasing the drop rate of currency as I feel this would solve absolutely nothing.

You really feel that the use of 1 Exalt is worth the 10 GCP you could get for it? There are *so many* affixes, and so few that are truly useful to a given spec. I just couldn't do it.

Just gonna say, lets look at a few things:

An alteration orb is to an augmentation orb what an chaos orb is to an exalted orb.

Lets investigate what I mean

Alts roll up to 2 mods, but can roll only one sometimes. Now if it happens to roll one, an alt can give it that second mod.

Chaos orb roll up to 6 mods, but can roll 4-5 sometimes (don't thinkt hey can roll 3). Now if it happens to roll less than 6, an exalt can give it that extra mod.

Now we may have noted that 4 augmentations is ~= 1 alt. That is according to a fixed recipe.

We can also argue that an exalt is relatively better compared with a chaos, than an alt with a aug, because of a higher number of mods.

But I don't really believe it should be worth more than the chaos itself. This is an exorbidant price, and it is never worth exalting any item. It was barely worth exalting any item back when it was 1:5 with gcp. If you were to exalt a beautifully rolled armour with the +flat/+% and two resistances, it would almost never give you more value than teh exalt itself was worth in the item.

The exalts 'price' is purely set by its drop rate. There are only a few other orbs set by this. Those are the blessed orb and the divine orb (Regals are hard to come by aswell).

All the other orbs have semi fixed pricing due to availability.

GCP is related to the 5% gems which no one actually awnts, but are 1/7th of a gcp. So gcp you can get a few ways, and you don't really use them either cause its cheaper to buy a 17% gem than it is to spend 17 gcp on a gem. This makes GCP relatively overpriced aswell as the exalt.

Chaos you can make with any high level farming of rares, pretty easy. Its also of a fairly fixed price (relative to lower orbs) because of how available it is, yet its actual worth as a money sink for maps/item crafting (lol @ item crafting, but must include for accuracy).

Alchemy you CAN make with shards or by stacking 400 pages of rares. Okay, you used to be able to stack pages of rares. Now its just finding shards. Even then you can get shards reliably by selling those rares you aren't saving for chaos recipe. Its also fairly fixed in value because 1 alch + 1 scouring = 1 chaos

Scouring are hard to make. But also low demand. Primarily through drop rate, these stay at a fairly fixed price thanks to the previous recipe

Fusing stay fairly common thanks to large demand (people always linking items), and easy crafting (8 alt is 1 fuse, this keeps them easily obtained but they burn on items fast).

Regrets I hate and refuse to discuss as I think they are worthless and won't accept them for trades.



So we can see the odd ones out are either very powerful in unusual circumstances (divining an item is unusual but can make a powerful unique better, blessed orb is valuable for when you roll that unique onyx amulet with +9 to all stats, and regals aren't too often used but are super lategame crafting only), or are low drop rate with no true value --> Exalt and GCP

"

cannabination wrote:

"

Dragon585 wrote:

I find all of the currency useful. They each have their own use and I use each of them daily with the exception of some of the more rare ones. Exalted orbs add a random stat to a rare. What more could you want them to do?

And if you increase the drop rate, the prices will just go even higher. Making your only option of obtaining exalted orbs... finding them yourself. How many impatient people are gonna be ok with that?

I don't buy exalts. When the prices began to skyrocket I took a stance and refused to sell or buy any of them. And since, I have found at least 4 which I used on my 2 rings.

The games economy didn't become a problem on its own. It was working just fine. Only recently has the price of exalts become questionable. And it happened so fast that it is very suspicious to me. Normal inflation takes time. This seemed to happen over night and continues to escalate.

Again, my thoughts and opinions, but I would like to state that I am STRICTLY against increasing the drop rate of currency as I feel this would solve absolutely nothing.

You really feel that the use of 1 Exalt is worth the 10 GCP you could get for it? There are *so many* affixes, and so few that are truly useful to a given spec. I just couldn't do it.

I have done it, many times... at least 8 times that I can think of. I prefer to trade as little as possible. I don't look at what I could have gotten vs what I got. And I can say honestly, that exalting my gear has turned out well for me. I have also spent over 800 fusings trying to 6L my armor. Was it worth it? You bet! Did I spend more than I should have? Of course, but I did it myself. I hate buying gear when I can craft it myself. To each his own.