pls add gold to buy items

I'm not saying that gold is needed.
Currency doesn't have to be gold.
It could be orbs of something.
It could be credits
It could be fried frogs.
It just doesn't matter how it looks like.
It's just a matter of preference and intended 'flavor'.

The valid point is that they are a lot of currency items here:
orbs of this and that + scrolls, upgrades.
So if I want to sell some item I have to ask buyer what price should I demand.
10 alchemy or 10 chaos or 10 regal?
Or maybe 5 alchemy 3 gem quality upgrade and 15 whetstones?
Or maybe 1500 tp scrolls?
I got this for trade, what do you have? :>
Oh you don't have x orb? So maybe you have x upgrade or y orb?
Do you think ppl would be trading anything like that?
No they will not.
Ppl won't convert prices into different currencies depending on which one buyers could provide them.
It's just retarded way to trade anything.
It would take too much effort to negotiate (adjust) price, also you could not provide any definite pricing for an item that you want to trade.

Therefore market (namely ppl who would start all the ingame business with trading end game items) will choose some ingame currency.
If the game will be delivered in current state gem quality upgrades will be my bet as such currency.
They are rare so they are worth a bit in the same time they won't be sinkable a lot since you could easily find some +14-16% quality gems so you need only a few quality upgrades to max them out.
Any qgu you will find after that will be free to trade since will get no reason to use them (similar to sojs in d2).
Alchemy orb regals and exalted could and will be sinkable no matter how good (advanced) player will be.

Some games have multiple currencies:

copper
bronze
silver
gold
platinum

Yet each currency unit has a fixed value that is able to be broken down into other units of lesser value. So, 5 copper is 1 bronze, 10 bronze is 1 silver, 20 silver is 1 gold, 50 gold is 1 platinum.. or whatever.

In PoE we have orbs.

Why can't the orbs work exactly like the system above? I don't see a reason why they cannot.

So, maybe I should adjust my point a bit... gold isn't pointless because "gold" is pointless in and of itself, but because the system in place already facilitates anything that a more... common system, could do.

All GGG has to do is set the value of each orb using the sell/buy venders as a metric and adjust the drop rates accordingly, so there is no mystery as to how the system will work or how an auction house could be implemented.

No difference between 1 copper and 1 Transmutation orb.

"

Fluffy wrote:

When we get an auction house (and we will and it will be forum based) how is the house supposed to determine a winning bid or players determine the high bid when bids are in the form of 3 x orb + 2 y orb and half a stack of wisdom scrolls? The idea is farcical, as farcical as the 'prices' of the current NPC vendors which brings us back to the OP's post pages and pages ago.

...or, maybe, we won't get an auction house, for both the reasons you pointed out and the fact that it really doesn't fit the concept of a devastated and profoundly unfriendly continent.

What, after all, does the game lose by keeping trading between individuals who actually talk to each other?

I can't help but think of that one Prinny in Disgaea 3's Land of Carnage.

"You've got a lot of nerve trying to buy your way to victory HERE, dood."

"

wittgenstein wrote:

All GGG has to do is set the value of each orb using the sell/but venders as a metric and adjust the drop rates accordingly, so there is no mystery as to how the system will work or how an auction house could be implemented.

That's what I wrote several post earlier.
Basic laws of supply vs demand and setting exchange rates right.
It might sound easy but it's not easy even with one currency in circulation.

Also there is one 'tricky' issue with PoE currencies.
Aside of being currencies (representing some value) they could be used to gain something.
Every currency item has its own function.
So their worth will be represented not only by their rarity but also by their utility.
How to compare utility of orb of scouring with utility of quality gem increase in digital fashion (to set some exchange rate)?
Devs would say it's 1 to 10.
I'd say it's 1 to 7 because that's how I feel about it -> I won't exchange my 10 scouring for 1 gem quality upgrade.

Games using multiple denominations of the same currency won't face such problems.
If you could exchange 10 copper to 1 silver it means that paying 10 coppers could give you same effect (you could get some item or service paying that) as paying 1 silver.

That's a major issue with that multiple currency system and I simply can't see how GGG could overcome it.
In real world floating exchange rate will be used in such situation and market will decide what's the worth of currency x comparing to currency y.
Here there's no such option imo.

"

Skivverus wrote:

...or, maybe, we won't get an auction house, for both the reasons you pointed out and the fact that it really doesn't fit the concept of a devastated and profoundly unfriendly continent.

What, after all, does the game lose by keeping trading between individuals who actually talk to each other?

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Devs, go ahead and implement the systems Fluffy wants, because you're going to do it anyway, according to him.

"

Skivverus wrote:

...or, maybe, we won't get an auction house, for both the reasons you pointed out and the fact that it really doesn't fit the concept of a devastated and profoundly unfriendly continent.

GGG didn't put what must be a huge amount of effort into linking items in player's game world inventory and stash to the forum including league identification and real time existence checking just so players can show each other items without posting screen shots. Seems obvious to me their unannounced plan is to integrate an auction house and possibly direct player-player trading with the forum.

"

Wittgenstein wrote:

Some games have multiple currencies:
copper
bronze
silver
gold
platinum

Yet each currency unit has a fixed value that is able to be broken down into other units of lesser value. So, 5 copper is 1 bronze, 10 bronze is 1 silver, 20 silver is 1 gold, 50 gold is 1 platinum.. or whatever.

In PoE we have orbs.

Why can't the orbs work exactly like the system above? I don't see a reason why they cannot.

Because these items are not easily managed, and their perceived value to players will vary and not have integer relationships. If you try to enforce integer relationships with an NCP who exchanges at those integer rates players will only trade the orbs they think the NCP overvalues for the ones they think he undervalues and won't accept the NCP rates for player to player trading either.

I do think we need an NPC who trades orbs at rates automatically adjusted according to player supply and demand but you need a fine resolution currency to be able to implement those rates. I posted pages ago scrolls of wisdom could be the trading currency. Their value is small enough but to be manageable you need to be able to stack 100,000,000 in a slot and split with a typed number (because you can't split 100 from a stack of 1,000,000 with a slide bar). If you did that scrolls would look rather like gold in other games with item identification having a cost of 1 gold. There never was anything inherently wrong with gold, just poor implementation in some other games.

"

ness wrote:

Nature abhors a vacuum.

That's it?

Also, Witt, I'm siding with ness on the problem with set exchange rates for scrolls/orbs/et cetera.
There's also the additional problem that if players are allowed to trade up, they can gain access to higher-end currency items simply by farming low-level areas for correspondingly longer.
Players shouldn't be able to get chaos spheres just by clearing the Terraces in normal a thousand times, for example (of course, if it's that many, it's likely going to be bots doing it). This is also a problem if any single drop-anywhere currency exists, and leads to the incentive to rush through content merely for the sake of the extra income a high-level character is capable of.

Imo there's no difference whether lowest tier currency items (aside of scrolls) will be exchangeable to higher ones or not by some dedicated ingame feature (vendors).
Transformation orbs will be valuable even for high lvl players so there will be constant demand for them.
Transformation orbs could be found in act1 normal afaik.
Same goes with sock rerolling orbs.
At least on of them will be normal low lvl item.
They could be easily farmed in act2 normal and then exchanged for some higher lvl orbs or some common currency (some higher currency item or higher regular item) by a barter trade at some chosen but well known rate.
Just like D2 perfect skulls were traded for sojs or the other way around.

btw I just read dev diary on currency again
It's pretty insightful but GGG didn't take one fact into consideration.
I'm referring to parts worded in bold by me.

"

Bartering Currency Items

In online RPGs where gold is too easy to obtain, we observed players trading certain items as currency and ignoring the underlying gold. Some examples are the “Globs of Ectoplasm” in Guild Wars and the “Stone of Jordan” and “High Rune” economies in Diablo II.

We found that successful game pseudo-currencies have four characteristics:
Homogeneity: Each unit of the currency has to be equivalent to other units. They should stack together, and there should never be a reason for a player to discriminate between two different units of that currency.
Utility: The individual currency items have specific uses in addition to their trade value. If the recipient of the currency item is able to use it to improve their character, then it’s even better for them to trade for. The economic value represented by its scarcity is just an added bonus so that they are able to on-trade it if they decide not to consume it themselves.
Scarcity: The currency should not be trivial to find. Some popular in-game barter items represent days or weeks of playing, and provide meaningful trade material for very high-end items. Other barter items are more common (cropping up every half hour or more) and allow for granularity with lower value trades.
Handleability: It should be convenient to transport or transact with a large portion of your net worth as currency.

These three factors help make a currency acceptable. If a currency is arbitrary (players are told “this is what you should use to trade with”) but it isn’t useful, homogeneous or particularly scarce, then it’s possible they’ll pick some other currency that feels more appropriate to them. It’s important for game designers to predict the encouraged player behavior and to make sure that behavior is enjoyable.

I've stated my opinion why gold wasn't traded in D2 few posts before. It wasn't ignored, it was just made impossible to use in trading valuable items because no one could carry as much gold as it was needed to trade such items.

Considering Sojs here there was one more thing that I wrote few posts ago.
Their usability was restricted because a player could use only two of them (per char but they could be transferred after all) and he couldn't sink them.
Personally I gambled a few couples of sojs playing D2C and it wasn't anything impressive then, I knew some ppl who got few mules full of sojs.
So for me soj usability ended after I found(gambled) second one.
Each one more was just a trading asset and I pushed them into circulation.
Therefore on soj example I think that usability of an item has to be restricted to make it possible to work as a currency.
Its (currency) amount in circulation has to grow as items worth in circulation grow, because they will without doubt.
The problem in PoE now is, that every single currency item could be of some use for just anyone, no matter if he is low lvl or high lvl. So they are gonna be constantly sinked, their amount won't grow as fast as amount of items for trade.
If such currency will be used then we would have pretty large deflation of items worth -> it would make items cheaper as game progresses in much faster pace than it would be if both currency and items won't be sinkable by any game mechanic.

Gem quality upgrades are closest thing to such non sinkable currency item now because their utility for higher lvl players is pretty much restricted.
High quality gems (15%+) are not that rare in loot and some of quality granted mods are crap so there's no point in spending gem upgrades to boost them.
Every other currency item has pretty much unlimited utility (usability). Maybe excluding flask quality upgrade but their worth is just too low to make it possible to become a common currency.

At first it'd be enough to be able to sell items :).