POE: The Best of Games and the Worst of Games

Mostly agree with OP, at least for the crafting part, You need more currency than a person can farm in a lifetime to reliably craft an item with with 4/6 desirable mods, (x alts+augs for 2 mods, x eternal regals for 3 and x eternal+exalting for the 4th) and not even talking highest bracket rolls. for that you need your own personal herd of farmers. Untill you can craft 3-4 mods reliably without spending orbs worth years of farm time (a lot of people haven't even seen an eternal drop).

This fact, that you cant reliably craft an above average item (required to survive high maps), leading to the need to buy, and the only ones who can afford to actually craft said items are people who spend all their time "trading" e.g: buying all the 6L items on the forums and reselling them for 50% profit.. which they can afford after flipping currency for worse rates than vendors and reselling for profit for a week or so... so you have an economy where the "rich" control everything and exploit the "poor"(people who spend their time playing the game over macro-spamming trade with).

congrats, the fact that crafting isnt a resonable way of getting OK items, gave this game the a worse economy than Somalia, even in the temp leagues! (rank 1 most corrupt country of 2013).

but yeah enough negativity, Playing this game solo/strictly with friends with no trade-related interaction with other players and before trying crafting has been a really pleasant experience, but OP covered the good parts of this game fairly well, so not gonna circlejerk on that.

+1 I support the OP's message.

Let me elobarte a bit on "almost all top players use RMT" ....

Yes they do ... sorry. Maybe not directly (taking Credit Card and buy) in many cases but by trading.

If you sell an item for 20 exalted every week do you really belive the guy who bought your item did find that exas? You dont - you know no real player can find 20 exas in that game (at least not in some weeks), you didnt find 20 exas in domination and noone else did. So you know that this 20 exas are from trade. The guy that buys your item got his exas from trade or bought them with his credit card. Exas are not found in most cases, they are just botted and then sold for cash.

Its like buying something for dollars you know that are coming from drug deals or something else illegal. You may not be guilty of drug dealing yourself but you are part of the problem.

Just like that "top players" (read: heavy traders) they may not buy that orbs themself but the accept currency they (must) know it was gained by botting - thats what drives RMT.

With the current drop rates in a bot free enviorment a very top end item would cost 1-2 exas not 20 ....

The only real flaw that the OP pointed out is that this game desperately needs a self found league to get rid of trade 2 win and make the drops and "crafting" feel fun.

I will laugh at anyone telling me that I would get bored playing this league. Look at all of the characters I have made so far. I already can buy whatever I want right now, how the hell would I get bored in a league where I can enjoy FINDING stuff instead of having to boringly trade for everything?

Crafting is so unrewarding, i wonder why its in the game. Why not just put a slot machine where you dump all your gear inside and it help you dispose it into nothingness.

I could barely play more than 1 dungeon per day now, making no progress, all currency burn on crafting and back to square one every time.

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return33 wrote:

Let me elobarte a bit on "almost all top players use RMT" ....

Yes they do ... sorry. Maybe not directly (taking Credit Card and buy) in many cases but by trading.

If you sell an item for 20 exalted every week do you really belive the guy who bought your item did find that exas? You dont - you know no real player can find 20 exas in that game (at least not in some weeks), you didnt find 20 exas in domination and noone else did. So you know that this 20 exas are from trade. The guy that buys your item got his exas from trade or bought them with his credit card. Exas are not found in most cases, they are just botted and then sold for cash.

Its like buying something for dollars you know that are coming from drug deals or something else illegal. You may not be guilty of drug dealing yourself but you are part of the problem.

Just like that "top players" (read: heavy traders) they may not buy that orbs themself but the accept currency they (must) know it was gained by botting - thats what drives RMT.

With the current drop rates in a bot free enviorment a very top end item would cost 1-2 exas not 20 ....

I don't know about RMTing, but it wouldn't surprise me if some did it.

PoE's economy is like a pyramid scheme, I think it delivers as long as the pay out is only to a small minority. Nobody self-found the higher end currency in large enough quantities so that they can afford 30+ exalted orbs to throw on a mathematically improbable item that someone has managed to roll up. They have likely squeezing a lot of people below them for the currency.

Joe Average gets lucky and finds an Exalted, he will cash it in for chaos or use it to buy gear he will unlikely find himself and the higher end currency tends to feed up the pyramid to the minority.

If you play with dedicated groups, you have the buffer, the culling strike/item rarity dude and the composition of your normal group amplifies the quantity and quality of items that drop so you churn through the quantity of items to get some decent ones. You are purpose built to farm. They are in the box seat to establish a good market position on the pyramid just because as a group they will generate far more currency and they will pass down the slops to people not in that position for their currency.

I just don't see the economy working if everyone was playing 'optimally'. Everyone would have items and nobody would have currency, the system is extremely poor in terms of converting items to currency outside of trading with other players. The system intentionally feeds currency up the pyramid. Not sure if anyone has logged into a dumpster league, those economies are horrendous. You do not want to be a buyer... Domination is half way there already, should not degenerate that badly in this period of time.

The supply/demand cycle just doesn't work unless the probability to find currency/good items was low for the average player. That creates demand. It is intentionally this low to make it unrealistic you will find what you need yourself, this creates demand to trade. It is the same way Blizzard got people on to the RMAH. Items with lots of affixes but had a few that were required to make the item usable. This resulted in a lot of junk being generated and you need the volume of thousands of players all constantly rolling to find a small quantity of desired items.

Torchlight didn't have the need to try and balance an economic system so they just dropped crazy loot from the word go.

I think scarcity is better than an overload of gear so I am not suggesting it rain unique items. However, something Torchlight does is that it doesn't gimp your character on gear so you are not bottlenecked in terms of progression. You might not get the best loot but you are guaranteed to find stuff that will provide you upgrades.

I still think the best crafting system would be one which allowed you to generate gear you need to progress within reason but still leave plenty of room for gear you want or lust for. I just don't feel PoE has the balance right yet. It comes down to balancing how much of a timesink they want the game to be getting reasonable gear. The exceptional gear should always be something that is extremely difficult to achieve, without the anticipation of finding an upgrade an ARPG loses it's appeal.

Part of the problem is I don't expect to find upgrades, I will identify an item in the case one is good enough worth keeping but my expectation is that it is going to be junk. That low anticipation is a negative. I think it is desirable to have that sense of expectation. It is a tricky thing to balance.

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return33 wrote:

Let me elobarte a bit on "almost all top players use RMT" ....

Yes they do ... sorry. Maybe not directly (taking Credit Card and buy) in many cases but by trading.

If you sell an item for 20 exalted every week do you really belive the guy who bought your item did find that exas? You dont - you know no real player can find 20 exas in that game (at least not in some weeks), you didnt find 20 exas in domination and noone else did. So you know that this 20 exas are from trade. The guy that buys your item got his exas from trade or bought them with his credit card. Exas are not found in most cases, they are just botted and then sold for cash.

Its like buying something for dollars you know that are coming from drug deals or something else illegal. You may not be guilty of drug dealing yourself but you are part of the problem.

Just like that "top players" (read: heavy traders) they may not buy that orbs themself but the accept currency they (must) know it was gained by botting - thats what drives RMT.

With the current drop rates in a bot free enviorment a very top end item would cost 1-2 exas not 20 ....

you're completely wrong.

Without bots, there would be no very top items in game at all, or they would cost 5-50 times MORE (not less).
If any bot farms exalteds, it farms all other currency types as well. Alterations, Chaoses, etc, etc... If bot leaves them on ground, then it's incredibly badly-programmed bot! So, if there are bots, they farm ANY currency, and in same numbers as ordinary players (because drop rates for bot are the same). Obviously, this currency will be sold out for real money as well as exalteds, or used to craft godly items which then will be sold for real money. Pretty same to what players do.
In fact, botting decreases prices for all items, so most of your loot turns into crap. That;s how bot poison economy.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

In fact, botting decreases prices for all items, so most of your loot turns into crap. That;s how bot poison economy.

No, botting decreases prices of almost all items but the top tier items just gain more and more in value, because they are the best and there won't be any better than these ever, so their value has to scale with the fact that there are more and more currencies coming into the economy. That's what happened in D3 : at the beginning, no item was worth the 2 billions buyout cap and you could sell average blue items on the AH. 1.5 year later, even decent rares are worth nothing, but a crazy good top tier legendary is not even sold on the AH anymore because the cap is too low.

They Should do something about fusing and 6L its to bad...
Ok 6l its op but spend 4,5,6 or 7k for get a 6L its retard. And for some ppl its one or two fusing....
And now its so bad ppl just pay 10ex and get 6L easy mod with lottery (wich is nothing 10ex for a 6L because if you make a 6L with only 500/600 fusing you are really really lucky, system is broke imo...

Its need to be hard to get 6L but 7000 fusing for a 6L its to much .
It Will be Nice if your chance increase each Time you use a fusing on an item

I would see ppl use fusing for get 6L instead of spam trade chan with lottery....

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Temper wrote:

POEs gambling system doesn't even make a scratch on D2 gambling system.

You see,in order to gamble and I mean constantly ride the slots,to have even some success you need to have the currency that particular gamble system requires to spend.D2 provided that currency in abundance,POE does not.

In "exchange" of this, POE offers (even for the fact that it can become a mess to handle) a LOT more of configuration possibilities than D2 ever had... try to imagine you would have needed linked sockets to make runewords as a very first mindstep... - or imagine to destroy your 20/20 multistrike if you have to resocket it as another (from the other side of view) ^^