The case against Eternal Orbs and the benefits of removing them

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Veruski wrote:

Eternal Orbs were not a good addition to PoE. I propose that they be removed, for a number of reasons.

1) They cheapen rare items in general. Rares become less worthy of being picked up, or being identified. It's far less exciting to find a good/great rare item when you know somebody can trounce it by spending a few hundred eternals.

2) It makes using the main orbs on items feel like something only rich people can do. It becomes "do or die" -- make a perfect item, or go home. Eternal/exalt for the best modifiers, or don't bother. Yolo exalting is still done, but it has lost a huge amount of it's excitement and value.

Basically it makes feeling like tinkering with items beyond their color/sockets feel like something you can only do if you have hundreds or even thousands of exalts. I think players in general find this frustrating and boring.

Agree so far. Like, seriously agree. Already +1-ing this.

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Veruski wrote:

3) They make it near-impossible for GGG to release higher level tiers of modifiers. The second they did this, within a few days or weeks at most, people would already be producing fresh 6x T1 items with maximum modifiers. All you need is a pile of eternals, and then the mirrors that drop will proliferate them.

Pretty sure this would be happening in Standard even if Eternals didn't exist. But it would be less people and have less of a market impact. In other words: not prevented, merely hindered.

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Veruski wrote:

In addition to this, it would come with the return of the "almost good" rare items. These used to be exciting to find, and valuable. People used to pay a pretty big premium just for the opportunity to yolo-exalt them and hope for an important modifier. This is nearly gone now. The only ones that hold any value have to be "almost perfect" as opposed to "almost good."

This change would create huge excitement for farming, and finding rares.

This is overly optimistic. Anything which the market is flooded with now, it will be flooded with later; you can't expect a change like this to have a huge impact on the value of non-scarce items.

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Veruski wrote:

The only downside I can think of to removing Eternals would that the economy would need a replacement sink for Exalts. I don't know what that would be. Maybe this thread can serve as some brainstorming in that direction.

Actually, more Exalts would be used with Eternals gone. It would go back to the good old days, before the Eternal existed, of using Scourings to preserve 6Ls... or throwing the item out and starting over, if the item wasn't sufficiently linked to make it worth Scouring. There would also be a much bigger demand for "Exaltable" items, since it wouldn't be a case of getting your hands on one then using Eternals to preserve it. "Exaltable" would mean a different thing in a temp league than it would in a permanent one, so it still might be very hard to manually farm something which is effected by this change, but there would be more demand for this type of item.

What gets me about eternals is this...


GGG made it quite clear, several times, that they don't want there to be a BiS, go to, no brainer, rares can GTFO unique item. They want rare items to have the ability to always be the ultimate.

Apart from the fact they failed at this in several cases, let's look at what eternal+mirror gives us.





Now how, exactly, is this any different to the unique>rare situation that GGG wanted to avoid?
Other than you can't actually find it from a monster, like wtf?

OK, it's a rare item, but you will NEVER, EVER, rival this item.
Well, unless you want the CoE variant and that will also be available.

Hell, there are many eternal-spammed mirror services that offer several ultimate variations on the same item, all saved with eternals.


I'd say having a unique item that can drop from a monster, at an extremely low drop rate, that is the coveted BiS item for a certain scenario (whether good or bad) is a million times better than having that item NOT BE ABLE to drop, realistically, ever, but be available to buy (with whatever legal or illegal currency/method).

Imo GGG top brass is / was too infatuated with trading and economy, to be able to recognize what a silly bad idea mirrors and eternals is / was.

Or they are running a RMT racket with PoE frontend.

Pick your bad explanation for the existence of legal duping and mechanisms to aid legal duping.

mirrors and ethernals are perfect, every msg in this thread i read, has no logic.

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RoyalStar wrote:

mirrors and ethernals are perfect, every msg in this thread i read, has no logic.

if you're going to troll, at least put some effort into it. sad attempt.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

I'm not being hypocritical. I don't think they should exist. Just not for the the reasons you listed. Which has to do with reasons based on the economy, which I don't care about.

i dont think an alpha member should be this narrow minded, seriously
if all our alpha members over there test stuff with this mentality no wonder things like atziri gloves or mjolner/shavrones/CoE happens.

I'm totally in support of the removal of eternals, but not necessarily mirrors. Life before eternals was indeed better. Knowing you can exalt something freely without the stress of eternals hanging overhead was great.

The only thing wrong with all this is... What happens to all the eternals that already exist? Deleting all the existing ones would cause an enormous uproar, but leaving them would cause the 1%ers to have an even larger stranglehold on the economy. I don't personally care about standard, but I know a lot of people do and this creates a huge catch 22.

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JahIthBer89 wrote:

What happens to all the eternals that already exist? Deleting all the existing ones would cause an enormous uproar, but leaving them would cause the 1%ers to have an even larger stranglehold on the economy. I don't personally care about standard, but I know a lot of people do and this creates a huge catch 22.

If it were me, I would either delete them all or remove their functionality.

However, I would give the playerbase several months notice of this change, and constantly remind them that it was coming.

This would turn eternals into a "use them or lose them" thing.

Also, this is the main reason why I proposed combining the removal of eternals with the release of higher tier modifiers -- to eventually make the "perfect" items outdated.

Power creep can be used as a tool to undo old game design mistakes -- like eternals. Used with care, it's just another tool in the game development arsenal, kind of like inflation is a tool of economic regulators in real life.

Obviously, too much power creep is terrible, just like inflation. That doesn't mean there should be none of it, though. For the long term health of the game, the removal of eternals would make this kind of issue easier to control, and lessen power creep.

They've repeatedly said they won't keep adding higher suffixes.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

They've repeatedly said they won't keep adding higher suffixes.

irrelevant.

it's a tool that can be used to fix a problem.

if GGG refuses to use the tools they have available to fix the problems they have made, then it's no surprise the game is in the state that it is in.

meanwhile: do you have anything useful to add?