List your AH fears

Saph, I agree with everything you said, except for your jab at my tone when arguing with people and your last paragraph.

What content is currently gated behind difficulty besides uber atziri? The majority of PoE content is RNG gated (maps) or time gated (reaching max lvl).

Besides that I am sure GGG considers how many players will be able to complete new content when balancing. More people with better gear means that GGG can safely increase the difficulty in some way while still allowing the same target percent of players to complete the content.

I am not sure how you think more high level gear being available would leave more players behind instead of propelling more players forward. Do you care to explain your reasoning on that?

"

Fluffy_Puppies wrote:

Saph, I agree with everything you said, except for your jab at my tone when arguing with people and your last paragraph.

What content is currently gated behind difficulty besides uber atziri? The majority of PoE content is RNG gated (maps) or time gated (reaching max lvl).

Besides that I am sure GGG considers how many players will be able to complete new content when balancing. More people with better gear means that GGG can safely increase the difficulty in some way while still allowing the same target percent of players to complete the content.

I am not sure how you think more high level gear being available would leave more players behind instead of propelling more players forward. Do you care to explain your reasoning on that?

I kind of have to say hes right tho. Everything I've read that you've said I agree with but, you shouldn't use a condesending tone to the rest of the people in here who don't understand. You need people to not think you're being a d*** if you want them to understand what you're saying. As for the other thing he said; I'm not sure you actually understood what he meant. He wasn't saying more higher level gear leaves more people behind.

He was saying that even with and auction house available BIS gear will still be out of the reach of people who simply aren't making enough currency from killing mobs. If you are getting tons of gear that you would sell but don't want to waste tons of time to do that. Than an AH is amazing. You'll beable to make a good amount of currency and beable to buy things and find what you want more regularly.

However if you have nothing to sell and are new. And AH won't suddenly make things more affordable to you. You're 10chromes, 1alc, and 2scouring you picked up won't suddenly help you buy top level gear. He's saying you have to increase the droprate of BIS gear, which the easiest way to do that is by reducing the RNG of rares. So that a higher percentage of top rolled items are available.

Otherwise content keeps getting harder with the thought in mind that you will have these perfect rolled rares and poorer players will continue to not be able to do the content more and more until they are stuck doing the least profitable farming never able to actually get into the market in the first place.

Sorry Saph if that's not perfect but that's what I took away from what you said. But even saying that, I don't think thats 100% true. It is true to some extent. But the game isn't balanced around top end gear. If you have top end gear you just roflmao all over all the content in the game and make infinite money. The game has zero balance for extreme min maxing, take a look at the videos of people reaching in the millions of damage and killing atziri in a split second.

Short version: He was mentioning basically Trade vs Self-Found. This game is far far far leaning towards Trade. You don't self-find much things of worth. Especially if you are in crap gear. He was saying to help other players get into the market more they have to beable to rely somewhat on self-finding good items.

A game with leagues doesn't have to decide between AH and nonAH. Just make a league for both and get out of players' way so we can play how we want.

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

An auction house wouldn't change the practical effect of that, which is: the availability of best-in-slot gear is strictly a matter of your disposable wealth relative to other players, regardless of the form that wealth takes. If more money becomes available, prices will go up; if less money becomes available, it depends on how the money was drained.

Anyway, the "actual problem" there isn't the price of expensive goods, but the fact that the possibility of someone equipping them influences the design of future encounters, so that there's evermore content that's simply not accessible to most people. And that has nothing to do with the people or the trading system, and everything to do with the drop rates of the gear required to run that content. In other words, this talk of auction houses is almost entirely a red herring, but we all suffer for it.

I don't really agree. There is two ways to get items. One is to get it through monster drop. Two to get it through trading. Better market efficiency increase the supply and availability of items.

Players does not necessary need to sell their items to other players. They could as easily keep it in storage or destroy it. This create wastage. Trading require market knowledge and significant time investment. This barrier to trading isn't healthy to an economy. Less items being sold mean less overall wealth.

Wealth isn't the same. Items such as equips are more like assets than disposable wealth. Other players does not necessary want to take these items for trade. Currency such as orb are more liquidable disposable wealth. Better market efficiency increase the rate at which you can liquidate your assets and lower the time require to do so. You will have more disposable wealth. You might think player can earn unlimited wealth, the problem here is it require time investment to do so. Players can only earn as much wealth as they are willing to spend time. Similarly, if you can't spend as much time to trade you earn less wealth.

You can say availability of items is a problem with drop rate rather the trading system. In a way I agree, however it is just the tip of the iceberg. Even if it is a problem with the drop rate, it doesn't mean there isn't a problem with the trading system.

Interesting discussion, this.


My view is, if enough people are complaining about something, then it is up to the business owner to fix it.

The alternative is to ignore the people with the money...ie: the customers.. and pay the price for that in the long or short term by losing those customers and their support and getting a bad reputation to boot.

In this electronic world which we live in, a bad reputation is *the* hardest thing to shake off.

Word spreads so fast now days.

It is *not* the customer's job to fix the problem/s with a business, it is the owners duty.

The customers can/may make suggestions but in the end it falls on the shoulders of the management to come up with a solution that will satisfy the majority of their clientele.

You cannot please absolutely everyone every time, as a businessman I know this. However, you *must* do your best to please the majority of your customers whenever you can.

It seems to me that there is definitely a fault in the trading here on GGG which does need to be addressed by the management.

I'm not the one to tell them how to run their business, they no doubt have some very talented people on board who can do that.

What I can do is just say that in my opinion, as a customer of GGG there *is* a problem in the trading system which GGG should address.

That's about it.

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

"

JahIthBer89 wrote:

Items being cheaper isn't strictly better when they are everyone's source of income. We don't have an enormous array of industries to profit from in a game like you do in a real-life economy. Comparing the two as though they're parallel is incredibly naive.

I'm left wondering where you think orbs come from. Do you think trading spontaneously generates them?

That's one way of interpretting JIB89's post. The other, more reasonable way is to assume that lots of players (not everyone, that is hyperbole) rely heavily on sale of numerous small items in order to gain the wealth needed to trade for gear upgrades for themselves. Yes, we get it: players farm orbs too, not just low-end, trade-fodder gear.

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

The thing about online games that makes real-world analogies useless is, online games have unlimited demand for labor at a fixed price.

No. No they do not. There is no such thing as unlimited demand. Also, who is supplying this demand? "The game?" The game doesn't have desires of its own.

More importantly: fixed price? There are differences in skill. There are differences in capital (gear). There are even differences induced by randomness, similar to how salespeople who work off commission can have good times and bad times. The price is anything but fixed.

I don't know how you convinced yourself this was true, much less worth saying.

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

Or to put that in game terms, any player can, at any time and for any length of time, go out and do something that will net them money. While it's false and glib to say it in the real world, in an online game, time literally is money. Even more importantly, time spent "working for the game"---killing mobs, in our case---is how money is issued. If we were thinking of GGG as a government and players as citizens, then GGG is open to running a limitless public deficit, where the deficit is paid directly rather than indirectly through debt securities and a central bank. Then, conversely, using a chromatic orb to reroll some colors is a tax.

The one thing worth taking out of that was that killing mobs is the rough equivalent of printing money. Which means the game is printing money, and at risk of inflating currency (or deflating it, by increasing supply of goods) pretty much all of the time. I assume most of us knew that already, but I guess it bears repeating.

The one thing I cannot wrap my head around is your obsession with the "time is money" thing. It doesn't seem to me to be any less, or any more, true than the phrase usually is, in real-life contexts. It doesn't seem glib or false to me to say that you could always be doing something valuable with your time; thus, time is value; the only part of the "time is money" phrase which doesn't quite carry over is the notion that all types of value can be bought and sold. If we could find some way to buy and sell any form of value which exists, then time would indeed be money. Which means: if we could find a way to trade XP in-game, then time would be money in PoE as well. (I guess for level 100 characters and for those who die so often their net XP gain is zero, it's already the case.)

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

Path of Exile is a bit different because the process that generates orbs also generates items.

Different from what? As far as I can tell, there are games where currency generates items well, and games where currency generates items poorly... and not much else.

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

Spoiler

It's still not a bad approximation to say that time is money even in PoE, so let's zero in on that statement.

First, is it desirable for goods to take less time to acquire? While leveling, why not? In particular, while leveling and because orb drops are all over the place and because there's no good way to convert between orbs, it's generally not feasible to farm for them so upgrades are fewer and further between. So this gets back into that truly bizarre argument people make that market inefficiency is the best thing since having to slice your own bread, or that people being in worse gear because of said inefficiency is a noble game design choice.

Second, this actually exposes what's going on, and it reminds us of something: if GGG wants to make an item more expensive, they can make it better, or they can reduce its drop rate. If they were so inclined, and willing to throw off the "D2 did it so that must be the correct way" blinders, they could increase item scarcity by having items bind on equip.

Indeed, a lot of this talk about pricing dynamics is missing a fundamental aspect: there's a lot of ways to skin this cat, so why is making people frustrated the correct way? It's a bit like the parable of rested experience in WoW: They wanted to mitigate poopsock-leveling, so they implemented a system where, after you acquired a certain amount of experience in a day, your experience gains were halved. People really detested that system, and their solution was to double experience requirements across the board, replace the first block of experience per day with a 100% increased "rested" rate, and once that runs out you gained experience at the "normal" rate.

Other than the transitions being very weird (I saw nothing exposed, as reminded of nothing), this stuff seems mostly reasonable.

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

Now let's talk about another way an online game is not like the real world. In life, I need around 2000 calories of food and around 7 pints of water per day,

I like where this is going...

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

I need say three sets of climate-appropriate clothing, I need someplace for shelter and some fuel to heat it, and I want a variety of luxuries, and so forth. Some of these requirements are strict physical matters, and others are slowly-changing cultural norms, but much of this is physically invariant. It's not going to be the case that God will alter the thermodynamic properties of the universe tomorrow to dramatically alter my food or heating budget.

But online games do have dictators who are capable of making such fundamental alterations.

...and you really didn't go where I thought you were going with it. At all.

I feel the big difference you were starting to pick up on is that in-game economies do not have forced consumption. In the real world we need to eat, drink, and so on, these things force people to have a certain amount of earnings (whether it be regular income or some form of charitable donations) in order to merely keep going on. Online economies rarely have any form of this issue at all; even consumables in PoE (maps) are more like XP-gain timesavers than actual necessities.

Which might have been an interesting topic, somehow. But that's not what happened.

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

I think one of the big things that made D3 explode so spectacularly was the difficulty tuning of inferno. This made certain items actually inaccessible to most players, and it created a very hard demand floor for very good items. Best-in-slot wasn't just a luxury like embalmed sharks or shitty sports cars, it was a going-on-necessity to even complete the game.

The A3Inferno-gated items were nice and all, but not at all necessary to progression. It's just that they were the game's only decent legendaries and set items at the time, everything before that was made into such utterly, ridiculously boring shit that there was absolutely nothing to get excited about. Note that I'm talking about excitement, by which I mean: fun. You needed A3 Inferno access, or trade with someone who did, to have fun items. You didn't need this to simply keep grinding away at the game, because, well, someone had to be first to A3.

I remember very well, there was this huge difficulty spike in A2Inferno back then which really did gate those A3 items, and gate them hard. But I don't think that huge difficulty spike was entirely bad (except for the heavy reliance on ambushes and spike damage, but that's the how of delivering the difficulty spike, not directly related to whether there is one or not). I think the real problem was that all the nice goodies were put in exactly one spot, on the A3 side of the gate, and on the other side you had abso-fucking-lutely nothing. If they would have had 60-80% of the interesting items available at or before early A2 Inferno, then 15-30% of them as A3 exclusives, then another 5-10% as A4 exclusives, that would have been just fine.

Really, though, it's a moot point. There is nothing equivalent to that type of difficulty gating in PoE. The endgame here is simply not a linear experience.

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

There is a feedback between the power of available gear and the power of mobs, which is enforced at the game design level. This has the effect of creating effectively-limitless demand for best-in-slot gear---and the price increases associated with that are not some counterfactual about auction houses, but they're the present reality. Prices for best-in-slot gear are already incredibly high, because there's limitless demand and such limited supply that you only have to cater to the ultra-wealthy.

Again, no such thing as unlimited demand. There's just good old-fashioned "demand" demand, where there's more than one person who wants the thing and only one of the thing to go around.

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

An auction house wouldn't change the practical effect of that, which is: the availability of best-in-slot gear is strictly a matter of your disposable wealth relative to other players, regardless of the form that wealth takes. If more money becomes available, prices will go up; if less money becomes available, it depends on how the money was drained.

Not "strictly," but pretty much, yeah. The nature of orbs will always prevent an item's price from exceeding the cost (believed) necessary to craft it, assuming somewhat average luck. And yes, an auction house is totally irrelevant to it. It's interesting that we're talking about this, since this is an auction house thread and you'd think we'd be discussing things relevant to auction houses.

"

sphericalvoxel wrote:

Anyway, the "actual problem" there isn't the price of expensive goods, but the fact that the possibility of someone equipping them influences the design of future encounters, so that there's evermore content that's simply not accessible to most people.

Again, failing to consider skill, randomness, or build. Again, someone is always first; how did he get there, without the gated gear?

In conclusion, what I mostly got out of your post was pretension and complaining about content being too difficult for you to handle. Not impressed.

"

Kingdestiny wrote:

"

Fluffy_Puppies wrote:

Saph, I agree with everything you said, except for your jab at my tone when arguing with people and your last paragraph.

What content is currently gated behind difficulty besides uber atziri? The majority of PoE content is RNG gated (maps) or time gated (reaching max lvl).

Besides that I am sure GGG considers how many players will be able to complete new content when balancing. More people with better gear means that GGG can safely increase the difficulty in some way while still allowing the same target percent of players to complete the content.

I am not sure how you think more high level gear being available would leave more players behind instead of propelling more players forward. Do you care to explain your reasoning on that?

I kind of have to say hes right tho. Everything I've read that you've said I agree with but, you shouldn't use a condesending tone to the rest of the people in here who don't understand. You need people to not think you're being a d*** if you want them to understand what you're saying. As for the other thing he said; I'm not sure you actually understood what he meant. He wasn't saying more higher level gear leaves more people behind.

He was saying that even with and auction house available BIS gear will still be out of the reach of people who simply aren't making enough currency from killing mobs. If you are getting tons of gear that you would sell but don't want to waste tons of time to do that. Than an AH is amazing. You'll beable to make a good amount of currency and beable to buy things and find what you want more regularly.

However if you have nothing to sell and are new. And AH won't suddenly make things more affordable to you. You're 10chromes, 1alc, and 2scouring you picked up won't suddenly help you buy top level gear. He's saying you have to increase the droprate of BIS gear, which the easiest way to do that is by reducing the RNG of rares. So that a higher percentage of top rolled items are available.

Otherwise content keeps getting harder with the thought in mind that you will have these perfect rolled rares and poorer players will continue to not be able to do the content more and more until they are stuck doing the least profitable farming never able to actually get into the market in the first place.

Sorry Saph if that's not perfect but that's what I took away from what you said. But even saying that, I don't think thats 100% true. It is true to some extent. But the game isn't balanced around top end gear. If you have top end gear you just roflmao all over all the content in the game and make infinite money. The game has zero balance for extreme min maxing, take a look at the videos of people reaching in the millions of damage and killing atziri in a split second.

Short version: He was mentioning basically Trade vs Self-Found. This game is far far far leaning towards Trade. You don't self-find much things of worth. Especially if you are in crap gear. He was saying to help other players get into the market more they have to beable to rely somewhat on self-finding good items.

Well...I don't know how far you read back, but my tone was set in response to a rude post by Boem (a person I have a previous dislike for). Everything since then has been giving these people back what they are giving in kind. I don't see any reason to be nice to people who are both wrong and being rude. I even said to Boem early on that I had no intention of trying to sway his opinion because I happen to know that he doesn't change his opinions no matter what evidence or facts are presented to him (this is true in every thread on these forums). Rather I am posting for third parties to get a better understanding.

Repeating other topic.

I

saw

that

in

the

past

with

other

game.

AH = Big game mechanics change + "Worst thing ever" for new players.

Real Money AH = Hardcore players + AH price control + GGG thinking that they can go gg

RMAH is the next step of AH.

"

Fluffy_Puppies wrote:

Well...I don't know how far you read back, but my tone was set in response to a rude post by Boem (a person I have a previous dislike for). Everything since then has been giving these people back what they are giving in kind. I don't see any reason to be nice to people who are both wrong and being rude. I even said to Boem early on that I had no intention of trying to sway his opinion because I happen to know that he doesn't change his opinions no matter what evidence or facts are presented to him (this is true in every thread on these forums). Rather I am posting for third parties to get a better understanding.

I see. I don't keep track of peoples names around here. I don't often post much as you can see been here since early 2011 and prob have made half a dozen posts. This is really the only thing I've felt compelled to comment on because PoE is so blatantly trade heavy and has a terrible trade system. You can't be 95% trade and 5% self-found and have a stone age trade system. Either fix trade, or better yet make it more like 55% trade 45% self found. So it's actually easier to just pick up a rare you find and make it into a top tier piece.

Really the only issue I've ever had with the game. And I have a ton of HC action rpg player friends who refuse to play PoE simply because it's so trade heavy. Diablo 2 was never so trade dependent. It was actually possible to find top tier stuff like Shako's by just playing every now and than.

"

fernandoaraujo wrote:

Repeating other topic.

I

saw

that

in

the

past

with

other

game.

AH = Big game mechanics change + "Worst thing ever" for new players.

Real Money AH = Hardcore players + AH price control + GGG thinking that they can go gg

RMAH is the next step of AH.

lolno. The only game an AH has ever been bad for, excluding some sort of exploits, was Diablo 3.

The rest of your post was just nonsense.