Here's why I love the design of Inscribed Ultimatums, and why GGG will probably delete them.

In a phrase? I love Currency-based (and to some extent, Card-based) Inscribed Ultimatums because they are guaranteed to be rewarding if you pass the challenge. The only possible scenarios in which I can imagine you incurring a loss are:

• You bought an Inscribed Ultimatum without understanding the mechanic, and purchased at negative profit. For example, you bought an Exalted Orb x1 ulti that "Doubles sacrificed currency" and thought "cool, 2 ex profit, I should pay 1.5 ex for this" - without realising that by sacrificing 1 Exalted Orb, you only gain 1 Exalted Orb from doubling it. Or in other words, you actually paid 2.5 ex for 2 ex. I believe this is an acceptable loss scenario because it can be 100% avoided by knowledge of extremely basic math/economics/logic.
• You ran a Unique to Unique Inscribed Ultimatum and sacrificed a higher value Unique for a lower value Unique. Again, I believe this is an acceptable loss scenario because you're consciously taking the market risk on.
• You bought cards or currency to run an Inscribed Ultimatum and can't sell the resulting cards or currency. Again, I believe this is an acceptable loss scenario because you're consciously taking the market risk on.

In all other scenarios, you gain profit from completing the Ultimatum. But wait, you might ask - where's the excitement of RNG? Path of Exile is famed for being a casino, because the lows and highs of gambling (at least the way the designers envision it) make the highs feel better. Here's where the beauty in design comes in, as I see it - the RNG is in the encounter difficulty.

This isn't immediately obvious at first glance. You might think - I've run 1 Ruin 3, I've run them all. There's no excitement, all grind, in running these things. But this doesn't seem to be true. I've noticed some ultis are sparse, some mob types are easy; other ultis are swarming, other mob types are deadly. This may be frustrating the first time you lose an ulti that you thought you could handle. But for the discerning player, it introduces an interesting element of which mods pose which type of risk. If I run Limited Flasks, will I be body blocked into a deadly swarm while my Phasing flask is down? Will I react fast enough? IF I'm not an avoidance build and run a Ruin III Restless Ground III Stone Circles ulti - will I be able to juke all the projectiles for the whole duration if it's easy mobs? Hard mobs?

The fact that the RNG is in the encounter difficulty also means that you are, naturally, incentivised to make your character stronger. Not just more DPS for faster clearing, but stronger in terms of able to handle a wider variety of challenges, or is more reliably able to handle certain challenges. You might stack avoidance so you can breeze through Ruin III Restless Ground III challenges, for example.

But that beauty is also where GGG balancing team comes in and, I'm sure, is very tempted to obliterate Inscribed Ultimatums with the nerf hammer. What happens when a character is fully geared by a top-end player who has the game knowledge to build a character specifically for Inscribed Ultimatums? People will say that there's no risk anymore. They'll say that it's a boring currency grinder and has no place in the game. They'll say - it's deterministic rewards. I know you're all getting sick of the Harvest memes, but that sounds familiar, yes? Top-end players getting perfect results upends GGG design that wants randomness. The vast majority of the playerbase will still experience wild variance, but the top-end players won't. Which is what worries me that Inscribed Ultimatums will be removed from the game.

I'm really hoping GGG proves me wrong on that one. I've lost 1000s of chaos gambling on Inscribed Ultimatums, but they have never once felt like gambling - there was always an element of "I could have made better choices and gotten a better result," which combines the best of both worlds: Gambling lows and highs vs the feeling of player agency or the importance of player decisions.

The RNG is finding one a day at best then it's a Unique item exchange or equally worthless reward. So you save up 5 to trade in and get another bad one. I seriously think I've only done it 4 times.

That's not to say I've only found four but more I don't have whatever dumb Unique it wants.
I've found at least double the number of Exalts as inscribed Ultimatums.

As a league mechanic both Inscribed Ultimatums and the Trailmaster are horrible because they're so rare. After the league? Sure, but when you fight this guy 1/15000 and he's THE league. Kinda crap.