bit of pushback against comments chris made recently regarding the ex/div switch

ok so chris made a comment i think in an interview with ziggy recently regarding the switch between exalts and divines. he made the comment, and if it was just to try and push aside criticism as a PR comment he doesnt really buy behind closed doors then ok, fine. but if he and the rest of ggg actually believe what he said then i feel the need to push back against it because its important the devs acknowledge what they are doing moving forward if things like this become options again. maybe u still do it, but be honest with yourselves about what you are doing.



when pushed about people who had vast amounts of exalts suddenly being screwed by this switch he said people should have diversified their investments, and its like investing all your money in bitcoin and then bitcoin goes bad, you should have a more stable position...


no, owning exalts was not like investing your money in bitcoin and then suddenly bitcoin goes down and something else goes up. owning exalts was like owning money, it wasnt investing your money in something, it was money and you turned around one day and said oh, btw dollars are no longer money, buttons are now money and if you owned actual money in the bank sry youre fucked, but if you happened to have a lot of money invested in buttons well done you won the lottery today.


thats what happened, its not investing money in this or that, it was having money as agreed by the community. and chris even acknowledges this when asked about divine shards he says divine shards exist, theyre called chaos orbs... oh really? chaos orbs hu? not alchs? not regals? not scroll fragments? why does he say chaos orbs?


because chaos orbs are money, they are what we as a community have agreed is money for a decade now, thats why he said chaos orbs. theyre not investing in bitcoin, they are raw money, and exalts were raw money. you may have had a dream that you had an economy that had no gold, but that didnt survive contact with reality, just like a stone of jordan things became money and you know this hence the chaos orb comment. you cant change stone or jordan and nagelring around and say well, now soj isnt money, nagelring is by dev decree and you should have had half sojs and half nagelrings... why nagelring? you would have to own equal amounts of all uniques in the game incase the devs randomly changed agreed money, soj, into another random unique? and if you dont then hey ur silly for putting all your money into bitcoin? no, im sry thats bs.




you did what you did, and it is what it is, im not even making this thread to complain about it, chris is a top guy and i have a lot of love for him. but dont bs yourselves about what it was you did, and acknowledge in the future if you do this again what it is you are doing and take responsibility for your actions, stop trying to pass the buck onto players for drastic actions you took that massively screwed some long term players that worked hard for those items and you bare full responsibility for.

+1

+1

I also felt offended by this shabby comment of Chris.
I was grinding to get my first Mirror-Service. Tried hard, got like 1500 Ex and was keen to finally get some OP-Item. Then came the Switch and i was poor again.

NEVER EVER will i invest so much time again in this game, because the dev can, at any point in time, make my currency stash worthless.

Sorry GGG, no farming anymore here.
"Diversify" was the word he mentioned and I EXACTLY DO THIS:

I MOSTLY PLAY OTHER GAMES NOW!

Exactly

I guess this is trade-core thing. Oh NoEs my F2P video game currency horde :O

I mean yeah that statement from Chris was somewhat problematic and i was also kinda pissed at the exalt/divine swap but let's be frank. Everyone playing standard knows that GGG doesn't give two shits about that mode. Things like this happening is something we'll just have to accept, just like we have to live with the fucked up map conversion. They don't consider standard when making design choices and probably never will. This is well known. Whatever kind of reasoning or excuse he gives now is kinda irrelevant. The simple fact is, they don't care.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

no, owning exalts was not like investing your money in bitcoin and then suddenly bitcoin goes down and something else goes up. owning exalts was like owning money, it wasnt investing your money in something, it was money and you turned around one day and said oh, btw dollars are no longer money, buttons are now money and if you owned actual money in the bank sry youre fucked, but if you happened to have a lot of money invested in buttons well done you won the lottery today.

Wrong. Most of the players deluded themselves into thinking exalts were money. If you were here since the start of the game, you knew GGG is not a fan of a one unit currency. I think because of RMT, people got tricked into thinking that exalts were US dollars but GGG never stated such a thing. For RMT it is good business if some of their service players brainwash people into believing exalts were e-gold.

Also if the community regarded exalts as e-gold, then why didn't this continue when the recipe was changed? Or are there other forces at play? Think about this one.

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

I mean yeah that statement from Chris was somewhat problematic and i was also kinda pissed at the exalt/divine swap but let's be frank. Everyone playing standard knows that GGG doesn't give two shits about that mode. Things like this happening is something we'll just have to accept, just like we have to live with the fucked up map conversion. They don't consider standard when making design choices and probably never will. This is well known. Whatever kind of reasoning or excuse he gives now is kinda irrelevant. The simple fact is, they don't care.

yep. and look, i hav often said i think exalts should be cheaper compared to chaos orbs so people can use them to craft, and that the game cant be held hostage by a small clique of very rich players in standard league. there is other ways to achieve that which were less drastic, but im not even saying it was a bad change for the game.

but it was a change decided by the devs, it had real consequences for some of their most dedicated long term players and the devs need to own that, they need to understand and accept what they have done and take responsibility for it. im not talking about coming out and making some kind of public statement, im just saying in their own heads and when they discuss these things in a setting where theyre being honest and not trying to spin for PR they need to know the reality of what they did and that it was 100% on them.

"

Reinhart wrote:

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

no, owning exalts was not like investing your money in bitcoin and then suddenly bitcoin goes down and something else goes up. owning exalts was like owning money, it wasnt investing your money in something, it was money and you turned around one day and said oh, btw dollars are no longer money, buttons are now money and if you owned actual money in the bank sry youre fucked, but if you happened to have a lot of money invested in buttons well done you won the lottery today.

Wrong. Most of the players deluded themselves into thinking exalts were money. If you were here since the start of the game, you knew GGG is not a fan of a one unit currency. I think because of RMT, people got tricked into thinking that exalts were US dollars but GGG never stated such a thing. For RMT it is good business if some of their service players brainwash people into believing exalts were e-gold.

Also if the community regarded exalts as e-gold, then why didn't this continue when the recipe was changed? Or are there other forces at play? Think about this one.

im right, exalts were e-gold, just like chaos orbs are e-gold and chris even acknowledges this in the very interview where he made this statement. people didnt get tricked, just like stone of jordan people need an agreed form of money to form an economy around, if ggg thought they could change that FACT then they were clueless and mistaken about the practical reality of an economy, and it doesnt matter how clueless they were going in because for 10 years they watched the economy using chaos and exalts as e-gold, they know they were e-gold and we know they know because in interviews like the very on m quoting they talk about these currencies as e-gold and state that game design, like having divine shards, doesnt need to exist because divines and chaos are in an e-gold relationship of pounds and pence, dollars and cents with each other. they acknowledge divnes and chaos are now the games e-gold after coming out and telling the community to switch their relationship with divines and exalts.

they literally did that, they didnt just release a patch note that said the price for this bench mod is now switching from exalts to divines and then the community naturally began to move away from exalts to divines as standard gold currency. no, the devs literally came out and talked about it and told people they want the 2 currencies to switch around.

this wasnt well we changed skill balance associated with a given unique so that unique naturally changed price over time due to demand and people with their gold invested in that item had a value shift. this wasnt that, this was them knowingly coming into a situation where they were taking the games e-gold and switching it for a different thing, telling the players straight up this was a switch they were pushing through because they as devs have decided thats what they want, forcing the issue, nothing natural about it regarding players forming their own market trends and shifting how they behave to shifting game balance over time. this was the devs coming in and telling people flat out exalts and divines are switching places, direct top down intervention into what they know, acknowledged and openly talked about being the games e-gold.


that is completely unprecedented in this games history and they need to be honest with themselves about what it is they did, because chris talks a lot about how items are sacred and if you mess with peoples confidence in the things they are farming for your game is fucked. ok, well this change has impact on that for some die hard long term players and its no good bullshitting yourselves that its the players fault for having money in a savings account rather than randomly having bought a skip load of tennis balls just in case the government decided to switch legal tender from dollars to tennis balls over night... oh no wait they changed it to golf balls? fuuuuu... i had tennis balls, i should have known! i should have seen this coming why didnt i own golf balls... oh i guess im a stupid citizen and my government has no responsibility here for my decade long savings that were held in actual money and tennis balls now being worth fk all....

anyone has any solid source on POE2 wipe?
because if they are planning to wipe, that what they did makes 1000% sense.

instead of ruining everyone's safe heaven/wealth in one go, you chip it patch by patch so people wont rage'n'quit on wipe because there wont be anything left to rage about

I sort of disagree with the main assessment.

"Exalts were not an investment, they WERE money"

But...money is technically an investment. The value of a dollar bill never stays the same, it is constantly changing. The physical form of a dollar is an "investment" into the US currency. That currency can tank at any time and all that MONEY you had ends up being worth next to nothing. Because all currency is an investment. It just so happens that CERTAIN currencies are SAFER investments. This is way ultra wealthy tend to buy land, or property, or gold/diamonds. These things hold their value much better than the physical currency investment does.

Same with PoE: the actual crafted items remain as valuable as they were prior to the switch, it is only the currency that tanked. We all just didn't see it coming and in the real world this kind of change typically wouldn't happen so drastically. Although it did in Greece, and over the last year or two it happened to pretty much every currency in the world. Practically overnight, everyone was worth 20% less.

Money is an investment. You are fooling yourself into thinking that money, or a specific type of currency, itself is a constant.

Regarding the "currency" in PoE: it is not a central currency like cents, dollars, dimes, quarters, etc. But rather, every single currency item in PoE is like a different country's currency, especially considering that each item has a unique usage. Their values compared to other currencies are constantly in flux and cannot be counted on. An exalt is not ALWAYS worth 100c. A fuse is not ALWAYS worth 1/10 of a c. You cannot use a augmentation orb instead of a fuse to link an item, they are NOT interchangeable differently-valued members of the same currency. They tend to settle around the same value each league, but that doesn't change the fact that this was never a "gold" system but rather a far more sophisticated and variable series of currency systems.

Think about if you were buying a gumball: it costs 25c to buy that gumball. More specifically, it costs a QUARTER. 2 dimes and a nickel might be worth 25c, but it is NOT worth that quarter when it comes to getting the gumball. Depending on how much you really want the gumball, you might be willing to give 3 dimes for 1 quarter. THAT is how the economy in PoE works. It is NOT a bank.