Gold is a significant boon to PoE

I just finished up playing in the Ruthless Gold event, and my conclusion is that gold is definitely worth adding to the core game.

Pros:
* It feels good to have loot explosions of something that a) is fast to pick up and b) always has a purpose, unlike 99.9% of "loot" in the current game.
* Knowing that I can always be building towards that next purchase of a currency that I need (ie, fusing) instead of hoping for the RNG gods give me specific things (and wihout needing to go through the extreme tedium of vendor currency conversion) is awesome.
* It gives something that can be scaled for trading far easier than orbs, especially for lower value goods, and it is the simplest currency for the auction house that this game desperately needs to add.
* Access to gambling from a system other than a specific Expedition currency is awesome, and it will act as a significant currency sink too

Cons:
* Not being able to vendor currency for identify scrolls sucks (ie, whetstone sells for 1 gold, rather than 8 ID scrolls), though this is not really an issue outside of early game Ruthless mode
* It does tend to slow down the gameplay a bit to have gold dropping in all directions, though this could be countered by filter settings

I didn’t really like it. I mean I don’t hate it; it works fine, as it has in every other game in history. It's just not very interesting. "Number get bigger" is something games like this work to abstract and complicate even while it is absolutely what you're chasing under the hood. I like the complications.

Having one single currency induces more of the hoarding instinct, so I'm less likely to buy things. And when you're not buying things, gold has no other use. The exiled tinkerer-survivalist theme behind the "everything has a function" design doesn't necessarily translate well into late-game when you're mowing down armies in other worlds, but I still like that everything has a function.

Of course since orbs can be traded (whether through players or NPCs) I'm well aware that they are ultimately "just" different denominations in a sense. But I think it matters that that isn't front and centre. In reality I convert between them so infrequently that they don't feel like just tokens.

If they add gold to base game without changing anything about existing currencies, no one will use it, except maybe at the very beginning of the league at low levels. People will still charge div for expensive items, because div also has functionality by itself, not just being abstract number. Maybe gold could replace chaos eventually, because of outdated tiny stack size meaning bad QoL, but cannot say for certain.

If they really want to make gold valuable to everyone, the easiest way is to incorporate it into crafting too, like make each benchcraft cost some amount of gold in addition to currenices, make expedition gambling/crafting cost gold in addition to artifacts, etc. Any "generic in-game money" needs hefty amount of functional money sinks not related to trading between players to remain in demand.

I found the gold to be just bloat to be honest. Outside of a couple of weapons very early on that I bought from the vendor, I literally have not used any of the gold I picked up. It's just piling up. On the downside, gold meant a lot of important vendor recipes (i.e. transmute for wisdoms and the like) didn't work because those combinations gave gold instead.

Remove TP scrolls from the game, have a built in button for TP. Reasoning: 10 minutes into the league having enough scrolls is a non issue.

Remove Identification Scrolls from the game, instead have a "ident all" button backed into the inventory screen. That way less clickery but you dont have to bother which keeping scrolls at hand and ident all saves clicking.

Remove low tier Orbs from the core drop pool, instead use gold drops to buy them from vendor. (only acceptable if your pickup radius is bigger then it is in RwG)

I like it because I filtered it out on my lootfilter for the true ruthless experience. I would like gold in a normal league though.

as an aside gold is a better reward than random items.

It isn't a crafting component, so I don't feel bad missing any.

It doesn't take up much space, so I can stash items (I don't have stash tabs)

It has a clear easy to understand use. I don't need a guide to understand how to use it.

It basically is just harvest lifeforce. that also was a good addition (despite harvest being drastically nerfed because of it.)

How is the Gold aspect changing the game at all for you guys? Obviously RwG is different from the "normal" game because Ruthless, but the existence of gold coins isn't actually a change because, Spoiler Alert...

Wisdom scraps are gold coins.

The other currencies are just larger denominations of wisdom scraps. There's no real difference between the two systems, in terms of actual functionality.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

How is the Gold aspect changing the game at all for you guys? Obviously RwG is different from the "normal" game because Ruthless, but the existence of gold coins isn't actually a change because, Spoiler Alert...

Oh, it is, and in this specific case it's for the worse, by the time I've hit maps I had around 100k gold with which you can do fuck all except take a few gambles that gave produced nothing useful. If there was no gold I'd at least be able to roll flasks because I'd have a steady supply of transmutes and alts.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

The other currencies are just larger denominations of wisdom scraps. There's no real difference between the two systems, in terms of actual functionality.

First sentence is true, but the second is false.

You could trade, say, a car for an oven. That doesn’t mean cars and ovens have “no difference in terms of actual functionality”. The fact that you must trade them for access to other functionality shows that there is a difference. Those differences matter, because playing games isn’t just data flowing through a spreadsheet.

I don't know, sure it was something new and I liked the idea but the problem with gold as a currency is that it's pretty worthless on its own. Diablo 2 had gold and no one ever used it to trade, because it was so easy to get and cap.

I'd just change chaos orb stack size to 50,000. There, that's your gold. You can carry it around with you at all times and do pretty much any trade with one inventory slot worth of currency.

I like current 'goldless' trade system with the exception of C stacking to 10 pieces, this is obnoxious with 300:1 exchange rate with divine orb.