Gold is a significant boon to PoE

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

I don't disagree with most of the points made, but I do want to expand on 3 specific things:

1) Gold would be superior to the current vendor system (I don't mean trading with players) - if they set more appropriate prices for each of the other orbs and allowed buying any of the normal vendor-purchasable ones - for 2 reasons: a) It removes a ton of tedium and math (how many wis+tp+trans+alt does it take to make a fuse+regret????) and b) It means you always have access to the exact item currency you want. Currently you can't downgrade regret to fuse for example, but with gold you could buy that fuse when you want it and that regret when you want it.

I don't like Chaos as a core currency because it's just one of many potential value drops and I don't want to go through the painful process of figuring out how many blessing or regret or horizon or annullment or ancient or whatever orbs that I actually do have it would take to buy a 75 chaos item, assuming the seller would even be open to it, or looking up conversion rates then finding players to convert those into Chaos. If we could convert things into Chaos without player trade, THEN I'd agree that Chaos is all the gold we need.

2) Gambling was HUGE in D2. Everyone loved it. Here it can be great too, though it is difficult to see that with Ruthless mode's drastic reduction in resources. I HATE how current gambling is locked behind one of a dozen new currencies that are specific to one of my least favorite league mechanics, so I never get to use it.

3) This is specific to the very low resources in Ruthless, but having something drop regularly that you know is building to something you can meaningfully use is a wonderful feeling. I bought several huge upgrades from the vendor, did some gambling, bought some maps, and knew that I was working towards the crazy valuable fusing orbs every time I walked over some gold. To really work, things like transmutes, alts, etc need to be buyable with gold too, but the core feeling was there.

Anyway, great points everyone!

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

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.

That's an incorrect comparison. He is talking about functionality in terms of "trade system" functionality. Gold as it was introduced provided no novel way to trade. As that was its sole purpose for existing, the original comment is 100% true.

Your comparison talks about functionality of the currency itself, which is not the point. The only functionality being discussed is as a form of trade reform. It's pretty darn obvious that a transmute doesn't have the same function as a divine...but they both serve the exact same function in the form of trade: a certain amount of one for a certain amount of the other. The addiition of gold did not "substitute" for any other kind of trade, which is sort of the point of a gold system in the first place.

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coldcandor wrote:

I don't like Chaos as a core currency because it's just one of many potential value drops and I don't want to go through the painful process of figuring out how many blessing or regret or horizon or annullment or ancient or whatever orbs that I actually do have it would take to buy a 75 chaos item, assuming the seller would even be open to it, or looking up conversion rates then finding players to convert those into Chaos. If we could convert things into Chaos without player trade, THEN I'd agree that Chaos is all the gold we need.

HUGE problem here....no matter what GGG does, literally any possible change will result in figuring how much of one thing is in terms of another. That is simply how trade works....it is NOT an AH with one usable currency. Just like how it works now: trade values of certain items is not at all congruent with the trade costs associated with vendors. It never will be. If vendor prices change, trade will adjust as well. Trade itself is entirely dependant on usage and availability and NOT vendor costs. For example, see the value of regret orbs vs scours. Chromes vs Fuses vs Jewelers. etc.

There are only 2 solutions that will result in a system you describe:
1) Auction House-style: not really a "trade", but rather a "shop". One unique currency to buy things with. Or I guess you could use multiple currencies, but then all that would be is an afk version of what we already have. You would still need to value currencies against each other.

2) Removal of all functional currencies that exist, and instead create a crafting bench that uses ONE unique currency for ALL functions.

Anything less than those two total overhauls will result in the exact same system we already have, just with tweaked values.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

Anything less than those two total overhauls will result in the exact same system we already have, just with tweaked values.

Your statement is technically correct, but that does not mean that nothing should change. If I can acquire the onions I need for tonight's stew by exchanging my spare tissues to someone for an old computer mouse, which I can then pair with my old keyboard to trade to someone for a jar of honey, which in turn can be used to bake some bread that I can then trade to someone for onions... that doesn't mean I already have the ability to get my onions so don't bother changing the system.

Personally, I find the need to seek out currency trades in this cluster**** of a trade system in order to have the currency that you need to seek out other items in this cluster**** of a trade system to be very close to, if not THE, reason I'm on the verge of quitting until PoE2.

In a game that is designed at every level to trade with other players, it is truly impressive how little effort has gone into making trades safe, effective, and efficient.

I could probably settle for a partial fix: Let us use the vendor to convert currencies to chaos and div for trading, but still require finding and trading with players directly for items.

^oh believe me, I totally agree with you that I wish we had a different system. My main point was that it CAN'T be fixed as it is now without drastic action that would completely change the game. "Partial fix" does not exist...as proven by the gold event AND every single time they add a new currency into the game. It's proven and re-proven that no matter what they do, it will inevitably fold into the existing system.

The only reason Chaos is the central currency around which all other currencies are valued is because it is common enough for all to have access to it, but rare enough that it holds enough value to be usable in the limitations of the trade window. Otherwise, every item in the game could and would be valued in terms of wisdom scrolls (eg: "gold"). Regardless of vendor reforms, a central currency will emerge that can be traded lower AND higher within the confines of a 60-slot trade screen. This is the nature of such a large multi-currency tiered system.

Your idea of allowing vendors to trade all the way up to chaos/div/etc. would be interesting to see....but my prediction is that the cost to vendor up to those currencies would so astronomically higher than simply trading for them that it would remain useless (as per my point about regrets/scours). Perhaps it would be worth the extra cost to just trade with a vendor: but that leads to a bigger problem of WHY it would be worth it (the trade system needs to be fixed, not the vendors....).

I just don't think it's possible to create vendor prices that would be equivalent to trade, because "use" is a thing. Regrets cost MORE than a scour, but scour has more use than a regret. Chance orbs cost a lot for what they do, and how common they are. Chromes cost way too much when compared to alterations and fuses. If all of these were adjusted somehow...there would still be one or more currencies in the vendor that would NOT make sense value-wise, which would raise the vendor price of all the higher currencies above.

What they COULD do (and I still think this wouldn't work...) is do a hard data analysis of currencies used over the last 5-10 leagues, create a tiered system for themselves, and then price vendors from wisdoms up to divines where only one currency leads to the next. Example: wisdom -> portal -> aug -> trans -> regal blah blah. There can't be any currency that has the same type-cost beyond portal scrolls, it has to be a 1 to 1 ladder all the way up.

I feel gold in PoE would show just how scuffed currency has become over time.

I almost want that just so the majority can see the nonsense. PoE is kin to having Copper, Silver, Gold, Latnum, Electrum, Platinum. Then using 10 different colors of each currency. Each currency and it's color represents a random pool of things you can buy which also have random tiers.

The orb system worked well in the early days because there was simply less. Less affixes, Less influences, less intense crafting. We went from 1 Implicit, 3 Prefix, 3 Suffix to 3 Implicit, 3 Prefix, 3 Suffix, Vield, 8 Influence which you can double or triple clone split, etc.

The silliest part is we don't need this level of power. It's just there for power fantasy players.
...and of course the core of an ARPG. Kill enemies get cool loot. Suffers.

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Xzorn wrote:

We went from 1 Implicit, 3 Prefix, 3 Suffix to 3 Implicit, 3 Prefix, 3 Suffix, Vield, 8 Influence which you can double or triple clone split, etc.

One slight correction: ZERO implicits, 4-mod rares was where we began! There were so few mods in the pool that almost all items only needed 3 or 4 mods to be "perfect"

OH also, the original concept of orbs also wasn't that great...eternal/ex slamming to craft was, dare I say, WORSE than what we currently have (in terms of tedium).

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jsuslak313 wrote:

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Xzorn wrote:

We went from 1 Implicit, 3 Prefix, 3 Suffix to 3 Implicit, 3 Prefix, 3 Suffix, Vield, 8 Influence which you can double or triple clone split, etc.

One slight correction: ZERO implicits, 4-mod rares was where we began! There were so few mods in the pool that almost all items only needed 3 or 4 mods to be "perfect"

OH also, the original concept of orbs also wasn't that great...eternal/ex slamming to craft was, dare I say, WORSE than what we currently have (in terms of tedium).

In regards to what we "need", yea.

The spectrum of what we need is far larger also. Not only do we need to meet higher standards but can go so much further beyond those, the game isn't able to challenge the player.

Hence my poke at power fantasy.

I mentioned in another topic where PoE kinda fails in regards to scaling. Maps only scale to a medium level while content like Delve only scales offense. Then you have this jump to Ubers, Simulacrum and similar. You're doing like 3/10 difficulty maps to get in and fight 8/10 difficulty content.

..and hell, it's not even worth doing juiced maps now.