Gold is not necessary in poe2

Dear GGG,

I hope you are well today.

I don't think you need to add gold to your new game unless you have some weird new mechanic that forces it.

I love how confused everyone always is when they sell their stuff and they get...scroll fragments? It is unlike any other game. Keep up that unexpected path to pull people in to a different style of game. This is one of the first mechanics that is unlike any other encountered in any other game. In my opinion. Gold only adds clutter and a rigid economy. poe1 has more of a bartering system than a strict 1:1. It's more fun that way.

Please correct me if you have a different opinion, I would love to hear the pros and cons.

I think they made this decision because they were unhappy about players didn't using the currencies on items because they're too rare to be used that way and it was only used for trading.

So now they'll have a generic currency so vendor and market prices can scale better and they can make crafting currencies much more common and actually being used by players.

As for me, i also liked the game without gold because of it's uniqueness but as i told, i think they realized the weak spots of that system and wanted to make a change.

a lot of stuff heavily reminds me of diablo 2. so lot less crafting and better items dropping. could be a big shift in the way we acquire items. also coherent with no crafting bench.

jonathn also said sth along the lines of, it feels better to drop sth rather thn nothing. wich makes little sense since players can differenciate trash loot from good loot but who knows, maybe dropping 1/8 of a chaos in gold feels better in gold than a chaos shard ? hard time making any sense of what he said.

They did say that the currency/crafting system is still very relevant in endgame.

Based on that Im assuming gold is simply meant to allow especially new players to buy items from vendors more easily, instead of having to pre-plan how man transmute or alt orbs they will need for different gems and such plus some gear from vendors here and there, which also includes vendoring items to get those currency items in the first place.

If thats true, than gold is pretty much worthless outside the campaign and is unlikely to replace other currency items as trading resource as far as endgame is concerned.


Thats just a guess but would help newbies to have a better time while playing the campaign, reach endgame more reliably and have them stick around longer.

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Alternalo wrote:

I think they made this decision because they were unhappy about players didn't using the currencies on items because they're too rare to be used that way and it was only used for trading.

So now they'll have a generic currency so vendor and market prices can scale better and they can make crafting currencies much more common and actually being used by players.

As for me, i also liked the game without gold because of it's uniqueness but as i told, i think they realized the weak spots of that system and wanted to make a change.

I agree with this. I, once in a while, chaos orb things that aren’t good just to see if I can make a profit but I see them going down and stop because they are valuable for trading.

If you could buy our current currency with gold then everything would be simplified since people would trade things for gold and not for crafting currency.

Trading in gold is going to be like trading in wisdom scrolls. The value will be too low to be worthwhile. I am under the impression that this was said explicitly at some point but you can also see it already in the balance of the gold costs by act 4. At that point, items at the gambler cost around 1k gold iirc. They’ll probably cost 1.5k-2k by act 6. It stacks to 5k.

Would you trade in a currency where a stack of it is functionally worth getting 2-3 random items at a gambling npc? A full stack of gold is maybe comparable to 1 astragali - and this is assuming there’s a map-tier gambler that takes gold (there may not be).

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DichotomousThree wrote:

Trading in gold is going to be like trading in wisdom scrolls. The value will be too low to be worthwhile. I am under the impression that this was said explicitly at some point but you can also see it already in the balance of the gold costs by act 4. At that point, items at the gambler cost around 1k gold iirc. They’ll probably cost 1.5k-2k by act 6. It stacks to 5k.

Would you trade in a currency where a stack of it is functionally worth getting 2-3 random items at a gambling npc? A full stack of gold is maybe comparable to 1 astragali - and this is assuming there’s a map-tier gambler that takes gold (there may not be).

I've been wanting to make a post on this but haven't yet...

They said 2 important things about gold in PoE2 (important to them, not me).

1. It's a way to let them have monsters drop fewer items, but let players still feel good about killing monsters as they get to see *something* drop.

2. They don't want the economy to be based around it and they don't expect players will ever trade it / trade for it like we do with Chaos and Divines (a lot like what you're saying I imagine, it will be very low value).

So. Players only feel good about drops they consider worth picking up. If a thing sucks, players will filter it out. Thus, if gold is good and valuable enough to be a 'feel good' drop, then it will also be valuable enough to be traded on the market.

Conversely, if gold is truly this 'cheap' relative to crafting orbs then you don't need to introduce it as a system. Using the same vendor system but replacing gold costs with wisdom/portal scroll costs achieve the same thing - where players will be excited to find scrolls (at least in the campaign) b/c they know that vendors can sell them some half decent items.

Like, it just doesn't seem necessary in any way unless the real reason goes back to what the OP said and the GGG devs aren't being honest here. They perhaps want it because players expect it, and they don't want people quitting the game out of confusion when they vendor their early A1 drops and get 'scroll fragments'.

I agree, I don't think we need gold. I'm imagining its use as a vendor currency will tap out after completing the campaign, so it'll have no endgame function, disappear either from drops or loot filters post-campaign, and so be unlikely to play any significant role in the trade economy. I'm no economist though, what do I know. But I really like PoE's unique currency system as is.

I get that GGG want players to feel rewarded without showering them in trash loot, good plan, but I think it's optimistic to imagine that a shower of relatively worthless pennies will be intrinsically satisfying, at least for me. More likely a teensy tiny bit irritating, as it's transparently junk. If possible I'd filter it out just like I filter out trash loot at the moment. (Maybe it'll be made necessary by design, if pre-maps vendors and drops are rebalanced to justify gold, but I can't see myself feeling like it's less junk even if so; just that it's junk I have to deal with.) I think gold is a bit of a design blemish at this point, and I suspect it's a bit work-in-progress for GGG right now.

I'm reminded of the Forgotten Tower in Diablo 2; I never bothered wandering round cow-clicking all the tiny piles of gold, or vacuuming up the huge shower of pocket change the Countess dropped all over the floor when she died. I didn't pick up fulminating potions or any other trash either, just things that might actually be useful. If D2 had a loot filter I'd have been all over it.

Personally I'd rather monsters dropped either a) something which might actually be good, or b) nothing, even if nothing is 99% of the time. Killing things and making progress is plenty satisfying on its own for me.

Why introduce gold when we already have Perandus coins?

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Suhuy wrote:

Why introduce gold when we already have Perandus coins?

gotta get rid of the old one first so nobody knows the new one is just the old one but with less moving parts.