Crafting mats as trade currency is a fundamental flaw

A lot of the poor design decissions in the game can be blamed on trying to balance crafting material drops around maintaining a trade economy.

The biggest issue with that currently being that each new league/big patch assuming adequate currency drops is bound for hyper inflation without currency sinks such as a functioning crafting system. And even if the crafting will work eventually there will probably still be weird things about the loot drop rates to keep the economy stable.

The solution that i propose is the following:

Gold is the only trading currency on the player to player market.

This probably wouldn't solve everything over night but it would give more levers into GGG's hands to balance things. They can dynamically adjust gold drops in maps and vendor prices for gold to loot exchange according to how the economy does. If there is too much gold in the economy they can tax the s**t out of it via trading fees. There already is a tax system implemented too in Alvas currency exchange. People also gamble away a lot of their gold at Alva and they love the new unique gamble strongboxes. Those are great currency sinks that are already in the game and don't require to reinvent the wheel!

A possible downside that i could think of is that people would feel compelled to make a lot more back and forth trips to sell every bit of loot they find for gold.
This would have to be balanced around opportunity cost. If running maps and picking up gold from the ground is more efficient than picking up every white and blue item then this shouldn't be a problem. Only for people who don't know better.

Another possible problem: People love their Divine drops. How to ensure Divines stay prestigious in such a changed economy system? A possible solution is that the utility of the Divine Orb reflects a possibly significant boost for any item that it is used on. For instance a Divine could function similarely to a vaal orb but without corrupting an item. (not necessarely that you can do it over and over again if that's too OP but that you get one chance for an additional socket or implicit and if it fails the item isn't completely bricked, you can still try your luck with other crafting options).

Other possible problem: We probably don't want people to have to mess around with weird huge numbers like in Eve: Online. So eventually simpler ways of trading gold could be implemented like exchanging 1 million gold for 1 gold bar. People would then most likely trade in gold bars for better items.

Two birds with one stone:

A lot of people, including me, think trade and SSF leagues should be separated more because the player trade balancing causes a lot of issues for SSF. Balancing around two different playstyles could mean a lot of extra work tho and new issues. However if gold is the trade currency it could just be implemented that where trade league players have their currency exchange at Alvas, SSF players can buy crafting mats from her for gold (heck reuse the same interface!). That way i don't think drop rates or anything would have to get adjusted for SSF specifically.

+1

+1

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3767133

Yup - agreed. I'm still really convinced GGG is in on the backwater bullshit shady RMT. I mean, the rates and design is just so ... in favor of, shall we say?

But, each to their own thoughts.

Asking a game explicitly balanced around trade to not be balanced around trade is like asking Stardew Valley to have less farming. Silly imo.

Not really since PoE 1 already solved it by giving players various avenue to consume the currency. The biggest problem in PoE 2 is that there is really no currency sink especially divines.

Chaos needs to be reverted back like in PoE 1 to completely reroll all mods, swapping the drop rate between Exalt and Chaos so Chaos orb become the generic / bubble gum currency again, make tablets to be exclusively a rare item despite only able to have 2 mods so it also become a Chaos orb sink beside rolling maps, make Omens like Whittling / Prefix or Suffix annul to be much much much more common but they instead using 2 divines for Whittling and 3 Divines for Prefix / Suffix annul, and boom, inflation rate will be kept in check.

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KaosuRyoko#1633 wrote:

Asking a game explicitly balanced around trade to not be balanced around trade is like asking Stardew Valley to have less farming. Silly imo.

Did you only read the title? How would the game not still be balanced around trade with my propasal? It would only take away the pressure from having to make bad design/balancing decissions around crafting materials in order to not completely ruin the economy.