The Drop Rate Paradox: Why more loot means less loot

I want to start a discussion about something I see mentioned often: the difficulty many players face in finding meaningful gear upgrades and the frustration with crafting feeling like a casino rather than a deterministic system. While the desire for better drop rates or easier crafting is understandable, I believe there's a paradox at play, within the context of PoE's open trade economy.

My core point is this: In a fully open market economy like PoE's, the more the overall chance to find a "good" item increases, the lower the relative chance a casual player has to actually obtain what is considered "good" or valuable.


Here's why:

1. The Market Dictates Value: When global drop rates for powerful items increase, everyone starts finding them more often. This isn't just the casual player playing a few hours a week; it's also the highly dedicated players who farm efficiently for many hours a day.
2. Supply Overwhelms Demand: These dedicated players will flood the market with previously rare items. Basic economics tells us that increased supply leads to decreased value (price). The "good" item you were happy to find yesterday might become vendor trash tomorrow because the market is saturated.
3. Shifting Goalposts: As items become easier to acquire, the definition of a "good" item shifts upwards. The gear required to feel powerful or trade for valuable currency becomes better and better. So, even if a casual player finds more items than before in absolute terms, the relative value of those items and their ability to trade up for truly impactful gear might actually decrease because the top end moves further away, faster.
4. The Currency Conundrum (e.g., Divine Orbs): The same logic applies fiercely to currency. Imagine GGG doubled the Divine Orb drop rate for everyone. A casual player might think, "Great, I'll find twice as many Divines!" But the reality is, hyper-efficient farmers will massively increase the supply. The market price of a Divine Orb would likely plummet by more than half. The result? The casual player finds more Divine Orbs, but their actual purchasing power (what they can buy with those Divines) could potentially decrease. Their increased drop rate is outpaced by market devaluation. And in the end even "emotion" fades - Divine no longer "Divine" - no thrill, no anticipation, and eventually even alluring high-pitch sound and white/red naming will be stripped off of it by NeverSink.
5. Trivialization as the Only Outcome? If finding powerful gear becomes significantly easier across the board, the main outcome isn't necessarily a richer casual playerbase, but rather the trivialization of game content. Challenges become easier to overcome not through skill or knowledge, but simply through easier access to powerful gear, potentially shortening the engaging lifespan of the game.


In Conclusion:

Simply increasing global drop rates or making high-end crafting universally easier seems like a straightforward solution to help casual players gear up, but in our trade-based economy, it's a double-edged sword. It primarily benefits the most active players who can capitalize on volume, leading to faster devaluation and potentially making it relatively harder for casuals to acquire truly valuable items or currency compared to the market standard. It risks trivializing content more than it empowers the average player in a meaningful, relative way.

It helps shift gear as players who stick something in the "1 div" tab and forget about it would let the market help them find the right price for it eventually

And if currency dropped more, then people wouldn't be so afraid to use it. I haven't used a single chaos orb yet this league, the small chance of improvement isn't worth 5 ex

What *is* bad, is inflation like last league, as exalts being the default currency means with a higher drop rate they become less and less useful

I think exalts should be a high drop rate initially but rapidly replaced by chaos the better MF you get as chaos spam can be endless, and chaos should be the default trade currency

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to1R#7567 wrote:

My core point is this: In a fully open market economy like PoE's, the more the overall chance to find a "good" item increases, the lower the relative chance a casual player has to actually obtain what is considered "good" or valuable.

I am going to tell you that you cannot be more wrong, even if you try to.

This is mathematically wrong.
It may be REMOTELY true if we discuss unique items.

But for anything else, increase in quality does not affect directly the market.

And you do not have to even calculate too much.

You can take one look at grand heist in POE 1, where the "drop" is rigged so you get better items, and the market still balances itself around the rarity of the item. Simplex gear etc...

And it has this "gold digger anti-inflation" that is built in.

It is valuable - everyone is doing it. Too much gold shows up, lower in price. Some people stop doing it. At the end it balances and you get what everyone else is getting...

This whole post is just...

Someone find that clip from Billy Madison...

To make the whole system better, they need more control in the options players have to work with. Gatekeep those behind progress goals. Like Acts 1-3 you can reforge, acts 4-6 you can recombinate, tiers 1-5 you can lock prefixes or suffixes with something (or have omens of that nature become more common), tiers 6-10 you can force higher tier drops, tiers 11-15 you can do something better, and so on.

Right now, the options are so large in their range, that they are useless compared to currency farming and buying.

Take essences. They are useful in the simple sense that they let you roll a smaller selection of mods on an item. However, smaller does not really equate to valuable or useful (for some or even most).

The real conundrum in poe2 crafting/gear upgrades, right now, is rerolling. Without a way to reroll, it is a loss based system, where you have to crunch down item bases until you have none left. And the chance of an actual upgrade while crunching down bases is the same as 5:1 on a vendor, just at 3:1. Maybe if it was 2:1 for reforge and 3:1 for vendor, it wouldn't be as punitive as it is now, but it is what it is.

I know GGG will want rerolling to be as limited as possible in order to maintain as much off the ground use as possible. However, off the ground use needs more of a boost than recently. We shouldn't be getting a 'lucky' drop, singular, in t16+ maps and their bosses. With the range of mods, even with the best drops, we will be crunching tons of items just to actually get an upgrade.

But again, all in 0.2. Who knows what other league options will bring.

Most people play either SSF or in a trade league but rarely or never trading. Less loot means less loot, more loot means more loot, there's no paradox.

As long as the crafting material is more valuable in trading than crafting, they messed up. Thats like money beeing more valuable than the good itself. Calling it currency on top feels like a joke. Especially with trading.
Flood the market with all orbs, omen and else.
What have we learned? You cant eat money.

What if we just didn't balance around trade? Hear me out, we aren't playing a Merchant simulator, we're playing an action RPG.

The drop rates should be balanced around SSF. If the market suffers because of that, so what? If somebody want to play games with trading, they can try collectible card games like Pokemon or Magic. There they can get real money for being good at trading.

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kosmo_blacksmith#5449 wrote:

As long as the crafting material is more valuable in trading than crafting, they messed up. Thats like money beeing more valuable than the good itself. Calling it currency on top feels like a joke. Especially with trading.
Flood the market with all orbs, omen and else.
What have we learned? You cant eat money.

That's the issue. More deterministic crafting that gives exalts more value in their intended use would fix a lot of problems without even having to touch drop rate

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My core point is this: In a fully open market economy like PoE's, the more the overall chance to find a "good" item increases, the lower the relative chance a casual player has to actually obtain what is considered "good" or valuable.

This is incorrect. Most of my poe1 leagues my gear is obtained either via crafting or trading, some target farm for specific items. But because there is idk 150-200k in trade, who have a chance to get a good item, i can trade my currency for that good item.


Same goes for casuals, settlers i had a 2div drop during my early heist runs, this bought me almost an entire set of upgrades and ment i could push far into maps instead of hours in heist.


Higher maps = more loot/currency > better crafts/gear > higher progression


In poe1 the SSF loot argument then fixes itself, because currency/crafting is common and deterministic you can target farm very easily. It just takes time because you can't trade that currency for the good items, which the pain again is solved by crafting till that item drops.