The Drop Rate Paradox: Why more loot means less loot

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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.

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to1R#7567 wrote:

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.