PoE2’s Economy & Resources Locking 90%+ of Players Out of the Coolest Builds and Crafting

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I think that's a fair take. I guess it's because my background is Diablo 4, my expectations are low and I'm easy to be satisfied if it's even slightly better than D4. I know it's a running joke but there's some truth in that.

Hahah how I understand you. But yeah, we have to go against the trend, be critical thinkers and actually call stuff the way it is vs what the vocal minority wants it to be due to underlying interests.

We also need to put this into perspective for GGG because clearly the data analysts don't give them actionable data to look at stuff this way.

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darrenrob82#3531 wrote:

I get the sentiment, but I think you're expecting the game to be something it's not. Neither builds nor combat are the primary focus of the game. The game is a slot machine.

Cool builds are rewards for the slot machine. Currencies are rewards for the slot machine. Trade is necessary because it mitigates the effect of slot machine based gameplay, while also expanding how many items are "jackpots" for a player.

I don't disagree with you. However, the sheer discrepancy in power between a simple build accessible to the 99% and the power of the 1% is do disproportionate that it's unjustifiable from a business perspective.

It's the silent #1 reason that PoE isn't A LOT bigger than it is. Because of the needless gatekeeping that GGG does and the top end players exploit, without any consequence. Especially the RMT'ers who we all know who they are, yet season after season they're allowed and enabled to destroy the economy.

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yummysushipjs#7638 wrote:

I don't think it matter in the end.

All content can be completed without high end crafting or buying high end crafted items. They're simply not needed for any content in the game. All they do is make the content easier/faster to complete.

The kind of people that do want those items either farm enough to get the materials or buy them by selling drops they don't want or need.

Or they do the crafting themselves and therefore farm up the materials or currency required to do so.

While I'd also like to see high tier end-game crafting be more accessible, it's simply not required to "complete" the game.

I totally understand what you mean, but there comes a point when you feel stupid slugging and dying repeatedly in the campain and low maps, using exalts on trash items and collecting white items, when really you could have just spent 1-3ex on a couple of key items/modifiers and be blasting through like a boss instead on dying constantly and moving around very slowly.

The point is, if you don't get to the end game quickly and efficiently you'll burn out before you get to even use the late game mechanics for what they're worth, usually it'll be the new stuff, it always feels bad to skip on it because you are left behind.
I guess at the end of the day the main problem is the monopoly of the peak.
There is no point expanding any effort unless there is a shot for the top notch.

I don't care to RNG spam counltess amount of orbs, effort, hours, brain power or life force into anything in POE unless the dice roll has a shot (preferably less than abysmal) at being top-tier or god-tier.
Anything lower than that is litteraly a waste of time.
The challenge is to get as fast as possible to the point where you can start taking these shots.

Well the slot machine comment doesn't make sense when the higher tier currency they added is very deterministic compared to what you described. To me the chase is getting my character the way I want it. Idc if there is chase currency items or not. So many more ppl would play this game more if they made character progression and gear progression more deterministic. And I've played things like warframe and hardcore grinding games like that but the trade off from those slot machine styles is once you complete it you have it forever the same is not true in path of exile 1 or 2. It's play the slot machine till next league and play it again. Also guild player basically trade amongst there guild for free do why does non guild trade have to matter. What the difference if someone trades me something for free or I just take it out of a guild stash tab? Want solutions to be offered make the game so trade is a secondary option reduce the slot machine style play and make non end endgame rewards more rewarding so you dont feel like your just wasting your time which is why everulyone rushes to the end. If you wanna rush all the more power to you but if I take my time and do extra grinding before the end game I should be rewarded for that other then just rewarding the ppl who skip the majority of your game. The fact that a lot of ppl support just skipping most of the game to get to the actual rewards is part of the problem. And you fix that by making more things rewarding rather then just rush to end game. The way you fix this is by making more things feel rewarding. Give ppl a reason to engage with the whole game not just end game

Or we could add an auction house, with real money, like that people who dont have too much time to play PoE2, can buy unique item looted from T5 pinnacle boss, in order to finish the game in few hours.

Its a good idea, isnt it ???













Do you really want that ? Why dont you accept, some players who theorycraft PoE2 for hundred of hours, who spent 50h in 3 days playing the game with which they earn their living, could just earn a lot of currencies and have fun with some OP item in T16 maps ???

And I could say : look, with new deterministic way to craft with essences and abyss mechanic and ofc, new perfect tran/regal/exalted, players who cant afford pinnacle boss items would craft pretty good end game stuff, but you know what ? Im pretty sure almost all of them would use their perfect trans/regal/exalted currencies to... buy stuff in the marketplace, like they already did with their exalted. Why ? Because players you are defending just want to finish PoE2 with no difficulty, an OP build with one button to push, a guide they follow and absolutely nothing to think about. People who play and like the game as it is, dont complain about items being too expensive.

signed by a SSF player

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DavexGG#0471 wrote:

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Demonsoul1616#7179 wrote:

What is the actual actionable feedback of this post? What does "resource locking" "economy locking" mean? What do you want to do that can't be done?

Rare omens are definitely target farmable from a solo / goal-oriented perspective. I think the biggest pain point before was actually getting the passive skill points to get the machine running, which will be significantly improved in 0.3. In a roundabout way the rarity of boss fragments was a big pain point to like all things, and that will be improved now which is great.

Yeah, sorry to tell you but no. Go look at mirror crafting channels, look at how much a top end item (not even mirror tier, just top end) takes in terms of materials, then tell me how long it takes 9/10 players to get those materials. I'll tell you, there aren't enough hours in the season. That's why wittlings were the price they were.

The actionables are pretty simple: Boost every single crafting drop rate, enable crafting methods, add recombs and horticrafting equivalents. Make it so people can actually craft. Then look at the top end content (pinnacles) and balance their difficulty accordingly, so that the difficulty of the game is more mechanical than a competition race of who can get cheaper RMT to create mirror tier items and take over the market with inflation.

Also, what exactly are the takeaways of people who disagree yet can't offer alternative solutions or even a shred of argument contradicting the existance of this problem? It's easy to ask, but try offer something to the conversation.

I am genuinely trying to get at the root of the complaint, because it's so hand-wavy I can't even disagree with it. I'm trying to understand why my perspective is so different from yours.

Your response did help answer this. In my opinion, "top end" items on a global game with trade among literally hundreds of thousands of players farming end game should not be realistically achievable in less than hundreds of hours. Those top end items are being acquired by the 1% because they are literally 1 in a million, they are chase items. I'd view the acquisition of a single such item as an end of league goal for a normal player, and that's perfectly appropriate. Otherwise, truly hardcore players (the 1% you hate) will completely run out of things to do within a week. And speaking as a more casual player, I imagine I would acquire "sub-GG" gear pretty easily within a week and have no desire or delusions of getting to GG, so it would also ruin my experience.

It seems like this mentality stems from some combination of trade and FOMO. Imo the mentality of wanting to acquire all "top end" items is the issue, not the actual item acquisition. If you didn't look at trade, streams, forums, etc. then "Top end" would be the best piece of gear you're wearing after 100 hours, which, surprise, is completely acquirable (you're wearing it).

For me making stuff easy to find kills any reason to grind for a long time
I kinda don't want to grind only to create new characters
I want to grind for the best possible character and when I get tired and think my char is good enough I will then grind with another char if league is good

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Psez#2914 wrote:

For me making stuff easy to find kills any reason to grind for a long time
I kinda don't want to grind only to create new characters
I want to grind for the best possible character and when I get tired and think my char is good enough I will then grind with another char if league is good

This is my mentality as well. From that perspective, I think the current difficulty of waystones (w/o mods) is way too low. After campaign, player power increases can hardly be felt because everything up to t15 is a breeze. It makes item acquisition boring. I can also see how it may feed the gamification of achieving top-end gear (versus farming for an actual goal)

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Demonsoul1616#7179 wrote:

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DavexGG#0471 wrote:

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Demonsoul1616#7179 wrote:

What is the actual actionable feedback of this post? What does "resource locking" "economy locking" mean? What do you want to do that can't be done?

Rare omens are definitely target farmable from a solo / goal-oriented perspective. I think the biggest pain point before was actually getting the passive skill points to get the machine running, which will be significantly improved in 0.3. In a roundabout way the rarity of boss fragments was a big pain point to like all things, and that will be improved now which is great.

Yeah, sorry to tell you but no. Go look at mirror crafting channels, look at how much a top end item (not even mirror tier, just top end) takes in terms of materials, then tell me how long it takes 9/10 players to get those materials. I'll tell you, there aren't enough hours in the season. That's why wittlings were the price they were.

The actionables are pretty simple: Boost every single crafting drop rate, enable crafting methods, add recombs and horticrafting equivalents. Make it so people can actually craft. Then look at the top end content (pinnacles) and balance their difficulty accordingly, so that the difficulty of the game is more mechanical than a competition race of who can get cheaper RMT to create mirror tier items and take over the market with inflation.

Also, what exactly are the takeaways of people who disagree yet can't offer alternative solutions or even a shred of argument contradicting the existance of this problem? It's easy to ask, but try offer something to the conversation.

I am genuinely trying to get at the root of the complaint, because it's so hand-wavy I can't even disagree with it. I'm trying to understand why my perspective is so different from yours.

Your response did help answer this. In my opinion, "top end" items on a global game with trade among literally hundreds of thousands of players farming end game should not be realistically achievable in less than hundreds of hours. Those top end items are being acquired by the 1% because they are literally 1 in a million, they are chase items. I'd view the acquisition of a single such item as an end of league goal for a normal player, and that's perfectly appropriate. Otherwise, truly hardcore players (the 1% you hate) will completely run out of things to do within a week. And speaking as a more casual player, I imagine I would acquire "sub-GG" gear pretty easily within a week and have no desire or delusions of getting to GG, so it would also ruin my experience.

It seems like this mentality stems from some combination of trade and FOMO. Imo the mentality of wanting to acquire all "top end" items is the issue, not the actual item acquisition. If you didn't look at trade, streams, forums, etc. then "Top end" would be the best piece of gear you're wearing after 100 hours, which, surprise, is completely acquirable (you're wearing it).

Do you actually think the top crafters are out there spamming transmutes, augments and exalts forever ?
Of course not.
Except for a few exceptions the best items in poe 2 0.2 come from omen crafting.
You can stack item rarity and collect rares tier 4-5 for a decent shot at something.
But other than that it's all about omen crafting.
Nobody wants to spam transumation and augs orbs at hundreds of white bases, it's extremely boring and it's useless unless you're the guy lucky enough to get the million dollar lottery ticket while scrapping trash cans at random, and no one wants to do that. It is lame, stupid, stinky and deluded, why would you do that ?

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LFA01#0120 wrote:

Do you actually think the top crafters are out there spamming transmutes, augments and exalts forever ?
Of course not.
Except for a few exceptions the best items in poe 2 0.2 come from omen crafting.
You can stack item rarity and collect rares tier 4-5 for a decent shot at something.
But other than that it's all about omen crafting.
Nobody wants to spam transumation and augs orbs at hundreds of white bases, it's extremely boring and it's useless unless you're the guy lucky enough to get the million dollar lottery ticket while scrapping trash cans at random, and no one wants to do that. It is lame, stupid, stinky and deluded, why would you do that ?

So you don't want to engage with the baseline crafting system, because it's stupid and stinky. You do want the ability to craft the best items in the game, but you don't want to need to invest the "1%" time/knowledge to have the economy to do that. I just really struggle to understand that argument. What is the functional change to make that possible? Do you want it to be easier to craft mirror-tier items?

I keep asking questions because I'm trying not to argue in bad faith. Like if y'all just want rare omens to be more common I could 100% get behind that. But all I'm seeing are complaints about not being able to easily craft top tier items, like ??? this is an item chase game, you're not supposed to be able to easily acquire top tier items. That's the chase. The entire gameplay loop is predicated on slow, incremental improvements and lucky power spikes. Trade must be completely souring your expectations. If we made access to everything easier, you'd just end up with even cheaper top tier gear, and there would be nothing left in the game to engage with because you just buy a GG set for 10c, kill all the bosses, and move on. You'll literally never craft something good for cheaper than 1 of 500k other people could have crafted it (with luck), so you're seeking some impossible end state.