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

This perceived problem is the reason people flock to meta builds, because the faster a build can clear whatever content you want to farm the faster you make currency. If tailwind exists forever and armour bases gives you movement speed penalties the choice is easy to make.

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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).

I totally get where you’re coming from — chase items should feel like long-term goals, and I’m not suggesting GG-tier loot should be raining from the sky.

The concern isn’t about trivializing rarity; it’s about how steep the gap is between what most players can realistically achieve and the level where the game’s deeper crafting and build potential unlocks. Right now, that threshold feels way higher than “hundreds of hours” for the majority.

I’m not saying everyone should have mirrors in week one, but it would be great if experimenting with more than a fraction of builds didn’t feel completely out of reach for 90%+ of players. There’s room for chase items and broader accessibility to mid- to high-level crafting without breaking the economy or killing progression.

Especially as you'll always have chase in PoE in terms of items. And you'd also have it if bosses were harder mechanically, yet people were able to have access to items and crafting.

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Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

This perceived problem is the reason people flock to meta builds, because the faster a build can clear whatever content you want to farm the faster you make currency. If tailwind exists forever and armour bases gives you movement speed penalties the choice is easy to make.

Perceived? This is factual, just look at the economic curve through time in ANY season, current, past or the upcoming.

perceived because it only exists for people that are chasing those crazy builds.
Like if you go back to jr high when you were playing gauntlet legends on n64 you weren't obsessed which character could beat the game the fastest. You just played the game.

The youtube/twitch efficiency era created that problem.

It is only part of the community that is hyper focused on the economy.

Those people just tend to be the loudest i reckon because they decided to create asynch trade instead of things that actually make playing the game better like new classes, keyboard + controller functionality, etc.

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Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

perceived because it only exists for people that are chasing those crazy builds.
Like if you go back to jr high when you were playing gauntlet legends on n64 you weren't obsessed which character could beat the game the fastest. You just played the game.

The youtube/twitch efficiency era created that problem.

It is only part of the community that is hyper focused on the economy.

Those people just tend to be the loudest i reckon because they decided to create asynch trade instead of things that actually make playing the game better like new classes, keyboard + controller functionality, etc.

I think you're looking at it wrong, or not the way I framed the problem. The issue of meta-chase doesn't have anything to do with this.

The issue at hand is that the vast, vast majority of players don't even make it to 20% of a meta build. The further issue is that those missing 80% are an exponential power creep to that build. Consequently, the vast majority of players never get to see the vast majority of build potential in PoE. And we're talking about a game in which the main goal is the build, combat and loot chase. So you don't get the build, you don't scale to the combat possibilities and you never see the real loot, because if you did you'd be able to scale builds.

This has nothing to do with what other people do. Take any player out of the pool of total players and 9 out of 10 times, they've never had 10+ divines. That's unjustifiable. They've never explored even 10% of the game.

The point of this post is that in 10+ years of PoE, this hasn't been changed and it's unjustifiable that it hasn't. These aren't the vocal minority. This is literally 90% of the player base.

What you're basing your argument on is literally the vocal minority constituted by less than 10% of the player base.

And that's the fallacy GGG are also falling for. For 10+ years now. Literally all they have to do is look at their data and draw conclusions. It has even been confirmed by Johnathan in interview.

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Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

This perceived problem is the reason people flock to meta builds, because the faster a build can clear whatever content you want to farm the faster you make currency. If tailwind exists forever and armour bases gives you movement speed penalties the choice is easy to make.

It is perceived because it is reality. I want to play Sorc and check out infusions. And also unarmed Chayula. Guess what I'm playing first? Deadeye. Because with Deadeye I can progress quickly and stay up with the economy(or get ahead of it if I no-life the weekend). I'll use that economic power to buy what I need to build my sorc and monk.

If I start with the character I want to play I'll struggle the whole time and probably won't make it far enough into the build because of trying to afford things or spending way more hours to grind out what I want in SSF. I literally could play Deadeye to 90 and then level both Sorc and Monk with the gear they need faster than if I simply started with Sorc or Monk.

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DavexGG#0471 wrote:

The point of this post is that in 10+ years of PoE, this hasn't been changed and it's unjustifiable that it hasn't. These aren't the vocal minority. This is literally 90% of the player base.

It is completely justifiable. They are catering to the whales that buy the microtransactions. Most of the rest are free or low investment players. From a business perspective, they exist only to be gloated at by the whales.

POE has always encouraged this. It has always been about either getting super lucky or no-life-ing the game and then bragging as if that player's immense skill and knowledge is the reason why they get to have nice things. It's their business model.

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DavexGG#0471 wrote:

I totally get where you’re coming from — chase items should feel like long-term goals, and I’m not suggesting GG-tier loot should be raining from the sky.

The concern isn’t about trivializing rarity; it’s about how steep the gap is between what most players can realistically achieve and the level where the game’s deeper crafting and build potential unlocks. Right now, that threshold feels way higher than “hundreds of hours” for the majority.

I’m not saying everyone should have mirrors in week one, but it would be great if experimenting with more than a fraction of builds didn’t feel completely out of reach for 90%+ of players. There’s room for chase items and broader accessibility to mid- to high-level crafting without breaking the economy or killing progression.

Especially as you'll always have chase in PoE in terms of items. And you'd also have it if bosses were harder mechanically, yet people were able to have access to items and crafting.

Mmm yeah I think a lot of you are right that the fundamental "trans / aug / regal" crafting loop is not fun/gratifying, and the barrier to pretty much anything else is quite high. I think the "greater" orbs will help with this a bit, but it's still not very engaging.

That said, I think Scours are counter to the current vision, which is to make acquisition of bases an essential component of the crafting loop. Do you have any other ideas of mid-tier crafting options that might better fit into that vision? I'm hoping this patch improves the situation to a pretty large degree with the essence changes (magic to rare is WAY better), boss fragment changes (easier access to league-specific mats like omens), and the new tiered currency. I worry they've made the greater currencies too rare though when they aren't really that powerful e.g exalt slam one single high tier mod - doesn't mean the mod is good, plus you need to slam three good mods on a good base before that. But they already mentioned greater exalt orbs will probably be about as rare as a Divine - imo they could double that.

On the flip side, I think a much higher drop rate of Omen of Whittling might move the needle too much. I don't think we need higher access to absolutely top tier crafting like that, where we can deterministically annul a mod. Whittling actually belongs as a chase / 1% crafting option, where you may only see 1 or 2 in a league as a casual player. But 100% agree that better accessibility to interesting crafting options in general is needed. We could probably afford to have many more Dextral and Sinistral omens in the loop, where it becomes realistic to farm out a couple within a day of dedicated Ritual farming.

I agree with every take.
At some point, I started hating this game because I was farming just to buy things just to try out new builds. None of the actually rare currencies, items, omens ever dropped for me. I had to make currency by selling items with potential to craft (like rings with 2 T1 attack affixes). I would've liked to keep them, but I didn't have the currency to buy the currency to try crafting... that sounds and is crazy to say for a videogame.

After 0.1 I stayed in Standard, so I am sure I have grinded enough all of the content and I feel I was never rewarded for it. I lost the account for how many times I did Trial of Sekhemas, just to get a couple of Time-Lost cashes that dropped maybe 1 jewel I was able to use. The rest weren't good AT ALL!

I don't know if GGG want to keep their player base as ''tryhard gamers which have all the time in the world to farm for items they will never get, and streamers''.

I only play PoE 2 because of the graphics and physics, this is the only next gen ARPG in the market now. As soon as something around this lines releases with a more accesible gameplay/grind, I would move on.

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Kage#1250 wrote:

Wrong take.

Agreed.


Hey, here's an idea for all who are struggling with currency in Poe1 or 2.

Learn to MAKE IT. And get out of the effin campaing ffs.