Crafting orbs or currency? A serious discussion of the game's direction

All valid concerns. I spend about half my currency on trading and the other half on crafting. The main reason being that I LIKE crafting. I find trading to be kind of the cop out way to get good items. That and I enjoy upgrades dropping for me from enemies, and if I trade for amazing loot for pennies, that is never going to happen.
The primary thing I trade for are skill gems for character builds I want to try as well as specific uniques that I need to make a build work.

I definitely think there are some currency items that get used a lot more than others. I see the problem with the higher end stuff though. I very rarely am using anything above a chaos for crafting. If I have an Exalted orb, I am not using it on an item. It is far more valuable as currency. The more the market gets flooded too, as you said, the less people craft and the more they trade.

Fresh leagues are the best current answer to the problem. I really think that you will not be able to solve all the economy woes of standard. A permanent league where everything filters into it, multi-boxers, nothing to remove rares, it just keeps bloating and bloating. There isn't really anything you can do.

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CliveHowlitzer wrote:

If I have an Exalted orb, I am not using it on an item. It is far more valuable as currency. The more the market gets flooded too, as you said, the less people craft and the more they trade.

This, this , this and...this

People is starting to realize that crafting an item will most likely fail. So, they try to trade all they have for exalted orbs, to be able to buy gear. Simple as this.

Anarchy league is already screwed. 5 days after it started. People want to sell stuff for pure ex only, as they won t use the orbs from their sell to craft, but to buy gear from other people that will only sell for pure exalts too...Add to this that a lot of people in Anarchy thinks they are in default and they ask 40+ chaos for their exalts -_-
Anarchy economy will reach the same point as default very soon : 45ish chaos per exalt, because even at this rate, it s still better to buy 10 exalt to buy the perfect item for you than getting it by alt+regal+ex it.

So yeah, buffing orb drop rate would help i think, so maybe we should be able to really play self found. GGG will never give us an offline mode so we don t have to deal with those trading bullshit, but i think they could consider a no-trading league.

I had a very good start in Anarchy i have found 1 good rare chest that allow me to farm decently fast. I m considering very rich for the fresh league because i have 20+ chaos...I m getting insulted and trolled when i want to buy an exalt for 15 chaos because the guy selling the unique i really want only accept exalts...I will never spend my 20ish chaos on a rare items, but i will hoard those tempting and fun orb to buy stuff.

If we're only talking about exalts then sure. Otherwise no.

I think the solution would be to make vendor recipes for the valuable orbs. This would stabilize the currencies and actually make them attainable.

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Warhaul wrote:

I think an increase in overall orb drop rates would be a good idea. At this point it's just not fun to spend 5+ hours farming for orbs. I can get maybe 1 valuable orb in that time period. This game is amazing, I love most aspects about it, but the crafting area is just awful. I am eagerly waiting any news on this, I hope GGG knows how bad this is.

Let me see: if you do docks (with reasonable IIR/IIQ), you can get a full inventory of blues + a yellow or two, within a few minutes (let's say 5) which can be identified and traded for 1.5 alt or so. This gives you 18 alts an hour or 90 alts in 5 hours.

90 alts can be vendored into 11 fusing, which can *easily* be traded to 5.5 chaos or 1.25 GCP

Then there is the chaos recipe, which allows you to trade 9 unidentified rares for 2 chaos. I'd guess that you would find a rare amulet, two rare rings and a rare belt (the rest is easy) every five hours.

So we are at 7.5 chaos which is almost 2 GCP for just farming Docks. It goes even faster on 66 maps, as you can add quantity and get a good drop from the boss.

And that is only when you find *nothing* else. Each augment (vendor for alts), alteration, alchemy scrap, chrome, chromatic item, 6S item and occasional higher orb adds to this.

So getting "maybe one valuable orb in 5 hours" is demonstrably false.

Obtaining items through trading is not rewarding or fun, imo. (well, scamming noobs or sitting 3 hours on chat to catch that "deal of the day", might be rewarding for some people, but not for me). This is not how you should obtain items in an ARPG, yet in PoE it's the most economically sound and fast way to get equipment.

In fact you must be mad to not trade, or a self-imposed "self-found masochist". So far, I have been playing self-found in the new Onslaught league, but eventually I'll hit the "upgrade wall" and be forced to trade.

Either crafting is reworked so it will give you a deterministic outcome, and thus compared to trading it wont be a complete and utter waste of orbs, or:

1.) Significantly increase drop rates of orbs (20x, 30x the current rate)
2.) Increase drop rates of quality socketed / linked white items
3.) All items, with maybe the exception of uniques, are being degraded over time (hits received / hits dealt). Items cannot be repaired. When degradation hits 100%, the item cannot be equipped anymore. You then throw away this item and craft yourself a new one.

The solution is to have an actual crafting system for crafting.

If GGG wanted to have a true barter system, they would have made a better crafting infrastructure. Players could then craft actually useful items, then trade the items, and not the orbs used to craft them. With a system where players could actually create useful items using orbs without the simply bad rng that applies now, orbs would lose 'currency' value and gain the purpose they were meant for: crafting.

THEN we would see a true barter system. As the game plays now, there is no difference between these so called orbs and gold, silver and copper coins in other games. The difference is that many other games have actual weapon and gear crafting.

The problem is that you may be able to craft good items, but who will you trade them to? Everybody else has also crafted good items, so you can only craft for yourself.

And after everyone is decked out with 6L gear with just the right affixes and top rolls, then what?

Then we play the content of the game.

I mean, look at what we are trying to justify here, the largely painful experience of watching a terminal scroll by spammed with WTS/WTB so that the game can have an 'economy'

We made crafting orbs, but not really, they're more like money.

We made a crafting system, but don't use it it's designed as a 'currency' sink

We made a bartering system, but not really, it's more like retail

We made an economy......yeah we have an external exchange rate and everything....

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Powertrip wrote:

The difference is that many other games have actual weapon and gear crafting.

That very old game we all love and always compare PoE to, has a vastly superior crafting system than PoE. It's time PoE introduces a crafting mechanism that involves recipes.

Crafting right now: farm for orbs (subjugated to RNG). When done farming start wasting orbs and pray that the crafting slot machine will give you what you want (subjugated to even more RNG).

A real crafting system: Farm for resources (subjugated to RNG). You have them all? <happy face>, now do the recipe "Item + X + Y + Z", which will give you a deterministic outcome you want. (less subjugation to RNG).

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The problem is that you may be able to craft good items, but who will you trade them to?

As I mentioned in my previous post, irreversible degradation of items could take care of item inflation. If you had a better crafting system at your disposal, you wouldn't care for item loss, cause you would be able to relatively easy craft yourself a new similar one.

Trading could be reserved for (non-degradable??) uniques, skill gems and for orb exchange.