How the Economy Actually Works

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sidtherat wrote:

but doing that and then blowing it all on items you want to vendor for one alch? this isnt a good deal.

it might have been before that change that quality improves the odds of 5/6l, but now this is definitely not the case

What I'd really like to know is:
1) are there people out there trading stones and scraps?
2) if so, what's the approximate exchange rate?

I don't believe going on trade chat and asking is going to get any fair answers; hurray for buying low and selling high. (And no, I'm not buying or selling, so don't try it here either.)

well what you have written is nothing new, what would have been more interesting is a solution to this.

Honestly I feel like if exalts were worth relatively as much as often they drop, the price would be about 10 x higher than now. How many chaos do you find until you find an exalt? 200? 400?
Some people play 500 h and have never found an exalt. In my opinion this game REALLY needs some feature like a drop counter for exalts. Let's say if and only if you havent found any in 150 h playtime, one is guarenteed to drop.

This would provide "lower" players more access to high end crafting or at least to progress more quickly to endgame.
As you noticed correctly, only the highend players craft right now. The rest just trades because it's cheaper. This is bad because the endgame players is only a small fraction of total player count.
Also divine orbs are worth shit but are quite as rare. There needs to be a recipe to make 1 exalt out of 2 divines to raise their value.
Now the whole problem is that if exalts were easier accessable, the ritcher would become even more ritch and prices of cheap items would drop even more, because more players could farm endgame and generate more lower tier crap to flood the market. But honestly I believe there is no way around that in a balanced ARPG. In the end it has to be the objective to make the very good loot (as compared to the "very best") as well as endgame content accessible to as many players as possible. There will always be demand for the good endgame gear as many people try out new builds etc. If the demand for the overflooded low-mid tier gear dropped as a result, you could easily play through the game and buy the necessary gear cheaply until you reached merciless A3. But this is not a problem because:
- Experienced players wanna reach endgame fast.
- Newer players usually have no idea about prices and don't trade much at their first playthrough. If they trade they are happy on the deal, no matter what they traded.

The crafting system is totally great but you only benefit from it if you are at the top of the food chain. If you try to benefit otherwise you are a fool. You might get lucky as you can in a lottery, but it's much more efficient to trade all currency for items and people start to notice that.

Now there could be some features to create exalt sinks for the ritchest people. Let's say a new recipe: 10 exalts, 2 rares: one attribute of one rare is exchanged with another attribute of the other rare. The price is rather extreme; but you could theoretically create an armor chest with 30 movement speed from boots etc.
But tbh I don't think there would be that many more exalts around if a counter were introduced.

The problem with your idea is that people would stay logged in on several thousand accounts at a time and get several thousand exalted orbs every 150 hours.

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Barry wrote:

The problem with your idea is that people would stay logged in on several thousand accounts at a time and get several thousand exalted orbs every 150 hours.

You are correct with that one. But you could also make a "merciless monster kill counter" which is equivalent to hours spent. I don't know what the correct numbers would be for 150 h though. Quite a lot and also depends on gear then.

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Dan1986 wrote:

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Barry wrote:

The problem with your idea is that people would stay logged in on several thousand accounts at a time and get several thousand exalted orbs every 150 hours.

You are correct with that one. But you could also make a "merciless monster kill counter" which is equivalent to hours spent. I don't know what the correct numbers would be for 150 h though. Quite a lot and also depends on gear then.

That could work, but what's wrong with just tweaking the numbers on the current drop rate?

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WinWalter wrote:

You're right. The money would be worthless and will be.

Great, then give me a few thousand dollars, and I'll give you this box of cornflakes.

...What? You don't want to? But what I have is intrinsically valuable food, and what you have is worthless fiat money! Look, I have to deal with incredibly dumb economics on the various political forums I frequent. Let's not bring it up here, eh? Fiat money has value because we attribute value to it. Hell, it's not even a direct correlation between money in circulation/GDP and the value of money - see also: low inflation despite quantitative easing in the current recession.

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Barry wrote:

Spoiler

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sidtherat wrote:

i sense a strong hypocrisy here

traders are not players. most people with insane gear DO NOT play this game. they do trading only. or 'scamming only' is the better way.

you know - the douches that 'Blabla Bla, Bla Bla - offer' waiting for some noob to overprice, the queens of 'lowballers will be ignored' (oh i love to play with them offering them like 3transmutation stacks or whatever just to test what he had in mind) etc

people with insane gear are not playing this game. they are playing trading simulator transferring POE wealth to other games via generally known means. they do it in broad daylight and because they fooled devs of all previous games they know what to do to not get caught

crafting? them crafting? you are joking. why would people hoarding 300 exalteds and 10 kaoms craft anything when all they are looking for are a) noobs to scam b) orbs to RMT

for every PLAYER with godly gear there are 100 traders that in some cases havent even reached mapping. they only flip items for enormous profit. for them it is fun and i dont blame them. but stop the hypocrisy.

sad part that only few builds (spork mainly) are not gear dependant. all other - you HAVE to trade for stuff as playing self found is very similar to D3 self-found (and i know that because i have 2 para-lev 50+ self found chars in D3 and 2 80+ self founds in POE - there are no differences on how miserable and inefficient that way is)

because i idle in trade chats i started to recognize names of the 'trader-players' - somehow they always have the best uniques on the first day and their orb rates are dreadful. noobs buy into it. this can easily be fixed by vendor recipes like chaos=55alts etc.

This has to be the most bitter and envious post I've seen on the forums. Nothing you actually said holds water.

It's kind of true, the richest person I know who has pretty insane gear, multiple mirrors, had to buy additional pages just for currency and uniques got so wealthy not by mapping but by grinding the old chaos recipe all day in normal and trading. I know hes currently grinding something else while trading but as far as I know it isn't maps.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

If an upgrade for your character is available on the market, the only reason to make it yourself is that you enjoy paying more.

Or maybe you want to gamble because there is always a chance to craft an upgrade you can't pay for and is maybe craftable for a lot less than its market price ?

I crafted a 600ES 2 resists ilvl75 vaal regalia with like 1 alch and 3 chaos (the white itself is worth 2 imo). If I wanted to get a 600ES ilvl75 chest with 2 resists, I would have payed way more than what I've put into crafting it.

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asmodeos666 wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

If an upgrade for your character is available on the market, the only reason to make it yourself is that you enjoy paying more.

Or maybe you want to gamble because there is always a chance to craft an upgrade you can't pay for and is maybe craftable for a lot less than its market price ?

This is exactly the same argument behind buying lottery tickets. It doesn't hold up for anyone who has a functional knowledge of probability.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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asmodeos666 wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

If an upgrade for your character is available on the market, the only reason to make it yourself is that you enjoy paying more.

Or maybe you want to gamble because there is always a chance to craft an upgrade you can't pay for and is maybe craftable for a lot less than its market price ?

This is exactly the same argument behind buying lottery tickets. It doesn't hold up for anyone who has a functional knowledge of probability.

knowing probability doesn't stop me from occasionally buying a Lottery ticket, or visiting a Casino when I'm abroad.
it is true that both the worst case and the average case scenarios are not quite favourable for the player - but I'm kind of hoping for a best case scenario :)

however, an ARPG is not a Casino, and it shouldn't act like one when reward and progress are concerned. RNG has very well-defined roles, and making it "run wild and unchecked" is wrong.