Scrotie wants YOU to help prevent PoE's economy from becoming more like D3's

There will always be currency in any barter economy because items have value and people will still hoard known valuables, that they then trade if they need something special.

There isn't too much risk of this turning into a trade simulator because xping in this game takes time. The players who are attracted to the gameplay of this particular game will be those who love building characters in great detail, and to complete that they need to play instead of trade all the time.

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CanHasPants wrote:

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reboticon wrote:

A gold standard economy sounds excellent because gold is orbs and there is a genuine sink for them.

Hoarding orbs is an item sink? I never knew! Logic win.

Most people with lots of orbs use them. To roll maps. It's easy to burn 50+ chaos a day rolling maps.

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CanHasPants wrote:

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reboticon wrote:

You guys know humans quit using barter economy for a reason, yeah?

Off topic, but I suspect it had something to do with the expansion of governance and establishing a means to extort power, and had nothing to do with farmer Joe requiring some means of soliciting blacksmith Jack's wagon repairing service.

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I suspect you are a bit of a conspiracy theorist and the real reason is because blacksmith jack didn't need anything from Dave the cooper but he could use something from farmer Joe who was in dire need of some items from Steve the fletcher. Rather than sit down and try to work out the logistical nightmare a standard currency was born.

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CanHasPants wrote:

In a loot find aRPG, everybody is a producer. In an AH simulator, most people are consumers. The root of the problem is that our trade environment fails to achieve the primary goal GGG set forth when they designed the orb system, which was to sustain a gold-less barter system where the currency has an inherent sink to regulate the economy. Investment Orb Banking circumvents that sink.

False. Most people can't be consumers without RMT. People aren't just giving items away.

There is far more hoarding in standard - which can never have a balanced economy - because this is the only league with "free" items entering it from other leagues.

I disagree completely with this topic. The number one reason D3 economy became horrible is because it has no ladders(which is being changed mind you).

There is new leagues and ladders in PoE. Because of ladder resets the economy remains fine.

I also disagree with you attacking someone who is volunteering their time for the convenience of other players.

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johnKeys wrote:

if we all have a Consumerist Prospective, who is the Producer?

In a loot find aRPG, everybody is the producer. You produce your goods for trade, every time you kill a monster and something drops. This is compromised when you are forced to compare your items to a perceived market value, and trade against peoples' expected profit margins. You become the consumer, feeding your bank, rather than a player, feeding your character's development.

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johnKeys wrote:

and how is a "barter economy" different, than an economy where you barter?
you barter, within some price range [X,..,Y] - where X is the ideal price for the buyer, and Y is the ideal price for the seller - trying to find a good price somewhere in the middle.
that price range, is indeed defined by the data in the indexer.
the "Auction House" if you will.
otherwise, you would offer lower than X and be flamed, or higher than Y and be ripped-off.

In a barter economy, there is no price tag. There is only relative value to those involved in the exchange.


Without a price tag, there is no need to search for a buyout price to know what the item is worth. There is only the need to understand that I have something you need, and you have something I need.

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johnKeys wrote:

truth be told, I'm not here to play economic simulator. I'm here to hack monsters and find loot. but when monsters suddenly hit harder than you can take, and you get no upgrades to counter this - because drops are a barren random desert - you are forced to enter the economy.
yes, as a consumer.

But that is exactly what you are doing by relying on price tags. You are participating in the economic simulator, shopping for an item to buy, by transmuting your items' value as equipment into relative value in gold-standard currency. When you stop trying to reach a price tag, you cease to play an economic simulator. You fight monsters, find loot, and exchange items based upon their inherent values as equipment. By engaging this consumer economy, you are then lead to feel victim to RNG because you neither received an adequate upgrade, nor an item worth trading for enough to buy that upgrade. Instead you must resort to grinding out many small gains, and playing economic simulator until you have gained enough to bypass the gear check.

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johnKeys wrote:

and as a consumer, I ask of GGG to have the following priority:

1) make the game a fucking ARPG - loot drops, risk and reward, real crafting - so I won't need to even know there is an economy, if I don't wish to participate in one.

2) if 1 is a "no", and I am forced to venture into the marketplace, make it easy enough so I can get in, get what I need, and get the fuck out and back to killing monsters.

1) already exists, but I'd argue that risk and reward are not in balance. We are more at the mercy of wild swings of luck, attained through excessive persistence, than we are able to feel empowered over our characters' destiny. This, in some ways, is great. It leads to some very interesting tension, where you must figure out how to get by with what you've got. On the other hand, this can lead to some situations where an otherwise sound build cannot advance at all. In these cases, I place the blame solely on pure gear check encounters, where monsters are poorly designed such that no amount of skill can overcome the challenge, and the benefits of that tension are lost.

2) would require either: drastic changes to our current in game systems (to remove all elements that enable the "economic simulator"), or a quick bandaid fix (which perpetuate "economic simulator" but make it more tolerable). I am, obviously, in favor of the drastic changes.

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reboticon wrote:

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CanHasPants wrote:

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reboticon wrote:

A gold standard economy sounds excellent because gold is orbs and there is a genuine sink for them.

Hoarding orbs is an item sink? I never knew! Logic win.

Most people with lots of orbs use them. To roll maps. It's easy to burn 50+ chaos a day rolling maps.

Eventually, yes, once those orbs find their way up the ladder to those able to spend abundant amounts of perceived wealth to roll high level maps. But establishing orbs as a gold standard is contradictory to their use as an inherent item sink when most people would rather hoard (invest) them to buy shit. This defines. . .

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reboticon wrote:

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CanHasPants wrote:

In a loot find aRPG, everybody is a producer. In an AH simulator, most people are consumers. The root of the problem is that our trade environment fails to achieve the primary goal GGG set forth when they designed the orb system, which was to sustain a gold-less barter system where the currency has an inherent sink to regulate the economy. Investment Orb Banking circumvents that sink.

False. Most people can't be consumers without RMT. People aren't just giving items away.

There is far more hoarding in standard - which can never have a balanced economy - because this is the only league with "free" items entering it from other leagues.

. . . what I mean by being a consumer. Most people can't afford to spend abundant amounts of orbs crafting level 76+ maps. Those people are, essentially, working for those people who can. The high level mappers find the items, the low wealth players grind our small victories over time until they can afford the price tags on those high level items.

To me, this sounds like a classic example of 'looks good on paper' idea, but in practice falls apart.

I agree with Pants that a barter system is far more interesting and appropriate for a game like POE, and ultimately in the long run is more fair and offers greater returns for playing time. It's also interesting that a buyout system was tried in a similar game, and so totally failed that it was pulled from the very folks that invested mucho to realize it (D3 AH).

Unfortunately, the sheer number of replies in favor of a system which has proven to fail speaks volumes....and why this is a 'great idea on paper' topic. The collective mindset is such that a gold standard economy prevails, and most likely always will. We can all speculate as to why--be it time concerns, convenience, bad chat system, etc.--but the end result is fairly clear.


Personally, I think XYZ request should be rejected solely on the grounds that it's so obviously transparent to benefit his site and his service that it's somewhat insulting.

XYZ is doing a service for Path of Exile and its player-base, not the other way around.

Come on, man. Just get to the bottom of it and be done with it. Request that GGG develop a private API from which only you can tap item information across all regions and leagues.

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crabshack wrote:

To me, this sounds like a classic example of 'looks good on paper' idea, but in practice falls apart.

I agree with Pants that a barter system is far more interesting and appropriate for a game like POE, and ultimately in the long run is more fair and offers greater returns for playing time. It's also interesting that a buyout system was tried in a similar game, and so totally failed that it was pulled from the very folks that invested mucho to realize it (D3 AH).

Unfortunately, the sheer number of replies in favor of a system which has proven to fail speaks volumes....and why this is a 'great idea on paper' topic. The collective mindset is such that a gold standard economy prevails, and most likely always will. We can all speculate as to why--be it time concerns, convenience, bad chat system, etc.--but the end result is fairly clear.

First, this game does have a buyout system. That is precisely what all of the people here are defending.

Second, popularity is not synonymous with prevailing, because the popular option is not always the victorious one. If this were true, living paycheck to paycheck would be the American dream, and McDonald's would be the best restaurant on Earth. It is the precisely the buyout mentality which turns the Dev Diary on currency on its head and transforms PoE from the desired pseudocurrency economy into a de facto gold economy. If you call such a state of affairs "prevailing," well, then I guess stupidity prevails.

I will concede this to you though: challenging the buyout mentality is difficult. It's a lot like the situation with Diablo 2, when there was rampant cheating, botting, dupes. I believe it's a fixable problem, but it requires inconveniences to the player (such as online-only gaming, which is a huge inconvenience for those without or with poor internet connectivity, especially those who plan to play solo) and even then it's a problem which likely never gets fixed completely (there are still botters in PoE, even if GGG is hunting for them and banning them). It would mean implementing a system similar to the one I described in another thread, and removing options such as the ability to link items in forum and trade chat. The whole thing would be experimental, there would likely be unforeseen complications, and at some point things would probably go wrong for a bit until a solution was found, because right now it is just "on paper." But I don't believe that means we shouldn't try, that we should let the fear of failure stop us.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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crabshack wrote:

To me, this sounds like a classic example of 'looks good on paper' idea, but in practice falls apart.

I agree with Pants that a barter system is far more interesting and appropriate for a game like POE, and ultimately in the long run is more fair and offers greater returns for playing time. It's also interesting that a buyout system was tried in a similar game, and so totally failed that it was pulled from the very folks that invested mucho to realize it (D3 AH).

Unfortunately, the sheer number of replies in favor of a system which has proven to fail speaks volumes....and why this is a 'great idea on paper' topic. The collective mindset is such that a gold standard economy prevails, and most likely always will. We can all speculate as to why--be it time concerns, convenience, bad chat system, etc.--but the end result is fairly clear.

First, this game does have a buyout system. That is precisely what all of the people here are defending.

Second, popularity is not synonymous with prevailing, because the popular option is not always the victorious one.

The buyout as it exists now is implicit. D3 was explicit. That's what I meant.

I hear you man, except that in this case popularity is synonymous with prevailing; the popular option is the victorious one. We've seen it happen. From CB to OB to release, the economy has transitioned from barter to gold standard. It's popular among the folks, and it's winning out, to the extent that most in this thread support enhanced functionality for a third party site that promotes buyout.

There's no need to bring up independent examples of American dreams and this or that. We have the evidence here, in this game. You're swimming upstream against a collective mindset and acting as though it's a variable you can control. Human nature can't be. When the game was small and attracted a certain type of player, bartering could survive.

The environment of the game has changed as a consequence of a larger, more diversified player base (both in experience and demographics), and ignoring the environment is potentially worse for POE than allowing this XYZ clown to enhance his site.

Which is why, I suggest circumventing his idea by pointing out the obvious. The guy has zero interest in the game. He only cares about his site and the traffic it generates and we all know exactly why that is. He's cloaking his agenda under the false pretense of 'what's best for the game'.

It's bullshit, and GGG should tell this guy to eff off by implementing their own, equivalent or novel, system....which is what I hope they're hitting hard.

Just don't use it.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I will concede this to you though: challenging the buyout mentality is difficult. It's a lot like the situation with Diablo 2, when there was rampant cheating, botting, dupes. I believe it's a fixable problem, but it requires inconveniences to the player (such as online-only gaming, which is a huge inconvenience for those without or with poor internet connectivity, especially those who plan to play solo) and even then it's a problem which likely never gets fixed completely (there are still botters in PoE, even if GGG is hunting for them and banning them). It would mean implementing a system similar to the one I described in another thread, and removing options such as the ability to link items in forum and trade chat. The whole thing would be experimental, there would likely be unforeseen complications, and at some point things would probably go wrong for a bit until a solution was found, because right now it is just "on paper." But I don't believe that means we shouldn't try, that we should let the fear of failure stop us.

Scrotie, the mentality you are referring to is there for a reason -- the game's existing design promotes it. It is what CanHasPants refers to as "risk and reward not being in balance" and "the wild swings of luck". Until there exists systems in the game that proportionally reward the player for actually using the currency items they have instead of encouraging hoarding, people will trade, and they will seek ways to -- to an extent, but not to that of an Auction House, as limited by the game's design -- optimize it.

Until then, whatever issues you might have with people's mentality is, I feel, misplaced. No player should feel the need to take the long view, as a theorycrafter such as you likes to do. No one has a reason to believe that the current status quo (defined by trading's reliablity and predictability compared to "crafting") will change in the short or long term, and for those people, your arguments have no significance.

Crafting is fucked. And until GGG unfucks it, there shall be no alternative to trading, and poe.xyz will remain a benefit to this community. Level the playing field (and I know you put in the effort to do so) and then your abstract concerns will have their rightful place.