POE aka "Capitalism Simulator"?

Great post Scortie. I try to reply early tomorrow, since i dont have acess to a PC yet. Two things that comes in my mind when reading you post.

1 You have to define what you understand when apeaking of skill. I think POE requires very little mechanical skill and very much strategical skill.

2 The skill of making money exists ofc in real world economy too. Which kind of similar attributes (imho).

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Reinhart wrote:

Buying mid-tier game in Path of Exile is actually really simple. Just surf to the trading forums and there is a ton of stuff out there trying to be sold. Browsing a few threads will already net you the item you were looking for.

No.

It generally takes me some time to find and purchase a specific item. Even screening for sellers with an online status, I frequently receive either no response or a response of "Mapping" when attempting to purchase a 1-2 chaos buyout item.

From the sellers point of view, it is not worth the investment in time required to sell mid-tier items. They would far prefer to actually be playing the game. This limits the availability of mid-tier items available on the market and drives up the time requirement for conducting mid-tier transactions.

For the high end vendor, who may actually be sitting in Lionseye, it is not worth the cost in inventory space to carry mid-tier items. Why fill your stash up with 1-2 chaos items when you are dealing in items priced in 10's of chaos or exalts? Mid-tier items are vendored in sets for a fast turn around.

I want to play and get upgrades, and I can do that now without spending a lot of time trading.
So some folks get rich trading. Why should I care? :)

Here's another way of putting it: does PoE have a healthy middle class? I have a limited perspective, of course, but it seems to, from what I've seen.

only read the original post and apologize for potential double post:


I totally agree with OP in the analysing of the economy, but i dont agree with the conclusion. Pls just read the manifesto of GGG and u will understand, that all u wrote is a big compliment to GGG. Cause they wanted the game exactly like it is.

And i have to say, that is was nearly a perfect work done on it.

Just think about it. Look at the game from outside:

U have a stable, fluctuating market with no/minor inflation. Its a great system and i cant imagine how they build them. To make things clear: nothing is unintended in the economic system in PoE

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estu87 wrote:

the solution is easy, remove trading/all item account bound/only self found. tadaaaaaaaaaa!!

And now the game is ruined! Whoo Hoo!

PoE is a fantastic mirror for the the US however im not sure what RMT correlates to in the real world.

RMT has destroyed standard and will destroy poe as a whole due to GGG's stance on focusing efforts on chinese bot farms rather than high profile buyers who have basically turned the sever into their own private sim city.

If you arent already rich, chances are, you will never get rich. That is the sad truth and no amount of determination or mfing will let you break the ever rising cost ceiling set by those who are willing to blow a mirror and 100 exalts to get a copy of xyz bis rares.

If GGG launched an exhaustive hunt for rmt buyers then I have no doubt the 30% or more of the top 100 ladder on every league would be banned over night. GGG wont do this because its horrible PR and they dont have the resources to devote to it.

If you are only interested in playing the game, you will remain a broke ass player.
What annoys me, is the fact that other players dictate what happens in my solo game experience. I can't have the currency I need to progress because of gimped drop rates due to a economy that I don't wish to participate in. I can't have a smooth offline game experience because a tiny minority might hack the game & ruin the economy I do not wish to participate in.

I stepped outside of my solo box a few times, I joined a few party games, which lead to my FPS dropping to 4-16. As you can imagine, it's unplayable.

I don't care what anyone says. I've had 1 ex drop since closed beta. I'm ok with low drop rates, but that is utterly ridiculous to anyone trying to progress by playing the game.

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roteweste wrote:

1 You have to define what you understand when apeaking of skill. I think POE requires very little mechanical skill and very much strategical skill.

In the case of trading, it's a combination of strategy and information gathering. Note that third-party shop indexers provide the relevant information easily and thus reduce the amount of skill required.

One of the drawbacks of PoE, in my view, is how desync has largely prevented the game from having mechanical skill. I believe mechanical skill would become a much bigger player in the game if it had more stable netcode — no other changes would be necessary. However, playing a character where mechanical decision-making is make-or-break doesn't seem to work, so instead it's mostly about long-term planning to make yourself resilient against threats regardless of your immediate mechanical reaction. For example, glass cannon (with emphasis on the "glass") might become a lot more viable overnight if desync was significantly reduced.

the end game goal is to make it so your character does not require much skill to kill or survive. essentially the brain dead auto pilot mode people seem to detest so much. I dont see it as such because arpgs have never been about skill.

If you want a skillful game go play an rts like starcraft.

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Nephalim wrote:

the end game goal is to make it so your character does not require much skill to kill or survive. essentially the brain dead auto pilot mode people seem to detest so much. I dont see it as such because arpgs have never been about skill.

If you want a skillful game go play an rts like starcraft.

I feel this kind of viewpoint is close to the truth, but makes a few assumptions which may be true, but not necessarily so.

The end game goal is to make a dominating character (or group of characters, if a dedicated party player). You want to maximize your performance in multiple metrics — loot per unit time, loot per map, XP per time, XP per map.

Now "dominating" often means precisely what you said: the content provides minimal challenge, enabling auto-pilot. In such a situation, the application of mechanical skill provides a bonus (it does increase your metrics in loot per time, for instance), but you're still essentially immune to penalties, such as death, while playing in autopilot.

However, this is not necessarily the case; it's possible for ARPGs to offer builds where the skill bonus is large enough to take a build from mortal without, to superior performance metrics with. In other words: the size of the skill bonus is something which is under developer control.

For more on this topic, check out Extra Credits - Balancing for Skill.