Which is not even tradelords… please differentiate between scalpers and traders. One are a community service… the others are leeches.
I’m a tradelord in PoE, crafter and trader, those primary ones. I roll for hours for good results from bases others sell for cheap. I create the items others wish they had… but which still wouldn’t be fitting for their chars, and since I do it for all types of chars I make profit with it.
That’s healthy and good for a game. I make profit and get better stuff I buy from others which haven’t rolled properly for me while making stuff for others. That causes a constant fluidity of the market to happen, which is mandatory for a healthy economy. Flow of goods. LE is ‘stale’. Either you sell something in a relatively short timeframe or it’s sitting ‘forever’ basically as prices got too low and re-pricing is such a debacle it doesn’t warrant the time investment to even do.
I still can do that… if you know what people actually list or don’t list it becomes surprisingly easy to make still tons of Gold in Legacy. But that’s a major issue actually. Those items are very prevalent and easy to acquire but it’s so darn hard to find anything properly in their shit-tier UI that they’re overlooked.
I would rather not make hundreds of millions of Gold when it means the community can properly interact with the market and hence providing a bigger variety of items which I could possibly need in return as more players actually know that they would’ve some form of value.
The needles are utterly useless outside of initial progression, so they immediately fall off in value.
The keys… you’re getting showered in keys, they’re also worthless.
The ‘evolving’ items are a thing, yes! But they once again have the issue of champion affixes or experimental affixes. Actually getting a item which is valuable is once more solely a ‘jackpot’.
That’s why the crafting system in PoE is set up as it is. You acquire for example fossils, and when you got 10-20 you can realistically start crafting early stuff and actually get a upgrade with a high chance. With the special ones you can actively ‘fish’ for specific results.
You won’t always get what you want but with prevalence of usage you get good results which you then can turn into a circle of acquiring more and trying to keep on crafting. Hence you cause fluidity in the economy. One resource goes out, finished products come in. Some get sold, others get lowered in price, when the resources become too expensive you stop and farm up more. But the market stays ‘alive’ through those things long-term. There’s a sink and the older items are ‘removed’, in LE permanently as phased out old items are trash rather then value.
Which - as mentioned - is fine… for now.
You’ll see a distinct issue arising as the game grows. Either mechanics becoming worthless entirely and the game always feeling ‘small’ and hence people getting to the end-point in record time as ‘nothing feels worthwhile to do’.
Or you get the issue that it’s overwhelming and steadily forcing you into stuff where you would rather do something else as exclusive drops are only found in a specific place.
Which death-sentence would you rather give the game? Because both are without a method to alleviate it 
Yes, and people able to deal with Uberroth hence get loads of value. Farm-worthy!
Is the core gameplay ‘farm worthy’ though? Not really as 99,5% of drops are worthless and finding out which one has value is a nightmare.
Is arena farm-worthy? No.
Dungeon bosses? No.
Even shade? No.
You can spend 50 hours farming each of them and not get a single MG valuable item. Why? Because you need a specific LP value on them to even get some reasonable value. So you ‘farm empty’ for that time.
This doesn’t happen with Uberroth for example, but that’s solely because nigh nobody can access him and deal with him.
That’s why commonly consumables are the core repetitive farming reason. Not finished outcomes besides a few distinct ones. We only have ‘so many’ slots to fill for gear, and it becomes ever harder to fill them. So to alleviate that means resources to acquire something is a viable option to exchange for and not have those severely long downtimes… you still ‘get something of value’ in the meanwhile.
This is currently simply not the case.
Yes.
We do actually? Imagine the current currency exchange inside it at Day 1.
Has it caused a downside? No?
Why would it have done so earlier?
Is there a reason why that would be the case? Some difference in situation causing it? If so yeah… but that’s for example with ‘Faustus’ in PoE not the case.
So yes, it would’ve been better Obviously so.
It’s like saying ‘would the life of people have been more comfortable if they already had toilet paper readily available in the middle ages?’ Obviously yes 
PoE would very likely not exist anymore without GGG caving with their trade API and the trade-side hence coming into existence.
They would now play Torchlight Infinite or Diablo instead. Those being the best games in the genre…
Or at least it would be a really small-scale game still dimpling around for more then a decade. Likely dead though as it falls out of favor since the engine updates and QoL updates together with the content releases would’ve had no chance to be upheld to stay meaningful.
Which - as already stated several times as well - is not how the prevalent mindset of people works.
People leave as they get bored.
Ensure people don’t get bored and they don’t leave.
Variety ensures people don’t get easily bored.
Many games have found that out over the course of the years. Why do you think is OSRS so wildly successful? Because they have a myriad of possible mechanics to do. If you’re sick of doing Wintertodt then you can go and fish. If you’re sick of fishing you can go and do farming, if you’re sick of farming you can go and play the Grand Exchange market-wise. If you’re sick of that you can go and PvP. If you’re sick of that you can go and do clues. If not that you can raid…
Basically there’s such a massive variety in the game that generally ‘something’ is fun at the time, even when you’re tired with the core gameplay. Be it farming for something specific. Skilling further up. Doing some minigames or whatever.
Your mindset is rare, your mindset makes companies fail, actively. Yes I know it sucks… but that’s simply what it is, wanted or not. You can still ‘hope’ for the perfect game making that a reality… but don’t ever think it’ll be in any way ‘large’. It might fit you perfectly but only have 500 players… which suffices to keep it alive anyway. But it being that and large long-term? That’s mutually exclusive.
Which is also not inherently true.
Given many choices at once does, absolutely! But if the mind can reduce it to singular options or a low variety of them then this is sidestepped completely.
The worst retention in PoE was when they threw all mechanics at you at once, no way to change what shows up in a map, no chance to imrove them happening or remove them.
That changed entirely with the Atlas passives, that gave player agency and retention time has significantly improved because of that.
They simply sidestepped the decision paralysis.
A prime example game for ‘how to handle immense content bloat gradually’ is CDDA (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead), a rather little known ASCII game (with tilesets though) that’s overwhelmingly complex with the sheer amount of content inside. It’s overbloated to oblivion. You can create houses with electricity, in-depth health system that demands the need to take care of nutrients, a in-depth illness system, building vehicles from the ground up, overwhelming crafting options for everything.
It’s also open-source and has a active community, which means it gets up to 5 updates per day in the experimental version.
It’s massive, it’s overwhelming, it’s bloated.
But… their method to immediately remove content bloat in-between is to revamp their UI. At one time they had all items in a single list of crafting, that was unfeasable. They made crafting tabs and suddenly it become manageable again (still overwhelming). It reduced the issue by magnitudes.
Then they made a separate UI solely for building item tiles of any kind.
A separate one solely for vehicles.
A separate system for the inventory management.
A separate system for…
You get the gist. This method in development is called ‘compartmentalization’. You stuff things into a specific area of the game, commonly out of view so you don’t see it, you don’t interact with it. And when you stumble upon one of those the player has the choice of ‘do I interact with it or not?’ at the time. This choice is what the only agency of the player is at the time ‘do I have the mental capacity free to engage with something new or do I still struggle with ongoing stuff?’ and hence decide.
This allows the bloat to become non-bloat.
Mind you, that game has such a fast paced and chaotic development that it still struggles severely with bloat… but 5 years ago it was the same severty in issue despite having 5-10% of the content in it.
In this case 2 specific mechanics were mentioned.
Shattering and unique re-rolling.
Shattering hence being the unique shattering one would expect. The set shattering is a specific one, absolutely!
So from 36 different woven echoes we got a really miniscule result there.
The cemeteries… tombs… (still don’t know which is which 
) they’re now ‘core gameplay’ as you cannot avoid them. They’re shoved in your face, which already was repeatedly discussed why it’s problematic, so I won’t get into it. It makes all the exclusive drops from that ‘core gameplay drops’ though and hence invalidates it as a side-mechanic by design, so enchanted idols and the runes are hence ‘core drops’ and removed from how they would provide the highest impact.
The leftovers are:
6 extremely circumstancial uniques
4 copies of an already existing system (arena rewards, tomb bosses, shade, harbingers)
1 new mechanic (set item shattering)
Uberroth
All others are pure RNG reductors/terget farming methods.
Which… don’t get me wrong, target farming methods are a big thing, but it is not exclusive. As are the copies of existing systems.
So in total we got through weaver nodes:
6 Uniques
1 new mechanic
1 boss
And a few core additions.
4 bosses
a few uniques.
idol enchantments.
That’s the summary in total.
Is that enough? Not even remotely in the current state of the game.
If EHG had implemented the tombs… cemeteries… the things in the echos actually in a variety of options rather then ‘generic’ as their usual downfall is then we could say something different.
One which has champions inside and focuses around their items.
One which has the weaver bosses inside and focuses on their uniques and enchanted idols.
One which is focused on acquisition of the weaver nodes.
One which is focused around buffing the content outside of it.
As example… then it would be exclusive stuff, things worthwhile to interact with, their design showing what is inside and hence allowing the decision if you wanna engage with that type of content.
But that wasn’t the case now, was it?
Instead we got the ‘generic treatment’ for em, which is detrimental.
Yes, that’s a viable short-term solution, 1 mil itemized for example, a platinum coin… or a diamond… or whatever.
And allowing them to be listed like Gold at your char.
The solution to EHG’s issue was already implemented with ‘Everquest’ in 1999, hence 26 years ago via ‘copper, silver, gold, platinum’ coins. So each has a technical limit.
There’s a reason why that is done.
Automatically this also works, so no issue with the exchange at all. No need for p2p even.
They are actually often listed for the respective mirror-prices.
Nowadays ‘TFT’ has taken over the task for top-end ones though, formerly it was solely mentioned in the forums.
But you often see ‘1 mirror’ items solely for indexing. Indexing is important still and if you see a 1 mirror price it’s either a mirror-service or a ‘offer’ one.
It never was, it’s a miniscule stop-gap to allow a miniscule amount of extra time. Does take nearly no effort to implement and has a bit of impact.
But yes, without a sink it won’t ever work out.
