The effects of MG reputation on market pricing of items

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A few days ago I noticed that it seemed like there was a large jump in the reputation needed to progress past rank 5/6, until I learned that you also gain reputation when you spend favor. After that I started saving/selling good exalted items that other builds might want to buy, but after a few days now I’m starting to recognize a separate issue.

Obviously one doesn’t want to undersell themselves, so if you have a good item it behooves you to list it high, and then bring the price down over time. I was doing this, and noticed that you don’t get any favor refunded when you unlist an item. At the time that didn’t bother me, but after a few days of thinking about it I now understand why so many people are selling cheap items for 0 gold.

I’m not sure whether it’s intentional or not, but this places a downward pressure on prices. Rather than list an item a bit more than I think it might be worth, I’m incentivized to list it below what it might be worth - but then anyone else price-checking before listing their item would be incentivized to undercut me, leading to a race to the bottom.

It could be that this is intentional - after all, the real point of trade isn’t to make money, but to let other players make use of items that would otherwise get sold to a vendor.

I’m not sure I have any suggestions about this. I’ll need to keep thinking about it. But I wanted to start a thread about it because I didn’t see one listed here yet.

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Personally I think it’s a good thing, if an item is so common and enough people have copies it shouldn’t sell for very much. This makes building a character decently relatively cheap and creating an incentive for people to list decent items for cheap keeps the supply there. If there’s only a few on the market they’re going to naturally deflate until someone snaps them up.

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I have one. Make re-pricing an item possible without de-listing.
Issue solved.
Add a cooldown of a few minutes to stop people abusing the mechanic.
Follow-up issue solved.

That’s not the issue talked about.
OP talks about the system forcing people to automatically underprice items to not be underpriced further. It’s not a healthy economy.
Economies, both in and out of game are based on fluidity. Supply and demand. If supply is extreme then the price drops as a natural conclusion, if demand is high then the price rises as a natural conclusion.

Currently we have no way of actually comparing prices properly as the functions for sorting items properly are simply missing, this is the first stepping stone. ‘Will it even sell? Are there others having similar items then mine?’ is not something you can discern easily at all, it makes pricing a nigh impossible thing unless it’s uniques which are mostly differentiated via LP. And even in the respective LP range it’s hard to say ‘my rolls are better, I can price it a little higher’ because comparing it is nigh impossible when several pages are available.

The next issue is that it doesn’t cause ‘cheap items for builds’, it’s actually causing people to leave trade and instead use CoF to acquire massive loot showers, getting the items on their own. Since the system makes people hesitate to put up good items as they have no clue if the pricing is right it leads to a scarcity on the market. This leads to in- or de-flation of prices beyond the standard supply/demand chain, worsening the situation further.
Why would someone put up items vastly below their value after all?

But if supply and demand are there then surely those underpriced items will be bought, right? And prices adjust accordingly?
Usually yes. Not in LE though. Since you need high ranks for LP items and exalted items even if you put them up you have no feedback on market demands. Demand might be there… but the people wanting to buy don’t have the ability to actually do so since they’re not at the respective rank yet.
This leads to people not knowing if their pricing is right in the first place.
It causes people to hold back on putting items onto the market hence.
If things are stockpiled and not put into circulation then someone wanting to plan for the future sees the scarcity.
If there’s nothing available to upgrade on the market from all players at once because of those issues then they have no reason to stay as it shows ‘I won’t be able to acquire this even after the grind!’
This stops people from interacting with the market even further.
This increases scarcity even more on higher levels.
Supply drops even more.

Sure, it might self-regulate over time. But we’re starting 3 month cycles, and for that it’s not a working system simply. Might be good for legacy but the whole ‘fresh economy’ trope of a cycle breaks down utterly, leading to only leaderboards, some oddballs nonetheless using the market and people just not wanting to have access to their old stuff to use the cycle, making it barely used.

In comparison:
90% of people in PoE use a league. !0% Standard. Why? There’s a fresh mechanic. There’s a fresh market, there’s hence a fresh experience.

I would say if we turn away the fresh mechanic - which absolutely should be introduced at the same time - we’ll see a bigger influx towards Legacy, probably pushing the Cycle number down to 60-70%

If it stays the current way cycles will maybe be 10-20% instead. This doesn’t warrant keeping such a system up and also hurts player-retention massively.

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Supply and Demand.
As players quit playing and/or stop listing easy/common items, perhaps the floor will raise a bit for high supply/low demand items. As it is now - working as designed. Devs were pretty clear in the way they spoke leading up to 1.0 that they didn’t desire for much of an ‘Economy’ to form. One of the big reason’s they’re opposed to any type of resale.
As you said yourself - goal isn’t to make money but to transfer items to those that need them :wink:

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Yeah, but that’s not how it works.

And if there’s no economy then that means the market dies out, simple as that.

What you describe with re-selling is called ‘flipping’ and is viable to remove, actually good to do so as otherwise people will influence the market forcefully, removing that is actually stabilizing prices as they’re solely reliable on actual demand versus supply rather then artificially lowered/raised prices.

This doesn’t mean that the current situation is good though. If you don’t know if there’s demand for your item as people can’t reliably access them when the progression stage would demand them to have access then it becomes an issue.

Also you want to get the most out of your item, it has ‘value’ after all, right? So why would I put something into the market vastly below its value? It undercuts my efforts, wasting my time. So I wouldn’t put it up until I know what the status of the market is.
This means people hold back listing items for high-end gear which takes effort to acquire, which leads to a high scarcity of that.

Just look how many Legendary items are listed currently despite hundreds of thousands of players! 10 in a single category is overstating it, some categories have… 1. A single one.
Players already are at a stage where they can make dozens of those though, so why don’t we see them?

2 Reasons:
-There’s no possible demand as people haven’t reached the rank required despite being level 100. That’s bad.
-They don’t know if they’re over or underpricing since they don’t have a supply/demand chain in the first place and even if they wouldn’t be able to compare it to other items listed properly.

So yeah, it’s a major issue currently, it has nothing to do with making a big economy or not. You either have a functioning economy which makes it for both buyers and sellers worthwhile… or you don’t have anything at all. Currently we’re seeing the later. Many dabbling into the system, a miniscule fraction staying with it.

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I agree with you. Fairly certain a true market would be much healthier for the game (and greedily, much more enjoyable for me to observe).

Just meant to say that as they designed it, it’s providing the outcome they desired.

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Yeah, it’s just as they designed it.

But I don’t think they’ll like the outcome of it in the end :stuck_out_tongue:
If they don’t fix it it might well end their game over time, LE waited to get traction with a full scale implementation of multiplayer and a MMO-like trading system after all.
The release drew in a massive amount of players, many enjoying it greatly, and many playing it basically solo, without online interaction at all despite having an online character.

So the answer will probably come with 1.1 how EHG is going to address the situation, because of they lock the new mechanic behind their cycles people will be pissed. If not then the cycle will mostly be empty outside of people wanting a fresh competition (small amount but there) and some other miniscule amounts of the community. Cycles in looter ARPGs are reliant on their economic reset after all, providing a full ‘fresh’ feeling.
Hard to do with… well… no economy :stuck_out_tongue:
So that leaves them playing Legacy… which will be gone and done with in moments since their characters are already ‘at the top’, blasting in a few hours through the new content, maybe a few days.

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Only to a point. Once the downward pressure hits a certain point then it’s no longer worth listing the items. I’d rather limit my number of trips to the bazaar for efficiency’s sake.

I can understand newer players listing common uniques for 0 gold (to spend their favor and gain reputation) because they don’t know how to identify valuable rare/exalted items, but more experienced players won’t. I’d rather craft a loot filter to find decent Exalted items and sell those in smaller batches. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I’d like to see this as well.

I’ve seen people list very desirable items for 500,000,000. I assume for something that valuable it’s worth the trouble of unlisting and relisting. It’s not a matter of not having enough favor, it’s just the hassle of the process, though I suppose there’s not much difference in the friction of unlisting/relisting or changing a price field.

My experience was different. I joined a league because I had no choice. After 10 years of all the currency made in the Leagues rolling into Standard at the end of the league, inflation in Standard is so bad that new players can’t play Standard because they can’t generate enough currency to buy even the most basic items.

I HAD to join a League, or wait 2-3 months in Standard for the current League to end and hope I could snipe gear from people who only played Leagues and would sell items cheap before starting the next League. I didn’t want to wait 2-3 months if that wasn’t even guaranteed, so I had to join the League. We’ll see how LE’s Standard economy progresses over time.

I agree. And I didn’t create this thread so much to immediately criticize, but to dicuss what I was seeing, and potential unintended consequences.

Yeah, I think it would make a lot more sense for us to hit Rank 10 around the same time we reach level 100. I’m level 100, Rank 9, and have 1.2M reputation needed to get to Rank 10. That’s so far away that it’s taken the wind out of my sails, but that’s fine. I’ve nolifed the game for the last two weeks to get to 100 so quickly, and could use a break. And it’s good to have a stretch goal past lvl 100, but I’m just not sure that this should be what it is. I’m not sure what else I would suggest either though, so I’ll just sit on it and think about it for now. Introducing new pinnacle content may open new possibilities.

I do concede that buying Legendary items basically allows you to buy BiS items, but I’m not sure why I would need to attain another rank past lvl 100 to do that. I would say let us get that at lvl 100, and then the “stretch” part would be generating enough income to actually be able to afford those items lol

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One costs favor, the other wouldn’t.

Which is another issue from the system.

Ah, many say that and I get where you’re coming from!
Non-basic crafting materials there go for a premium though. So if you have 1000 fossils of something you’re basically owning hundreds of divines already.

It seems awful at the start but it’s actually utterly fine, just the market is smaller and the low-tier and mid-tier listings for items are less. Makes progression harder but end-game easier.

Obviously for the first League it’s smarter to join a League, but playing Standard afterwards is utterly fine and possible.

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Not necessarily true. In my case I struggled to find a build that I (a) liked, (b) understood, and (c) was moderately affordable. I played in leagues for a few years because it was the only way for me to try out other builds and play them long enough to find and really learn the one build I decided I liked the best well enough to really get to know the ins and outs of what mods it needed, and how to go about building that build.

My intention was to play one more league, and then use all the currency I’d stacked in Standard to start playing that build in Standard, and that very league was when GGG swapped exalts for divs, with no way for users to exchange one for the other. That completely wiped out literal years of work, with no recourse. I uninstalled the game and will never play PoE1 ever again. I’m not even sure I want to give PoE2 a try, but I might just out of curiosity. But I will absolutely never give them another penny of my hard-earned wages. That absolute lack of respect for player time killed me more than any QoL issue or build change ever could.

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The solution is OBVIOUS

link reputation to FAVOR GAIN instead of FAVOR SPEND

there, now players will not have to do any wierd optimisation to be able to level up reputation

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Yep, that was one move which I’ll definitely never forgive them either. It’s shattered any leftover goodwill I had for them since it invalidated peoples efforts in Standard over the course of a whole decade arbitrarily.

I can fully agree there.

Though, in general (without some shitty stuff like GGG did… as they repeatedly did in different ways) playing a cycle/league/season or whatever it’s called first has many upsides before switching to a permanent thing afterwards.
Without that change you would’ve had probably around 100 or more exalts… not to speak of the value in your gear you’ve had leftover.

Agreed.
Why they came up with this uselessly convoluted and quite weird setup is beyond me.
But well, for now it is what it is, first try, first fail… if it goes upwards from there it’s fine, otherwise LE will follow the footsteps of PoE simply, having a stain on their name which follows through for their existence until another game of their caliber comes along and takes the people from both them and PoE.

They provided a well thought out base system and then ruined it entirely with arbitrary decisions when it went to the detailed design. Which is a shame… since they have a solution to year long standing issues and just threw it all away for now. Hopefully they’ll pick up the splintered shards and put it back together into a proper functional mechanic in the end.

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this also is the issue with CoF, with the base system being good, but the details being bad and certain nessesary elements being missing from it. Also it is bugged in a few ways.

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