I haven’t spent much time thinking about this, but I have to agree the the lack of gold sinks does present an issue with inflation. POE and Torchlight Infinite use crafting currency for trading/AH and I think it works pretty well.
TL:I also has fees for using the AH which also take more of that currency out of the economy. And so you simply don’t get the kind of inflation in those games because of the sinks of those useful crafting mats.
And so, with inflation casual or new players need to get lucky and find a valuable item to sell.
Yes, and to make things worse, sometimes ultra-rare loot drops or items crafted to their maximum potential early in the game. After that, no matter how much time the player spends, he can’t find anything better, which can lead to a drop in engagement during the second half. That’s why I believe the best gear, along with the best crafting potential, should only be sold by merchants and bought with gold. It’s much easier for developers to control gold rewards in each area than to rely on random loot drops, and it makes progression feel more balanced.
But I’m strongly against lazy design where the player ends up with tons of gold and nothing useful to buy. If developers decide that balanced progression requires gear worth 100k gold, then exactly 100k should be available through drops - no more, no less.
As I said, the average RMTer doesn’t RMT for a single item. They’re people with high disposable income that look at a build guide and say to themselves “I want all this right now”.
In PoE, they buy the items directly (or even a full build).
In LE they can’t buy the items because item RMT isn’t really a thing here, being too fluid and annoying to achieve, mostly because of the lack of direct trade, so they buy gold so they can buy all the items in the build. They don’t want just a red ring. They want 2 red rings, preferably with LP. If possible, already slammed. They want a 1LP omnis. They want a 4LP Titan Heart or whichever chest they use.
If they use the class relics, then they want either a legendary version with already the affixes they want or otherwise a few dozen high WW ones.
RMTers are lazy people that don’t want to actually play the game. So they’re not going to be buying a single red ring. They’ll be buying all the items in a build.
There are a few exceptions to this, but those are the players the RMT market thrives upon.
Which is the version of their ‘whales’ which you describe.
That’s not the norm.
RMT - like microtransactions - have a significant amount of ‘one payment’ individuals. Those which are frustrated by a single acquisition of some kind which they can’t seem to get or is simply too far ahead to be bothered with, hence skipping the whole time investment to reach it instead.
That means the significant amount of people doing RMT are doing it 1-2 times commonly.
But the important ones are those you describe.
It just shifts the issue, absolutely. Put extremely overpriced random item on trade, have the RMT selling char buy it, exchange happened… the re-selling does reduce a significant amount of fluidity and other exploitative methods from the market but it does nothing for RMT. As long as something is available which someone wants and there’s the option to get the resources in a non-acceptable way people will use it, always was the case, is the case and likely will stay to be the case for a very very long time. Prevalence is the important aspect here.
Absolutely! Some are. But the part that individuals do sidestep parts is also a thing. Which means that fluid progression is extremely important in design as it sidesteps a lot of the reasoning to engage in RMT.
That is part of it. Which could be fixed. The biggest reason was P2P trade was removed is RMT bots where using it. It was the main way RMT was happening
Edit also if i remember correctly the exploit with P2P trading was fixed. And RMT is what lead to it being removed
That is not the main reason P2P trade got removed…see a above
Also it was said somewhere either stream or discord or reddit. By devs saying if they can mitigate RMT with P2P trading they will bring it back
Edit… in discord as the devs. A dev said this.
I personally removed the code for player to player trading. It is completely gone both in the client and server.
Because there is only so little currency arround. Make the cap rise with levels if nessecary so all the currency you woul’d buy via rmt would dissapear.
Sure and if ppl buy stuff that isn’t worth the money it’s on the people.
currency without a cap is just increasing the spiral.
You can’t repair legacy anyway so who cares? If they don’t hard reset legacy, what would be a bad idea, it will be broken and stay broken.
It’s not about stuff not being worth the money. If lots of people can reach the currency cap, then prices get higher and eventually the top tier of items stops getting sold because the tier below is already being sold at cap.
PoE would like to disagree.
Only because MG is flawed in LE. In PoE, despite years and years of an ongoing economy, it’s still stable. Because players don’t have a chance to reach cap and because the currency is spendable. So an equilibrium is always reached.
Which is a clear showcase of a lack of understanding.
It’s not that a reset is needed, absolutely not, quite the contrary.
It’s that only of Legacy functions long-term with a market that the mechanics accordingly are upheld in general.
Any mechanical combination which causes Legacy to break is inherently a non-functional one anyway, one which dismantles itself over time. Exactly what the issue of the current MG is.
Legacy is a showcase of the health of the system. And we can clearly see ‘how healthy’ it is
Nope, only if no sink is available and the timeframe is respectively long.
Even with no sink available it at least provides leeway of action because there is more time before it breaks.
But we don’t even have that, which is a major issue.
Look at the RMT side of it and how prices spiral there. If you are into RMT you can buy a whole chars worth of equipment to run the game down for about 10 bucks. If there is no currency to work with and people overprice their items they lose currency because nothing gets sold. If you have to work with a fixed income reality changes a lot.
I can’t purchase anything in legacy because stuff is expensive. Then again starting legacy in PoE is like starting ssf for me.
Yeah but it was doomed from the beginning and nothing was done about it. The question is if this is the systems fault or if the execution is at fault here,
That’s why a dedicated currency would be better. Gold is rather meaningless outside of buying bank space because alsmost everything else what you can do with gold is kind of a joke.
And where do you think this Gold comes from? It needs to have a root cause for popping into existende.
There’s 2 options for that:
Either the state of the game is vastly worse then expected and it’s overrun with botters. Which would mean all those excessive methods to reduce RMT have failed through the bank and the game is actually half-dead in reality.
Or the resources are in a vast amount already existing anyway, hence only sold to the RMT site by a portion of individuals while the botting is solely supporting it to a smaller degree. Which is the currently more lenient situation as the first would mean ‘bye bye game’ long-term anyway as EHG would’ve entirely failed to stop botting and hence we’ll see the common death-spiral happening.
So the ongoing situation is that it’s either already existing and created… or we can lay down any need to argue anyway since it’ll be useless and we’re already dancing on top of the corpse of EHG.
That’s the darn point!!!
It’s the showcase of the equilibrium in LE not existing.
And why is starting in Standard of PoE like SSF for you? You make currency like nothing else there and stuff below a specific power is cheap as heck. Seems more like a ‘you’ problem then an actual one.
The answer to your question is actually: Yes.
Systems because they don’t support it properly.
Execution because of how EHG did handle things.
It’s both.
Lightless Arbour would be good… but MG actively causes that to be non-functional for anyone playing this faction. It’s impossible for that mechanic to compete after all.
So yeah, dedicated currency would not only be better, it’s mandatory to support not double-dipping and to keep the other mechanics in a healthier more balanced state.
