I have no idea where you got those numbers or how they relate to what I said.
Of the total generated gold, most of it will end up in the hands of a small percentage of players. That’s how it always ends up. Be that in PoE, LE or real life.
99% of the money ends up in the hands of 1% of players. 99% of the players will have less money than they generated it because they spent it on the 1%.
It makes no difference who gets taxed. 1 million goes in, 850k goes out. It doesn’t matter if the one paying the 150k is the buyer or the seller, that 150k is gone.
And of that 850k that gets used in another trade, 850k goes in, 722.5k goes out. That’s only 127.5 gone now.
And of those 722.5k, next trade is that going in, 614k going out. Less than 110k now.
You need 5 transactions with every bit of gold generated to halve the current existing gold.
There is a difference between real life taxation and game taxation: in real life, the money doesn’t disappear. It gets shuffled to the government, which then shuffles it back to other venues.
The real life money sink that exists is mostly lost money. Destroyed notes, lost coins, etc. And that is also decreasing, with the rise of digital payments.
Which is why governments need to regularly create more currency to keep the economy flowing.
So quite different from a game economy in that regard.
The two exploits that happened in 1.0 and 1.1 would have been the same whether it was gold, favour or MG gems.
The exploit that was public so far would also affect MG, if only for the “duped” items.
I agree that MG shouldn’t be gold based, but not because it would avoid dupes/exploits. Because it wouldn’t. Those will always exist, no matter what you name the currency or how isolated it is.
It shouldn’t be gold simply because it creates an inequality between MG and CoF. Which gets aggravated with the more things you can do with gold.
Yes, but in general economies don’t generate funds like games do, so games need to go out of the way to properly void those generated funds again. And as mentioned, 15% is way too little.
And if a dupe happened - once more, big surprise, right? - it only gets worse after all.
Owning 99% of your 2B would mean that out of the 20k people in your example I would be the only one able to own that, hence 0,05%… 1 in 20k
It does for how fluent the resources are.
Less value needing to be acrued by the buyer means more turnover rate. More turnover rate means market equilibrium is reached quicker and it showcases the ‘real’ state earlier.
In comparison when the seller is taxed that person acrues less value, meaning it doesn’t cause as easy of a value rift to appear.
Both in combination cause price gaps between lower end gear and higher end gear to be less prominent overall.
Yes, for the overall economy it doesn’t make a difference where it leaves… but for the individuals it does. The same amount of currency is still existing either way but who has it at the end is different.
That is some weird math you’re doing. I never said that. I said that the 99% of the 2B end up in the hands of the 1% (200 people). The other 19800 end up with 1% of the 2B (20M).
The real effect of a trade market in a game is to shift all the money to the sweatlords, even if that’s not the intention.
You can’t ever reach market equilibrium in a game with just a tax. Since you start the market effectively at 0 resources, your tax can’t be as high as to sink all generated gold, otherwise the overall available gold never increases and no one gets to accumulate money.
So the overall gold keeps increasing every single day at a uniform rate. All a tax does is reduce that growth rate. It’s important to reduce inflation, but without further gold sinks, it will never stop it. Inflation will keep rising at a steady rate because the amount of gold in the game keeps increasing always.
And stash tabs aren’t really good gold sinks, because, unlike in CoF, you don’t really need 200 tabs in MG. If you do, you’re playing MG wrong. Most MG players outside of the top 1% will have 20 or 30 tabs.
Sure, but that doesn’t make a difference for the issue being discussed. It’s like discussing that 15% or 20% reduce different amounts. That would be obvious.
The point is that the generated money never really goes away.
Let’s say we’re the only 2 people in MG. I generate 1 million and you don’t generate anything. You sell an item for 1 million. I buy it and pay the tax. You end up with 850k. Then I sell you an item for that value and I end up with 722.5k. On and on. We can keep selling items for several iterations and we still only farmed the initial 1 million.
And in the meantime, in a real example, more money keeps being generated. So the overall amount of gold keeps increasing daily.
Now, is it possible that there is a dupe? Yes. Is it likely that it’s what’s causing inflation? Not really. If there exists a gold dupe, then it’s being done by a small group of people. Anything bigger would become general knowledge and would have been detected and fixed by now.
If it’s a small group of people, then it’s not likely that they are buying 50 shattered worlds each day. There would be no point to it nor any real advantage. Unlike in PoE, where you could hoard the high value items to sell later, in LE you can’t resell, so there’s no benefit to it. So there is a limit to the usefulness of using duped gold to buy items.
So inflation is most likely caused by several factors, among which is the ever increasing amount of gold in the game, the stock market behaviour of a player driven economy that is highly affected by panic trends and perception bias.
Up to a degree where instead of inflation actual deflation happens, reduction of the circumventing currency.
In real life a awful situation since loans become harder to pay back. In a game without them actually a perfect state though, something actively sought out.
I have a lot more, but that’s because I’m a collector. 4 LP item? It stays.
Perfect idol roll? It stays.
That simply accumulates.
But yes, I would argue 4-5 tabs for exalted and idols, 2 tabs for uniques and the stuff you personally wanna craft + outfits for other builds, and that’s it basically.
A higher circulation speed does increase the removal of the currency though. Since more trades are done per person that means a overall higher amount of gold is removed per day.
So it does help, not much… but it does help.
Obviously with 2 people it doesn’t work, but given that items in MG have a severe and sudden drastical increase in price it’s important to ensure that the buyers have the actual buying buyer behind them, rather then long-term hoarders trying to acquire a large item.
More small items being sold is better for the game then a single large one as it does even out the scales of progression. Albeit it’s kinda hard to see in LE since EHG was so ‘smart’ to give us unlimited listing ability, hence counteracting that entirely + creating all the issues coming with that.
In LE it’s mostly supply and demand, not any sort of perception bias.
That can easily be seen via the uniques actually.
Uniques swiftly trend towards a price-tag of ‘0’ in MG, well… nowadays 1000 instead. Depending solely on the usefulness versus the rarity of the item.
I personally set up a filter every cycle for the uniques (since we can since a while) and only add drops showing at 100k+ value. Otherwise it’s just not worth to interact with the bazaar after all, acquiring 100k is extremely easy… so just buying it is better for me.
From doing that I’ve seen how the prices tend to increase. 0 LP no value… 1 LP no value… 2 LP suddenly 2 million. Which is a massive spike. 4 ‘primary’ states (roll-ranges are secondary) for uniques after all through LP, so it showcases it well simply.
If the perception bias would apply then those items would at least keep a miniscule amount of value before reaching the threshold, but since so many drop comparatively in magnitudes it means they simply have such high supply and so low demand that they become entirely worthless.
That’s a ‘market equilibrium’ being reached. Those items retaining value have more demand then supply overall… which is good! Those costing nothing have more supply then demand.
Looking at that shows where the exact issues with a market are since the equilibrium takes a long time to show itself, but highlights underlying issues with a market easily. Hence mostly visible in Legacy as more items retain value for the duration of a Cycle. Them dropping steadily though means that they’re in a ‘bad state’ comparatively to the others when they only start to have any value at either 3 LP or even worse… 4 LP. 4 LP uniques are ‘dead uniques’ basically, unused by builds since they have neither a function as a generalized leveling unique (to bypass level restrictions for new characters) as well as being used in a build which is viable.
If you showcase the market equilibrium then you can see more exactly the reasonings of why something happens. For example if suddenly the price for items rise while being in said state before… a dupe is happening, or a new mechanic has appeared making things less viable. This also provides the devs with proper in-game feedback. Watching a in-game market is one of the best ways to gather feedback on the status quo properly without having to go through massive and lengthy amounts of testing to dial into the actual issue… as it takes care of the first steps entirely.
But you can’t really achieve one in LE. Gold production needs to be higher than gold destruction. Global gold needs to increase, since it starts from 0, otherwise no one buys anything because no one can get more than a few million, at best.
And if the gold production + tax means it increases globally, it will keep on increasing globally.
This is solved in PoE because your currency is spent in crafting. But LE doesn’t really have a good gold sink, so gold will always keep increasing. You can’t reach market equilibrium with constant production and just a tax. Not unless you make the tax grow over time.
So available gold will always keep increasing more and more. And inflation will keep happening.
Market equilibrium just means that the changes are miniscule, there’s a ‘baseline’. For example in the stock market this usually happens with the value of gold when nothing major goes on in the world, the price for precious metals gets low and stays solid in place. That’s called ‘equilibrium’.
For example in PoE 1 Standard there’s a clearly visible equilibrium happening with consumables, they don’t change value over the course of months even, maybe 1c up or down for the majority… more expensive ones like boss content access staying completely the same for the time.
And in PoE there’s also non-stop resources being generated, the difference is that there’s a proper sink available to remove those resources basically non-stop.
So that tells us?
That Gold needs a proper non-stop sink which is viable to be used by MG, a way to improve something in a unique method that can only be achieved by paying gold.
One such thing could be actively buying FP on your items, for example… 1 FP for 1 mil. Which is achievable, does something at the first use (you can change attributes again and hence fix items) while also introducing a limitation on using the crafting mechanic by enforcing that the maximum FP usage has to be available on the item to do a craft.
That wouldn’t break the itemization system, remove Gold from the economy and provide a way to reduce the RNG as well. A hefty power-creep though since this way items become deterministic as outcomes.
But that’s the first thing coming to mind to provide a solution, the problem will sustain itself permanently after all, even with a currency specifically for MG, it just raises the limit by 500 times at best (1000 gold being the current minimum price, then 2 ‘tokens’ as a possibility, 1 to list, 1 as tax minimum)
TBF, gold production increases theoughout the season as players get their characters to higher corruption, so IMO, the tax rate should probably follow suit, or the tax % is based on the value of the trade, low value trades attract a low % & high value trades (however one defines that) attract a much higher %.
Sure, that could also work. As for how one would define that, that would be simple, since you already have tax tier tables as an example.
Based on how much gold you’re selling for, you pay x% tax depending on which tier it lands on.
So something like 1k-10k would pay no tax, 10k-100k would pay 1%, …, 500M+ would pay 40%. Or whatever values you need to actually balance it.
They would have to start with an experimental table (probably on the forgiving side first) and then adjust values according to the data. Kinda like how it works in real life.
