That's only about 22 exalted orbs worth of fusings on Rampage at the going rates. Totally within reach if you have a sweet six-link to sell or something.
Oh wait...
Oh wait...
Path of Exile
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****, I don't even know how much an exalt is. Is that more than a regal or less?
See what I mean? I can't even tell how much money I have, for ****'s sake! What goddamn lobotomized baboon designed this system!? Why can't there just be gold like in any other game? You could literally just have gold without sacrificing any of the functionality. Identifying items, opening town portals, crafting items, all those could simply consume an appropriate amount of gold. But no, we have to have this idiotic, incomprehensible, byzantine system of orbs and no in-game explanation of what they're actually worth. What was so wrong with being able to tell how much money you have at a glance? Goddammit.
See what I mean? I can't even tell how much money I have, for ****'s sake! What goddamn lobotomized baboon designed this system!? Why can't there just be gold like in any other game? You could literally just have gold without sacrificing any of the functionality. Identifying items, opening town portals, crafting items, all those could simply consume an appropriate amount of gold. But no, we have to have this idiotic, incomprehensible, byzantine system of orbs and no in-game explanation of what they're actually worth. What was so wrong with being able to tell how much money you have at a glance? Goddammit.
Because gold economies don't work well in loot collecting games like this. Gold has no use that items don't, and designing sufficient sinks is difficult and often insufficient. As for your example, identifying items and opening portals are insufficient sinks. These would naturally have low prices. This is why the Diablo 2 economy ran on Stone of Jordan rings for a long time even though gold existed. It was pointless to trade for gold because its only use was to repair items, which was dirt cheap. A Stone of Jordan, though, was a valuable unique item that could be readily traded for other valuable uniques with some kind of exchange rate or used as a piece of equipment. It was also quite rare. These things combined meant there weren't too many of them coming into circulation, and they were constantly being taken out of circulation by people who wanted to use them rather than sell them.
Using gold for crafting in Path of Exile would be a nightmare, though. Gold would have to be readily available or you couldn't use it as your means of identifying items and opening portals. This means the cost of crafting with gold would have to be exorbitant to give crafted equipment any value at all, and then its value is only determined by the time it takes to farm the gold to craft it. Clearly, the way to win in such an economy is to figure out how to farm as much gold as possible in as little time as possible. Because it will have to drop everywhere to make it feasible to identify/portal, acquiring large sums won't be too hard. Eventually, the game will have players running around with 232-1 gold in their stash and it will be inherently worthless because of its sheer quantity. Then crafting is too easy. You could ask in chat for someone to give you 500 million gold to make a six-link chest piece and nobody would bat an eye. Nobody would trade you a valuable item for a stack of gold because they'll already have so much lying around. Same problem as in D2, even if you have better sinks than D2 had. Eventually you just have too much gold floating around.
Path of Exile skips the pretense of a currency-based economy and goes straight to what loot collecting games always end up as, which are barter economies. The value of an item is dependent on its usefulness and rarity. It takes a bit of metaknowledge to know just how rare various orbs are, and back when PoE started up nobody knew how valuable certain orbs were. Over time, people have figured out the relative rarity of orbs and value is based on supply and demand. It helps that every orb has a unique and useful function to take them out of circulation, but this also affects prices. For instance, gemcutter's prisms have gone down in value with the advent of strongboxes that can have +%quality modifiers on them, yielding skill gems with high quality from a source other than random monster drops. I expect orbs as a whole to dip in value because of arcanist's and artificer's strongboxes, but their relative rarities are still the same so the hierarchy remains. Some things are rarer than others, and all things have a reason to be taken out of circulation, so the economy doesn't get hyperinflated.
A useful website for figuring out just how valuable certain orbs are on your league is www.poeex.info
For example, on Rampage league Regal orbs are (for whatever reason) less valuable than Chaos orbs right now despite being more rare. I think this is because Chaos orbs are more useful for now, in that they can reroll rare items and strongboxes, and have been the established go-to currency for a while. This may change later. On the Default league, a Regal orb is valued at almost two Chaos orbs, and this is to be expected because of their relative rarity. GCPs have gone up in price from one Chaos orb to two Chaos orbs each over the course of a week because of increased demand as more people hit higher levels and want quality gems on Rampage. This fits their expected value better, as they are also more rare than Chaos orbs.
For reference, when I said 1500 fusings = ~22 exalted orbs, I was referencing Rampage league's prices. One exalted orb = ~32 chaos orbs = 64 orbs of fusing. My estimate was a bit low because I was using an older exchange rate for exalted:chaos orbs, 1:35, which was about standard on Rampage for a while. It's going down now, to match Default's 1:32 ratio.
So, while I agree that there isn't really enough information in the game for a new player to figure out how valuable things are and what exchange rates are, I don't think it's entirely bat****. The current system supports player trading more than gold-based crafting ever would, and the fact that a new, temporary league is already approaching prices similar to that of the default league where every character will end up shows that inflation is being controlled rather well in this system.
Using gold for crafting in Path of Exile would be a nightmare, though. Gold would have to be readily available or you couldn't use it as your means of identifying items and opening portals. This means the cost of crafting with gold would have to be exorbitant to give crafted equipment any value at all, and then its value is only determined by the time it takes to farm the gold to craft it. Clearly, the way to win in such an economy is to figure out how to farm as much gold as possible in as little time as possible. Because it will have to drop everywhere to make it feasible to identify/portal, acquiring large sums won't be too hard. Eventually, the game will have players running around with 232-1 gold in their stash and it will be inherently worthless because of its sheer quantity. Then crafting is too easy. You could ask in chat for someone to give you 500 million gold to make a six-link chest piece and nobody would bat an eye. Nobody would trade you a valuable item for a stack of gold because they'll already have so much lying around. Same problem as in D2, even if you have better sinks than D2 had. Eventually you just have too much gold floating around.
Path of Exile skips the pretense of a currency-based economy and goes straight to what loot collecting games always end up as, which are barter economies. The value of an item is dependent on its usefulness and rarity. It takes a bit of metaknowledge to know just how rare various orbs are, and back when PoE started up nobody knew how valuable certain orbs were. Over time, people have figured out the relative rarity of orbs and value is based on supply and demand. It helps that every orb has a unique and useful function to take them out of circulation, but this also affects prices. For instance, gemcutter's prisms have gone down in value with the advent of strongboxes that can have +%quality modifiers on them, yielding skill gems with high quality from a source other than random monster drops. I expect orbs as a whole to dip in value because of arcanist's and artificer's strongboxes, but their relative rarities are still the same so the hierarchy remains. Some things are rarer than others, and all things have a reason to be taken out of circulation, so the economy doesn't get hyperinflated.
A useful website for figuring out just how valuable certain orbs are on your league is www.poeex.info
For example, on Rampage league Regal orbs are (for whatever reason) less valuable than Chaos orbs right now despite being more rare. I think this is because Chaos orbs are more useful for now, in that they can reroll rare items and strongboxes, and have been the established go-to currency for a while. This may change later. On the Default league, a Regal orb is valued at almost two Chaos orbs, and this is to be expected because of their relative rarity. GCPs have gone up in price from one Chaos orb to two Chaos orbs each over the course of a week because of increased demand as more people hit higher levels and want quality gems on Rampage. This fits their expected value better, as they are also more rare than Chaos orbs.
For reference, when I said 1500 fusings = ~22 exalted orbs, I was referencing Rampage league's prices. One exalted orb = ~32 chaos orbs = 64 orbs of fusing. My estimate was a bit low because I was using an older exchange rate for exalted:chaos orbs, 1:35, which was about standard on Rampage for a while. It's going down now, to match Default's 1:32 ratio.
So, while I agree that there isn't really enough information in the game for a new player to figure out how valuable things are and what exchange rates are, I don't think it's entirely bat****. The current system supports player trading more than gold-based crafting ever would, and the fact that a new, temporary league is already approaching prices similar to that of the default league where every character will end up shows that inflation is being controlled rather well in this system.
Rhox
Squire
This game is great I know it just didn't get me addicted, anyway, look at this, it may not sound funny enough, but whatever, it sounds funny when translated to portuguese
Mosquito's Rawhide gloves of success, hahaha just wondering how many mosquitos you have to kill to make a glove out of their hide.
Mosquito's Rawhide gloves of success, hahaha just wondering how many mosquitos you have to kill to make a glove out of their hide.
Yes, that's why I think gold should be used for crafting as well, to provide a suitable gold sink.Orion said:
True, but the cost already is exorbitant. It just doesn't seem so because most of the time you don't really realize how much currency you're spending because the orb system is incomprehensible.
You mean as opposed to now, where an item's value is only determined by the time it takes to farm the currency orbs to craft it (or, more likely, buy it)?
You mean as opposed to now, where the way to win is to figure out how to farm as many currency orbs as possible in as little time as possible?
Um, no it won't. Why would it have to drop everywhere? You seem to be under the impression that gold would be an actual physical item in your inventory, and that you could remove it from your inventory and therefore not have it available at all times. The last game that worked that way was Diablo 1 back in 1996. Ever since then, gold is just a number. You hit T (none of this "open inventory, click scroll" bull**** either, come on, it's the 21st ****ing century), a portal appears, and your gold total goes down a bit.
Let me put it this way. A scroll fragment is the smallest unit of currency in PoE. 5 combine to make an identify scroll. So a scroll fragment is 1 gold. There's an NPC, let's call him, oh I don't know, Deckard Cain, who identifies items for the low, low price of 5 gold per item (i.e. exactly as he worked in Diablo 1, although there is also a button in your inventory that just identifies everything you have and deducts the cost, because **** identifying items one at a time, again, 21st century). A portal scroll costs 3 identify scrolls, so opening a portal costs 15 gold. A transmute costs 7 portal scrolls, so using a crafting station or NPC that provides the same function costs 105 gold. An augment costs 4 transmutes, so that's 420 gold. An alt is 4 augments, or 1,680 gold. A jeweler's is 2 alts, or 3,360 gold. A chromatic is 3 jeweler's, or 10,080 gold. A fusing is 4 jeweler's, or 13,440 gold. A scouring orb is 4 fusings, or 53,760 gold. An alch is 2 scourings, or 107,520 gold.
That's literally identical to how the system works at the moment, except infinitely more comprehensible.
That's pure nonsense. I merely wish to replace the incomprehensible system of orbs with something more intuitive. I never said I wanted more currency to drop. You could keep the prices and drop rates exactly the same and just use different units of measurement. I don't see why PoE's existing currency sinks should somehow become less effective just because the currency is merely converted to a more comprehensible format without any changes to drop rates and prices.
Yes, the high-tier orbs are the only thing that can't readily be converted to gold, since their exchange rates are not fixed. But as you said yourself, their relative rarities remain the same and their value normalizes to what it is in Standard league over time (where, I assume, the exchange rates reflect the orbs' rarity), so I really see no harm in just transferring those functions to a crafting station or NPC and fixing the price to whatever the Standard exchange rate is.
Alternatively, they could implement a hybrid system where the low-tier orbs with fixed exchange rates are just replaced by gold and the high-tier orbs remain. Then instead of orb prices being relative to each other (i.e. incomprehensible), the player-driven economy would determine their value in gold. Again, that would function in exactly the same way it does now, except you could tell at a glance how much **** is worth without having to refer to a ****ing third-party, fan-made website to give you this elementary information.
The problem with converting all of these crafting functions to utilize a single currency which will be available at all points of the game is that you could feasibly farm the worst area for item drops but still make it worthwhile because of the gold you can earn there. The fact of the matter is, gold would have to be available in most places just like portal scrolls and scrolls of wisdom are available in most places. They're basic, essential utilities that a player must have. Monsters would have to drop gold similarly to how they drop wisdom and portal scrolls currently, because you're just replacing one with another.
When applied to the current functionality in PoE, this means you're practically allowing NPCs to make currency conversions. You want to be able to turn all of your wisdom scrolls into higher tiers of currency at an NPC. In the process, you want to simplify the system so it doesn't have several discrete denominations of currency, instead preferring to have everything operate off a single currency with certain actions/recipes requiring more of this universal currency than others. Essentially, NPCs will convert your pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds into yen.
I don't see how this avoids the problem of people collecting vast sums of this universal currency from low-risk monsters. True, you might have 1000 pennies, and 1000 pennies is "worth" ten dollars, but not many people will want to trade you a ten dollar bill for 1000 pennies because nobody regularly trades in pennies. What you want, in essence, is for NPCs to always make that exchange, even when players won't. I challenge you to trade a bunch of stacks of wisdom scrolls in the game. Somebody will buy it, eventually, but the point is you have to find another player willing to convert your currency for you. Somebody else must want to buy what you're selling, or you've wasted all of that time farming pennies when everybody trades in dollars.
I must say I don't like that idea.
When applied to the current functionality in PoE, this means you're practically allowing NPCs to make currency conversions. You want to be able to turn all of your wisdom scrolls into higher tiers of currency at an NPC. In the process, you want to simplify the system so it doesn't have several discrete denominations of currency, instead preferring to have everything operate off a single currency with certain actions/recipes requiring more of this universal currency than others. Essentially, NPCs will convert your pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds into yen.
I don't see how this avoids the problem of people collecting vast sums of this universal currency from low-risk monsters. True, you might have 1000 pennies, and 1000 pennies is "worth" ten dollars, but not many people will want to trade you a ten dollar bill for 1000 pennies because nobody regularly trades in pennies. What you want, in essence, is for NPCs to always make that exchange, even when players won't. I challenge you to trade a bunch of stacks of wisdom scrolls in the game. Somebody will buy it, eventually, but the point is you have to find another player willing to convert your currency for you. Somebody else must want to buy what you're selling, or you've wasted all of that time farming pennies when everybody trades in dollars.
I must say I don't like that idea.
Except all of those prices are suggested prices. There's even a module at the top of the website that lets you vote on price suggestions. This is because all prices in Path of Exile are decided by the players. That's why the economy isn't totally ****ed by farming. That's why prices for orbs on Standard league which has been running forever are so similar to Rampage which is just finishing its first month. The only things that are decreasing in price are uniques because nobody wants to vendor them so they stay in circulation after people upgrade.
[quote author=Anonymous]**** that, coming in this thread hot[/quote]
Cookie Eating Huskarl
Marquis
If you ask the playerbase however, everything in the game is worth tree fiddy.
Kevlar
Baron
Ringwraith #5 said:
Ya, since gold worked out SOOOOOO well in diablo 3 (in that it literally broke the economy and they had to stop their auction house).
http://mises.org/daily/6435/A-Virtual-Weimar-Hyperinflation-in-a-Video-Game-World
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/13354139/diablo-iii-auction-house-comes-to-a-close-3-18-2014
Just because you are to stupid to understand how much something is worth doesn't mean they should go with another system that is bound to fail. The currency system and skill tree are basically what set path of exile apart from any other ARPG and make it a much more rewarding experience.
False premise. That argument is based on the idea that having NPCs that can convert currency at a fixed rate would make it possible to farm currency in an area that doesn't have good item drops. Which is false for two reasons. One, an area with bad item drops is an area that's significantly lower level than you, and such areas already have a penalty to currency drop rates precisely to disincentivize the farming of currency in them. Secondly, there already are NPCs that convert currency for you. That last paragraph? Complete nonsense. You'd never trade a bunch of stacks of wisdom scrolls to a player, you'd just feed them to one of the jewellery vendors in exchange for portal scrolls. Then you feed her those in exchange for... I don't even know. I've forgotten already. See the problem? The point is that exchange rates from wisdom scrolls all the way up to alchs are fixed because there already are NPCs that convert smaller denominations into larger ones for you. That's why these low-tier orbs aren't included on the exchange rate website. There's no point, the exchange rate is fixed. So what's the point of them being different currencies? They might as well just be one.Orion said:
I've actually thought of something else as well. There's an application called Procurement which automatically monitors what items you have in your stash in order to generate shop threads and assist with trading (again because the game doesn't bother to provide the necessary tools, so the community has to fall back on these third-party, fan-made tools). You could make a similar application that would monitor your currency, add it all up, and convert it to a single number. The exchange rates for low-tier currency are fixed and you could just plug in the data from that exchange rate website you linked to for the high-tier ones. Then you'd have what's effectively your gold total. Couple that with a simple calculator for converting prices of items you wish to buy or sell to other players and you could ignore the silly orb-based system altogether and operate with the standard gold currency in your very own private microcosm of logic, common sense, and easily accessible information.
I was talking about knowing how much currency I have, knowing how much items are worth is a separate issue. Here's how you solve this separate issue:
Step one, implement a proper in-game trading interface. None of this third-party, fan-made website bull****. What you want is effectively the Diablo 3 auction house, a searchable listing of items for sale. You want to sell an item? You put it up for sale, you set the price, and that's it. You want to buy? You just search for it, click the one with the lowest price, and you're done. None of this nonsense with having to actually contact the seller and meet them in person.
Step two, monitor the transactions and record how much currency people are paying for items.
Step three, make that information available to the player. Steam does it pretty well with its little collectible cards. You look one up and it tells you how many people are looking to buy and for what price, and how many people are selling and for what price. It's a very rudimentary system but it already gives you a good idea of what the item is worth and whether it's a buyer's or a seller's market. Ideally you'd want to just hover over an item in your inventory and have the current community price be included in the item's stats list. For uniques, this is really easy. We basically already have it. How many Facebreakers can you get for a Bringer of Rain, you ask? Well you look up a Bringer of Rain on the fan-made auction house poe.xyz.is, see how much it sells for, then you look up a Facebreaker, see how much that sells for, and you do a little bit of elementary arithmetic. That's what currency is for, that's the whole point of it. It allows you to easily compare the values of two completely different things by converting them into a single standard currency. What I'm proposing would simply cut out the third-party, fan-made middleman and give you the information right away within the game itself without requiring pointless busywork on your part. I find it very ironic that people crucified Diablo 3 for doing precisely this, to the point where the developers eventually excised it from the game altogether, while the developers of PoE made a point of not including anything of the sort and deliberately made the currency system as byzantine and incomprehensible as they could, and how did the PoE community respond? They made their own auction house, a crude and unreliable imitation of the one Diablo 3 was lambasted for, and a website whose only purpose is to allow you to make sense of the incomprehensible currency system. What does that tell you, hm? It tells me that people are cretins who don't know what the **** they want.
Anyway, the only problem here is the so-called rare items, since each one is unique and not easily comparable to others (which is something I've always found ironic; it's the rares that are unique, the uniques are all the same). To get what you asked for, for the game to actually tell you how much an item like that is worth, you'd need a learning algorithm of some description that would monitor what stats and combinations of stats command what prices and then estimate the prices of new items based on that data. That would be pretty damn complex, but totally doable. Alternatively, you could simply do what the fan-made tools already do, i.e. provide detailed search criteria in the auction house to allow you to search for the kind of item you want and see how much it sells for. You could set up various middle-ground solutions relatively easily as well, such as being able to feed an item into the auction house and having the auction house spit out a list of items that are most similar and their prices.
Notice that nowhere in the preceding description did I refer to gold. This system would work perfectly fine with either gold or orbs. You'd simply need to monitor orb-for-orb transactions as well to keep track of the exchange rates (which has the added benefit of being more reliable than a website based on community voting) and convert prices to a single standard currency according to the current exchange rate.
Again, converting the low-tier currency into gold would make absolutely no difference to that. The gold price of high-tier orbs would still be determined by players. Absolutely nothing would change except for the fact that the system would be a whole lot more comprehensible and intuitive.
I'm not even going to respond to some of your arguments because this is an outright lie and shows your ignorance of the economic system in place, making any response pointless. If you would care to take a look at the exchange rate site I linked before, you'll see that Alchemy orbs and lower, all the way to Alteration orbs, have exchange rates listed. The three things not listed are wisdom scrolls, portal scrolls, and transmutation orbs. It's funny you should say that their prices are fixed because NPCs perform these conversions, when in reality on the player market their prices fluctuate. You can trade 3 Jeweller's orbs to an NPC for a Chromatic orb, or you could check the site and see that Chromatics are valued the same as Alterations, which you can trade to the same NPC 2:1 for Jeweller's. So you say prices for these are fixed and aren't listed on exchange sites, but the very site I linked says Chromatics are worth as much as Alterations. If what you said is true, a Chromatic should be worth 3 Jeweller's orbs which in turn are worth 2 Alteration orbs each, meaning Chromatics should be worth 6 Alterations. Do you not see the problem here?Ringwraith #5 said:
Another example are Fusing and Alchemy orbs. They're worth about the same right now on Rampage on the player market, with Alchs trending down in price. An Alch is worth about 1/3rd of a Chaos orb now, and Fusings are worth about 1/2. At a vendor, you must spend 8 orbs of fusing to make 8 orbs of chance, which you convert into 2 orbs of scouring, converting those to an orb of regret, and finally you can trade that for a single Alchemy. Not only is a single orb of fusing worth more than an orb of alchemy, but at a vendor you have to trade at a ratio of eight to one!
I witnessed a player trading Chaos Orbs for them at a ratio of 1:120. Considering that you can acquire wisdom scrolls so fast that they become a nuisance, this seems like a fine trade to me.
However, despite clearly not knowing ****-all about the player market, you do have a good idea in this:
While realistic exchange rates are not fixed, the exchange rate sites generally offer a pretty accurate estimate for current rates. These current rates could be parsed from the site and applied to all of the currency in a player's stash using a program similar to Procurement, and then expressed in terms of a single commonly traded currency, such as Chaos orbs. It would also be beneficial if it broke down the total into all of its parts, showing you how many Chaos orbs worth of scrolls of wisdom you have, for example.
Is it really? Clearly you missed the part where I said the Diablo 2 economy ran on Stones of Jordan for a long time. A Stone of Jordan is a unique ring. It's an item. The fact of the matter is, any item can become a currency if it's accepted as a medium. That's all currency is: "anything that is used in any circumstances, as a medium of exchange." People may call the orbs in Path of Exile currency, but they're not just currency because they are also crafting components. What, then, separates orbs from equipment? They both have value, they're both tradeable, and they both have utility. What makes orbs "currency" and items not? I can trade in items if I want to, and I can express the value of an item in terms of another item, which means I'm using one as a medium of exchange. The PoE player market chooses to express the value of their items in particular orbs, but orbs are just another item.
Finally:
You mean you couldn't just
?
Yes, you are right that I overlooked those low-tier orbs on the website. Nevertheless my point that PoE's system of currency is designed very badly stands because, again, you have to go and look **** up on third-party websites to even figure out how much money you actually have. Yes, I freely admit I know very little about the player market. I prefer playing self-found and avoid the player market like the plague. It's a ****ing ARPG, for ****'s sake. If I wanted to look at spreadsheets all day, I'd play Eve Online. Do you not see the problem in that?Orion said:
Yes, you're right that orbs aren't worth what the game itself says they are. I was wrong about that. But what does that mean? Well that just means the game is badly designed! If anything, that's yet another reason why they should switch to gold. Then the devs could look at the metrics to see what kinds of crafting people are doing a lot (i.e. it's too cheap) and which they're doing very little of (i.e. it's too expensive) and tweak the prices of those crafting operations to even things out. Or make them uneven, whatever the intent of the game designer is.
Really? I seem to have a constant shortage of them and have to vendor other currency to get more, and I vacuum up every single one that drops. How do you acquire them so fast they become a nuisance, pray tell?
I don't really care what the standard unit of currency is, I just want there to be one and for the game to tell me how much of it I have. Though if there is such a function, then I really see no point whatsoever in having those multiple kinds of currency. Especially if there is an easy to use trading system that you can use to readily convert one into another.
Yes, I played Diablo 2 quite a lot. Probably more than you did, actually.
You could say the same of gold that is consumed when an NPC does the crafting. I see no difference whatsoever between an orb that is consumed when it's used to craft and a quantity of gold that is consumed when an NPC or a crafting station is used to craft.
Yes, that's the point. You can't tell at a glance who much **** is worth. You have to go to a fan-made, third-party website and look a bunch of **** up when really that information should be provided to you by the game itself.
The game can't tell you how much things are worth because it's a barter economy. Things are worth what you're willing to pay for them, and what people are willing to sell them for. One good thing about having all of the crafting functions split among a bunch of different consumable items is that you may have tons of crafting component X but none of crafting component Y, so if you want to craft with Y you have to trade some of your X's. The quickest, easiest, and simplest way to do that is to join a trade channel and find someone who wants to deal with you.
I have some bad news for you, Ringwraith. Some orbs simply cannot be obtained from NPCs. The highest worthwhile vendor recipe I know of yields 3 Regal orbs, and maybe the recipe for GCPs if you have a bunch of low quality low value skill gems. The only way to get an exalted orb from an NPC is to be phenomenally retarded, and while you can sell a 6-linked item to an NPC for a single divine orb, you could sell it to a player for several times that. There are no ways to obtain Blessed or Eternal orbs from NPCs, and getting Exalted or Divine orbs requires you to be dumber than cutlery.
This means you're eventually going to have to trade with someone to get what you want, or farm until it maybe, eventually, possibly drops. Maybe. The economy is centered around player trading, and by saying "I avoid trading with people like the plague," you're saying you're not doing what the game expects you to do. Good job. Your critiques are meaningless then. Plus, it's obvious you've never seriously tried to do so. I linked you to poeex.info because it has info readily available. You could just ask in trade chat for a price check on anything and somebody would tell you, and you can expect the same for questions about currency ratios. You don't have to do anything third-party.
I have some bad news for you, Ringwraith. Some orbs simply cannot be obtained from NPCs. The highest worthwhile vendor recipe I know of yields 3 Regal orbs, and maybe the recipe for GCPs if you have a bunch of low quality low value skill gems. The only way to get an exalted orb from an NPC is to be phenomenally retarded, and while you can sell a 6-linked item to an NPC for a single divine orb, you could sell it to a player for several times that. There are no ways to obtain Blessed or Eternal orbs from NPCs, and getting Exalted or Divine orbs requires you to be dumber than cutlery.
This means you're eventually going to have to trade with someone to get what you want, or farm until it maybe, eventually, possibly drops. Maybe. The economy is centered around player trading, and by saying "I avoid trading with people like the plague," you're saying you're not doing what the game expects you to do. Good job. Your critiques are meaningless then. Plus, it's obvious you've never seriously tried to do so. I linked you to poeex.info because it has info readily available. You could just ask in trade chat for a price check on anything and somebody would tell you, and you can expect the same for questions about currency ratios. You don't have to do anything third-party.
I realized I missed something, so I'm going to go back to your previous posts first for a bit. You said:
Anyway, on to your latest post.
What PoE is about, from the point of view of how the game is designed, is building a character. It gives you oodles of information about the stats your character has, your items' stats, what your skills do, how your linked skill gems interact with each other, etc. The trading side of the game, on the other hand, is extremely rudimentary, and almost all the tools you need for trading are fan-made, third-party things. You need a fan-made website to tell you how much currency you actually have (which I still find mind-boggling despite the fact that we've been talking about it for some time, because what the ****, that's the most basic piece of information you need for trading and the game doesn't bother to give you even that), you need a fan-made program to parse your stash, then you need to take what that program spits out and post it in a shop thread on another website, and then you need yet another fan-made website that monitors the shop threads and makes them searchable. I mean, come on!
Yeah, sure, you can say you don't need any of that, that you can just sit in trade chat all day. Yeah, right. Technically yes, you could do that, but it wouldn't be very fun, would it. And that's the way the game is designed to be played. That's how trading is supposed to be done because that's the trading tool the game gives you. If a game is made to be played in a way that's not fun, it's a bad game, plain and simple. All those third-party things? They were made by fans so that they could do their trading in a way that wasn't intended. The whole point of them is precisely to let you get out of the awfulness that is trade chat and get on with actually playing the game, tweaking your build, and killing mobs in the most efficient way you can. That's what the game is about. The fact that you need to trade to be able to do that just gets in the way, it's a flaw that should be remedied. The third-party trading tools are the fans' attempt at doing precisely that. The players can't change how the game works, they can't remove the need for trading, so they at least created tools to get it out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible so that they didn't have to do it the way the game expects them to do it.
So no, Orion. My refusal to trade doesn't mean I'm refusing to do what the game expects me to do. The fact that the trading tools available in the game are so rudimentary indicates that trading is supposed to be only a marginal part of the game at best, and that you're therefore supposed to be able to get by with very little of it, if any at all. Engaging in the economy a lot and therefore by necessity using all those third-party tools, that would be doing something the game doesn't expect me to do.
And then you said:Orion said:
So which is it? Does the orb system prevent the farming of vast quantities of small denominations of currency and their efficient conversion into denominations that are actually usable or does it make it even more efficient than it would be if the currency system was just based on gold? It can't be both at the same time.Orion said:
Anyway, on to your latest post.
I already addressed that. If the game had a proper trading interface, it would be possible to monitor trades (and therefore prices) and provide that information to the player.Orion said:
That's a matter of opinion. You think it's a good thing, I think it's obnoxious and terrible.
You say that, but I don't think that's actually the case. Just because you say "the game's about player trading" doesn't make it so. You can tell what a game is about based on the information and tools it gives you. Skyrim, for instance, is not about survival in the wilderness because it doesn't actually have any survival mechanics in it, despite the fact that the setting would be perfectly suited for that. Eve Online is about player trading. It gives you all kinds of trading-related information in charts and graphs and spreadsheets. Diablo 3 was about player trading for a while. It had a very well-developed trading interface that allowed you to search for precisely the kind of item you wanted. It told you how many such items there were for sale and it allowed you to sort the results by various criteria. It had auctions as well as buyouts. PoE, on the other hand, doesn't have any of that. It has the most basic player-to-player trade window that requires you to actually physically meet the other person in the game and it has trade chat, and that's about it.
What PoE is about, from the point of view of how the game is designed, is building a character. It gives you oodles of information about the stats your character has, your items' stats, what your skills do, how your linked skill gems interact with each other, etc. The trading side of the game, on the other hand, is extremely rudimentary, and almost all the tools you need for trading are fan-made, third-party things. You need a fan-made website to tell you how much currency you actually have (which I still find mind-boggling despite the fact that we've been talking about it for some time, because what the ****, that's the most basic piece of information you need for trading and the game doesn't bother to give you even that), you need a fan-made program to parse your stash, then you need to take what that program spits out and post it in a shop thread on another website, and then you need yet another fan-made website that monitors the shop threads and makes them searchable. I mean, come on!
Yeah, sure, you can say you don't need any of that, that you can just sit in trade chat all day. Yeah, right. Technically yes, you could do that, but it wouldn't be very fun, would it. And that's the way the game is designed to be played. That's how trading is supposed to be done because that's the trading tool the game gives you. If a game is made to be played in a way that's not fun, it's a bad game, plain and simple. All those third-party things? They were made by fans so that they could do their trading in a way that wasn't intended. The whole point of them is precisely to let you get out of the awfulness that is trade chat and get on with actually playing the game, tweaking your build, and killing mobs in the most efficient way you can. That's what the game is about. The fact that you need to trade to be able to do that just gets in the way, it's a flaw that should be remedied. The third-party trading tools are the fans' attempt at doing precisely that. The players can't change how the game works, they can't remove the need for trading, so they at least created tools to get it out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible so that they didn't have to do it the way the game expects them to do it.
So no, Orion. My refusal to trade doesn't mean I'm refusing to do what the game expects me to do. The fact that the trading tools available in the game are so rudimentary indicates that trading is supposed to be only a marginal part of the game at best, and that you're therefore supposed to be able to get by with very little of it, if any at all. Engaging in the economy a lot and therefore by necessity using all those third-party tools, that would be doing something the game doesn't expect me to do.
It's a hard barrier in an isolated system, and a soft barrier in the bigger picture. In the isolated system, which in this case is just you and the game with no other players, you simply cannot convert between all of the orbs. As I mentioned, you can't get Blessed or Eternal orbs from NPCs, and you can't acquire Divine or Exalted orbs through conversion of any crafting materials less than a Mirror of Kalandra. So in this case, yes, the game does prevent farming of vast quantities of small denominations of currency and converting them into certain other denominations. AFAIK, you can't turn scrolls into Alteration orbs, so you can't even begin to convert them into higher currencies on your own.Ringwraith #5 said:
It's a soft barrier in the bigger picture because it involves other players, and while you can theoretically find someone who will buy your stacks of wisdom scrolls it won't be a common occurrence, so the exchange is possible but unlikely. As for acquiring tons of the damn things, I can tell you that I don't pick up or ID blues, and once I started picking up ilvl60+ rares I mostly stopped ID'ing those as well. Between ilvl60 and 74 they're more valuable as unID'd collections.
No you ****in' didn't. You clearly don't understand what was said. How is the game going to tell you what an item is worth to you? Barter economies work on the exchange of goods desired by both parties, or simply put, I give you something you want in exchange for something I want. If you have what I want then I'll offer you something that I know you want for it. Whether it's a fair trade is up to you to decide. That's why I asked how many Facebreakers equal a Bringer of Rain. It's a trick question. Sure, you can go look up the going rate for both on poe.xyz and accept what other people say it's worth, or you could just figure out how much you're willing to part with to get what you want. Nobody needs to tell you what things are worth, and that kind of spoon-feeding nonsense is better left out.
Finally, you've shifted the goal posts.
You can get by without joining any chat channels at all. How successful you are is somewhat dependent on how lucky you get with drops, but you could make it to the end-game without trading with anyone. So, sure, the game is entirely playable without trading at all. I don't see why you're complaining then. Don't trade if you don't want to, just be prepared to farm for what you want.
Meanwhile, because the game is about building a character, and building a character in games like this is part stats/skills and part gear, I'm going to trade some of what I find for things I need to improve my character. I'll deal with the old school trade systems they have in place and check third party sites, and I'm going to end up with better stuff than you. It might not be pretty but it works, and I won't just "get by," I'll blaze through. Have fun in the third world, Ringwraith.
Notice I said "usable", not "the very highest tier that nobody ever uses anyway". And before you start on that, I'm obviously exaggerating for effect.Orion said:
Wrong. Any jewellery vendor will sell you a portal scroll for 3 wisdoms, a transmute for 7 portals, an augment for 4 transmutes, and an alt for 4 augments. Who's the one who doesn't know the first thing about how this game works again? Especially since I told you this very information like three posts ago?
What you don't seem to understand is that the kind of economy you're in makes no difference whatsoever to the question. You could just as well say, "Sure, you can go online and look up how much money your car is worth, but that doesn't tell you how valuable it is to you." And while that's true, it doesn't change the fact that your car has measurable value (called market value in real economics). Just because it's more (or less) precious to you personally doesn't change that. Same with items in the game.
No you ****in' didn't. You clearly don't understand what was said. How is the game going to tell you what an item is worth to you? Barter economies work on the exchange of goods desired by both parties, or simply put, I give you something you want in exchange for something I want. If you have what I want then I'll offer you something that I know you want for it. Whether it's a fair trade is up to you to decide. That's why I asked how many Facebreakers equal a Bringer of Rain. It's a trick question. Sure, you can go look up the going rate for both on poe.xyz and accept what other people say it's worth, or you could just figure out how much you're willing to part with to get what you want. Nobody needs to tell you what things are worth, and that kind of spoon-feeding nonsense is better left out.
If your question was supposed to be a trick question, it was a really poorly thought out one. Going to the PoE auction house and looking up the prices is exactly how you figure out how many Facebreakers you can get for a Bringer of Rain. Maybe your Bringer of Rain is more precious to you and you ask for too many. Well then you most likely won't get them, unless you happen to find a buyer who's desperate for one. Maybe you don't know or care about its value and you ask for too few. Then you've let someone else walk away with a profit at your own expense. If you consider doing pricing research 'spoon-feeding nonsense' and you prefer to just price items depending on what you think they're worth without knowing anything about the market, then you're going to make lots of other people very happy and yourself quite a bit poorer than you could have been. The point being that just because there are fluctuations and anomalies doesn't mean the item's market value is completely up in the air. It isn't, it's there and it's measurable. When you ask "how many As can you get for a B", your opinion of the item's value is irrelevant, what matters is the market's (i.e. other peoples') opinion. Your 'trick question' was about on the level of asking whether a tree falling down makes a sound when there's nobody there to hear it. Seemingly deep and thought-provoking but in reality trite and inane. Yes, of course it makes a ****ing sound, the fact that things don't cease existing when we happen to be looking elsewhere is something babies learn before reaching 12 months of age. Next ****ing question.
Not to mention that PoE is not a barter economy at all. That trade of a Bringer of Rain for Facebreakers? Probably not going to trade one for the other directly, are you. You're going to use the orbs as a medium of exchange. A barter economy is one where there is no medium of exchange, but that's not the case in PoE (nor real life, incidentally). Yes, the orbs have a use as well aside from trading, but that doesn't mean they're not currency. They are what's known as commodity money. But I'm sure someone as knowledgeable about economies as you purport to be knew that... right?
No, I haven't. I started by saying it would be nice if the game told me how much ****ing money I have (which you agreed would be a good thing, btw). This discussion about the role of trading and how it's implemented in the game is a related but separate question (which I have also mentioned previously).
Or I could just go play a better game. Y'know, like Diablo 3. Though I have to say I find it cracks me up how you accuse me of a logical fallacy and in the very same breath you go "I have a bigger e-peen in a videogame" in response to having your point refuted. I don't even know what logical fallacy that is and frankly I can't be bothered to look it up. You can do that on your own time.
Hey, it used to have a very good trading system, much better than PoE has, and now that that system has been removed the game has been adjusted so that you don't need to trade. It's gone from one extreme end of the spectrum all the way to the other extreme end of the spectrum in a single update, but it executed both of those design philosophies really well. PoE is in this weird middle ground where you're encouraged to trade by the fact that drop rates are really low, yet you can't trade effectively because the game gives you hardly any tools for it. It has the worst of both worlds without the advantages of either. In this respect at least, both the old and the new Diablo 3 are better than PoE.Scully said:Ringwraith #5 said:
Wrong. Any jewellery vendor will sell you a portal scroll for 3 wisdoms, a transmute for 7 portals, an augment for 4 transmutes, and an alt for 4 augments. Who's the one who doesn't know the first thing about how this game works again? Especially since I told you this very information like three posts ago?[/quote]Well I can't say I ever bothered trying to buy portal scrolls considering they drop all the damn time, and you get alterations for any piece of junk you sell to a vendor so I never have a shortage of those either. The only NPC conversion that's worth a damn is probably 2 Alterations for 1 Jeweller's.Ringwraith #5 said:
And who are these other people whose opinions are so much more valuable than mine? Is it not general consensus that determines these prices you can find on websites, and is not a consensus made by individuals with opinions? My opinion is as valuable as the next guy's. The funny thing in PoE is that "market value" is just a bull**** number people tend to agree on, it's the current consensus, but what if you're asking different groups of people? I wouldn't expect you to know this, but the market value of items in trade chat is almost universally higher than on poe.xyz. Nothing is cheaper on trade chat. So clearly there is difference of opinion among many players of the game, as trade chat is always flooded with people trying to sell **** for more. So what's to be believed? Is an item worth X, or is it worth Y? Who says it isn't more or less among another group? Point is, not all players agree on prices. Funny ****in' concept. It comes down to the individual to decide his price. You may see a similarity between his price and xyz or trade chat or some other site, but in the end he's the one that decided his price. No website forces him to sell his **** for a specific price.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't understand the market! Kevlar could trade his Facebreakers 1 to 1, I'm sure of it. They're 995%, which can't drop anymore. The new range is 600-800%. What are his worth? They can no longer be acquired, and can probably be removed from circulation if some idiot uses a Divine orb on them. They're suddenly infinitely more rare than they were, so really they're more-or-less priceless. They're worth what Kevlar is willing to sell them for, essentially. But please, tell me how I didn't think it through.
Holy ****ing **** read the above. No orbs involved.
Yes you have. It went from "is player trading important" to "are the mechanics efficient enough for easy player trading." That's shifting the ****in' goalposts for sure. Player trading is important even if the game's systems don't make it as easy as it could be, but you said it clearly isn't important because the only trading systems in the game itself are chat and a trade menu. Bull****, and I explained why it's important twice now. Some things you just can't get from vendors, so if you want them and don't have them then you're looking at farming your life away or trading with other people. Practicality dictates trading.
To borrow a phrase, if I may, this is why I think you're an idiot. You come into this discussion assuming you're right, and everything I say that isn't agreement must therefore be at least partially wrong. You assume that you have refuted my claims while still attempting to dispute them. If your claims were right, would they not be self-evident? Why, then, do you continue to argue? Surely there is some uncertainty or this is an entire waste of effort. Unfortunately, you assume you are right in all things, evidence to the contrary. You don't come into anything with an open mind. You're a ****ing brick wall, too much effort to take down and for no gain, when I could just walk around.
Go play Diablo 3, which, if you would care to remember, was for a time reduced to a barter economy because of economic conditions like hyperinflation rivaling the Weimar Republic. Clearly it was implemented so well!