On ARPG economies from a game design perspective

What many players fail to realize is that making trading easier doesn't encourage flipping, it discourages it.

Flippers and farmers form a symbiosis. The flipper depends on farmers not being as skilled at playing market simulator, or simply not being willing to; the farmer depends on the flippers to be there immediately to buy their items (even if it's below market) and to sell them items (even if it's above market), the point being availability and convenience, thus not having to deal with the trading system directly themselves. It's the same as the supplier-middleman-customer relationship in real life.

In real life, cutting the middleman is normally a good thing. But games aren't about pure optimization; they are about throwing the player curveballs, making things difficult enough where perfection is impossible. Games are the place where "too easy" is a bad thing. However, it's also a place where "too hard" is a bad thing. The key is balancing for difficulty.

When trading is made too easy or farming made too hard, you end up with a Diablo 3 system — every farmer also becomes a trader, and due to the lack of flippers the items found sell too high and the item bought are bought too low, leading to a feeling that trade rather than farming is the path to wealth (since you are so much more likely to buy your upgrade than find it). When trading is made too hard and farming made too easy, you end up with an essentially self-found system — trading rarely or never occurs, and players depend entirely on the mercy of RNG.

Good game design provides challenges to both styles of play, without making either impossible. It's not good design to make farming harder by deliberately downgrading the UI or by adding severe, almost impossible gearchecks; instead, the best method is to add challenges which test a player's skill at the game, allowing skilled farmers to succeed where the unskilled will likely fail. In the same way, the proper way to make trading harder is about adding skill checks to the system, not arbitrary restrictions.

The key skill in trading is item valuation, the ability to look at an item and determine its worth; the best way to make trading harder is to make item valuation harder. Adding more build diversity so that a multitude builds are considered top-tier, giving all of those builds different desires in terms of itemization, and balancing various rare affixes against each other so that the "perfect 3 prefixes" for any one build is a hotly debated subject... these are all proper means of balancing trading, making it more skill-intensive. The harder it is to determine the value of items, the better.

In the last section, we concluding that making trading hard — based off skill checks, not bad UI or artificial barriers — is a good thing, which means what we don't need is gold — its value is far too easy to determine — and we definitely don't need a buyout system which allows the seller to be offline/busy during the actual transaction — which would cut flippers out of the economy completely.

However, one major problem with the Path of Exile economy at present is that orbs are too close to gold. Yes, there is are some differences in valuation, but it's a little too easy to establish relative value and orb-to-orb exchange ratios in the various leagues. As mentioned before, the best way to establish difficulty in valuation is build-dependency in items and balance between various builds, creating a metagame where it's difficult to tell which items are the best. Unfortunately, these have little or no effect on build-independent orbs and maps.

With maps, it's not difficult to imagine methods to increase build dependency, making certain maps better for some builds than others. It's worth noting that there currently is some small amount of build dependency — some builds deal with different monsters better than others — but we could easily amplify this. Making map affixes themselves more build-dependent by adding affixes like "Monsters have +x% more Accuracy Rating" and other tailored affixes would lead to certain builds preferring certain affix rolls, and implicit mods could be added to maps to ensure more build dependency even with white maps.

Orbs are a trickier problem. They are also essentially build-independent, but it's harder to think of ways to add build-dependency to them. One radical suggestion is to make orbs, and only orbs, account-bound; however, like all account-bound suggestions, it also serves to discourage flipping opportunities and thus hurts flippers, which isn't our objective. A more moderate solution would be more appropriate, although I have no idea what form such a solution would take.

The real problem with orbs is: they were designed to be a currency, which means they were designed to have build-independent evaluation. That's the opposite of what we want; for a proper skill-based trading difficult, we want more difficult evaluation. A good ARPG doesn't design currencies, but instead the players decide on one, using what they are given; all attempts to force one upon the players end up with the gold problem as seen in Diablo 3. Orbs might not be a bad thing, but currencies are. The question is how to make orbs less like a currency, and more like a normal item.

Suggestions for a "self-found league" have become a phenomenon on these forums, and mostly a misguided one. Sure, there are a few who have advocated a self-found league purely for the challenge of it, and to those I say "go for it." However, the vast majority of the support has been based on the promise of increased drop rates in such a league, which is essentially an appeal for the trading-too-hard, farming-too-easy imbalance mentioned in Section 1, where players would find themselves at the mercy of RNG, and following their suggestions would be detrimental to the health of the game.

However, that does not mean that they don't have a point. As a matter of fact, most any time you see that large of a forum movement, you can count on them being riled up about a very real problem, and proposing a very poor solution to fix it. Such is the nature of mass QQ.

In this case, the problem is trading orbs vs actually using them. Orbs are far too much of a currency in Path of Exile, and not nearly enough of a crafting gambling material. This is an important issue for players who prefer to avoid trading altogether (even forsaking use of flippers as middlemen).

What causes this problem? Simply put, when one farms, one finds a lot of tradeable gear — various rares with decent affixes, but not appropriate to one's current build — but a precious small amount of currency. If one trades (even to middlemen), this isn't that bad — you get much more value from the gear than you would vendoring them — but if you're going relatively self-found you have very little currency to use on your gear to get extra rolls to combat RNG where you need them.

I would not advocating making the game easier, so like many of my suggestions I suggest nerfing one thing while buffing another. GGG should increase currency drop rates; in exchange, the drop rates of gear should be reduced. The result should be increased orb use (and reduce screen clutter).

It is vital that both of these changes be applied together. Back in OB, GGG increased currency drop rates, and the result was less orb use and more orb hoarding. But when you think about it, this behavior makes sense. Let me explain.

The thing about orbs is, you don't use them early game unless you absolutely have to. You know you'd rather save your orbs for end-game, high itemlevel gear, so orb thriftiness is highly encouraged by the game design. For the most part, players only use orbs when they hit a wall — they can't progress with their current gear, or they can't trade for an upgrade (the market simply doesn't provide one), so they start tossing orbs on the items they have.

Increasing orb drop rate, without any change to the drops of rare items, doesn't serve to increase expenditure, because it doesn't make players hit that wall. They're just as likely to find upgrades farming before and after, so all it really does is give them more currency to trade with. It doesn't make the economy any less likely to provide them an upgrade, because the amount of "tradeables" found farming doesn't decrease.

Now imagine the same situation, but you're less likely to find a nice rare or 6-socket upgrade farming, the market provides less "tradeables" because other players are finding less rares too... but you have more orbs dropping for you than before. You're far more likely to hit that wall, and thus orb use goes up.

This would be an important boost for the self-found player. Currently, self-found is too much at the mercy of RNG, and they still would be, but with careful orb use they could have more control over where RNG takes them. This is the solution for that particular problem — not the creation of new leagues.

Perhaps more importantly: The more players hit "the wall" and are required to use orbs on items, the more orbs will feel like an actual item, and less like a pure currency, which was our objective as outlined in the previous section.

In "The Nature of Flipping" I covered why it's important to make trading difficult, and why skill-testing is the best means to do so. This section deals with why other methods of making trading more difficult are futile.

Given the fiasco with Diablo 3's auction houses, players are loathe to incorporate more time-saving trading features into Path of Exile. They don't want to replicate the auction house environment by adding things such as search features.

However, for good or for ill, such things are inevitable, and for the most part already exist in the form of third-party websites. Forum shop indexers, like poe.xyz.is and poexplorer.com, are already pretty common knowledge, and one should expect anything to eventually be searchable, given enough time. For example, check out poetradechat.com; yes, you can read PoE trade chat while you're at work.

Long story short, all forms of searchability and trading ease-of-use are inevitable. The only question is: will GGG be the ones providing the service, or will some third party do it?

The best answer is for GGG to pre-empt such websites with official versions of the same functionality. Third-party sites are subject to RMT influence, and GGG should take efforts to avoid exposing players to such influence if possible. Features which improve trading, especially in terms of searchability and filters, should be embraced, not rejected because "it makes trading too easy." Third parties will make trading easier regardless.

Note that, with ease-of-trading inevitable, the need for skill-based difficulty in trading only gets stronger. If we embrace easy trading in terms of searchability and UI improvements, we must still ensure trading does not become to easy overall.

I'm a fairly socially liberal person, and although I don't partake myself (I tend towards addiction issues), I have no issue with the consumption of recreational drugs. It seems to me to be a victimless crime; if it makes the user an addict or an idiot, then my issues are with the addiction or the idiocy, not the consumption of the substance itself.

However, I have a huge issue with people who buy their drugs off of the street; I consider the act unconscionable. Money given to those dealers trickles up, helping to fund all kinds of evil: heroin funds insurgency in Afghanistan, marijuana (in the US) funds cartels in Juarez, cocaine funds Columbian drug lords. All groups act in open revolt of their governments and are the causes of countless murders, kidnappings, and other violent crime.

So to all those stoners out there: grow your own, or just stop. Don't feed any more money into that system.

But what does this have to do with Path of Exile, you ask? Three letters: RMT.

Real money transactions wouldn't be a bad thing in a bot-free gaming universe. If I knew I could buy a particular item from a non-botting, non-cheating player, everything would be fair: no rules would be broken, and unless that non-botting, non-cheating player was a sucker, he'd charge appropriately for his time, which means I would be paying a cost justly proportional to that which other players must pay to acquire the item through non-RMT methods.

However, there's no such thing as a bot-free gaming universe, which makes my utopian scenario moot.

In real life, RMT funds coordinated efforts to hack, cheat, and exploit the game to acquire items through illegitimate means. On average, you can expect a RMT seller to look at the game from a completely malicious point of view, looking only for ways to subvert the economy, and running every cheat, hack, and bot they can get their hands on. At worst, this actually does fund real-life criminality, such as the human-rights violations of sweatshop labor.

The primary force against RMT should be GGG themselves. It's their game to protect, and thus it's their war, like it or not. The investigation and banning of RMT buyers, sellers, and items should be thoroughly pursued. Also, as mentioned in Section 4, GGG should take efforts to concentrate tools under the GGG umbrella, rather than forcing players to depend on third-party trading tools which are subject to RMT influence.

However, this doesn't mean that flippers have nothing to do with RMT. Generally, the flow of illegitimate items is: initial acquisition by bot, to RMT seller, to RMT buyer, to legitimate flipper. This is because RMT buyers are normally motivated by their inability to flip with any skill, combined with a desire for rapid access to the best items in the game; they make great suckers due to their impatience and vast amounts of wealth.

To combat this, I strongly recommend that GGG enact a policy of deleting illegitimate items, regardless of who is currently in possession. Just like being in possession of stolen goods, being in possession of RMT currency should be punished, in this case not with account bans or anything so punitive... but just having that currency poof the instant the parties to the original RMT are deemed guilty. Such a rule in itself would have flippers wondering about those deals which are "too good to be true," and thus you'd have an army of flippers working with GGG, not against them, to help combat RMT.