What Exactly Killed Diablo 3's Economy (and Implications on PoE)

On the one hand, it's wrong to assume everyone cares about movespeed on boots. Some builds can use Leap Slam or Whirling Blades almost exclusively for movement, rendering the affix useless outside of town.

On the other hand, for pretty much everyone else... yep. Probably deserves a nerf.

It doesn't matter what kind of itemization a game has the item hunt is an inevitable march to perfecta items. What made the D3 economy so horrible was the combination of the homogenous gear/stats, the load-out skill system, and an unrestricted AH because it completely linearized progression and created a constant full access item economy resulting in rapid item inflation.

What many people fail to realize about D3 is that you can easily beat it and progress playing self-found. To this extent drops are fine in D3. It is only relative to the item economy that drops in D3 are considered terrible and that's because players can very inexpensively buy gear in the 99+ percentile of all loot quickly bypassing the vast majority of all item progression.

PoE inherently avoids most of these mistakes. It not only does it not have an AH, but without a standardized currency like gold nothing like an AH can really be implemented. Gear/Stats are not nearly as homogenized as D3 because the value of stats depends on how builds invest into certain mechanics. Finally, and probably the most important the diversity of builds not only create a huge variety of different pathways of progression, but every new character one makes for a new build starts a new item hunt and demand for gear.

So PoE not only has a longer, healthier, and more diverse progression, but it also makes starting anew enjoyable.

Scrotie, the item system in PoE is pretty much just as lame in the rare category as d3 is.

Lets take a look at chest pieces.

Prefixes: flat defense, % defense, if hp build hp, if not defense/stun hybrid
Suffixes: Resist, resist, resist, everything else is sub optimal.

Anyone can see if a chest piece is good in the blink of an eye, same with weapons.


I'm still waiting for them to actually put interesting stats on rares.



I also think mirror of kalandra is the worst idea EVER.

Posts in this thread show that everyone understands what made d3 economy so bad.

In my opinion you can not have a perfectly stable economy in a game like PoE or Diablo.
It would require extremely efficient sinks, massive numbers of wealthy players leaving the game and new players taking their place on daily base.

Question only is how long you can expect an ingame economy to last based on the game itself.
D3 on release: ~2 months at best.
But people still play in the very same environment that already was ruined few weeks after release.

Uncomplicated, not too complex, easy to understand, not too difficult, everyone should be able to experience the complete content of the game, get a version of every item, be able to experience every encounter. Those are some targets blizzard set to d3 based on their new game philosophies. Simple games for as many people as possible.
They achieved this also by cutting down basic gameplay, lowering built variety, extremely simplistic itemization and char development.

Natural that such game wont have a long lasting economy.
How could you expect something different?

Removing AH from the game will slow down the progress of d3s economy a bit in future and add some weeks to its lifespan. But to really fix it and get an economy that can last at least half a year through a ladder season they would have to start with major changes in diablos basic mechanics and gameplay. Massively add complexity and content on top. Increase built variety, replay value and so on.

Well written! I agree with everything you wrote!

I play D3 as well as POE, I certainly love the currency system (could have a higher drop rate) of POE, as well as the itemization and variations in skill gems and skill trees. On a macro scale, POE did better. BUT, because Blizzard is such a big company, they can afford to do the micro better. EVerything is better optimized. Gameplay is smoother (A LOT smoother). POE gameplay at times seems clunky and unrefined. This is the only reason that I still play D3 pretty much (considering that there is no endgame there).

Read the entire first page, then got bored and skipped to the end. So if anyone mentioned it before, my apologies. But I feel it's also the abundance of items, that wrecked the economy. Not just the predictability of items(even though I do see the value of that).

In a healthy arpg economy, you got multiple tiers of people, starting from people who just started the game, with bascially no wealth till people with the godly endgame tier items. if you look at the amount of people combined with the amount of wealth they have, you will most likely get an interesting graph, starting kinda big at the bottom, getting bigger untill a certain point, and then going small into a small point. Pyramid standing on top of an unfinished inverted pyramid, basically.

This is healthy. Why?
People who just started out, have no wealth, but find no problems in obtaining any. Thus, they have no problems moving up into the wealth pyramid. But there will be a point, where most people stagger. It is harder to get further up the pyramid, because you have to get past Cruel, or have to start trading smart to get much more wealth. This is the point where the pyramid actually starts. The broadest point, containing the most people. From this point onwards, it will only get smaller, untill it reaches the top.
And the people higher up the pyramid? Well they are happy, they have invested more time in the game, and it is showing. They are richer then the masses, some able to buy(or find) that top tier gear, you need to make that awesome build.
And then you got the people at the top of the pyramid, farming and trading 24/7, gaining immense wealth for the time, but also methods, they use.

In a perfect world, the balance between rich and poor will stabilize at this point. Well, for those who study economy, knows that it won't. Usually, it will end up with the rich getting richer, and the poor, poorer. But in traditional Arpgs something else happens.

Even though the rich might seem to get richer, and the poor, poorer, the exact opposite happens.

Wealth is usually determined by gold, items, equipment. All three have on thing in common: you can find them. And everything that is found(at least almost everything)will stay in the economy. Yes, people will sell low items, or use low orbs like it's nothing, but those are neglectable. The amount of items, the total wealth of an economy, will keep growing over time.
This will have an irreversible effect on the people in the economy. More items, means more people will have those items. And more people will be able to farm more effective, wielding even more items. Even though the highest items have the same droprate, if more people can farm for it, it will drop more, decreasing the value of that specific item. And this will happen for any item, eventually also with those god tier items, with a chance of one in a million to drop. More people farming, means more people finding it, no matter how low the droprate it.
And what happens with those items? They stay in the economy. No soul in it's right mind, will think about selling that shavs, or that 2K dps weapon, to the vendor. No, it will be kept, and if not needed, sold to someone low then you, creating another god tier equipped character, fully capable of farming even faster.
Even though both items and currency will keep dropping, meaning the physical price of an item will also rise, the proportion between amount of currency in the economy and item value will drop, simply because more people will be finding more currency more rapidly. The item will lose value.
Now, people will keep wanting to sell, but after a while, they won't have any buyers: The price of the item is way too high for the common folk, so all the people without them godly gear, will have problems buying it. This gap usually keeps people from rising up, but what do you do, if you really want to sell that item? You lower the price, making the gap managable to overcome. More and more people will stream into the higher rankings of wealthyness. This will also drop the value of an item ofcourse.
Eventually the most expensive item will have dropped so much, that it's easily obtainable by most people. Meaning, more and more people will enter that high wealth kingdom.

So, I concluded two things from this wall of text.
- Items will lose value
- People will have easier access to end game gear

What happens next? Still, the rich will get richer, since they are selling those items. Right?

Not right.

Look at the numbers, and you will see the difference. But will that difference matter anything? Yes, you can have 5000 exalts, but if the most expensive item cost you 100 ex to buy it, it won't feel like you are that much richer then someone with just 1000 exalted. You have friggin five times his wealth, but his items are the same as yours.
There is a wealth cap. A point where wealth doesn't matter anymore. People will stay on the same level there, broading the tip of the pyramid. More and more people will join, untill the tip is broader then it's neck: the pyramid will invert. Having much wealth will be a common thing.

Ofcourse, that is a process that takes years to accomplish, but people will notice it's happning, all because of an abundance of items.

Solution?
I personally think they should introduce another tier of items, legendary or whatever, only obtainable in 75+ maps or something, droprate around the same with a mirror, or even less(making a mirror unable to mirror it will help it as well), but that would only stall this inevitability. Even though, if they really make a few certain items, almost impossible to obtain, and I mean really Impossible, this could work wonders. Yes, the rich will get richer. But so does the poor. You can not stop that, because stopping that is taking away the pleasures of the game. So let the rich get richer times infinity, it will at least keep the economy going, as long as they can keep getting richer.

Edit: Holy shit I wrote a lot. 1K+ words, Fuck yeah!

Great post Scrotie. However, I really think you miss a, if you ask me, major detail: the fact that every skill was linked to weapon-DPS.

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Appels_Zijn_Gezond wrote:

Holy shit I wrote a lot.

Yes. Yes you did.

All of your logic is based on two key assumptions:
1) The lack of a death-based item sink (in other words, Softcore), or the claim that such an item sink fails to achieve its purpose (argument could be made about Hardcore if one believes deaths over time eventually approach zero)
2) Permanent leagues, or at least close to that to allow the required time for tectonic economic changes

As such, all of that only mostly refers to Standard League. And I guess the concerns are valid in a way...

...but they aren't the core problem. Once again, look at Diablo 2. Open Softcore in that game does have a lot of the problems you describe, but it's not widely seen as fucked. The solid itemization in that game, the variance of face-to-face trading, and differing subjective values for high runes help it from falling completely into the D3 trap.

Still, I'd be lying if I said your concerns aren't valid. A lot of what you describe can be seen in Diablo 2 as well. I guess the lesson is simple: all permanent leagues saturate with ubergear over time, thus D2's ladders and PoE's challenge leagues are necessary measures to appease one crowd, while permanent leagues are there to please a more casual crowd which doesn't mind the saturation.

Thus my final advice ends up being rather crude: if you don't like it, get the fuck out of Standard.

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ongZ wrote:

Great post Scrotie. However, I really think you miss a, if you ask me, major detail: the fact that every skill was linked to weapon-DPS.

Probably should have added that, yes. :) But it's really just another form of oversimplified itemization, of which I covered other examples; I figure most readers could deduce that weapon-DPS giving spell-damage was simply yet another shortcut making item valuation even easier.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Thus my final advice ends up being rather crude: if you don't like it, get the fuck out of Standard.

Aye, it's why I play anarchy(no HC for me, I tend to play drunk way to often nowadays.).
Even though, it would be nice if there was a way to keep this from happening. I guess I was more searching for an answer to that, then to complain how bad softcore is(which I didn't intend to btw) :3