Gaming the games currency and other QoL changes

GGG, this is part QQ, part introspection, and part feedback.

First off, I would like to bring to attention the subjective observation of currency league after league. In BHC, I have seen one of the most unbalanced currency markets since Perandus leagues. Combining tools that are available, such as poe.trade, poe.ninja, and currency.poe.trade, it's obvious that there is a portion of hard core gamers who dictate the swing of currency in the league. How is it that within a week of releasing this content, the currency jumped astronomically compared to other leagues?

Second, in most games that I've played when new content is released, the new gear and items do initially start off high in cost, but then over time as more players are able to farm those items, the cost of the gear eventually drops so that more casual players are able to obtain and play with those items over time. The exact opposite occurs with POE. As the league goes on, items more often than note increase in cost and not decrease making it much more difficult for casual players to get those items. Shouldn't it be the intent by GGG to make it so that before the end of the league, players should be able to get the items they are looking for to be able to experience end game content if they want to? But if the content is only available to players who spend 8 hours a day every day playing the game to amass enough currency, then what's the point for the casual player who may never see past a certain level?

Third, the currency valuation in game reminds me of the collapse of currencies throughout history. Take what happened in Brazil back in the 90's. (http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake-money-saved-brazil). This exact behavior is what I see in BHC. The value of conversions between currency should remain relatively static league over league. An exalted orb should have a fixed number of chaos, and a chaos a fixed number of fuse, etc. By GGG not stepping in with a currency exchange vendor for players like myself and casual player friends in game to be able to convert up or down currency, we are left with bartering with other players for whatever the market demands. For example, in most leagues, 2 fuse should equal the cost of 1 chaos. But because of inflation and devaluation, in BHC we are at 3.5 fuse for 1 chaos.

Forth, as the league winds down, instead of the prices plummeting because people who aren't going to play standard release all of their gears and wears in preparation for the next league, people horde currency and items waiting for the end of league where they will take those items for Standard and Hard Core and sell them for even more profits. I have to ask, over time is that behavior sustainable to those two perpetual leagues? And in addition to that, what kind of server overhead do you have in players like myself who don't play Standard and have umpteen "Remove Only" tabs in Standard and are unwilling to clean them up? All of that extra unused tabs has a server overhead to it. And for what benefit? At the end of each league you have a massive inflation within those leagues as a new infusion of currency and items hit the market. For example, in Standard, 1 exalt is now 88 chaos. How is that sustainable over the long term of this game? Sure in the beginning (beta), it made sense. But now as the game matures, I have to ask does it still make sense to have that model?

What I am proposing are a set of changes that if you think about it would balance out the game and reduce some of this fluctuation. That in turn should mean league to league players have a more consistent gaming experience.

1. Put an in-game AH. For the love of god why not! Let's look at the reasons why this is a good idea at this point in the games life. First, it would mean that players would not need to go to 3rd party sites and could more easily play the game in Fullscreen mode. This would help with the overall degraded graphics experience that you are challenging players with as the forums seem to now be littered with graphics related issues that ultimately will cause your player base to get so fed up that they move on to something else. Second, it means that we have a more consistent trading experience. With poe.trade and currency.poe.trade, how are those tools not achieving the same goals as an in-game AH? And an in-game AH would also mean you could put things up on the AH and allow other players to trade with you even if you aren't logged into the game. Lastly, by using currency to post items into the AH, such as 1 alt for normal rarity, 1 alchy for magic rarity, 1 fuse for rare rarity, and 1 chaos for unique rarity, you take currency out of the game as players buy and sell items.

2. Currency exchange vendor. This would be a HUGE improvement and would essentially set a baseline between all the leagues standardizing the value of currency between currency. 2 fuse traded to the vendor will return 1 chaos. 20 chaos will get you 1 exalt. You could still have drop only currency like mirrors, but at least in terms of crafting or item modifying currency, those should all be available through the currency exchange vendor.

3. Temporary league ending strategy. Currently when a league ends, the contents in the softcore version of the temporary league go to Standard and the contents in the Hardcore version of the temporary league go to Hardcore. Again, this made sense when the game was in its infancy, but it doesn't make sense now. You should consider changing this to the following: At the end of the league the only thing that transfers to the permanent league are the items on your character. Your stash is removed (both guild and personal), and no currency is transferred. This will help to stabilize the Standard and Hardcore leagues by not having these massive bumps of currency infusion and allow for those markets to stabilize with only the items and gems on the characters to be available for resale. Let's look at some of the benefits to GGG. This means that if you want something, you have to equip it to a character. It means that you have to have an available character slot to accommodate that transfer. If you run out of slots you have to use the micro transaction to buy more character slots. Since your stashes don't transfer, no more remove only tabs saving server resources and improving overall responsiveness of the servers. For players this means that if you're like me and don't play in the permanent leagues and only play in the temporary leagues, there isn't an accumulation of junk in those leagues. For players who only play in those leagues, they can wait for new gears to drop that are league specific, but they don't have to suffer the massive inflation each and every time a league ends. Imagine how things will look 5 or 10 leagues down the road. Based on the past league enders, it looks to be approximately a 10% increase in inflation per league end. At those rates is it really sustainable over time? I think GGG it is in your best interests to look at how to improve or change this cyclic behavior otherwise you'll be in a situation where 1 exalted orb might be worth 200 chaos in some future point of time or more.

The above is just some food for thought. When I consider why I play POE, it's to see new content and play new builds, but that is becoming increasingly more difficult as the system is being gamed more and more often without any rhyme or reason. Sure you could say that POE leagues are the pinnacle of free markets, but even in free markets, when inflation becomes out of control, it ends up destroying the economy's and directly leads to recessions. A recession in this case would be players who get fed up with the rat race and find other games where it is less of a problem. You ask players to already put up and shut up about the graphics issues that we face and the endless slew of RNG that leads to death in HC leagues and by and large I accept that. But to also ask that casual players can't reach end game content will be a major consideration to future league participation. Why play POE if the chances of amassing the ridiculous amounts of currency to get items that are build specific are little to none? Sure I could be like Cartman in the satire episode where they are faced with a troll player in WoW and end up grinding boars until they are of high enough level, but is that really what POE is about for casual players? At least in HC leagues, it should be content and skill that restricts a player from experiencing the league end game content. Items and currency shouldn't be the limiting factor.