PSA: Gold

For all the people still complaining about gold in Path of Exile and assuming everything is Diablo now: this was addressed as, like...the second question Kripparian asked Jonathan in the post-keynote interview. To ennumerate:

1.) Path of Exile's loot system has a problem. Killing monsters and getting no drops sucks, but they sure as hell can't just attach a rare item to every monster drop. There needed to be an intermediate solution that allowed trash mobs to drop stuff for the player to pick up without more "lootsplosion" antics.

2.) They realized that gold exists in other ARPGs for an actually good and valid reason - gold is the thing that trash mobs can drop in small, incremental batches so they still have drops without exploding the economy or flooding the player with junk rares. [Personal Observation]Simply dropping three billion Wisdom scrolls instead, having every third monster drop more Wis scrolls or Wis scraps, turns Wisdom scrolls into the effective equivalent of gold except more complicated and less user-friendly, especially in a game where there's an NPC that will identify your items in town for you.[/Personal Observation]

3.) Gold is not expected or designed to be a player-traded currency. Players can trade gold because there was no reason to account-bind it (yet), but gold is primarily intended to be an NPC currency used with vendors (which have been markedly improved and are worth engaging with now) and other in-game NPC services. The game is being designed with an eye towards players trading the same way they always have - with currency items.

Now, for my personal take because this is my thread and I can do that: Gold is too common a drop to be worth anything to other players. Unless the vendor system is overhauled to the point of insanity, everybody will pick up whatever gold they need to work with vendors themselves. Sure, there might be occasional bulk sales of "100M gold > 5 chaos" or such for people who want to buy enough gold to never worry about it again once, or there might be super low-level player trades between Perennial Poors who want enough gold to buy a Sweet Deal they found in town and they're willing to part with a few chromes or an alch or two to do it, but the people who really get into the player-to-player trade economy of Path of Exile will have no use for gold. See: Stone of Jordan-based economies in Diablows Two and any serious player laughing at offers of 'gold' for items.

Especially since, and this is the big one - gold can't modify items. Gold (presumably, and according to GGG as of this moment) has no purpose in the game other than to be traded to NPCs for basic items. You can't bulk-buy gold to aid your crafting efforts, because what the fudge are you gonna do with 100M gold that can't do a dang thing to your items? Crafting currency is valuable in PoE1 because you can use it to directly impact and improve your game. Gold does not do this, and thus it will not be valued in the player-driven economy. It's there specifically so junk monsters can actually drop something instead of nothing, which is a very important step in Grinding Gear actually fixing Lootsplosions such that we don't need loot filters anymore.

Gold provides the "hey they dropped something!" hit that loot-driven games like ARPGs need to constantly feed to players while being effectively invisible to the player-driven economy. If they pull it off? I think it'll work out fine. No need to keep freaking shits over it. yes, Path of Exile's "all currency is actually usable!" approach was novel and unique, and it's fun to mess with, but that doesn't make it the only solution.

1.) The reason why we need loot explosions and tons of loot is the amount of trash items and mods there exists that are not useful for your build. Reducing the amount of loot and introducing gold just gives me nightmares from the ruthless with gold time.

2.) There is no good ARPG that uses gold. All of them are trash. And probably due to the gold thing. Diversifying the currency and decentralising it into different currency is the way to go. Every click gives the currency its value. Something you auto-pick-up is simply boring and will probably also contribute to the feeling of not dropping anything.

3.) What's the point of naming this trash currency "Gold", literally one of the most valuable metals on our planet? Out of all the poe2 footage I've seen so far, gold is useless. That's pretty sad. So, yes, nobody, really nobody will expect gold to be important for trading. And if something is not valuable enough to trade, it's so useless, and so stupid, that it will be ignored.

I have the very strong feeling that Tencent is behind this gold push. Gold will trash more your inventory slots, and you'll probably need to buy some loot animal that stores your gold, a flying piggy bank or something. Of course nobody would buy this, if gold stays useless like this. So they will most likely introduce some stuff like: Every use of map device costs gold, or certain crafts will cost gold and so on.

Also think about it this way: Gold is trying to simplify the currency system. Why? To get more people to play the game and to get more money, probably? I don't see any reason to simplify the current currency system, it's great and I enjoy playing with it. The simple currency system of other ARPGs turns me off, and so it does with too many players. It hints at the root of the problem: The missing complexity. A complex game needs a complex currency.

Gold sucks and I really hope they consider not persisting on it. If gold will be part of poe2 it will either be completely useless and not affect us at all and we will actually just be part of their ruthless with gold super mode or it will be another money cow spamming our inventories because it will be an integral part of the game, and actually destroy it.

Because I'm lazy and just feel like calling out these two points;

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Proxava wrote:

2.) There is no good ARPG that uses gold.

Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Torchlight 2, Grim Dawn. All EXTREMELY successful and popular ARPGs, all use gold. This is a frankly aburde statement that bascially translates to "PoE1 is the only good ARPG that exists." which is ignorante and elitist in the extreme.

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Proxava wrote:

3.) What's the point of naming this trash currency "Gold", literally one of the most valuable metals on our planet?

Other than plutonium, palladium, rhodium, iridium, californium, francium, many rare earth metals too long to bother writing out, for a huge amount of time, aluminum was MUCH more valuable than gold (before we figured out it's really easy to smelt).

Gold is valuabe because it is both uncommon and nearly useless (obviously we've found some use for it outside of decorations, but that its more or less decorative means it's not eaten up in industrial means). This is like saying diamonds are rare. That thing we make drill bits out of, rare in comparison to say, iron.

There is no crafting bench, you are expected to use gold to gamble/buy unidentified items to cap your resistances and get upgrades in the campaign. When you vendor an item you get gold not alch shards or transmutes you get gold.
There are no scour orbs, there is not much crafting at all by the sounds of it. Need 10 fire resist to be capped get wrecked and hope the vendor has what you need.

I would have call them "shillings" or "doubloons".

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Proxava wrote:

1.) The reason why we need loot explosions and tons of loot is the amount of trash items and mods there exists that are not useful for your build. Reducing the amount of loot and introducing gold just gives me nightmares from the ruthless with gold time.

Never occured to you that they might be, I dunno...fixing the drop system? All four of them said they'd already reviewed the mod pool for all items and made necessary adjustments. As for finding items that aren't useful to your build? Welcome to ARPGs, people have been finding wrong-build items since Diablows the First.

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Proxava wrote:

2.) There is no good ARPG that uses gold. All of them are trash. And probably due to the gold thing. Diversifying the currency and decentralising it into different currency is the way to go. Every click gives the currency its value. Something you auto-pick-up is simply boring and will probably also contribute to the feeling of not dropping anything.

Good thing they're not getting rid of crafting currency then. Well, not getting rid of all crafting currency. They're definitely changing direction in crafting and I'm curious to see where they're gonna go; the lack of alts or scours was a definite "wooof" moment for me (how the bloody hell are you supposed to craft/roll your flasks?), but unlike some people I'm not going to assume the entire world is exploding because I can't see what their solution to a given issue is. Give 'em some time, let's see what they're doing with crafting in the next game instead of assuming, hm?

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Proxava wrote:

3.) What's the point of naming this trash currency "Gold", literally one of the most valuable metals on our planet? Out of all the poe2 footage I've seen so far, gold is useless. That's pretty sad. So, yes, nobody, really nobody will expect gold to be important for trading. And if something is not valuable enough to trade, it's so useless, and so stupid, that it will be ignored.

They could've named them grizzlesmorks and had to have a tutorial scene telling people what the hell a "grizzlesmork" is. They could've called them Wraeclast Bucks and we would've spent this time lambasting them for being cheeky jackheads. Or they could adhere to genre convention and call it 'gold', and have everybody instinctively and intuitively understand what it's for and how to use it. There was no good reason to buck convention on this one, the trope of fantasy cultures all trading with/in gold coins is deeply rooted in Western culture. Why mess with something thast works just fine?

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Proxava wrote:

I have the very strong feeling that Tencent is behind this gold push. Gold will trash more your inventory slots, and you'll probably need to buy some loot animal that stores your gold, a flying piggy bank or something. Of course nobody would buy this, if gold stays useless like this. So they will most likely introduce some stuff like: Every use of map device costs gold, or certain crafts will cost gold and so on.

It's not like your MTX purchase of a currency tab needs to work in PoE2 or anything, no no no. There's no possible way they'll be integrated a way to store bulk quantities of gold into the currency tab, nah. They clearly haven't learned anything from a decade of being yelled at for stuffing people's inventory with shards/fragments and haven't been pumping out special storage tabs with a zeal and passion that rivals the very gods themselves, no way.

"

Proxava wrote:

Also think about it this way: Gold is trying to simplify the currency system. Why? To get more people to play the game and to get more money, probably? I don't see any reason to simplify the current currency system, it's great and I enjoy playing with it. The simple currency system of other ARPGs turns me off, and so it does with too many players. It hints at the root of the problem: The missing complexity. A complex game needs a complex currency.

Well, good thing they're not getting rid of other currency items then, eh? Players at ExileCon have been finding all kinds of currency items. They haven't found some certain items of course - I really disagree with the total removal of alts and I'm not thrilled with the loss of scours, nor Mark's memey little smirk at the idea that we can't roll/modify no-go mods off our maps anymore - but most everything else you'd expect as a baseline is still there. A complex game will still have complex currency. Problem solved!

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Proxava wrote:

Gold sucks and I really hope they consider not persisting on it. If gold will be part of poe2 it will either be completely useless and not affect us at all and we will actually just be part of their ruthless with gold super mode or it will be another money cow spamming our inventories because it will be an integral part of the game, and actually destroy it.

Man, so many people in this game were apparently molested by Ruthless. The amount of sheer butthurt I've seen over "It's Ruthless! RUTHLESS! FORCED RUTHLESS!" is idiotic. Y'all need to chill. They dun said years ago, before PoE2 even, that they'd like to reduce the sheer glut of pointless items they know nobody picks up and get people to care about drops more. They would like for players to actually desire to pick rares up off the ground and see if they're any good, and for them to do so they'd need to make it such that a single boss doesn't drop sixty rare items you need to filter away.

As for gold being completely useless or an integral part of the game? Well, clearly it's both. Jonathan himself said that players trading in gold would be like players trading in Wisdom scrolls - nobody's gonna do it outside huge bulk sales for things like item gambling. You'll find enough gold to handle your needs for gold yourself, but the presence of gold allows them a lot of design space to make vendors more interesting. I'd much rather deal with gold than have vendors require untold countless stacks of wisdom scrolls for everything, that just makes no bloody sense. Why the hell would some goober in town give frog one about Wis scrolls when they've probably never seen an unidentified item in their life? Some good, solid coin they can trade to whoever is selling the food they put on their family table, though? That makes plenty of sense to be getting on with.

Anyways.

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ChanBalam wrote:

I would have call them "shillings" or "doubloons".

Yeah, there's an argument to be made there I suppose. An actual name for the currency beyond 'gold' that still clearly and intuitively calls out "this is money!" would be fine. Hueh...would've been hysterical if they'd gone with "Perandus Coins", gotta say.

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ChanBalam wrote:

I would have call them "shillings" or "doubloons".

Or Diabloons?

I don't mind trash mob drop chaos shard, alt shard or even Divine shard......just coin? WTF

The first point makes no sense. We have too much trash loot, not too little. Try playing a map without item filter. Currency is the least of the problems with loot, to me anyway. Sure there are alot of different currency items but they all have their unique use and you can filter the ones out that you dont want. To me items are the much bigger problem.
Depending on what we can spend gold on, it will be just another currency without primary function or the only relevant currency to gain power. Its just a bad system. Also makes zero sense thematically to have monsters drop gold...

Perandus Coins! Diabloons!

lol

:)