Can We Atleast Get A Aution-House-System for PoE Currency?

Posted by james bonds on February 7th, 2018

Part of the issue is that certain investments become snowballs. Once you can spend 100ex and potentially get nothing for it without impacting your build, you can make items that people will pay 50ex to mirror, which is effectively a fountain of infinite wealth.

1) the expected value of an item you can acquire by trading Y chaos in X time is significantly higher than the value of an item you will find playing over X time

2) You will almost certainly find Y chaos orbs (or equivalent currency) before you find an item that is usable of equal or higher value.

3) the opportunity cost of trading is the value of POE items plus the time it takes to search for or acquire an item.

4) an increase in the ease of trading (adding an in-game market) reduces the opportunity cost of trading compared to killing monsters by reducing the time necessary to perform trades.

5) as this cost is reduced, and approaches zero (think: built in, automated, auto delivered items through an AH), the expected value of trading dramatically becomes higher than the value of playing the game (killing monsters). This happens nearly instantaneously, until a certain point where your gear progression hits a wall.

6) a reduction in the opportunity cost of trading promotes more players to trade and list items, increasing the supply of items.

7) the increased supply of items drives the currency/commodity price of those POE items down as sellers compete to win sales.

8) this becomes a stronger and stronger disincentive to continue playing, as you are significantly more incentivized through lower opportunity costs to acquire just enough currency to reach a higher gear level, which will become cheaper for the vast majority of items.

9) Almost EVERYONE, not just the current group of players who use trade sites, will acquire ALL of their gear upgrades exclusively through the Auction House.

If you defeat tedium you defeat the game and if you defeat the game.. well we might all end up with nothing to do but experience the content within.. the content tedium works so hard to hide from us.