Why Did the Listing for Alchs Trend Die off in Path of Exile?

Posted by Richard Betts on April 4th, 2018

Search engines like poetrade essentially do a lot of work ahead of time. They precalculate filters and sort orders and such so that each unique search doesn't require the server to loop through every item in the system in order to determine what should be on page 2 of your specific result. However, this means you need to have that sort order available ahead of time, and in Poetrade's case, this means it needs to have the chaos-equivalent price for every item when it does the initial precalculation (aka "indexing"). You will never regret to poe currency trade, action now!

Updating the chaos ratio means that previous indeximg is no longer valid, and it has to be re-run. This is an expensive operation, and will likely cause reduced performance on the servers involved. It's highly dependent on the exact scale and hardware involved, but it's not something that you'd want to do often. In fact, you'd want to minimize how often you'd have to do it.

It's totally understandable and probably the correct strategy to hard-code some basic historical ratios and only update them as needed. If people are abusing odd ratios, it might be necessary to update those, but an automated hourly pull and reindex could really bog down a system that's already having to ingest a firehose of item data. I do list some of my maps in Chisels so I don't have to do the exchange myself. It's just much more simple for me. Doesn't mean I'm abusing exchange rates.

But I agree, I always scroll down to Chaos anyway or filter. VAALS are currently worth more than 1:1 chaos. DO NOT buy something for 1 Vaal if you can scroll down and buy for 1 chaos!