89. Path of Exile 2 Economy Review

I previously did a review of the POE 2 economy... in 2011. I know one of the founders of GGG has read it, but it seems the game director has not. Has anything changed in 14 years?

In 2011 I called my prediction paper on the Diablo 3 real money auction house and it’s (detrimental) effects on the overall performance of the game “Smedley’s Dream Part 1&2”. This made it harder for search engines to find it, but it was too good a joke to pass up. I would call this paper “Smedley’s Dream Part 3”, but AI wouldn’t get the joke.

The Blizzard player base repeatedly posted my article on Battle.net asking Blizzard to respond to my paper, both before and after all of my predictions came true. Blizzard responded by deleting any threads with my articles or name in them. By then they had interviewed me twice, and would interview me two more times in later years. None of those interviews went well, and the more recent lawsuits against Blizzard confirmed my perceptions of the sort of people I was meeting with.

Note that I’ve never played Diablo 3, but I didn’t need to in order to predict how the game would perform.

A few years after that paper I was called by one of the founders at Grinding Gear Games, I think it was Chris Wilson. He wanted to know if I could help his studio. I think the timing was bad as at the time I didn’t see the operation as serious enough to warrant a relocation to New Zealand. Now I wish I had taken it more seriously because by 2016 I didn’t feel safe in the USA. The mathematical odds of the death threats I was receiving becoming real was approaching 100% and I tried very hard to get out. Just a few months before I did get out (to Australia, so pretty close to New Zealand) I was attacked and hospitalized twice in Austin Texas, just 3 months between the two attacks.

So in 14 years has anything changed? Well POE 2 is a far superior product to anything Blizzard has produced, so that has certainly changed. I have played all 6 available classes beyond level 20. But as far as the business model they are using, it’s essentially Smedley’s Dream version 3.0. So that part is unfortunately the weakest link in the product. It also is acting predictable just like the Diablo 3 real money auction house (Smedley’s Dream 2.0) and Smedley’s original 2005 Station Exchange (Smedley’s original Dream).

I don’t want to repeat the 2011 paper here since it is all still 100% accurate. But I will go over what that looks like in POE 2. YouTube is flooded with videos on how to break the game with “perfect builds” that take advantage of various mathematical exploits. The game is balanced with the assumption that you will use similar builds so this unfortunately forces new players to watch dozens of hours of videos in order to progress even half way through the game.

These builds require the player to buy a LOT of expensive gear on the game’s auction house. External sellers (RMT3) are pounding the economy 24 hours a day, mostly selling Divine Orbs which are used to trade for any other gear on the auction house. The influencers making the videos, none of them admit how much they have spent to create the builds they show you. This is misleading as casual viewers might be put off if they knew “This build costs $300 USD. This other build costs $1000. Elon Musk hired someone(s) to play his account all day and his gear is probably well over $10,000.”

Thus even someone with minimal gaming skills can run around with a Level 97 character (max level is 100), negating any prestige associated with progression. And the game is balanced on the developer side from the assumption that players will do this because in order to “balance” the economy you have to balance to the top players, not the bottom players (the latter have minimal effect on the economy). Thus the game difficulty is set so high that regular casual players will die repeatedly to bosses which is very frustrating.

So how did GGG end up here? That’s actually a very easy question as they’ve admitted their thought process. Well, to be specific, Game Director Johnathon explained in a recent interview that the requirement for the auction house forced a number of design decisions that he considered mandatory. Like the difficulty level and the low drop rates, which forced players onto the auction house. Analysis: he’s never bothered to spend the 30 minutes to read my paper explaining how real money auction houses work, which has been in circulation for 14 years and has been read by millions of people including his cofounders. Since he’s a cofounder, people are not likely to question his judgment, especially if a culture of Toxic Positivity is in place.

So what happens next in POE 2? The top players are all playing professionally, earning Divine Orbs and selling them on the market. It is very rare that I watch an influencer video where the influencer talks about “fun”. The focus is on overcoming the high difficulty in the game. As the top players become increasingly adept at breaking the game, the market will flood with Divine Orbs and at some point (very soon) it will no longer be profitable to play the game. That makes purchases cheaper for the more casual players, but then they will in turn lose interest as described in my original 2011 paper.

The only way around this for casual players is to not use the auction house. There is a feature called “Solo Self Found” (SSF) that partitions the player away from the taint of the auction house. That allows a player to enjoy the game much longer. You will never see an influencer or Elon Musk on SSF. None of these people are playing for fun, their actions are performative. Once I realized this feature was in the game, I started over, abandoning hundreds of levels of characters, and created 6 new characters on SSF. There the game is fun, but the intense immersion levels required leave me fatigued so the game is not practical to play as I can’t afford to play games that fatigue me that much, with my busy professional schedule. If Elon Musk has more free time than I do, then more power to him.

It’s a shame they went this Path (pun intended) since it could cost them ~$100M per year with the otherwise very high production quality and gameplay design prowess shown. Maybe if they read my papers and then promoted SSF at a lower difficulty level (which they can do since SSF is for fun, not profit, and doesn’t touch the global game economy), the game would be more accessible to their target audience. They would also have to come up with an alternative monetisation model for SSF players, other than their “inventory hell” model that forces players to buy bags.