Path of Exile

Dev Diary: Rethinking Gold as a Currency​

• Gold Sinks: Games that use gold incur high inflation unless they have sufficient gold sinks in the form of mandatory expenses such as item repairs, paying to revive characters or continuously buying potions. These sinks are generally an unnecessary obligation and can be frustrating if a player is low on gold.
• Gold Farmers: Online RPGs often get infested by gold farmers who play the game to accumulate large quantities of gold that are then sold to other players. If gold is the main currency, it’s very simple to perform gold-accumulating tasks to supply the secondary market.
• Wealth Determinism: Earning a steady quantity of gold from monsters killed helps to re-enforce the treadmill feeling that many online RPGs suffer. People’s net worth in gold is directly proportional to the amount of time they have invested playing. This highly linear wealth gain can cause a sense of disillusionment when trying to save up a large amount of gold for a purchase – it’s apparent to the player how long it’s going to take to grind for it.
• Trade Parity: With a common gold currency, it’s easy for players to know and demand the current market value for an item. If the trade occurs at a value that differs from the current perceived market value, then one of the players feels that they got ripped off.

• Homogeneity: Each unit of the currency has to be equivalent to other units. They should stack together, and there should never be a reason for a player to discriminate between two different units of that currency.
• Utility: The individual currency items have specific uses in addition to their trade value. If the recipient of the currency item is able to use it to improve their character, then it’s even better for them to trade for. The economic value represented by its scarcity is just an added bonus so that they are able to on-trade it if they decide not to consume it themselves.
• Scarcity: The currency should not be trivial to find. Some popular in-game barter items represent days or weeks of playing, and provide meaningful trade material for very high-end items. Other barter items are more common (cropping up every half hour or more) and allow for granularity with lower value trades.
• Handleability: It should be convenient to transport or transact with a large portion of your net worth as currency.

• Sinks: By having every currency item inherently useful to improve a character, each currency item is its own sink. In our experience with Path of Exile, a majority of currency item trades end with the item being immediately consumed by the recipient. This also means that unnecessary gold sinks like repairing items can potentially be removed from the game.
• Gold Farmers: Although it’s still possible to farm currency items with unskilled labour, it’s substantially more complicated. Having to manage an inventory of dozens of different items with fluctuating rarities is a much larger ordeal that is difficult to deploy en-masse. Real players won't have a problem with this because they know more about the game.
• Wealth Determinism: A character’s wealth is determined by the sum of both his available currency items and also any items that he may have for trade. The unpredictable acquisition of both currency items and trade-worthy equipment helps mask the treadmill feeling that occurs when you can predict your gold gain per quest or per minute.
• Trade Parity: The relative value of currency items fluctuates constantly as new and interesting applications are found for them. It’s also subjective for each player – they all have own current item goals and each currency item may help them achieve that goal in a different way. Players can accept these barter trades because they either meet an immediate need for a currency item to use or because the items are of roughly equal value and can be later traded to someone else.

• Scroll of Wisdom: Identifies a magic, rare or unique item. People actually do trade these.
• Whetstone: Increases the quality of a weapon. For example, it can upgrade a +10% damage sword to +13%. These quality values cap at 20%.
• Armour Shard: Increases the quality of an armour piece.
• Orb of Augmentation: Adds a mod to a magic item that has only one prefix or suffix. For example, it could turn Short Sword of Frost into Sharp Short Sword of Frost.
• Orb of Transmutation: Upgrades a base item into a magic item. It could turn a Recurve Bow into a Burning Recurve Bow of Anger.
• Jeweler’s Orb: Randomises the socket arrangement on an item.
• Orb of Alchemy: Upgrades a base item into a rare item.
• Chaos Sphere: Rerolls a rare item to have new random properties.
• Exalted Orb: Adds a mod to a rare item, if it has less than the maximum.