Is Mirror Farming good for POE trade economy and player's enjoyment?

Higher investment should yield more profits my problem is the severe disparity between average player running maps and juicers. Jonathan himself said that the disparity between the best players and worst player should be somewhere around 10x in loot which I agree with that is fair. If I know more about scarabs and allflame I should be rewarded for that but I shouldn't be dropping a f***ing mirror per map. It's hard to be motivated to play the game when you KNOW that you're getting 1000x less loot because you chose to play the game normally or don't have an OP build that can afford to run magic find gear.

thx for your ingenious approaches to analizing the player vibes of the 1% who plays past kitava. Very serious, and exemplary ethics/disclosures to make clear intentions and bias

Income and wealth disparity helps player motivation when the disparity is small. Players are rewarded for knowledge and effort, and others have motivation to get to that point when they perceive it as attainable. When that disparity is large that does not look attainable to those not already there, so they're heavily demotivated. Players posting that this "is the first time they could afford X or Y" is actually a completely separate issue. You can lower the wealth disparity and ALSO increase the total generation as a whole. Essentially Necropolis is causing the entire economy to generate magnitudes more divines and cards/uniques than a normal league.... but all of that stuff is going to a few people only... so anything not being generated by that is instantly out of reach for anyone NOT doing the same strategy.

And btw of course the more you invest the more returns you should expect. But there needs to be limits, and diminishing returns. MF can and should exist, while still being heavily nerfed. MF should be an option, for a little bit of a higher chance to get better loot ; as opposed to feeling mandatory and create that much FOMO because of how overpowered it currently is. At least it shouldn't be how it is now.

Economy is something that moves and shifts - nearly a living breathing entity. Reminded of Chris Wilson's comments regarding diversification :) So I don't know that 'ruined' is a proper way to look at it... Maybe not what people wanted/expected/planned for. Unanticipated shifting's in supply and demand. But not 'ruined'. Yes - totally okay with those having more time/knowledge/gear/luck/whatever potentially reaping exponentially in comparison to others. Trade excitement - chaos/volatility usually provide scaling opportunities that are not always present :)

11 hours after this video everything got nerfed to the ground. You made it, im really proud of you G3

For me personally, the economy in a vacuum has always been fascinating and I never had problems adapting. The scarcest of economies and the most hyperinflated one present equal opportunities for huge wealth aquisition. My concerns are more related on how the shifts in the economy affect gameplay and overall how good the base game is. We got a lot of changes to how we approach the endgame... scarab and atlas tree rework, the removal of sextants, the addition of t17 maps, how moving access to uber to said t17 maps had trickle down effects to normal boss fights, guardian rotations viability, etc... I hope this wave of hype around t17 juicing dies down and we can get back to talking how the endgame for mapping and bossing right now is kind of bad. How vertical stacking of scarabs on a single league mechanic kills creativity and discourages experimentation with different combinations of mechanics and atlas trees. If I were to describe Affliction and Necropolis side-by-side, since they both seem to have the same style of economy and loot craziness on one strat.... Affliction was a sprinkle of craziness applied to a good solid base game that cranked it up to 1000. Necropolis has a gimmick (the anarchy alflame) that bandaids a stale questionable and frankly kind of bad endgame. Juicers are excited now and all discussions are focused around one strat, but what happens when 3.24 is over? We complain in 3.25 and wait for 3.26 for ggg to make changes because nobody pointed out that some things are not where they should be this league? Went on a bit of an off-topic rant there. Great video. Cool points. I personally keep coming back to poe leagues for 11 years now because this is the type of game that rewards accumulated game knowledge and experience. The moment that changes is the moment I move on.

In general, the gap between high-end farming and low-end farming has become far too wide. But this is something that can be solved through balancing. But what you shouldn't forget is that PoE is a game about trading and crafting What we call currency has two factors that determine its value. First there is supply and demand, and then there is the practical value as a material for crafting. Because producing items is so complicated and expensive, the majority of players have found it very convenient to simply farm materials, sell them, and then simply buy a finished item. Especially Essence, there are players who have sold thousands of them across various leagues but only used a maximum of 20 pieces to make Items themselves. I see this as an opportunity to finally get into crafting without becoming poor if something doesn't work out. And here's the icing on the cake: the more players learn how crafting works, the greater the demand for materials and the price for them increases again.

I had emmpy's stream on my TV in the background for a week. They were frequently talking about fubgun crying about not making money during the first week. Never heard of him before, I really don't care about other players and went to SC SSF ages ago just because it feels like I'm not in competition even though in fact it makes no difference than being in trade and not using it much. The base game loot not investing feels quite thin ATM. I just completed my atlas have the watch stones to work on but I am collecting scarabs and planned on doing the first week exile strat. Sounds like there are some serious buffs to amplify that. I am finding this league a lot of fun, and it has been over a year. Heist and one where you squished items together were leagues this fun. Good meta build available and a farmable mechanic :)

I think everyone can probably agree that more investment should produce more rewards. I think the question though is how that should scale.

Ill also add, the big strat that is tanking item prices in this case has a major accessibility issue in that it is crashing major streamers instances sometimes, and your average player even if they could afford to run the strat is likely not going to have a PC capable of running it.

If we're talking economy, then I think its important to keep the "trickle down" effect in sight. In Affliction literally everyone could do MF. That caused a lot of people to try it and therefor drive up prizes of everything else, to the point where literally every single alch&go strat yielded 20 div/hour. We dont know yet how this league will develop, we are assuming that the top tier MF content is so incredibly straining on both your character and your hardware that a lot less players will be able to do it, therefor limiting this trickle down effect. If 0.1% of players make mirrors/day whilst everyone else is at the usual 5div/hour it feels bad. Wether that will hold true or not we shall see

The level of investment to do the 10 mirror strat is not only in game, you need a really top end PC to be able to do it. I am fine with high investiment high reward when it is time and in game money.

I think one major issue right now is that the low end strategies for generating currency has been flooded. As someone pointed out, essence used to be a reasonable way to generate wealth which you could then reinvest. Likewise, scarabs used to be a good way to make some currency. Yes there are opportunities still, but largely everything were used to is worthless making it hard.

I often enjoy Crazy economies because it throws what is normal out of the window and force you to think how to take advantage of it. and you end up doing strategies that you would never do normally .

I do think higher investment should equal greater rewards. This is at a whole new level, where its crashing the economy. In what league, where HH is still a highly desirable belt, be 24 divines in week 2? FOMO is really hitting hard, and i think some of us will try the strat to get all the endorphins from all the loot.

More investment should yield more, but not BY DROPPING 1000x MORE STUFF, but by dropping 1.2 or 1.5 or 2.0 more stuff. Now there is exponential increase, there are strategies that getting more drops from 1 map, as others from 500 maps. the proportion is just to extreme.

Necropolis problem is that in eddition to farming mirrors and t0 uniques we also have insane crafting, wich make other crafting methods almost unusable compared to affliction. In previous league i could farm almost anything for profit... Now... It`s hard, and forcing me if i wat to buy mageblood and other expencive stuff in resonable time into boss farming or mfing

Altho I agree magic find on gear should not be a thing in the game, the reason why I think it's bad is this: You don't have a way to tell if it's actually working. For all it's worth, it could be all rng. You could throw a complete MF on and run 10 maps and not get anything noteworthy, and feel like it's a dead stat. Too little of it is irrelevant and there's no way of knowing if you're over investing sacrificing your character's power in the process other than simply blowing up or not being able to kill stuff. It just feels bad, and it's also bad for build diversity, propping up again outliers that CAN sacrifice power to the almighty fomo stat (I call MF fomo stat, don't mind me). Not ONCE I felt happy making a MF set of gear, sure, loot is great and getting richt is great, but it's just taking away from the essence of the game, IMHO. Kill stuff, Get stronger, Kill Stronger stuff. We KNOW it works, but it doesn't gives a palpable good feeling like equipping an upgrade, every MF gear is, to me, a downgrade to make the game spit out more loot. It just doesn't feels good. In a sense, I wish MF was reworked to be like the idol statues in Bastion. You select what hindrance you want applied to you, and in exchange, you get something you want out of it. It'd be something a more proactive feedback. Maybe have it something you can craft onto an item, like instilling and enkindling orbs for gear, that adds extra experience or MF (tho I wish MF would be more along the lines of what the Heist trinkets do than this blanket stat) along with a random penalty on orb use or selectable with the crafting bench. NOW you have a real trade off and you can invest into what you think your build can tackle, even game the system a bit. Example: Then you could get creative, like, chance for rare item to be unique, chance for magic item to be fully linked, chance for currency x to drop as y, enemies gives x% more experience, chance for enemies to explode into quality currency, the sky is the limit. OTOH each of these would come with a downside based on slot, enemies are % faster if enchanted on gloves, enemies deal % more damage if enchanted on weapon, enemies are move %faster if enchanted on boots, etc. You got a system that you can customize your risk/reward, a new currency with a lot of value and something that won't take away from your power, in fact, only adding to the difficulty of the game. This might be just another bad take, but it is along the lines of what I'd like to see instead of what we have rn.

I feel like knowledge and investment should yield more reward, but the worst currency strategy should yield 4 d/h and the best 20d/h or something like that. The difference between top and bottom is too big.