Currency switch - social experiment

Hi everyone!
Briefly what this thread is about.

In real world, today, there is a currency instability already happening, but the definitive flip, such as with the announcement of Exalted and Divine Orbs is unforeseeable. When an announcement comes in your news, it will likely take the course we saw in the trade ourselves in the past several days.


*Main currency of PoE changed
*Exalted Orbs were starting to lose value rapidly
*Divines were gaining value but slower than Exalted Orbs were losing it
(showing reluctance, resistance, conservation, fear of instability, chaos)
*PoE has been online soon close to 10 years, and has had an economy that has kept mimicking the real world, with a known currency of Exalted Orbs and a steady inflation (e.g. price of Mirror of Kalandra has kept steadily increasing)

GGG can use their trade site to analyze the transition, but how likely do you think it is that they will show us graphs of this transition.


You could argue that I'm an idiot for bringing this up here, since if you're witty, you can take your notes from the process we saw over the past days over multiple PoE trade related sites. I got some notes, but I get the sense that I'm missing some valuable points.

The insight that I'm missing is how people with different wealth numbers reacted. And who were the ones that controlled the exchange rate between Divines and Exalted Orbs, and how many of them were, and how fast their targets were met.



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I suppose most are familiar with these points:

* exchange all possible 6 links you can find to Divines (buy straight, cards, maps)
* buy anything expensive that is still sold in Exalted Orbs
* use a middle-man currency that was in worse condition/chaos than the rest of the currencies, to get from Exalted to middle-man, to Divines with less losses
* finish your crafting projects by throwing Exalted Orbs at it

I was dragged along with the transition since I wasn't rich enough, but I had enough to create at least some buffer. Those who have less, have a smaller buffer and take greater losses.

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All thoughts/ideas on how to maybe launch a poll on this or survey or basically anything that can lead us to more detailed view of this. Of course GGG, if you see this, you're also welcome to share it :D

I do think it's interesting if you look at how fast high priced items in EX got pulled off the market by standard players when the change got revealed. There is barely anything in searches listed in EX at the higher end price range now.

At any rate none of this stuff is something to worry about for 90% of players who didn't have tons of EX to worry about losing value in anyway.

I'd guess most standard players benefit from the change because of how many tabula they have to vendor for divines now that will be usable on crafting in the future.

A lot of comments in global chat about "this is why we need blockchain" and "fiat currency" and Zimbabwe's economic collapse show what people are thinking about the changes.

One guy pointed out that this is exactly the sort of thing that governments do to retaliate against groups they don't like, at vast cost to the rest of society. The example bandied about was when the Indian central bank suddenly invalidated one or more large denomination banknotes as worthless, ostensibly to curb smuggling, or counterfeiting, or funding of extremist gangs.

The net effect was to wipe out the savings of millions of citizens overnight, and cause panic and runs on independent banks. Meanwhile, counterfeiters, international criminals, and pirates were, as always, virtually unaffected by this change.

I am not saying this currency change is "ruining millions of lives" or that we, as PoE players, are not already comfortably in the top 1% of the world's economy with the leisure to get bent out of shape about a virtual currency's posted value. It's pretty funny to be fair, watching young, healthy people enjoying uninterrupted electricity and home climate controls long enough to farm ex and then pitch a fit when something upsets the value of the ex.

But to be fair again, these aren't small changes, and they definitely reward the haves vs. the have-nots, because with any economic disaster, it's those who already have their basic needs taken care of, that are better able to weather the loss of future earnings. What matter is it if your 10k exalts lose 80% of their value overnight, when in fact you still have 30+ quad stash tabs to store various rares with good rolls to take to the lake? Compared with the fellow who has 4 tabs total, who will have to vendor or leave things behind getting far less value out of his league than the first guy.

Or in standard, if you have 1000 ex, you probably also have a full set of harvest crafted quant gear and a legacy IIQ gem and other rarity/quant boosters to recover faster than the guy who was just newly rich and saving up to buy a mageblood or HH or legacy sadima's.