Sad truth of the game
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POE1 as of late is just a den of Degen Gamblers the entire economy is fixed based on harvest gambling cards theres players who dont even play the game anymore they get enough gold to flip some currency buy a couple gold ROTAs and just gamble the entire league.
Step 1 aquire gold/currency to get started when reaching maps. Step 2 buy gold rotations and flip on exchange. Step 3 buy piss juice and just crash the economy gambling HoM. Step 4 maybe kill a boss. Last bumped on Feb 12, 2026, 6:51:58 AM
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I strongly challenge your presumption.
Yes, gambling exists in PoE, and there are some people who enjoy that; but I guarantee you that the amount of people who do nothing but gamble and flip currency at faustus can be counted on one hand; not to mention that they do not control the market, they are just a small but significant part of it. Most of the people who never leave the market are the guys who sit around crafting gear to sell, because its what they like to do, and even they are few and far between; you would be lucky to get more than a couple hundred of them in a league (and I say lucky because they provide an excellent service to the rest of us who aren't that interested in crafting instead of just spraying monsters). Just because you see some goofy weird stuff streamers and their communities get up to on occasion doesn't mean that it is the only thing players do, nor does it have any need to have any bearing on your own enjoyment of the game where you are free to play however you want to. Any ire you feel for the 5 or 6 people who might spend most of the league playing path of slot machines is purely your own anxiety finding a group you perceive as "other" and using them as a straw man to spiral. |
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Without players actually playing the game as it is intended to be played, there would be no market in the first place. If regular players were not bringing items into circulation, there would be nothing for anyone else to trade, gamble with, or profit from. The entire economy rests on the foundation created by people who simply play the game.
As the other user mentioned, the number of players who focus purely on gambling is relatively small, and they do not meaningfully affect the broader economy. The players who truly shape and sustain it are those who actively engage with the game and generate items through normal gameplay. In some very niche cases, certain individuals may attempt to monopolize mirrors, mirror tier items, or the crafting materials required to produce them for their own purposes. However, this exists within an already highly specialized corner of the market and has little impact on the vast majority of players. In reality, both groups ultimately feed back into the economy. Players who gamble still purchase items that others have farmed or crafted, and those attempting to control a narrow high end market rely on goods and materials supplied by the broader player base. Rather than undermining the economy, they circulate currency and contribute to the demand for the products created by players who actively put items into the market. Hobby Gamer and Professional Software Engineer & Systems Architect from Tennessee
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe“ - Albert Einstein |
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Its like a tradition for me to gamble away all my divs at the end of the league though. If it poofs I quit, if I make a free mageblood/mirror I give it away to a friend or random person in global 420 chat and quit. Its pretty fun.
Lifelong NEET, loud and proud about it.
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" point? “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
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isnt div card gambling a zero sum game? for every card made by one person a card is lost by another so the end result is not actually more cards?
for me im not really worried about the card gambling specifically that much because afaik theyre destroying as many cards as they make, for me its the fact so many cards drop and so much comes from them. i feel like were back at a point where if i play a map ive got zero hope of a cool item dropping. theres loads in the economy and theyre all there through bullshit like cards, the tree, extreme niche juicing tactics etc, these other means of getting items outside of just rolling a regular map with some regular juice and running it. so all the cool things to chase are flooding the economy from other sources rather than just people playing the normal game. i remember in open beta 2013 finding a kaoms heart, finding a lioneyes glare, these really expensive cool chase uniques and it was amazing, finding a mjolner. you cant find anything now because the supply in the economy seems like 95% cards/bullshit weird mechanics. its got to the point where it sort of feels like d3/d4, games where theres no chase loot to realistically hope for when you just play regular content. i dont rly buy the full "theres no loot" thing cause i think theres tons of good loot and if you play self found you can absolutely do everything, the game provides. but specifically the high end chase stuff, theres an amount of it thats acceptable to exist in the economy and it feels like very little of that dropping as an item from a random mob in a normal endgame map. its from div cards, its from crafting with 5 mirrors worth of currency, its from the latest league mechanics item/currency/div card printer. all these things i can farm myself to some extent from specific maps and specific content and then trade my way into more of what i need but the game feels kind of shit when i dont feel like i can kill the next random mob i find in a map and hes might drop a mageblood or a sin or an amazing bis rare item, and i do think thats a sad truth. I love all you people on the forums, we can disagree but still be friends and respect each other :)
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" Mostly, yes. You're correct about the amount of divcards not changing since it's 50:50. However, yellow juice gets burned and no divcards are getting turned in for the resulting item but divcards are also the lowest source of those items so the impact is minor. " I'd say this is partially correct. The game has shifted to hyperspecific farms and you having to enable loot yourself by making very specific choices since sextants got removed. Right now the knowledge hurdles are massive and copying strats 1:1 is fairly bad past the entry stage. That's why people love strongboxes so much even though it's objectively bad profit but it requires close to zero knowledge and adds no difficulty.
example for the curious
  From one monster: ~450scarabs ~60 unique 6ls value: 40-60d The only recommendation I can give right now is: go explore, go experiment. There's plenty of wild stuff out there that has zero guides nor any information available. Last edited by Scarletsword#4354 on Feb 12, 2026, 5:59:31 AM
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" Correct. OP is falling for sensationalism bias, where they think something is happening far more than it is simply because the exciting outcome is the one that gets reported. It's the exact same as the people who think their account has a bad RNG seed because they haven't dropped a mirror, and they see people posting mirror drops on reddit and youtube. A solid foundation in statistics is pretty important before you try to understand economics. |
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" i cant see that pic cause imgur is blocked in the uk for some stupid reason sadly mate. i get what ur saying, thing is i personally dont really need to go find a way to get tons of loot, i got piles of divines and mirrors and stuff, just more stuffs than i could ever use. so im good in terms of the things i have. im just talking more in terms of playing the game and its overall state, i dont think people should need to go experiment, i dont think its healthy for an arpg to have all the really special stuff locked behind doing some sort of stupid thing and just the act of rolling a map, throwing in a scarab or 2 and then playing being a completely void experience where you cant really hope to find a mageblood because the way to get one is hyper farm stupid cards in specific places with a whole list of other boosting bullshit happening and then you go gamble and you either lose it all and dont have a mageblood or you win and make 3 magebloods and thats how magebloods get into the economy, along with valdos maps and the tree shitting them out and blah blah blah. the gameplay loop of an arpg is you just load a zone go in kill some monsters and some cool items drop. a belt from a card turn in is a shit experience imo, a belt actually dropping from a mob is cool. some guys with giga juice dropping 1000000 uniques per map while everyone running normal content normally are playing a game where they just dont ever hope to find really cool stuff is a really shit state for the game to be in. i cant see the pic but a monster shouldnt be dropping 400 scarabs and 60 uniques, a monster shouldnt be dropping a ton of stuff with 60d value and thats where items in the economy are coming from. 1 guy getting that monster while 100 clueless people play the game 'normally' and feel like theres no hope of getting what the game used to have which was the super chase uniques everyone wanted dropping, people would mirror rare items that had dropped for someone once upon a time. its a really unhealthy state imo, thats not me saying i dont have stuff so i need to go find how to get stuff, im just looking at how the game generates stuff right now and saying i think its trash, the games completely lost its way. i want to balance that tho with the understanding that self found is fine, i dont buy the idea the game is balanced around trade. but i think the super rare chase stuff is balanced around trade economy existing, that would be fine if everyone running maps was just in there, everyones mob can drop a chase unique, if i kill 10x more mobs than you i get 10x more chance for it. but its not really like that, i dont think most chase stuff is directly dropping from a mob at all in normal content its either dropping from a mob whos juiced to hell and drops so much that it completely skews the game to i get 10,000x the chance to get the item and these other 1000 people get nothing or its cards and trees and just crap mechanics. i remember finding a mjolner when a mjolner was a thing, i remember finding a voltaxic spine bow when it was first super hype chase and i found it in merciless docks or something? i didnt need a 4 divine per map investment strategy to enable chase items to appear in my game, i didnt turn in some cards i got from a farming strat + yellow gamba and just get handed the thing by a vendor at the end of it all, it didnt fall out of some stupid tree i killed a monster playing basic content and it dropped a unique spine bow, it was amazing. it was what an arpg should be, this game hasnt felt like that in so long. I love all you people on the forums, we can disagree but still be friends and respect each other :)
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As long as gambling costs juice you inevetably go broke if you do it often enough, so there is no problem. THe only problem is how can they afford the gold carries? Do they pay it with currency from actually playing the game or are they abusing cross trade or you know what?
But gambling is a currency deleting machine. Someone will always go lucky, but you cannot win this in the long run, you will always go broke even if the odds a fair because of the fixed juice cost. It's math. Last edited by Strickl3r#3809 on Feb 12, 2026, 6:54:08 AM
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