The economy of loot

After your talk yesterday with Ghazzy and Darth Microtransaction, it struck me that you don’t seem to see an issue with the current state of loot, crafting, and trading in the economy.

Let me give you an example that really hit me hard.

I’ve been playing PoE2 since launch on December 6th, nearly every day. Not crazy hardcore, but I’ve logged 9 days of playtime on one character—216 hours on a Spark Stormweaver, which, let’s be honest, is one of the easier builds.

For the past 100 hours or so, I’ve felt completely stuck. I’ve kept grinding, running maps, burning through my orbs crafting, and bumping up my item rarity and quantity stats, but I rarely feel any progress. No matter what I try, it feels like I’m treading water. Worse yet, the more guides I followed and defense layers I stacked, the easier it felt for monsters to delete me. Even with ~7k ES and 2.5k mana on a “safe” class, progression felt nonexistent.

What really stood out to me is how disconnected the guides and builds are from what’s achievable for the average player. Most guides start with, “You just need 100 divines for this” or “300 exalts, no problem.” It’s never, “Here’s how you can gradually craft or progress toward this over time.”

Yesterday, I spent the entire day trading, following NickTew’s budget build guide to the letter. Before that, I was comfortably running T18s, but they felt slow and clunky. After 8 hours of trading and optimizing gear, I’m flying through maps now. Those 8 hours of trading gave me more power and progress than the 200+ hours of grinding and crafting I’d put in before.

Trading shouldn’t feel like the whole cake; it should be the cherry on top. The core gameplay loop—loot drops, crafting, and grinding—should be rewarding enough that trading becomes optional, not mandatory. Right now, trading is everything. Loot and crafting feel secondary, almost irrelevant unless you’re in the top 5% of players swimming in currency.

Crafting, in particular, needs a way to be more deterministic and accessible. League mechanics can add unique crafting options, but the base crafting system should still allow players to fix their gear in meaningful ways as they progress. You could limit outcomes by character level or item level to prevent low-level players from crafting insane gear, but there should always be ways to steadily improve your items—without requiring 50+ divines or the stars aligning on random mods.

Right now, loot feels like an afterthought. Mark mentioned in PoE1 that many players don’t even bother picking up items anymore. But in PoE2, that problem feels even worse because it’s not about crafting being dead—it’s about trading being the only path forward. For most of us, every item we pick up is just vendor trash or chaos recipe fodder.

If you want to improve the game for all players, consider designing the loot and crafting economy as if trading didn’t exist. Give players a way to steadily progress through effort and investment—be it playtime, crafting, or grinding. Not everyone needs BiS gear, but there should be consistent and satisfying ways to grow your character from levels 1 to 100. Trading can remain a cherry on top, or an extra reward for pinnacle boss farmers, but it shouldn’t be the entire cake.

That’s my take on the current economy. After 200 hours of grinding, those 8 hours of trading shouldn’t have been the defining moment for my character’s progress.

For me, that feels fundamentally wrong.
I'm a little scared that I'll get used to it, that in 10 years I'll justify it as part of the game.

Trade in PoE2 should be closed! It`s produce inflation, create lots of illegal pages with selling. Trade always was trouble for game and in the end always was nail for coffin....

I don’t think trading itself needs to be removed. However, the loot economy and progression need to be designed as if trading didn’t exist. Trading should feel like the cherry on top—something supplementary, not the primary way to progress. The game should give me the tools to build up my character through time investment, effort, and a bit of loot luck.

Right now, my experience has been that I’ve replaced nearly every item through trading, and I’ve never found or crafted anything close to the items I traded for. Trading with clan members, friends, or even randoms is fine in principle, but here’s the problem: I’m left feeling like I’ll never be able to craft or find something that gives me a genuine sense of progression or makes my time feel worthwhile.

And without features like an armory or easy respecs, we’re stuck playing hundreds of hours on the same character, so there should be a stronger feeling of reward for the grind. Grinding can be fun and rewarding—but only if the game provides the proper tools for it. And those tools need to serve all players, not just the top 5%.

If there were enough deterministic ways to make your character stronger, the top-end grind could still be fun with some slot-machine mechanics. But that’s not how things work right now.

In my opinion, we need a crafting system like Last Epoch or Diablo IV—a vendor or crafting bench that offers deterministic crafting. It could still have limitations, randomness, or a pool of potential affixes and suffixes, but it would let me craft items tailored to my character’s needs. The power of these crafts could scale with item level to avoid being overpowered in early content. For example, I could use materials I find at level 5 and others I find on maps to craft progressively better gear.

The current affix and suffix pools desperately need an overhaul. Right now, most items roll into complete trash far too often.

Magic find, too, shouldn’t feel mandatory. It should be a nice bonus—not something that defines a playstyle. Honestly, I found Jonathan’s argument that magic find “enables a different playstyle” misleading at best. It’s just a big annoyance.

If the devs want to enable diverse playstyles, the passive tree needs to be more meaningful, and class design needs work. For instance, a class like Stormweaver shouldn’t be pigeonholed into just lightning builds as the meta. Every class and ascendancy should have at least 3–5 viable, meta-level builds with totally different approaches. That’s what creates true build diversity.

Ultimately, the goal should be this: I should always feel like I have a reasonable chance to find or craft the items I need. And when I can’t, I’ll buy one item through trade—not all of them. But right now, I’ve traded for 9 of my equipped items and found or crafted only one. That ratio should be reversed.

I love watching guides and builds—not to copy them exactly but to learn and adapt ideas to my own playstyle. Unfortunately, what I’ve learned is this: the only way to feel progress is through trading. And that just feels wrong.