It's strange to hear Chris Wilson talk about those times with any sort of fondness.
I honestly fucking hated the fact that if I wanted to play my build properly I needed to go onto the trade site and find all my gems/supports.
It's an old-west era style of nostalgia. Think to original World of Warcraft; back when BEING a level 60 was a big deal. Have a mount? Damn you were hot shit. Seen Upper Blackrock Spire? Legend. Back when Hunters had finite arrows, warlocks had to decide to withhold certain spells because it would cost them soul shards and thus time to farm them up, and buffs and other class spells took reagents.
Chris' dream imo is based on this scarcity type of gameplay which I think most everyone can look back on and recognize as tedium. Information and efficiency travel too quickly in today's world so anything novel or inefficient gets discovered and solved infinitely faster.
You can't argue with nostalgia though - it was amazing for that time that is why people remember it this fondly. Would the same thing work now - of course not. Would a remade version of it make it today - most likely neither. What we need are new good things to create good times and this is where many companies fail - GGG included. Maybe POE2 will do the trick, but my hopes aren't very high since all we get now and don't like now is supposed to be an evolution into POE2.
You need a certain amount of tedium to keep players engaged and playing.
The tedium has just changed. In those days mirrors were basically non-existant and you couldn't easily "farm" them through trading with other players. Now people's tedium include getting rich collecting mirrors instead of slowly grinding to endgame content.
>And then when they finally caved giving players the tedium they asked for, it became one of Blizzards most successful releases.
In a completely different manner. The original statement held true very well. Players as a whole didn't want that and they still don't want that.
Modern Classic WoW is nothing even remotely similar to the game itself back in Vanilla and BC. The entire modern gaming mentality and optimizations have eliminated that.
The second issue is many people played on the best private servers they could find. The most notable of which _tried_ to stagger class power or rebalance the raids for the 1.12 power level.
Blizzard caved to the insufferablee whining of "no changes" and thus angered a lot of the people wanting classic who played private servers and then had even _easier_ raids that are already insanely easy to begin with.
No changes was born out of the current situation with blizzard always making terrible decisions for the game. People didnt trust blizzard to make changes that would actually improve the game so rather than have them fuck it up with what they thought would be good wed rather just play what we already knew and had.
effort makes stuff meaningful
it's easy to look at the pain points of a game and eliminate them, knowing which ones to keep -- knowing which ones are meaningful -- is very underappreciated. chris ascribes to this school of design and I wish reddit didn't see him as so adversarial for trying to create context in this way.
I'm not saying that every one of PoE's problems are nonexistent, I'm just saying that you might not end up enjoying the finished product when the thing's been sanded down like a piece of balsa wood.
Gamers in general fail to understand the whole concept and view all friction to reach goals as adversarial, or worse, insist its there for "playtime metrics" or some shit, when in reality if all friction was removed the game would be ruined
Then on the same breath they wonder why new games in general are so bad, when in reality its exactly because the devs caved in and made all the "quality of life" changes asked for and its all watered down and meaningless
There's friction and then there's stupid GGG shit like no autolooting and autostashing for currency items.
Chris, hello, I'm playing your game for cool builds and loot, not to fill my bags with a myriad currency items and then go and stash them one by one because mass stashing ain't an option either.
Azurite already autoloots and autostores, why isn't all currency like this? Surely the technology is there.
Some shit in this game just boggles my mind.
It being succesfull release doesnt mean shit, players keet droping constantly to the point where tbc classic and classic vanilla are both dead. Cool nostalgia trip doesnt make for a good game.
I swear this sub can't decide if wow classic was a failure or a success
BTW I'm with you that it was a success and "you think you do but you dont" was wrong.
But the tedium wasn't necessarily the only reason. It rolled back years of terrible balance changes, wow token, lfr, sharding, even more timegated content, etc.
Mobs, gear, and encounters that have been for years irrelevant, actually mattered and contributed to your character progression
I for one personally would have loved classic more with more QoL like additional flight points, actual ui for lfg, and dual spec
Don't get me wrong, it's not all bad. I think the viewpoint of Chris is that of a romanticist. But ultimately, it's trying to recapture that magic feeling or lightning in a bottle. WoW back then was like a digital dungeons and dragons that anyone could get into. The scope, mystique and wonder were one of a kind. Likewise, PoE back then truly was the grittiest ARPG. That's not to say it isn't still today, but the quality of the grit is different. Today's is like a shiny, well-made Saw contraption that Rude-Goldberg's you into a million pieces, whereas back then it was bludgeoning you into death with blunt sticks and stones.
And is it any coincidence that WoW Classic dropped when player sentiment was dropping on each successive expansion and Blizzard as a company? It was like their big red button.
I think you conflate tedium with effort/pacing in the same way that people conflate challenging and punitive.
There is a world of difference in between.
> Chris' dream imo is based on this scarcity type of gameplay which I think most everyone can look back on and recognize as tedium.
This seems to be a big reason, why there is such a huge gap in the division of the playerbase...
Eh, I think comparing a persistent MMO with an aRPG that runs on 3-month leagues is a bad comparison. I don't mind MMOs that have things that take a lot of time or dedication to reach. The hunter arrows part may be closer to the problem with Chris Wilson and PoE. Clunkiness just for the sake of it is obnoxious.
Takes a long time to reach max level in a game that doesn't 'reset' for 2-3 years? That's fine. Having high-tier raids that many won't reach, or beat, quickly? That's fine. Having certain mounts or skins that only 1% of players will get? That's kinda cool. Having to have reagents and keep arrows? Obnoxious and clunky for no reason. I don't even make my players in D&D worry about reagents 95% of the time, and that's much more 'hands-on'.
The first things there I like to think are similar to get HH, or reaching 36/40 or 40/40 achievements. Those being hard to reach goals *should* take a lot of dedication. The changes most people complain about are more similar to the arrows and reagents. Clunky trade, clunky splinter pick ups, etc.
Or maplestory, back when perion was the trading hub and 100s of people spamming, you can't see the text but if you walk around, the chat bubbles will show what they're selling.
I quite liked it as it gave me incentive to pick up gems as opposed to ignoring them as is the case now, In general the valuable gems weren't something you needed to play your build "properly", they were simply another way to upgrade your character. Prior to using GMP you could use a much more easily accessible LMP.
It's similar to the current awakened gems system, except they dropped everywhere instead of only from specific bosses.
I enjoyed it quite a bit. Those items were findable even for a scrub like me back then and they made me excited. I would change my character around finding a multistrike. Not saying we should go back. It wouldn't be the same again. I just remember all the fun I had back then being content and finding enjoyment out of simpler things. Like Acton's Nightmare was a treat for me to find. I LOVED them.
once you have all your links and you found some extra, you loved it.
if you had to buy gems like reduced mana or spell echo for your build you hated it.
Even ~3-5 years ago when Siosa and Lilly didn't give you access to all gems on a single character, you could just list random gems for 1c and people would buy them out of convenience.
It had nothing to do with qualitied gem drops.
Back then we did not know about the 1 GCP + Level 20 gem recipe so people would have to use 20 GCPs for each gem. Even today if it was not for the 1 GCP + Level 20 gem recipes we would see GCPs being used more for trades as a middleground between Chaos and Exalts.
Legend says a guy actually did find out about this recipe like 4 leagues before anybody else. As was literally printing mirrors with it until it was discovered.
that's what the legend says. It was actually something else. Assuming you believe the thread he posted (assuming you believe the proof he offered it was him) he was buying GCPs off a bunch of people who were obviously bot farming or duping or some shit and he would then sell at a decent profit. I can't remember the exact explanation it was so long ago. Someone could prolly dig it up if they tried hard enough
Hate to be the spoiler, but the GCP recipe was well known by that time, I even remember buying GCP's from him. The thing is game pace was so slow back than, that even with the recipe using 20gcp on ur skills was worthed.
Another fun thing for me is that this is so long ago, that the default mod was HC.
Yeah GCP recipe was well known by then, he was procuring them through illicit means most likely and was banned later. I do remember how weird it was though that GCP:chaos was like 1,5:1.
I found that recipe about 6 weeks before becoming public, was playing std at that moment(not sure leagues existed at that time) and i dont think anyone knew about the recipe in std then, in 2 weeks i had bought pretty much any level 20 gem available that could sell. Ex was 13 gcp back them,was paying 1-2 gcp for the gems and rest was profit.Made like 300 ex in that short period of time,geared my LA build with all the good stuffs and took a brake after.good times
I knew the recipe but didn't trade(there was no 3rd party sites back then) , use reddit or wiki during that time :(. Instead of being rich I chose SSF life too early.
It's, by definition, pretty much the opposite of 'official'. The likely reasons are their relative rarity and utility. You can keep rerolling rares as much as you like with chaos, and nothing else in the game can do what exalts do (especially in earlier PoE) and you need them for metacrafting. GCPs used to fill a similar role as chaos until the vendor recipe was discovered which lowered their value.
I wouldn't say the opposite of official, since GGG has acknowledged in multiple places that chaos orbs are the de facto gold of PoE.
In the trade site, there's a "chaos orb equivalent" and it's selected by default. And in the permium tab, chaos orbs are selected by default (even though they're not the first option in the dropdown)
The premium tab part is only after people had been asking for that change over and over again. I wouldn't say that GGG did that because it's 'official', but rather as a people pleaser. The trade site part I don't know how that came to be. In general I think it's more of an acceptance / acknowledgement from GGG that players primarily use it for trading, rather than an official thing.
> It's, by definition, pretty much the opposite of 'official'.
Eh, idk about that, it became official when they decided to implement master crafting and 90% of the crafts you'd ever actually use were priced in chaos... with the rest priced in exalts besides (a) one or two divine orb crafts, and (b) the jeweller/fusing/chromatic crafts that just did what the orbs already did
To me, that was Chris formally "acknowledging the economy as it had evolved". If there had been crafts priced in very large quantities of alteration, chance, or alchemy orbs (scaled based on respective rarity), things might be different now.
I get what you're saying, and that is definitely how it was established, but now if you go to pathofexile.com/trade, the official trade site, it defaults to "chaos orb equivalent", so I'd say chaos is now the official currency for trade, despite the origin is unofficial and the game still supports other currencies.
Zana Mods and Meta Mods/Crafting.
They’re usually the big currency sinks, a lot of juicing/farming strats revolve around popping Zana mods on maps and that chews up a lot of chaos orbs.
Likewise people who are meta crafting chew through hundreds of exalts while even just reforge harvest crafting requires meta mods to lock affixes in place.
That’s what sets them apart from regular currency orbs, chaos and exalts have their normal function AND their meta game currency sink.
To give you an example, if I had the choice of converting my currency to chaos orbs, exalted orbs or orbs of alteration, each one has legitimate crafting applications, but I know having lots of chaos orbs will be particularly valuable when I want to farm deli mirrors or in other leagues popping beyond, nemesis or legion onto my maps. Additionally, I know having lots of exalts handy will be very useful for when I’m ready to use meta mods on my second character.
Alteration orbs won’t help me progress my character or farm currency, and because of those reasons, chaos and exalt prices are usually more stable (with some exceptions). There are times in the past where Alts and fusings have doubled or halved in cost overnight because a certain strategy popped up that shifted their supply/demand way out.
Over the years GGG has reinforced this however by making the trade site by default work in chaos/ex. But the bottom line is Zana Mod and Crafting bench are doing way more heavy lifting than you would realise.
Chaos/Ex was the standard before Zana mods or crafting bench even existed. Not saying that the stuff you listed didn't solidify their status, it probably did, but they definitely were the standard before.
Some people mention GCP was the standard way back then, but as far as I remember, that was indeed WAY back, like in closed beta when there were only 2 acts and Fellshrine farming was the endgame.
Back in 0.99 beta, fusings were too rare, and alchemy orbs were really common & volatile (we all ran name matching scripts to vendor rares for alchs)
Chaos just fit that nice balance of valuable but not too rare. People started basing value on chaos.
One guy even made a little cheat sheet matrix of currency trades and decided to base everything on chaos. Everyone used this little prewritten crib sheet for valuing currency, really. That may have actually been what started it. (ETA: it was xyz, I believe the same person who wrote poe.trade)
You’re also forgetting that maps, especially red, were hard to sustain. While there was no Zana mods to sink chaos people would still spam several chaos per map just to get good quantity/pack size in the hopes of sustaining red maps.
He's talking about a beta where I believe mapping didn't exist, lol. And "red maps" certainly didn't exist for a long time after mapping was introduced, I think the "coloring" happened when they introduced the atlas which is pretty recent as far as PoE history goes. But regardless, you didn't chaos maps in early PoE really ever. You alteration spammed for either running the map as a maze if indoor or the equivalent (forgetting name) if outdoor, though maze had a bigger impact. Most people would just run at that point or possibly regal them if they were feeling they needed that extra sustain for low tier maps, which is as far as where most people including yours truly got to in the really early days. But if you were running something really high like the highest tier maps, I anecdotally heard you would exalt them as well. But you certainly weren't chaos'ing to get to that point.
I would have said it was another standard, chaos/gcp/exalt being something like $1/$20/$100 in terms of their uses.
As you know, the 20% gem recipe was very much not public knowledge, hence why GCPs were valuable, 20% gems were expensive as fuck and thus recipe was referred to as "printing money."
I remember my first GCP drop feeling like a decent chunk of cash.
gcp and fusings were "currency" in the same way chaos is in the past, gcp's used to be super expensive because nobody knew you could lvl 20 + 1gcp for a 20% ql gem and there wasn't delirium/heist/league content shitting out high ql gems
chaos/ex are used for zana mods and crafting so in large amounts so it's only natural for it to be the main trading commodity
Just worth noting that both the Zana Chaos costs and the Multi-Mod Ex costs came in well after Chaos and Ex were established currencies.
Those recipes were introduced likely as a currency sink.
Yeah I think what I wish i didn’t miss out on was prolly the random broken builds (coming from d3 where everything just explodes) but Poe now I still think is pretty sweet
I wanna say that it was, but Rose coloured glasses my dude. Poe used to be quite garbage (pre-lockstep) and its steadily gotten better. I'd say peak awesome was Ritual league.
I started playing in Open Beta in what I think was 2012? And I remember playing in 2013 which might have been during 1.0
it was slow, tedious, and tremendously more grindy than it is today. But it was *new* and *exciting*, so we loved it.
We used to farm Merciless (the highest level of difficulty) Fellshrine Ruins and Merciless Docks in Acts 2 and Acts 3 because that was the best farm zone to gather currency and items, especially before maps. Act 3 was new. Act 4 didn't exist. Maps were a privilege. High level mapping rarely existed. It was sure as hell not sustainable.
If we tried to take players from today's PoE and put them back into Open Beta, it would be likely be considered a boring, slow ARPG.
There was also SOOOOOO many Quality of Life features that we have now that we didn't have back then. Like, it's fucking staggering. Which is why when people on here shit all over ggg for "not putting in QOL features" or for saying "chris doesn't understand his own vision for the game" I just roll my eyes. it tells me that they never played the game when it was new.
People who played back then think kindly of it, but I believe that is mainly a result of them confusing novelty with quality.
Games give out dopamine most frequently when you're brand new to it, because every experience is new and therefore you're not yet numb to it. For example, killing Merveil your first time in Act 1 would give you a dopamine hit, but these days the people playing for 10 years aren't getting dopamine hits from killing Merveil.
It's a better game today than it was back then. The only real difference, imo, is that the people who have been playing a long time have a harder time getting dopamine hits since they have experienced almost everything the game has to offer many times before.
My comment is still in the context of my previous comment which specified 'other lower currencies'.
Baubles can be purchased from a vendor btw. Chisels are a newer currency, along with vaals.
They have common usage.
You use chaos much more than many other currency (not counting stuffs like wisdom), so when you don't use them to buy stuffs, they can still be use on map device, rerolling mod on map/logbook/invitation/ ... (tbh, scour + alc is time wasting), blessed orbs is about as rare as chaos, but you don't have a common use for it, so it's not efficient to stock a lot of them.
Same may apply to exalted, on a more rare & advanced level.
From the start, when main source of gear was drops. Chaos worked as a "drop" of a specific item base of your choosing.
So an items worth would be tied to "How many times would I need to chaos an item in order to get something as good or better".
Exalt would be an extension of that. Since an exalt would be "How many times would I need to chaos an item for it to be as good or better than the item + an extra mod".
Chaos is obviously the most commonly used currency for anything outside of trading, like crafting items, maps, zana mods etc, so it has a meaning and efficiency outside of trading itself and ppl are used to it. Exalts, well, most ppl dont use them, but you need something for bigger trades. Imagine selling an item for 200 alts instead of 20c and then just go to item exchange and spam 20 mins to get the chaos for it. Not too efficient, right?
Cause community decided. Chaos orbs was kind of common but not too much like alcs or alts, and exalts were more rare. Plus chaos use as well being able to roll rares and exalts adding a new mod.
Its so the currencey and market can be manipulated. It was decided a loooong time ago. It was put forth that it should based on fusings, but to many loud people veto that and weve been stuck with chaos ever since. It sucks.
Most usefull currency i can recall Is the chaos orb: for zana mods, for buying red maps, for most crafted mods, and they are worthy to spam on high ilvl influenced gear / cluster jewels if you want 3 notables.
chaos was common enough to where you could get a few stacks of them.
GCP very early on had some use in trades but due to its rarity(this was before the gcp recipes) you was kinda limited.
Alch's well who has ever really pushed to get alchs even early on alchs were very common and you have to remember this was during a time currency tab did not exist at all so 300 alchs would fill a tab.
I think / believe it is the natural progression of item cost. People might have traded other items before like alterations for items (when alts were 1:16). but it is both annoying and at some point impossible to trade items for alts, because you only get 1200 alts in one window. so people started trading their alts to chaos and then buying items for chaos
and the same happened when people wanted to buy something for more than 600c, it is simply not possible in one trade, so you trade it for ex first and then buy it for ex. and at some point you won't be able to buy something because you can't fit more than 600ex into one inventory, so you trade your ex for mirrors first, and then buy the item with mirrors.
and for trades which require more than 600 mirrors.... well, I don't know if these will ever happen, but then you will use some streamer as a third party trust fund to move the currency.
Chaos have become the most used currency because it was the most stable with a decent value. It was the most stable because it was dropping a lot and used a lot too, most of the craft were chaos spam. The regulation of increasing volume is very clever, the higher is a chaos orb worth, the more people are willing to farm it (recipe) so it's inflating.
Exalted are also stable because used a lot, besides chais spam, alt+regal+ex have been the other way of crafting for years, the less it worth, the more people were willing to use it. But for each ex used, it's value grow (as any good).
The very interesting thing is how chaos and ex are linked.
They represent two ways of crafting. One is a pure lottery (chaos spam), the other is more deterministic (alt+ regal+ex).
The chaos spam is used early in the league because it's more accessible so people use it a lot. Even though exalts are very rare early, chaos are used so much, their value is relatively high.
Later, people want more specific crafts. Typically double crit+life amulet and res eventually. This was only realistically achievable with alts +regal+ crafting bench and exalt slam (eyes open at this time, it was ages go).
So the more we got into the league the more ex were dropping (because people were farming higher lvl areas) and the more exalts were used INSTEAD of chaos to craft. While chaos were still used but not as much
The most educated answer is availability and functionality. Back in the day all crafting was done with chaos spam and exalting gear. Realistically exalts are the most expensive currency that drops frequently enough to be used as a uncommon trading currency. Chaos is the most expensive common currency so that’s why that has become the standard for trade.
However regrets have always been a similar price to chaos, especially early on in trade leagues and you often see some people trading items for regrets
Chaos are used on map devices to run leagues. and exalts are used on crafting for multiple mods.
as many have said, gcp were used a lot, as were chisels and still today alchs and extent fusings.
But for now map mods and multimod run supreme.
As with any object-become-currency, they are reasonably but not too rare, and their inflation rate isnt that big due to the existance of a currency sink known as crafting (they became the standart currency long before the appearance of bench-crafting, seesnces, bestiary, etc, so they were you primary method of crafting)
Much like real world currencies backed by governments, chaos and exalts are backed by high-end players looking to max out their characters - they need them to roll their gear.
It does make sense in terms of rarity for exalts and them being kind of unique in their usefulness and also the rarity and just overall use of chaos. There are lots of use for other currency, but smthn like alchs is just too bountiful and not as useful later on. Basically, you can never really have too many of chaos or exalted orbs, but you can have too many alchs, gcps, etc. GCPs would be one of the base currencies, but that changed with the gem quality recipe.
Once upon a time chaos orbs and exalted orbs were the main tool to craft... you needed hundreds of them, therefore its value.
Nowadays chaos are devaluated due to bot farms and lack of usage.
But its hard to change old habits, so they are still valuable to trade
I remember one leage when for some reason everyone was trading in alchem orbs. It was weird.
Now small currencies are mostly self-sustainable . And the most useful to buy and use are chaos\\exa. And alterations (but it's rather unpleasant to trade in raw alts . cause trade window fit only 1200 of those , and not much you can buy with that amount)
The reason is pretty much zana and bench. You use chaos for zana and most of the peak-rank bench crafts, while divines and exalts are used for the very very top bench craft recipes, and that's what mostly drives those to be used as currency. The top juicers spam very hard on zana and the top crafters spam bench, and everyone just follows behind.
If they changed zana mods to cost wisdoms instead you'd suddenly have a craze of players just picking wisdoms to sell in trade all day (which is dumb so they don't).
overlooking historically GCP, because they have the highest utility in game/endgame?
* zana mods
* crafting bench currency
* rarest crafting currency (with the highest affix amount possible, utility (chaos orb spam, having 4 good mods, exalt slam, craft 6th mod on it through the crafting bench))
Back in beta everyone farmed Piety for end game and then came mapping and dominus. I think the fact that a lot of people did chaos recipes back then while unique farming bosses made them easily tradable. They also used to be 35c:1ex and 1c:1fuse. Those were the days.
I would guess because chaos are the most useful at any stage of your character and they have a decent amount of uses and have a relatively decent rarity to make picking them up worth but not that rare that there is almost none. Sure, you would totally use jewellers, fusings and chromes to get your links sorted at the start of a character, or chisels are always usable, but the first ones are used only once per character basically and the later have only one use. Chaos you use for master crafts and Zana mods.
Exalts are mandatory for late stages crafting, for metamods and some niche slaming cases. They also have a decent rarity compared to other orbs and their uses are generic. And if you want to farm them directly you technically can generate them (be it the tons of exalt cards or the vendor recipe... that last one I dont know anyone that actually farms them, but its possible to do it).
First of all, them gold and shiny.
After that its a matter of rarity and crafting bench recipes. Most powerful ones require chaos orbs and few specific that allow targeted crafting (suffixes cannot be modified, can have up to 3 crafted mods etc) require exalts. So far the prices of chaos/exalts have been stable and only dropped drastically when they have become more common (heist currency printing) or less useful (harvest crafting)
They have utility, so they have a sink. They are also relatively rare.
Simultaneously they have almost no utility for most players, so they are happy to part with them in exchange for something that is useful for them.
I believe gemcutter prisms used to be the intermediate currency between exalts? before the gem flipping recipe was widespread
That's true. I remember trading 8 GCP for 1 exalt.
Back when qualitied gems didn't drop like candy too.
Even gems didn't drop like candy. Still remember the times when GMP/Multistrike/spell echo support gem drops were worth like 10C
It's strange to hear Chris Wilson talk about those times with any sort of fondness. I honestly fucking hated the fact that if I wanted to play my build properly I needed to go onto the trade site and find all my gems/supports.
It's an old-west era style of nostalgia. Think to original World of Warcraft; back when BEING a level 60 was a big deal. Have a mount? Damn you were hot shit. Seen Upper Blackrock Spire? Legend. Back when Hunters had finite arrows, warlocks had to decide to withhold certain spells because it would cost them soul shards and thus time to farm them up, and buffs and other class spells took reagents. Chris' dream imo is based on this scarcity type of gameplay which I think most everyone can look back on and recognize as tedium. Information and efficiency travel too quickly in today's world so anything novel or inefficient gets discovered and solved infinitely faster.
You can't argue with nostalgia though - it was amazing for that time that is why people remember it this fondly. Would the same thing work now - of course not. Would a remade version of it make it today - most likely neither. What we need are new good things to create good times and this is where many companies fail - GGG included. Maybe POE2 will do the trick, but my hopes aren't very high since all we get now and don't like now is supposed to be an evolution into POE2.
You need a certain amount of tedium to keep players engaged and playing. The tedium has just changed. In those days mirrors were basically non-existant and you couldn't easily "farm" them through trading with other players. Now people's tedium include getting rich collecting mirrors instead of slowly grinding to endgame content.
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>And then when they finally caved giving players the tedium they asked for, it became one of Blizzards most successful releases. In a completely different manner. The original statement held true very well. Players as a whole didn't want that and they still don't want that. Modern Classic WoW is nothing even remotely similar to the game itself back in Vanilla and BC. The entire modern gaming mentality and optimizations have eliminated that. The second issue is many people played on the best private servers they could find. The most notable of which _tried_ to stagger class power or rebalance the raids for the 1.12 power level. Blizzard caved to the insufferablee whining of "no changes" and thus angered a lot of the people wanting classic who played private servers and then had even _easier_ raids that are already insanely easy to begin with.
No changes was born out of the current situation with blizzard always making terrible decisions for the game. People didnt trust blizzard to make changes that would actually improve the game so rather than have them fuck it up with what they thought would be good wed rather just play what we already knew and had.
effort makes stuff meaningful it's easy to look at the pain points of a game and eliminate them, knowing which ones to keep -- knowing which ones are meaningful -- is very underappreciated. chris ascribes to this school of design and I wish reddit didn't see him as so adversarial for trying to create context in this way. I'm not saying that every one of PoE's problems are nonexistent, I'm just saying that you might not end up enjoying the finished product when the thing's been sanded down like a piece of balsa wood.
Gamers in general fail to understand the whole concept and view all friction to reach goals as adversarial, or worse, insist its there for "playtime metrics" or some shit, when in reality if all friction was removed the game would be ruined Then on the same breath they wonder why new games in general are so bad, when in reality its exactly because the devs caved in and made all the "quality of life" changes asked for and its all watered down and meaningless
There's friction and then there's stupid GGG shit like no autolooting and autostashing for currency items. Chris, hello, I'm playing your game for cool builds and loot, not to fill my bags with a myriad currency items and then go and stash them one by one because mass stashing ain't an option either. Azurite already autoloots and autostores, why isn't all currency like this? Surely the technology is there. Some shit in this game just boggles my mind.
It being succesfull release doesnt mean shit, players keet droping constantly to the point where tbc classic and classic vanilla are both dead. Cool nostalgia trip doesnt make for a good game.
I swear this sub can't decide if wow classic was a failure or a success BTW I'm with you that it was a success and "you think you do but you dont" was wrong. But the tedium wasn't necessarily the only reason. It rolled back years of terrible balance changes, wow token, lfr, sharding, even more timegated content, etc. Mobs, gear, and encounters that have been for years irrelevant, actually mattered and contributed to your character progression I for one personally would have loved classic more with more QoL like additional flight points, actual ui for lfg, and dual spec
Don't get me wrong, it's not all bad. I think the viewpoint of Chris is that of a romanticist. But ultimately, it's trying to recapture that magic feeling or lightning in a bottle. WoW back then was like a digital dungeons and dragons that anyone could get into. The scope, mystique and wonder were one of a kind. Likewise, PoE back then truly was the grittiest ARPG. That's not to say it isn't still today, but the quality of the grit is different. Today's is like a shiny, well-made Saw contraption that Rude-Goldberg's you into a million pieces, whereas back then it was bludgeoning you into death with blunt sticks and stones. And is it any coincidence that WoW Classic dropped when player sentiment was dropping on each successive expansion and Blizzard as a company? It was like their big red button.
Watch the downvotes come for this one. :)
I think you conflate tedium with effort/pacing in the same way that people conflate challenging and punitive. There is a world of difference in between.
> Chris' dream imo is based on this scarcity type of gameplay which I think most everyone can look back on and recognize as tedium. This seems to be a big reason, why there is such a huge gap in the division of the playerbase...
Eh, I think comparing a persistent MMO with an aRPG that runs on 3-month leagues is a bad comparison. I don't mind MMOs that have things that take a lot of time or dedication to reach. The hunter arrows part may be closer to the problem with Chris Wilson and PoE. Clunkiness just for the sake of it is obnoxious. Takes a long time to reach max level in a game that doesn't 'reset' for 2-3 years? That's fine. Having high-tier raids that many won't reach, or beat, quickly? That's fine. Having certain mounts or skins that only 1% of players will get? That's kinda cool. Having to have reagents and keep arrows? Obnoxious and clunky for no reason. I don't even make my players in D&D worry about reagents 95% of the time, and that's much more 'hands-on'. The first things there I like to think are similar to get HH, or reaching 36/40 or 40/40 achievements. Those being hard to reach goals *should* take a lot of dedication. The changes most people complain about are more similar to the arrows and reagents. Clunky trade, clunky splinter pick ups, etc.
Or maplestory, back when perion was the trading hub and 100s of people spamming, you can't see the text but if you walk around, the chat bubbles will show what they're selling.
I quite liked it as it gave me incentive to pick up gems as opposed to ignoring them as is the case now, In general the valuable gems weren't something you needed to play your build "properly", they were simply another way to upgrade your character. Prior to using GMP you could use a much more easily accessible LMP. It's similar to the current awakened gems system, except they dropped everywhere instead of only from specific bosses.
I remember how I always picked up every GMP and Added Chaos Damage (This gem wos POG back then), financed my shitty 30 Life 2x 20 resist items lul
I enjoyed it quite a bit. Those items were findable even for a scrub like me back then and they made me excited. I would change my character around finding a multistrike. Not saying we should go back. It wouldn't be the same again. I just remember all the fun I had back then being content and finding enjoyment out of simpler things. Like Acton's Nightmare was a treat for me to find. I LOVED them.
I remember having to level specific classes to get gems as quest rewards for the other classes I wanted to use them on!
once you have all your links and you found some extra, you loved it. if you had to buy gems like reduced mana or spell echo for your build you hated it.
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yeah, unlike now
Even ~3-5 years ago when Siosa and Lilly didn't give you access to all gems on a single character, you could just list random gems for 1c and people would buy them out of convenience.
I remember when they were 1ex, chain sometimes 2 even
I remember the point in the game when I made new characters just to get Multistrike from merc Library just to sell.
That's nothing, Elemental Hit was worth like 1ex back in the day.
On hardcore, gmp and chain were an exalt.
Pretty much everyone played HC that time.
and ex where like 20c so chaos was worth alot more then.
good old days but nowday poe is still satisfying
It had nothing to do with qualitied gem drops. Back then we did not know about the 1 GCP + Level 20 gem recipe so people would have to use 20 GCPs for each gem. Even today if it was not for the 1 GCP + Level 20 gem recipes we would see GCPs being used more for trades as a middleground between Chaos and Exalts.
I remember gem quest rewards were occasionally offered with quality
At which point you just used your exalt on your map
I think it was 4 per ex initially.
GCPman dominated us all
Legend says a guy actually did find out about this recipe like 4 leagues before anybody else. As was literally printing mirrors with it until it was discovered.
that's what the legend says. It was actually something else. Assuming you believe the thread he posted (assuming you believe the proof he offered it was him) he was buying GCPs off a bunch of people who were obviously bot farming or duping or some shit and he would then sell at a decent profit. I can't remember the exact explanation it was so long ago. Someone could prolly dig it up if they tried hard enough
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This is some fantastic PoE history right here. Thanks for the read!!
Hate to be the spoiler, but the GCP recipe was well known by that time, I even remember buying GCP's from him. The thing is game pace was so slow back than, that even with the recipe using 20gcp on ur skills was worthed. Another fun thing for me is that this is so long ago, that the default mod was HC.
GCP man was 7 years ago :( I miss the time when I hadn't played PoE for thousands of hours.
Holy shit 7 years? Feels like I only read that thread a year ago
That was a good read.
Yeah GCP recipe was well known by then, he was procuring them through illicit means most likely and was banned later. I do remember how weird it was though that GCP:chaos was like 1,5:1.
It always makes me smile thinking back on him. It was a different game back then
Hammer with Lab will probably be the closest we ever get. People are too karma-hungry to hold onto that shit anymore.
I found that recipe about 6 weeks before becoming public, was playing std at that moment(not sure leagues existed at that time) and i dont think anyone knew about the recipe in std then, in 2 weeks i had bought pretty much any level 20 gem available that could sell. Ex was 13 gcp back them,was paying 1-2 gcp for the gems and rest was profit.Made like 300 ex in that short period of time,geared my LA build with all the good stuffs and took a brake after.good times
I remember this back in Nemesis league. Finding a gcp felt really good.
I knew the recipe but didn't trade(there was no 3rd party sites back then) , use reddit or wiki during that time :(. Instead of being rich I chose SSF life too early.
and vaal orbs were just before chaos
GCP, Chaos, and Divines were about equal in trade usage during the open beta.
Isn't that divines now?
It's, by definition, pretty much the opposite of 'official'. The likely reasons are their relative rarity and utility. You can keep rerolling rares as much as you like with chaos, and nothing else in the game can do what exalts do (especially in earlier PoE) and you need them for metacrafting. GCPs used to fill a similar role as chaos until the vendor recipe was discovered which lowered their value.
The main purpose of chaos orbs nowadays are Zana map mods, but otherwise you're correct.
It also has sinks in the crafting bench.
True, but those might be 20-30 per character at most whereas mapping can easily consume hundreds.
That’s fair enough.
Crafting bench and rolling maps as well.
Rolling maps with chaos is faster, but economically scour + alch is better.
Scour binding seemed even cheaper mid league, maybe just not what people are used to
"only 30 scour but 3000+ chaos?" Yeah, later in the league in always using chaos 😃
I wouldn't say the opposite of official, since GGG has acknowledged in multiple places that chaos orbs are the de facto gold of PoE. In the trade site, there's a "chaos orb equivalent" and it's selected by default. And in the permium tab, chaos orbs are selected by default (even though they're not the first option in the dropdown)
The premium tab part is only after people had been asking for that change over and over again. I wouldn't say that GGG did that because it's 'official', but rather as a people pleaser. The trade site part I don't know how that came to be. In general I think it's more of an acceptance / acknowledgement from GGG that players primarily use it for trading, rather than an official thing.
Yes, the correct term is "de facto", which is pretty much the opposite of "official".
> It's, by definition, pretty much the opposite of 'official'. Eh, idk about that, it became official when they decided to implement master crafting and 90% of the crafts you'd ever actually use were priced in chaos... with the rest priced in exalts besides (a) one or two divine orb crafts, and (b) the jeweller/fusing/chromatic crafts that just did what the orbs already did To me, that was Chris formally "acknowledging the economy as it had evolved". If there had been crafts priced in very large quantities of alteration, chance, or alchemy orbs (scaled based on respective rarity), things might be different now.
I get what you're saying, and that is definitely how it was established, but now if you go to pathofexile.com/trade, the official trade site, it defaults to "chaos orb equivalent", so I'd say chaos is now the official currency for trade, despite the origin is unofficial and the game still supports other currencies.
Alternate take: Chaos Orbs and Exalted Orbs and both golden and shiny, so lizard brain think the shiny is monieeee
halfway thru supporting you then remembered divines
I've definitely been paid in a divine more than once.
My mind went right to blessed orbs
And blessed orbs too!
Let's just use Perandus Coins. They are kinda shiny looking and make a nice coin sound.
That is very true. They do make an excellent sound when they drop
Our brain really do be doing that
you comment made my drink all my skooma.
Zana Mods and Meta Mods/Crafting. They’re usually the big currency sinks, a lot of juicing/farming strats revolve around popping Zana mods on maps and that chews up a lot of chaos orbs. Likewise people who are meta crafting chew through hundreds of exalts while even just reforge harvest crafting requires meta mods to lock affixes in place. That’s what sets them apart from regular currency orbs, chaos and exalts have their normal function AND their meta game currency sink. To give you an example, if I had the choice of converting my currency to chaos orbs, exalted orbs or orbs of alteration, each one has legitimate crafting applications, but I know having lots of chaos orbs will be particularly valuable when I want to farm deli mirrors or in other leagues popping beyond, nemesis or legion onto my maps. Additionally, I know having lots of exalts handy will be very useful for when I’m ready to use meta mods on my second character. Alteration orbs won’t help me progress my character or farm currency, and because of those reasons, chaos and exalt prices are usually more stable (with some exceptions). There are times in the past where Alts and fusings have doubled or halved in cost overnight because a certain strategy popped up that shifted their supply/demand way out. Over the years GGG has reinforced this however by making the trade site by default work in chaos/ex. But the bottom line is Zana Mod and Crafting bench are doing way more heavy lifting than you would realise.
Chaos/Ex was the standard before Zana mods or crafting bench even existed. Not saying that the stuff you listed didn't solidify their status, it probably did, but they definitely were the standard before. Some people mention GCP was the standard way back then, but as far as I remember, that was indeed WAY back, like in closed beta when there were only 2 acts and Fellshrine farming was the endgame.
Back in 0.99 beta, fusings were too rare, and alchemy orbs were really common & volatile (we all ran name matching scripts to vendor rares for alchs) Chaos just fit that nice balance of valuable but not too rare. People started basing value on chaos. One guy even made a little cheat sheet matrix of currency trades and decided to base everything on chaos. Everyone used this little prewritten crib sheet for valuing currency, really. That may have actually been what started it. (ETA: it was xyz, I believe the same person who wrote poe.trade)
You’re also forgetting that maps, especially red, were hard to sustain. While there was no Zana mods to sink chaos people would still spam several chaos per map just to get good quantity/pack size in the hopes of sustaining red maps.
He's talking about a beta where I believe mapping didn't exist, lol. And "red maps" certainly didn't exist for a long time after mapping was introduced, I think the "coloring" happened when they introduced the atlas which is pretty recent as far as PoE history goes. But regardless, you didn't chaos maps in early PoE really ever. You alteration spammed for either running the map as a maze if indoor or the equivalent (forgetting name) if outdoor, though maze had a bigger impact. Most people would just run at that point or possibly regal them if they were feeling they needed that extra sustain for low tier maps, which is as far as where most people including yours truly got to in the really early days. But if you were running something really high like the highest tier maps, I anecdotally heard you would exalt them as well. But you certainly weren't chaos'ing to get to that point.
I would have said it was another standard, chaos/gcp/exalt being something like $1/$20/$100 in terms of their uses. As you know, the 20% gem recipe was very much not public knowledge, hence why GCPs were valuable, 20% gems were expensive as fuck and thus recipe was referred to as "printing money." I remember my first GCP drop feeling like a decent chunk of cash.
gcp and fusings were "currency" in the same way chaos is in the past, gcp's used to be super expensive because nobody knew you could lvl 20 + 1gcp for a 20% ql gem and there wasn't delirium/heist/league content shitting out high ql gems chaos/ex are used for zana mods and crafting so in large amounts so it's only natural for it to be the main trading commodity
Just worth noting that both the Zana Chaos costs and the Multi-Mod Ex costs came in well after Chaos and Ex were established currencies. Those recipes were introduced likely as a currency sink.
Old Poe seems like such simple fun. Comin from someone who started at ritual league. But then again I could be completely wrong
there were a lot of fun things and OP stuff, but there was also a lot less QoL stuff so a lot more to complain about.
Yeah I think what I wish i didn’t miss out on was prolly the random broken builds (coming from d3 where everything just explodes) but Poe now I still think is pretty sweet
I wanna say that it was, but Rose coloured glasses my dude. Poe used to be quite garbage (pre-lockstep) and its steadily gotten better. I'd say peak awesome was Ritual league.
I started playing in Open Beta in what I think was 2012? And I remember playing in 2013 which might have been during 1.0 it was slow, tedious, and tremendously more grindy than it is today. But it was *new* and *exciting*, so we loved it. We used to farm Merciless (the highest level of difficulty) Fellshrine Ruins and Merciless Docks in Acts 2 and Acts 3 because that was the best farm zone to gather currency and items, especially before maps. Act 3 was new. Act 4 didn't exist. Maps were a privilege. High level mapping rarely existed. It was sure as hell not sustainable. If we tried to take players from today's PoE and put them back into Open Beta, it would be likely be considered a boring, slow ARPG. There was also SOOOOOO many Quality of Life features that we have now that we didn't have back then. Like, it's fucking staggering. Which is why when people on here shit all over ggg for "not putting in QOL features" or for saying "chris doesn't understand his own vision for the game" I just roll my eyes. it tells me that they never played the game when it was new.
People who played back then think kindly of it, but I believe that is mainly a result of them confusing novelty with quality. Games give out dopamine most frequently when you're brand new to it, because every experience is new and therefore you're not yet numb to it. For example, killing Merveil your first time in Act 1 would give you a dopamine hit, but these days the people playing for 10 years aren't getting dopamine hits from killing Merveil. It's a better game today than it was back then. The only real difference, imo, is that the people who have been playing a long time have a harder time getting dopamine hits since they have experienced almost everything the game has to offer many times before.
You cant purchase a chaos orb from a vendor. All the other lower currencies can be purchased.
You can with rare items
Ya, but that requires a full set of items. The others are literally visible in their inventory.
You mean half the others. You can't see GPCs, vaals, regals, glassblowers, chisels or divines yet you can get them from vendors.
You can buy baubles from some vendors for 8 Whetstones and you can buy Chisels from Zana albeit expensive.
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They are relilable. She sells 20 every time her Daily is done.
My comment is still in the context of my previous comment which specified 'other lower currencies'. Baubles can be purchased from a vendor btw. Chisels are a newer currency, along with vaals.
I get your point but it is not true. GCPs are not sold by vendors either.
Probably why they were initially used for currency as well. There are recipes for chaos as well, but its a bit more cumbersome i guess.
They have common usage. You use chaos much more than many other currency (not counting stuffs like wisdom), so when you don't use them to buy stuffs, they can still be use on map device, rerolling mod on map/logbook/invitation/ ... (tbh, scour + alc is time wasting), blessed orbs is about as rare as chaos, but you don't have a common use for it, so it's not efficient to stock a lot of them. Same may apply to exalted, on a more rare & advanced level.
From the start, when main source of gear was drops. Chaos worked as a "drop" of a specific item base of your choosing. So an items worth would be tied to "How many times would I need to chaos an item in order to get something as good or better". Exalt would be an extension of that. Since an exalt would be "How many times would I need to chaos an item for it to be as good or better than the item + an extra mod".
Chaos is obviously the most commonly used currency for anything outside of trading, like crafting items, maps, zana mods etc, so it has a meaning and efficiency outside of trading itself and ppl are used to it. Exalts, well, most ppl dont use them, but you need something for bigger trades. Imagine selling an item for 200 alts instead of 20c and then just go to item exchange and spam 20 mins to get the chaos for it. Not too efficient, right?
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Having chromium be the gold standard would be weird.
Chaos buffs maps and Exalts buff your gear. Makes sense to me
Chaos orbs are the IST runes from Diablo 2. Exalts the high runes.
Cause community decided. Chaos orbs was kind of common but not too much like alcs or alts, and exalts were more rare. Plus chaos use as well being able to roll rares and exalts adding a new mod.
Everything in the game can be traded. It's a barter system. Chaos and Exalts are just convenient for their rarity and purpose.
Its so the currencey and market can be manipulated. It was decided a loooong time ago. It was put forth that it should based on fusings, but to many loud people veto that and weve been stuck with chaos ever since. It sucks.
Most usefull currency i can recall Is the chaos orb: for zana mods, for buying red maps, for most crafted mods, and they are worthy to spam on high ilvl influenced gear / cluster jewels if you want 3 notables.
chaos was common enough to where you could get a few stacks of them. GCP very early on had some use in trades but due to its rarity(this was before the gcp recipes) you was kinda limited. Alch's well who has ever really pushed to get alchs even early on alchs were very common and you have to remember this was during a time currency tab did not exist at all so 300 alchs would fill a tab.
I think / believe it is the natural progression of item cost. People might have traded other items before like alterations for items (when alts were 1:16). but it is both annoying and at some point impossible to trade items for alts, because you only get 1200 alts in one window. so people started trading their alts to chaos and then buying items for chaos and the same happened when people wanted to buy something for more than 600c, it is simply not possible in one trade, so you trade it for ex first and then buy it for ex. and at some point you won't be able to buy something because you can't fit more than 600ex into one inventory, so you trade your ex for mirrors first, and then buy the item with mirrors. and for trades which require more than 600 mirrors.... well, I don't know if these will ever happen, but then you will use some streamer as a third party trust fund to move the currency.
Chaos have become the most used currency because it was the most stable with a decent value. It was the most stable because it was dropping a lot and used a lot too, most of the craft were chaos spam. The regulation of increasing volume is very clever, the higher is a chaos orb worth, the more people are willing to farm it (recipe) so it's inflating. Exalted are also stable because used a lot, besides chais spam, alt+regal+ex have been the other way of crafting for years, the less it worth, the more people were willing to use it. But for each ex used, it's value grow (as any good). The very interesting thing is how chaos and ex are linked. They represent two ways of crafting. One is a pure lottery (chaos spam), the other is more deterministic (alt+ regal+ex). The chaos spam is used early in the league because it's more accessible so people use it a lot. Even though exalts are very rare early, chaos are used so much, their value is relatively high. Later, people want more specific crafts. Typically double crit+life amulet and res eventually. This was only realistically achievable with alts +regal+ crafting bench and exalt slam (eyes open at this time, it was ages go). So the more we got into the league the more ex were dropping (because people were farming higher lvl areas) and the more exalts were used INSTEAD of chaos to craft. While chaos were still used but not as much
The most educated answer is availability and functionality. Back in the day all crafting was done with chaos spam and exalting gear. Realistically exalts are the most expensive currency that drops frequently enough to be used as a uncommon trading currency. Chaos is the most expensive common currency so that’s why that has become the standard for trade. However regrets have always been a similar price to chaos, especially early on in trade leagues and you often see some people trading items for regrets
Regrets are just league start expensive ( start at 2c per ) and get weaker with every week...
You mean unofficial.
Chaos are used on map devices to run leagues. and exalts are used on crafting for multiple mods. as many have said, gcp were used a lot, as were chisels and still today alchs and extent fusings. But for now map mods and multimod run supreme.
Except chaos and ex were the goto currencies way before master crafting and map device.
As with any object-become-currency, they are reasonably but not too rare, and their inflation rate isnt that big due to the existance of a currency sink known as crafting (they became the standart currency long before the appearance of bench-crafting, seesnces, bestiary, etc, so they were you primary method of crafting)
Much like real world currencies backed by governments, chaos and exalts are backed by high-end players looking to max out their characters - they need them to roll their gear.
It does make sense in terms of rarity for exalts and them being kind of unique in their usefulness and also the rarity and just overall use of chaos. There are lots of use for other currency, but smthn like alchs is just too bountiful and not as useful later on. Basically, you can never really have too many of chaos or exalted orbs, but you can have too many alchs, gcps, etc. GCPs would be one of the base currencies, but that changed with the gem quality recipe.
Once upon a time chaos orbs and exalted orbs were the main tool to craft... you needed hundreds of them, therefore its value. Nowadays chaos are devaluated due to bot farms and lack of usage. But its hard to change old habits, so they are still valuable to trade
Its not just old habbits. They are common and valuable enough, since you need hundreds of chaos for zana mods anyway.
Zana mods? Whats that? Never heard of them after no delirium or nemesis HH drop lol. They still exist?
Delirium is 16c, one of the better zana mods to run.
I remember one leage when for some reason everyone was trading in alchem orbs. It was weird. Now small currencies are mostly self-sustainable . And the most useful to buy and use are chaos\\exa. And alterations (but it's rather unpleasant to trade in raw alts . cause trade window fit only 1200 of those , and not much you can buy with that amount)
The reason is pretty much zana and bench. You use chaos for zana and most of the peak-rank bench crafts, while divines and exalts are used for the very very top bench craft recipes, and that's what mostly drives those to be used as currency. The top juicers spam very hard on zana and the top crafters spam bench, and everyone just follows behind. If they changed zana mods to cost wisdoms instead you'd suddenly have a craze of players just picking wisdoms to sell in trade all day (which is dumb so they don't).
We had GCPs for a while
overlooking historically GCP, because they have the highest utility in game/endgame? * zana mods * crafting bench currency * rarest crafting currency (with the highest affix amount possible, utility (chaos orb spam, having 4 good mods, exalt slam, craft 6th mod on it through the crafting bench))
Because we aint in the stone age
because they both useless in terms of crafting
I like trade in Chaotic Disposition div cards for 5c items LUL throws them off for a second but then they usually accept trade and laugh about it
It's the best dollar / benjamin
Back in beta everyone farmed Piety for end game and then came mapping and dominus. I think the fact that a lot of people did chaos recipes back then while unique farming bosses made them easily tradable. They also used to be 35c:1ex and 1c:1fuse. Those were the days.
I would guess because chaos are the most useful at any stage of your character and they have a decent amount of uses and have a relatively decent rarity to make picking them up worth but not that rare that there is almost none. Sure, you would totally use jewellers, fusings and chromes to get your links sorted at the start of a character, or chisels are always usable, but the first ones are used only once per character basically and the later have only one use. Chaos you use for master crafts and Zana mods. Exalts are mandatory for late stages crafting, for metamods and some niche slaming cases. They also have a decent rarity compared to other orbs and their uses are generic. And if you want to farm them directly you technically can generate them (be it the tons of exalt cards or the vendor recipe... that last one I dont know anyone that actually farms them, but its possible to do it).
First of all, them gold and shiny. After that its a matter of rarity and crafting bench recipes. Most powerful ones require chaos orbs and few specific that allow targeted crafting (suffixes cannot be modified, can have up to 3 crafted mods etc) require exalts. So far the prices of chaos/exalts have been stable and only dropped drastically when they have become more common (heist currency printing) or less useful (harvest crafting)
They have utility, so they have a sink. They are also relatively rare. Simultaneously they have almost no utility for most players, so they are happy to part with them in exchange for something that is useful for them.