down among the unclefts

1) Everything can be traded. There's no such thing as soulbound items. When you splurge on a new pair of gloves, you can sell your old pair right back to someone who is less far along their gear optimization journey. You can buy a weapon dropped only by one boss in the game, and use it to beat that boss. 2) The type of game that PoE is (a highly complex Diablo-like) lends itself to rather large trading volumes. The most valuable items you find are unlikely to be useful to you yourself, you have to trade them away and then buy something for yourself in order to actually progress. Add in the large playerbase and high dedication and you get a truly staggering amount of trades being conducted in this game. 3) (This one's where academic economists become interested, for example in this dissertation.) There is no official currency. There are dozens (well, by now it's hundreds) of items which can modify equipment, and these are the currencies trades are conducted in. By convention, Chaos Orbs are the "silver standard" for low to medium value items, but this is not forced by the game. The "gold standard" for high value trades used to be Exalted Orbs, but a small change to their use in in-game crafting led to the playerbase adopting Divine Orbs as the new gold standard instead. There's no such thing as fixed exchange rates between these, of course, everything is decided by the market, and different league mechanics can lead to wildly different markets. Trades which don't involve neither Chaos nor Divines still absolutely do happen, too. Exchange rate speculation is emminently possible. Market manipulation is hard but not unheard of. 4) Specialization is almost mandatory. As a new player, you should familiarize yourself with the general "crafting" (using currency items on gear) mechanics and use them for your campaign and early mapping gear, but leave the high end crafting to the players with more knowledge of all the possibilities, and just sell the crafting materials you find to them. You should also pick which kind of content your build is good at farming so you can be efficient. Yes, that means you effectively pick a job in order to trade with other players who have a different job.

I kept this as short as possible and I still feel like I omitted a lot of very important details.

If you have read all this, you may already be disconcerted that all this was happening through 1-on-1 trade windows, but you don't know the half of it. You want to sell your tediously collected hundreds of Orbs of Alteration for a few Chaos? Well, they come in stacks of 20, so you have to transfer all those stacks from your stash to your inventory, warp to the hideout of the other player, and then transfer all those stacks of 20 into the trade window. This was an actual thing real players did for over a decade, before the currency exchange got introduced in 2024.

This did not just affect you if you were the chump who had to collect Alteration Orbs for a living. Remember, there are literally hundreds of consumable materials. Orbs for gear crafting, scarabs to add features to your maps, fragments to combine for endgame boss encounters, specialized skill gems which are unobtainable from vendors, Divination cards, Oils, Tattoos, ... Just by playing normally, you collect a wide range of these, most of them completely useless to you, but valuable to sell for Chaos and Divines so you could eventually buy the equipment you've been eyeing.

But let's back off a little. How did you even find a buyer for your orbs without an auction house? Why, the official PoE forums, of course! Just open a thread and list the items you want to sell and wait for people to whisper you for them. Granted, this was before feature creep had introduced quite so many consumables, but there was no shortage of things to trade. It was the 2010s and forums were honestly on their way out already, but if you wanted to trade in PoE, they expected you to join the forums. How do you find a rare with exactly the stats you need among the thousands of forum threads? Watch your attitude, what are you, some kind of casual?

PoE was always a game for the nerds among the nerds, but the forums were a step too far even for them, so I get to introduce to you the reason why all this was able to go on as long as it did: Third party tools. Relying on third party tools for basic game functions does of course strengthen instead of weaken the "nerds among the nerds" reputation of PoE, but being by players for players, it all functioned relatively well.

So, if you wanted to sell something, you didn't actually have to go to the forums, you used a tool that could read the content of your stash, you told it what price you wanted for which item, and that tool then listed the items on the forums for you. Oh yes, forums still remained the backbone of this for literal years. And if you wanted to buy something, you went to a site which had crawled through the forums and indexed all the listings so you could actually let it show you only the gloves with good crit chance and at least decent fire resistance and not too high strength requirements, and pick what to buy from among them.

This all got streamlined eventually, but you can't streamline it too much while sticking to the decision not to have an actual auction house. Premium stash tabs eventually replaced trade forum shops, and eventually we even got an official trading site with very granular controls for searching other people's offers. The devs basically waited a few years to see what the community came up with before making it official. They did the same with loot filters iirc.

But of course, we're not done. So, we have found the gloves that would suit our build well and we have farmed all the currency we need to buy them. We're lucky and the seller is online right now, no small victory since players are scattered around the world. The official trade site even makes contacting the seller a breeze, we just click a button on the site while the game is open, and we automatically whisper to the seller something like: "Hey, I want to buy your soandso gloves for 2 Divine Orbs, they're located five slots to the right and seven down in your Premium Stash Tab number 3." It will whisper this to them in their own language even. (You will encounter a surprising amount of different writing symbols while trading. I always love that there is apparently a Thai PoE community, their character names look so pretty.) It will highlight the position we told them when they open their stash, they just need to invite us.

So we wait.

If they answer, the transaction is pretty quick, players have this down to a couple of seconds, the load time when entering the other's hideout is the biggest delay actually. New players are encouraged to learn the trading etiquette before engaging so they don't waste the time of high volume traders. There's even extra tools for quickly clicking a few dozen stacks of 20 currency orbs into the window, but we don't need that for this exchange, we just pay 2 Divines, a fair price for endgame-but-not-quite-optimal gloves, maybe a mediocre craft, maybe a lucky drop. Either way, we want them.

So we wait.

Why isn't the other player answering? They might be afk. Or they are waiting to see how quickly offers come in to gauge interest and maybe increase the price later. Or they might be trying market manipulation, no intention of selling at this price, instead counting on other players underselling to them, but this is more common with crafting materials, less so with gloves. Or they might be, you know ... playing the game. Pinnacle boss fights take a while and don't typically offer you some seconds to send a message to some prospective buyer to wait for a few minutes. Maps only allow six entries, and if they're in a map where they expect to die a few times, they might not want to waste one of the entries on exiting just to sell us the gloves.

This amount of friction affects markets. An easy to farm item might shoot up in price just because most players don't even bother picking something up off the ground if they don't need it themselves and the typical price isn't worth the effort. That's great if you want to find a lucrative niche, less so if you need more of these low value items than you can easily expect to get from normal gameplay.

We didn't get our gloves, we can try to find new ones which are only slightly more expensive or slightly less optimal for our build, or wait and whisper the seller again in a few minutes. We want to go back to playing the game instead of playing the market, but it would all go so much smoother with the new gloves ...

Keeping the game like this was a choice. The initial decision to have more immersive trading or whatever produced so many problems, for which players found so many workarounds, and the devs were fine with it, slowly making one workaround after the other official instead of even touching the underlying issue. It's like they were trying their hardest to cling to a barter ideal while getting dragged against their will into maintaining one of the most interesting and sophisticated virtual economies to date.

I want to say only lunatics would stick around through all this, but the truth is, PoE was just the best game of its kind. PoE had dethroned Diablo 2 (there's another deep dive waiting to be jumped into about how that one had stuck around as the standard for so long), and now it was just better than D3, and honestly even D4. The tedium was the price you payed for playing the best ARPG with the best auction house around, with the small caveat that this auction house did not actually exist, but at least you didn't have to go through the forums anymore.

In 2024, the Currency Exchange hit the game and players around the world shed tears of joy.

Mind you, buying gloves remained just as it was, but you no longer had to jump through these same hoops just to exchange one currency for another (keep in mind that crafting materials are currencies and that there are hundreds of them). You had to pay a small transaction fee in the form of the newly introduced (and untradeable) gold, in order to keep the bots at bay, but you could now sell the tattoos and buy the scarabs, all without right clicking other players to open the trading window.

It was such a roaring success that it only took another year before we got asynchronous trading: You can convert your Premium Stash Tabs into Merchant Tabs, which work as a virtual market table from which other players can buy your items without you being present. You can even access the trading site in-game, searching or exactly the item you need. You still have to go through a loading screen before the transaction to warp to the seller's hideout, but that's a small price to pay.