Broken market (currency exchange)

The idea of a player-driven economy sounds great on paper.
In practice, however, a small group of wealthy players can dominate the market, driving prices far beyond reasonable levels and locking out the majority of players.
This doesn’t feel particularly balanced or fair.

Its like real life rugpulling and inside trading but in a game im trying to play for fun. Market manipulation but in my game im trying to relax and play for funs.

unless you're in mass mirror buying market you will be fine, to manipulate the rest sustainably you would need way to many people or resources

Prices are in practice so volatile, I would prefer a fake economy for the currency market were I can exchange currencies with NPCs at a fixed rate.

The market is in a very bad place. Items that should maybe be a few divs are now beginning at 50+ div. The majority of players are playing SSF with currency exchange.

At the moment, for the average player, I think the economy might even be somewhat beneficial. You get early- and mid tier mapping gear for very cheap and if you drop even a couple of divines, you can slam exalts into your gear like there's no tomorrow.

The players who are not dominating the market but are wanting to do end-game crafting are prolly in the hardest spot.

But yeah. PoE1 and 2 are somewhat saved by the grace of the league system and economy restarts. In-game economies are always difficult to do well. There's a lot of issues about them.

Overall, there's a reason why pretty much all non-league games with trade heavily restrict the trade in one or the other way. Like they cap your trades per day; or their primary currency is mainly gained with real money so that its value doesn't fluctuate as much; or they only allow some of the gear to be traded; or they have very high trade taxes; or they force your selling and buying to happen within a given min-max range that depends on the long-term price trend of the items in question; etc.

There's also a reason why fully open private ownership -based economies aren't a thing in the real world either, and why pretty much every country seeks to control their economies in various different ways. They'd be very volatile and quickly skew to benefit mainly the early-comers otherwise. Not that those weren't problems as is, but they could be much worse problems.

I have to say that playing for like 100 hours should make me reach endgame with end gear for a character. So trading in market should help me achieve that but the reality is spending hours to earn some divines to trade them for a few currency to attemp a few gambles to maybe I can get the item I need or not. It just feels all wrong.