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This is often a repost from my blog: lifeinagraph.shalyt.com. Feel absolve to visit and geek out with me on some mathematical analysis of games, people as well as other complex but awesome systems.
Path of Exile (POE) is quietly becoming some sort of-wide phenomena with the past a few years. The action-RPG (think Diablo) is established by an indie game studio operating out of New Zealand - Grinding Gear Games - which has been established in 2006 specifically to generate POE Chaos Orb - "the only game we have ever wanted for making". Today the experience has numerous active players and consistently rises in popularity from a single expansion to a new, as well as being quite profitable (despite being technically free-to-play).
POE is considered to get geared towards a far more hardcore-gamer audience - from it's famously intimidating passive skill tree, highly customizable and optimizable skills and talents - and the majority importantly due to this article, a remarkably rich player-based economy.
A good indication from the size and dedication in the POE audience may be the wealth of independently developed tools and calculators for that game (that is also a proof from the complexity in the game - as some of those tools are practically a necessity for efficient gameplay).
My personal exposure to POE Exalted Orb started about 3 in years past. A friend recommended, also it's absolve to play, so I thought "why not?". It took me almost per week to complete the action on normal difficulty (to compare, it requires me ~6-8 hours today), while fighting from the many complexities in the character progression and skill mechanics - and creating a million mistakes along the way in which. I quit then, but after a few years the infinite possibilities for customization of skills and character builds tempted me back. I've been playing on and off since.
Any good game which has depth and complexity lets players discover more plus much more levels of gameplay - that naturally feature both character and player progression. Being part with the POE economy - namely trading items to players - can be an additional degree of gameplay that's not directly related to the action itself, but is surprisingly rich and requirements above average knowledge of game mechanics to sign up fully.
I've traded more and much more in the past a few months and recently (right at the end of patch 2.6) started "flipping" game currency. Being part with the economy transformed just how I experience the action as a complete - this informative article summarizes many of my observations and calculations around the subject.