Economy

''This page deals with the player-driven economy. For trading with NPC vendors, see Vendor and Vendor recipe system.''

Current patterns

 * The is the "silver standard", and  the "gold standard".
 * ,, and tend to trade at near vendor rates, namely 2 : 1  and 4  : 1.

Forsaken Masters, Rampage/Beyond (20 August 2014)

 * The introduction of crafting via masters changed which rare items were more valuable: now a rare item with high rolls in a few key affixes was better than an item with mediocre rolls in several. It also increased the power of rare items overall. The price of mid-range unique items dropped as a result.
 * Elreon, Loremaster's meta-crafting mod,, started off at the fairly low price of 1 . This resulted in quite powerful crafts via s and s. In response the price was increased to 2 in Patch 1.2.3. The price of s rose to well over 20  between the announcement of the price increase and the patch itself.
 * With strongboxes now less common, the price of recovered to their former level of about 2.
 * s fell in value, due to competition from master crafting on items and strongboxes making top map rolls less necessary. The ratio of s to s reached about 48:1 mid-league, as opposed to about 40:1 in previous leagues.
 * Despite the decrease in strongboxes relative to Ambush, maintaining maps became easier due to the introduction of Zana, Master Cartographer. Zana gives 1% free increased map quantity per level. In addition, there is an approximately 1-in-14 chance of finding Zana in a map; if we estimate that the Zana map is of the same level as the enclosing map and has +40% quantity on average, this is similar to a +10% free increased map quantity and experience. Finally, Zana effectively gives one free map per day via the daily mission. Running maps as Magic instead of Rare became more popular even at high levels, leading to a further decline in the value of s.

Shadow of the Vaal, Ambush/Invasion (5 March 2014)

 * The large number of Artisan's Strongboxes in Ambush increased the supply of, causing their price to drop still further, to about 1.5.
 * Similarly, Cartographer's Strongboxes greatly increased the supply of Maps in Ambush, particularly high-level maps.

Open beta, Anarchy/Onslaught (23 January 2013)

 * The vendor recipe consuming a level 20 gem and a and yielding a level 1, 20 quality gem became public knowledge. This caused a sharp decrease in demand in  and a corresponding decrease in price. Prior to this revelation,  were worth about 3 . Afterwards the price dropped to about 2 . Furthermore, the playerbase abandoned  as the economy's "silver standard", with the  becoming the new "silver standard".