Sounds an awful lot like a discontinued Diablo III feature on the surface - wonder if the modern gaming landscape will tolerate this now.
The “currencies” are all ingame. Because PoE has no actual currency like gold pieces or anything, players trade in consumable items like Chaos Orbs and Chromatic Orbs that augment items with random outcomes. The introduction of a market ingame helps facilitate trades that players were previously using external websites and forums to make.
Even the NPC shops trade for identification scrolls and have “recipes” where you put in ID scrolls to get teleportation scrolls and you can keep trading upwards.
Diablo III wishes it could be PoE.
That’s kinda half true. It’s certainly GGG’s intent, and there’s no official way to buy in game currency for real money, but you can absolutely buy it through third party websites. So effectively, you can still sell items for real money, you just risk getting banned.
But yeah, you’d be correct that the currency market doesn’t really help facilitate that. It was just already happening.
Trading in this game is hands down the single worst experience (aside from dota pub games) I’ve ever had. Ssf made me so happy because i literally never had to worry about trading. I want to trade. I like to trade. I didn’t like copy/pasting spam for 4 hours only to get 1 reply.
It’s nothing like that. You can already trade currencies between players. This just means that you can buy someone’s listed offer with one click instead of whispering 100 people hoping someone will respond and trade with you. Players have been asking for a feature like this for a long time and the announcement has been received extremely positively.
Plus, they’re only adding it to the next temporary league (which is like a season). They said the Q&A that the intention is to keep it afterwards but if it for some reason completely fucks up the economy they still have an out.
Currency in path of exile is a collection of items which can be use on gear and weapons, but also used with in game traders to barter goods. This currency enchange is an automated way to convert say, an item which reconfigures the linked slots on a piece of armor into one which rerolls the modifiers.