In season 3.23 of “Path of Exile 2,” the live trading price of Chaos Orb varies significantly across platforms and season phase. According to GGG Trade, in the first week of the season, it had an exchange rate with Exalted Orb of 1:85 (i.e., 1 Exalted Orb=85 Chaos Orb), but third-party sites such as PlayerAuctions saw augmented supply. The game currency price of Chaos Orb has fallen from $0.12 per unit at the beginning of the season to $0.08 per unit, a reduction of 33%. The actual test conducted by Twitch streamer Mathil is that for players with the efficiency of 600 Chaos Ororb per hour on map Farm T16, if they sell via POE2Market, their daily earnings are around $48 (assuming the unit price is $0.08), which is 40% lower than mid-season earnings.
The economic fluctuations of the game are managed by the season system – the “Abyss Rift” occurrence during Season 3.23 resulted in a 12% increase in the drop rate of high-demand items (such as the “Secret of Suffering” belt), leading to a peak daily consumption of Chaos Orb at 18 million units, and the price at one time bounced back to $0.095 per unit. But after two weeks, because the efficiency of players’ farms improved (the mean daily production of Chaos Orb rose by 27%), the price fell back to $0.076, with a standard deviation of ±8.2%, which was the highest volatility within three seasons. According to the Reddit community data, chaos orb price and Exalted Orb exchange rate correlation coefficient dropped from 0.81 to 0.63, meaning there is a loss of value anchor in the market to the base currency.
The disparity between the platforms is significant: The fixed price per unit for Chaos Orb of GGG Trade is $0.10 (with a 3% handling fee), while the “stealth delivery” service of G2G reduces the price to $0.065 through non-compliant channels but even exposes itself to a suspension rate of up to 6.7%. The POE2Market AI dynamic pricing model increased the discount for bulk orders to 15% in the mid-season (the cost of orders over 1,000 Chaos ORbs per unit was $0.068), and its inventory turnover was 210 times per minute, ensuring that 95% of the orders were received within 5 minutes. It must be noted that such “price insurance” concepts like presented by this platform (for a transaction, paying a 5% premium) can stabilize the exchange rate for 24 hours, saving players from the risk of price fluctuations caused by unexpected oscillations in the BD genre. For example, the unit price of Chaos Orb rose by 58% within 48 hours as “Lightning Arrow” grew in Season 3.22.
There is a gap of arbitrage between cross-regional transactions – the average US server value of Chaos Orb is $0.082, 0.078 euros approximately $0.085 in the European server, and the value in the Asian server is as low as $0.063 due to the excess of studio scripts. The “Virtual Economy Analysis Report” points out that professional players may earn an arbitrage return rate of 17% via cross-regional reselling (buying on the US server and selling on the Asian server), but bear a 12% risk of account suspension. In Season 3.23, GGG suspended 84,000 RMT accounts, 43% of which were set off to watch out for anomalous cross-regional patterns of transactions.
The long-term trend indicates the cyclic pattern of price of chaos orb is visible: The price at mid-point is $0.09 in the first two weeks of the season, falls to $0.07 in the fourth week and rises to $0.11 at the end of the season when players are lost. Figures from the sixth week of the ongoing 3.23 season indicate that the present price of Chaos Orb is $0.074, reduced by 23% since the start of the season, but above the historic average for the period ($0.069). Players who intend to stockpile should note that the forthcoming “Core Gem Drop Rate Double” patch of GGG is likely to further devalue the Chaos Orb. Previous such updates (such as Season 3.18) have resulted in a drop of 28%.