Yesterday, someone decided to throw a live hand grenade at the Path of Exile subreddit, posting a screenshot of one of the most incredible collections ever assembled in gaming. Somehow, user Present-Plankton-734 put together a complete set of every discontinued or modified item ever released in the game, the value of which cannot be determined with certainty (technically you are not allowed to buy and sell PoE items with real money) but may be worth over $100,000.
Path of Exile came out in October 2013, and they launch a new league every four months or so. Each league undergoes a reset, during which all characters are transferred to their eternal mode – Standard. Most people who play PoE never bother with the standard, preferring to stay where everything is new and shiny. This makes it a sort of graveyard where countless characters, once beloved, now languish, never to log on again.
One of the features of the Standard format is that items do not update like in leagues. If an item is patched, weakened, or otherwise modified, it will not affect the Standard. Thus, old items, some of which have been permanently changed, can exist in their original state in Standard as an echo of the past. Add in special event items, promotional releases, and gear whose cover was updated as part of normal development, and you have a collection that looks like a bunch of Magic cards with printing errors.
Despite the seemingly niche nature, there is a huge market for these types of things in the community. In over 3,000 hours of playing PoE, I have never seen a mirror (the most valuable currency that exists in the game) drop, and some of these items are worth hundreds or even thousands of mirrors.
Take, for example, the shining jewel of the Present-Plankton-734 collection. The Dream Fragments PvP Season reward is a blue ring that you can see separately in the top center of the screenshot. There are only four of them in the whole world – GGG ran special PvP event for one month in late 2014/early 2015, and you had to score a ridiculous amount of points to get the ring. This was achieved by two players each in the US and EU rankings, and that’s it. These four are the only four that exist. And that’s assuming the original owners didn’t sell them, remove them, or hit them with a Vaal Orb like a psychopath.
Due to the rarity of these things, the price can’t be accurately predicted – as with super rare collectibles in real life, it mostly comes down to what someone will pay for it at the time. However, the value of this collection exceeds $100,000.
I reached out to the author to ask about their project to collect all these items, but they chose to remain anonymous, telling me that they feared that if their information became known, their account could be compromised. I can’t say I blame them – there were some loud ones khaki lately, and I can’t imagine a more juicy goal than this.
And then the hidden question arises about how these items were acquired. The original Reddit thread about the collection is replete with posters accusing the OP of purchasing items (or the mirrors needed to purchase them on the marketplace) with real money, and GGG comes down with great vengeance and furious anger. If they are indeed guilty of violating the terms of service, the entire OP collection will be removed by the developers almost immediately.
Either way, it’s an incredibly impressive feat (well, assuming it’s a real screenshot. Of course, the amount of time and gaming knowledge it would take to create it… well, it’s a lot). Collections like this don’t come along every day, and for someone who’s been playing the game for a long time, it’s really cool to see the entire history of the game collected in one place, even if, like modern museums, it’s not without its history. fair share of questions about origins.