Someone decided to drop a live hand grenade in the Path of Exile subreddit yesterday when they posted a screenshot of one of the most incredible collections ever amassed in gaming. Somehow, some way, user Present-Plankton-734 has put together a complete set of every discontinued or altered item that's ever been released in the game, the value of which can't be determined exactly—you aren't technically allowed to buy and sell PoE items for real money—but might be over $100,000.
Path of Exile came out in October of 2013, and about every four months or so they run a new league. Every league comes with a reset where everyone's characters are relegated to their eternal mode, Standard. Most people who play PoE never mess around with Standard, preferring to stay where things are new and shiny. This makes it a graveyard of sorts, where innumerable characters, once loved, now languish never to be logged in again.
One quirk of Standard is that items aren't updated like they are in the leagues. If an item is patched, nerfed, or otherwise changed, this doesn't affect Standard. So older items, some that have been forever changed, can exist in their original state in Standard as an echo from the past. Add in special event items, promotional releases, and gear that's had its art updated as part of normal development and you get a collection akin to a bunch of Magic cards with printing errors.
Despite its seemingly niche nature, there's a huge market in the community for stuff like this. In over 3,000 hours playing PoE, I've never seen a mirror (the most valuable currency item 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 Present-Plankton-734's collection. The PvP Season 1 reward Dream Fragments is the blue ring you see sitting all by itself in the top center of the screenshot. Only four exist in the entire world—GGG ran a special PvP event for one month in late 2014/early 2015 and to get the ring you had to amass a ridiculous amount of points. Two players each on the US and EU ladders achieved this, and that's it. Those four are the only four that exist. And that's assuming the original owners didn't vendor them, or delete them, or hit them with a Vaal orb like a psychopath.
The rarity on stuff like this makes a price impossible to predict perfectly—like super rare collectibles in real life, it mostly comes down to what someone will pay for it at the moment. Estimates for this collection, however, exceed $100,000.
I reached out to the poster to ask about their project collecting all these items, but they preferred to stay anonymous, telling me they feared that if their info got out their account may be compromised. I can't really say I blame them—there have been some high profile hacks lately, and I can't imagine a target more juicy than this.
And then there's the lurking question of how the items were acquired. The original Reddit thread about the collection is rife with posters accusing OP of buying the items (or the mirrors required to buy them off trade site) with real money, something GGG cracks down on with great vengeance and furious anger. If they are indeed guilty of violating terms of service, OP's entire collection would be deleted by the devs basically immediately.
Either way, it's an incredibly impressive feat (y'know, assuming it's a real screenshot. Of course, the amount of time and game knowledge it would take to create this is… well, it's a lot). Collections like this don't come along every day, and as someone who's played the game for a long time, it's super cool to see the game's history all gathered in one place—even if, like modern museums, it isn't without its fair share of questions about provenance.
