My view is that the game invited collectors, grew, and collecting has been largely driven out by the proliferation of tokens. Tokens compete with each other. Not just in a given slot but from a budget standpoint and because the ability to move up in challenge level isn't that hard.
Nobody needs to play above Hardcore and, really, don't need to do that. Some of us choose to challenge ourselves because it justifies the collections rather than the challenge producing a need for the collections.
Sure, if there was a player growth at the rate of token production, maybe token economy could absorb the production. But, the production rate is massive. We don't need 20 more URs every year. There was demand for a while as players moved up steps in the pyramid, but it wasn't sustainable. Real usefulness of a new year of URs would be to like reprint 1 and have 3 new ones. Relics are ubiquitous. Legendaries are far more common than people seem to think and far more common than I believe anyone ever expected them to be.
May question why it worked previously. It worked previously because the total pool of tokens was so much smaller. With fewer different tokens available, any effect was more likely to be different and end up mattering to builds. Now, it was inevitable in all likelihood that rarities would get pushed down. Once upon a time, rares mattered to token tycoons; you can look at the really old trade threads. We had the UR/relic era. We are now in the post relic era.
Both the increase in players' average draws due to proliferation of TEs and the increase in number of tickets due to VTD vastly expand treasure in circulation. If we were getting 17 draws for only in person events, the supply would be massively less. I don't see any fix for this as people (not just players) care too much about TEs.
VTD also led to a sales spike where correction is not surprising. Company I work for is getting killed because it didn't manage a Covid related spike in sales and didn't plan for a correction.
Then, old stuff is generally weak. Power inflation has not been surprising as it's the norm for games. Whatever the scarcity of old stuff, if it doesn't go into builds, it's going to get devalued and devalued a second time as the player base shifts more and more to play-focused players rather than collecting-focused players. The power inflation in this game has been rather extreme, which only accelerated the deterioration of the secondary market and, as folks have pointed out repeatedly, actually undermines the future market for tokens as player expectations shift.
Layering Mythic on the game as essentially a separate game is interesting as a way to try to live with the power inflation, but it's not accessible enough and very awkward to implement. Token rotation is just an annoying patch that won't likely solve anything. This is not a competitive game in the same way that other games are. Players compete with each other for bling, and they compete against dungeon challenge levels. But, these are all player driven choices. We already see that many people who could be challenging themselves (maybe) at Epic choose to be unchallenged at Nightmare. Sometimes, I'm one of those players as I miscalculate for a theme run or end up running with groups that don't want to struggle.
As to challenge level, well, so far this week, Epic has been about right within the context of historicals. It's possible to be challenged, but you have to risk failure. It's so easy to build a collection that makes failure impossible given that we choose our own challenge level. But, while every aspect of the game interrelates to every other aspect in some way, I'd rate this as less relevant to why token valuations for swaths of tokens have crashed.
