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Auction Houses To Be Removed From Diablo III
An anonymous reader writes "When Blizzard built Diablo III, one of the controversial features was the inclusion of an auction house for players to buy and sell gear. On one hand, it created a safe environment for trading, which had been rife with scams in Diablo II. On the other hand, gathering loot was one of the main points of the game, and the auction house trivialized that. According to an announcement on Battle.net, both the Real Money auction house and the Gold auction house will be removed from the game as part of Blizzard's revamp of the loot system in Diablo III. The target date is well ahead of us: March 18, 2014. Blizzard said, 'We feel that this move along with the Loot 2.0 system being developed concurrently with Reaper of Souls will result in a much more rewarding game experience for our players.' Unexpected news, to be sure."
I always thought Auction house is what make Diablo III relevant and rewarding since the game play focus on being grindy. Now that you can no longer exchange gears for actual money, what is the point? Is the game play itself fun enough?
Of the people I know who still play the game, most of them only do so to sell items for cash. Frankly, the game itself was short and not that interesting.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Now they just need to bring back the ability to choose where your attribute points go on level up.
I still hold the position that the auction houses reduced the overall "social" feeling that I got from Diablo 2. Engaging players for trading by discussing in chat and meeting in game had a special feeling to it. Of course, there was also the downside of being spammed and scammed.
Isn't it too late? Who plays this anymore?
Also, why didn't they do any testing with groups to determine if this was needed or even wanted?
The auction house in World of Warcraft is perfectly usable except for a few minor details, but Diablo III's auction house just plain sucks. I don't care if it is two different development teams, it is still two Blizzard games.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The lack of an auction house is what made D2 (and Borderlands) such a success. Precisely that you had to grind endlessly to perhaps get the good stuff gave people a sense of achievement.
When all anyone needed to do was to flip out the credit card, that disappeared.
P2W does not give much satisfaction.
So the reason for Diablo 3 being always online was the auction house. They are removing that.
Does this mean that Blizzard will remove the always online requirement? I don't think so, but I can dream...
There were sooo many other things wrong with this game, the AH, while retarded (despite its potential for awesomeness in theory), was the least of why I stopped playing it shortly after release.
Haaaaaaa. I can't believe they're actually doing this!! Honestly, I'm sold. If the new system for loot is actually any good at all, I may actually start playing again. Hoping they give us the option to at least try out the gamepad configuration they made for consoles too, but that might be a stretch... Anyway, really an overall good announcement. Guess Microsoft isn't the only one who can do 180s these days. :P
The problem is, with Auction House loot didn't matter much.
You could always exchange it on AH immediately.
Completely ruined the sensation of actually see something nice drop.
There was a long long article explaining this phenomenon, done by some psychiatric I believe.
Unfortunately I cannot remember where it is.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
By 2-years.... Virtually everyone quit last year when they realized Inferno was broken.
When there is an auction house that lets you buy end game gear then all that happens is people grind gold and voila, the game is beaten.
If you make it so the auction house won't let you sell gear, but crafting materials to craft end game lewt(Guild Wars2), then suddenly you make random crafting items desirable to trade with, but end game stuff can still be bought.
The auction house is almost a detriment to keeping your game survive if you allow it buy end game content. Instead of allowing people to buy their end game content(and subsequently quit because they're max powered), you maybe only let early/mid game be bought and sold on the AH.
There's two main ways to allow end game content and that is to allow people to buy crafting pieces on the AH, but instead of 100% always crafting the most powerful weapon, you give them random stats of randomized power. And you even say,"If you throw more crafting materials in the forge(more lucky rabbits feet and purple horseshoes!), you get better chance for better random stats." That way the ah goes strong even end game, but people can't just buy their way to perfect end game gear.
Of course my theory is to never let them reach max power, but constantly get incrementally powerful, at lower and lower amounts of the time. If you're worried this impacts PVP, it does, but PVP can be more dynamic than just 1v1 in a zone you can't gain power in. Anyway if you want to read more about my end game MMORPG ideas, you can read here
God spoke to me
all of america is trying to underbid one another for work these days. and the jobs are often short-term. certainly has trivialized the work experince. how are we supposed to gather loot when we're constantly underbidding one another for small short-term gigs that amount to peanuts?
If the gameplay isn't fun enough for someone, having the AH available will only burn them out faster because they'll have less to work for. None of the Diablo games have ever had much of an "end-game" or anything. It's like Mario; you play because you enjoy the game, even if it's a bit grindy at times. It's also not like an MMO, where you can at least strut around showing off your gear to random people...
P2W does not give much satisfaction.
You sorely underestimate the super-rich and their ability to derive self-satisfaction from things that involve money. I mean, apart from the fact that they play a P2W game called "real life"...
with an AH system the loots are weighed so that maybe one in 1000, or maybe one in 10000 gets that nice loot.
if you can get actual money(£$) from it that one player isn't going to even use it himself. it becomes just a way to show that you have cash in the real world. that breaks the 4th wall and makes playing the game feel stupid quite frankly.
because you might just as well go grind the burgers at the mcd to earn that loot.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
After playing for 500+ hours, I think the AH did the opposite. The game was grindy because grinding was the only way to develop a bankroll large enough in order to interact with the economy, which was centralized essentially only at the AH (assuming you don't put actual money into your bankroll).
But since the itemization and character design in D3 was so poor that in order to reach end game -- each item type only had one set of ideal attributes to make it valuable, the prices on the AH were absurdly inflated. It made it worse that each class really only had one or two viable builds -- so even having small variations in ideal item attributes was rare, and getting good rolls on those build-specific attributes made items even more expensive than "standard" end-game items.
So it was a vicious circle of grinding -- you had to grind to get good items that were worth selling by default in order to participate in the AH, but since the attribute requirements for sellable items was such a short list you have to grind more and more to find drops that actually meet the requirements to actually get it to sell. I'd say I would sell maybe less than 10% of all uniques dropped, and the majority of that 10% I would sell for maybe 1-2% of the cost of the end game gear that I actually had, so it takes FOREVER to recoup costs unless you're lucky.
Even worse, in order to get good drops consistently you needed to grind at the highest monster power levels, and in order to do that you need end game gear! So vanilla D3 with the auction house was an eternal worthless grind unless you decided to put 20 bucks into your character to make him decent.
Now, hopefully with better itemization and better loot tables it will become less grindy to participate in the economy. Without the AH, trading will hopefully be more like D2 where the currency (SoJs back in the day, and later end-game runes) was much more stable than "gold".
Meh, I'm too busy playing linux games from Valve to give a shit about proprietary nethack ripoffs like Diablo.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It was the shitty itemization associated with the real money auction house that killed Diablo 3. Removing the gold auction house is a death blow for the casual gaming community if drop itemization isn't completely amazing (if it's like Diablo 2, it could work, but I doubt Blizzard is that smart).
If true, this is amazing news!!! I really hated the RMAH and the crap loot system built around it that forced you to crack open your wallet if you wanted to play Inferno.
I'll definitely create another Bnet account (sold the last one with D3, SC2, and WoW) just to buy this again.
P2W does not give much satisfaction.
depends on who you're asking. some people like seeing big numbers and don't care how they got there.
Grinding for hours only to have the RNG give you something for a completely different class also sucks. Does D3 have a feature like Torchlight, where you can convert rare items from one class into a random rare for your own class?
Completely ruined the sensation of actually see something nice drop.
Which would be a valid point, if anything nice ever dropped. I played through the game 6 times, on two characters (one through hell, one half way through inferno), and never saw a single legendary item drop. True upgrades to gear petered out after Nightmare, which pretty much forced you into the AH to just be able to advance without being slaughtered. Diablo has always been about buckets of trash and vendor loot, with the occasional gem thrown in to make it worth your while. I found none of that in D3, just mounds and mounts of garbage. Unless they tune the loot rates to account for NOT having the AH, it'll be even less desirable for me to give the game another shot.
The cheapest piece of gear for anyone leveling was in the millions.... The AH encouraged less players and more bots.
is what this news gives me. Now if they bring back OFFLINE PLAY, I'll be interested in the expansion. Until then, FUCK BLIZZARD.
Unless Blizzard wants to pony up and build me some landline broadband out here in the boonies where I live, that is.
How do you trivialize the fact that people, often adults, play a meaningless game to get fake intangible stuff. Why is buying the stuff with real money any different than playing a game to get stuff. It is being implied that there is some sort ranking system in the game where people with more stuff are somehow inherently better than people with less stuff. Does this extend to the real world where if I have a better car, then I am inherently a better person? Is the submitter upset that the egalitarian nature of the game, where everyone had equal opportunity to get stuff if they invested the hours in the game, even if they were in the real world not as rich? I can tell you that premise is false. Even to begin to play video games one must has reached a lifestyle comfortable enough to afford the game, and have the leisure time to play the game.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I played it just because the ad blitz made it sound interesting. I think I would've found the game much more interesting had it been sudden death beginning to end. Breezing through it to the end pretty much made it coaster after that.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Your saying of "give the game another shot" after playing through it 6 times (no less!) kind of becomes a paradox...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I played through D2 hundreds of times during my lan-party-every-night phase. I've played through D3 four... maybe five times, with four characters. Its replay value next to its predecessor is negligible, raw numbers aside.
So, since the Gold Shop and the Real Money Auction House were the primary reasons they were giving for requiring the always online, does this mean that they'll be patching that "functionality" out as well?
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
If trading of items is allowed, then not having an AH just makes it harder and riskier for people to do what they're going to do anyways.
I hate nodrop. I make lots of new characters, play them, and nodrop just makes it so I can't transfer gear to other characters/friends I play with.
Another way to discourage trading of end game loot is to prohibit decoration of traded items. Give traded items a really cheesy color scheme, so you can tell just by looking at a character whether or not they "just bought it".
Geez, what fun is it when you actually have to play the game to reap the spoils? No worries, I'm sure EA will make sure their hand stays firmly in your pocket for your never ending cash flow pleasure.
Hello, My name is Jim Sager, and I'm looking for a position as a Game Designer/Programmer for a MMORPG. I've tried to make my own MMORPG solo(tens of thousands of hours work), but I could not find enough art to fill the bill.
Sounds interesting! Oh, wait ...
Compiles with AS3 in Flash Builder 4.5 and above, may need to link libraries.
Never mind!
Yes, it's called trading
The article does state that the loot drop rate will change... or in D3 lingo: Loot 2.0
I hope they do not make everything bind on pickup. One of the draws of Diablo2 for me was trading with other players for the items I needed. Not only in game, but on reputable sites where you could trade items or sell for in game currency such as gems\runes.
If they make it where you can't even trade items then the game is pointless to play.
The real money auction house was intended as a money-maker for Blizzard. The gold auction house was intended to palliate the accusations of the game being ruined by pay-to-win mechanics.
As it turned out, the costs of having the auction houses outweighs the money they make, meaning the real profit vector is making the game itself as appealing as possible (to drive sales of the expansions).
Eliminating the auction houses, and modifying the game design to focus more on fun gameplay, was obviously the right decision from the get-go, but now that the numbers have crossed the desks of the right executives, corrective action is being taken.
This makes an assumption that everyone pulled out a credit card. You can play without it and still get the sense of achievement by grinding, and it's irrelevant what other players are doing (especially if you don't compete against them).
Dumb DRM, RMAH, Always_Sim-City_Online, U Play, mother fuckers learn the hard way...
The only reason I can think of for removing the auction house is if they wanted to do away with trading altogether, because old fashioned trading is just an extremely inconvenient auction house. Because I can't see them doing that, I am forced to conclude that they have changed the loot system so that you can rely on self-found gear. But if players are not forced to resort to the auction house in order to progress, then you cease to have a problem, so why remove this convenient feature?
:wq
I completely agree with you, D3 lost its luster for me when I realized that getting good gear was trivial done by using the AH. Instead of caring about what dropped, the only metric that seemed to matter was gold farmed per hour.
To put it in perspective, there were about 30 different random attributes. All builds require 4-5 of these attibutes.
All resist
str/dex/int depending on class
crit
crit damage
vitality
If you dont have ALL of these abilities on most of your gear, you simply cannot complete end-game content.
Well what are the chances of finding an item with all these abilities? I estimate about 1 in 150,000 drops have all 5.
But also consider that each of these stats will havev a randomly generated value. So you may have All Resist +10 when you need +70. Consider about 1/10 of any needed stat has good values, and that is 1/10000 of 1/1500,000 drops will have usable equipment for the highest level play.
That is a shitload of grinding. It is much better to spend about 50$ and buy enough gold for the AH to buy your gear. Also, the top-end gear is hugely inflated! all farmers need to do is kep on the lookout for any end-level gear, buy it and then turn around and sell it for 100 times what they paid for it. There is not enough of the top-end gear to go around, so the market is crazy inflated. It is a great example of how a hyper-competitive market is bad for the consumer. Snipers with multiple accounts and bots leverage their strength to price things up to astronomical amounts. Some of these things cost billions of gold when my grinding yeilds a few thousand per drop. Economic teachers should use it as a case study.
BUT IS IT REALLY WORTH IT?
I mean really, after you grind away or spend your hard-earned cash to fully equip your character, what is your reward?
YOU GET TO GO THROUGH THE SAME CONTENT YOU ALREADY CLEARED OVER AND OVER AGAIN!
YAYYYY!!!!!
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
I played through the game 6 times, on two characters (one through hell, one half way through inferno), and never saw a single legendary item drop.
So you played through the game 5 times without seeing any legendary items and though to yourself "ehhh... I'll give it one more shot." Sixth time's the charm, right?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
What if you hate other people and bought a single player game to not play it with other people?
I stopped playing Diablo 2 after a half dozen or so complete runs through the highest act/difficulty combo my character could complete failed to drop any upgrades for my character. no futher progression. lots of time wasted.
I stopped playing Diablo 3 after I beat the game on the highest difficulty, using gear I bought off the AH with gold dropped in-game and from items I myself sold on the AH. not a single real dollar spent. reasonable playing time. fairly enjoyable.
Then I went and played other games. you know there are other quality games out there? seriously there are!
The AH was a solid addition and I'd miss it if I still played the game.
So now they flip a bot and walk away until a flashing message appears: Item now in inventory.
Grinding is no achievement. In a cosmic sense, it's even lamer than buying good items. At least cash reflects real skill in some wierd way.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So you played through the game 5 times without seeing any legendary items and though to yourself "ehhh... I'll give it one more shot." Sixth time's the charm, right?
Even if a legendary dropped, the chance of it being of any use to me was extremely small, so I wasn't holding my breath. I just realized after I quit playing, that I had never seen one drop, ever.
Actually I'd say what made Borderlands a success (other than the fact its damned funny, something we haven't had in shooters since No One Lives Forever) was the fact that trading with your friends made ANY high level gun a good thing. for example I suck at CQB and prefer to stay and stand off distance so i favor rifles and revolvers but my youngest prefers shotguns and battling CQB so if he found a good rifle it wasn't "oh crap I don't use those" it was "meh I'll trade it to my uncle" and the same would go for me and shotguns, this made hunting for the good loot all the more rewarding.
Of course the down side of that is there is still a few legendary items that are frankly game breakers, you can farm the Bee legendary if you have the Tiny Tina DLC and frankly with that shield you can just slaughter anything in your path, with a decent SMG I was just obliterating creatures that were so high level they had a skull next to their name but with the Bee? two clips and they are toast. Thanks to the ability to farm all it takes is one guy with a bee to farm and you can quickly have a whole team loaded with Bee shields and then the challenge is gone, you can just blow through the entire game like it was nothing.
As for D3? Until they get rid of the "always online" component they can count me out. for those that feel like me I STRONGLY recommend Torchlight II, it gives all the diablo style hack and slash goodness (made by one of the guys that did D2) and unlike D3 not only is it offline if you want it also has LAN and co-op and supports modding, the community has already made a ton of killer dungeons, new monsters, enhancements, all kinds of good stuff. It even comes with a mod manager and supports up to 10 mods at a time, so you can mix and match and make the game YOUR way. I don't mind online only in a MMORPG, that is kinda the entire point of those, but I'll be damned if I pay good money for a single player game I can't play without a connection.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I haven't really seen Blizzard make any good decisions regarding any of their games lately. They listen to their criticism but often it's the wrong criticism to be listening to. Feels like the wrong people are running the show right now or something. They need a serious mix-up or just to remove some of the "yes" men from their midst.
That makes me think of my gamer customers, they'll spend truly insane amounts of money just to get to the top of some leaderboard which means exactly jack shit when it comes to real world application performance, but they treat those numbers like its some sort of E-peen measuring contest or something.
as far as you getting stuck with something you can't use? I have to give Gearbox credit as that is one of the nice things about the Borderlands series, any character can use any weapon. sure if I'm playing the assassin I can get some sniper buffs i can't if I'm a gunzerker but my gunzerker can snipe just as well as the assassin and can use the same weapon loadout. My only gripe is whomever built the share locker needs their ass kicked...4 slots? Really? And no way to get more? It makes it a real PITA when you get multiple items you want to share with your other characters, as you have to do a LOT of switching to get it all moved.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
and I might buy it
because I'm not paying $60 for a box where I have to get blizzard/activision's permission before I can play
Then you probably shouldn't have bought an online, multiplayer game.
you mean like simcity?
Other people are assholes, as your post clearly shows. Why would I want to spend more time interacting with them than necessary? How is that stupid?
It wasn't what made D2 a success, it just wasn't making D2 a failure (plenty of awful games didn't and don't have an auction house). If you take away the RMAH in D3, you will not be left with D2.
Borderlands was a success because it was fun to play and fairly unique. D2 was fun because of building different types of characters with different gear setups. D3 eliminates that in a huge way so no matter what they do with the loot system the build system is so boring and stupid that it doesn't matter what loot you get. I found it closer to Dark Kingdoms or RAW in terms of gameplay than any sort of Diablo game. D3 console version isn't always online which is nice.
So, I don't get it. Does that mean everyone in Diablo 3 gets their gear reset? 2 years seems like an amazing amount of time for a game to be released yet still clearly be in Beta.
Does PC get any other updates, like evade rolls, or larger portraits of toons? Sounds like Blizzard is attempting to completely gimp their PC version now to raise sales on console offerings.
I know I'll be celebrating.
Its sad when otherwise intelligent people say things that are in the realm of 'full retard'. There is absolutely zero reason why anyone playing a video game like Diablo 3 should care what other people do outside of plain and simple jealousy. Do I care if someone else has 250k DPS? Not at all because that has zero impact on me or the game that I am playing. Is your jealousy so out of control that you demand that not only your own sense of achievement be kept 'pure' but everyone else's? I can only assume that you are sitting around waiting for a reason to get angry regardless of how stupid you look in making your argument. If there was PVP in the game from the start you would be right. That is the kind of P2W that kills games. In a purely PVE game there are no valid reasons to remove the AH except to appease the crybabies. In Diablo 3, what are those players paying to win? There is no end game and nothing to win. If someone pays cash for gear to farm faster, the only person who is hurt by taking that away is the lucky guy who won the lottery of ROG for an item he didn't need.
Why do I care? Because the RMAH allowed me to buy WOW for my kid and SC2 for my girlfriend. I got lucky and it turned out that someone else was willing to pay for what I didn't need. Other than being butt hurt over knowing someone else has better gear than you, what is the point in claiming you were hurt by that?
The worst part is, Blizzard is in the business of making money. With the amount of cash they make off of the AH, they will have something else in the works to recoup those lost monies. Knowing Blizzard, the only reason to do this is to change all items to bind on pickup and open their own P2W shop where they create the items and keep all of the cash.
At least GTA V never had a cash auction house.
Which is why I switched.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yeah I've got no problem with auction houses. I'd hate to be grinding the same quest over and over trying to get the perfect item. Grinding isn't an achievement, it's pathetic.. Just take what you get and sell it to somebody that needs it. Take that gold and buy what you need. Done and the game doesn't become a full time job.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
You don't need to use a credit card. A small amount of in-game gold was all that was needed to kit your character up to beat Diablo on Inferno.
" Precisely that you had to grind endlessly to perhaps get the good stuff gave people a sense of achievement."
Not quite, what made borderland and diablo was the combat and SECONDLY getting awesome stuff. In diablo 2 the combat for melee classes like paladin acted closer to traditional fighting game mechanics (sword + shield bash + dash). Diablo was beginning to do interesting things with combat that balanced more action oriented game style with ease of use interface that is missed by the non-observant population.
If you thought diablo was only about loot, the joke was on you. Sure loot was a part of it, but the class design and atmopshere of diablo's world was beginning to gain it's legs in diablo 2. It was sadly was cut short by World of warcraft and the huge gap it created from diablo 2 to diablo 3 and the diablo 2 team going to work elsewhere.
The original teams behind D1 and D2 were stellar. The D3 team, lets face it, were a bunch of green devs (in terms of game design) trying to understand a decades old franchise. This is seen in how the items and class design were just awful. The WoW / MMO developer generation just doesn't get diablo, let's face this fact. Most modern RPG players have been raised on MMO's which is far from the oldschool RPG design of yore. If you grew up playing Eye of the beholder, Lands of Lore and the early utlima's, Final fantasy 1, etc, most mmo's are just so far removed from real dungeon crawling gameplay and challenges. To anyone who's oldschool, modern MMO's are giant theme parks which players are hand held and lead by the nose through the content with the challenging videogame part almost completely removed.
Well I can imagine some rich guy with the "best of everything in diablo III" that use to grind in d2, who just logs his computer own to show his friend his shiny virtual pixels and doesn't "play" the game.
It is better to invest money in an MMO and time into RL endeavors. You can effectively achieve everything in an MMO with a few hard hours of work, rather than years of work. With a little left over to spare for pizza.
The "achievement" most MMO's provide is just an illusion and it does lead to less productive living. Its generally easy enough to achieve though that everyone can play at running an empire without actually putting anything other than time on the line. Yet another illusion, because if you fail at empire building IRL and die, than your just "loosing time".
But a las, pixels are safe, and serfs will be serfs, and people will farm pixels. I even do it to a small degree, because mind numbing work with a creative output is, mind-numbing.
The shared stash really sucks. I want Borderlands to have that room from the Matrix with 'Guns. Lots of guns'. And it should have all the guns I've ever looted as any character. And I can type in some search parameters and watch the racks go whooshing in and out in order to find me 'an SMG of blue or higher quality, with an elemental effect, in the level 30-35 range'.
According to Jean-Paul Sartre, "Hell is other people." It stands to reason that if you want to fully experience Hell in Diablo III, it must be played multiplayer.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
Even if a legendary dropped, the chance of it being of any use to me was extremely small, so I wasn't holding my breath. I just realized after I quit playing, that I had never seen one drop, ever.
This.
Before the first loot patch I NEVER saw anything drop for the class I was playing. No problem eh? Switch to another class to get loot drops for your preferred class. Right. More grinding. Despite this I still played it through to the end without buying anything on the AH and without grinding classes I didn't want to play.
After the first loot patch I picked it up again for a day. Since then I've only played a couple of hours.
Now Blizzard is going to start patching the game to make it what it should have been at release. Too late, I've moved on to other games. D3 just wasn't much fun after I finished it once. The maps don't change and even with the first loot change, drops for the class I'm playing are laughably rare. And now my preferred class is so far ahead of all the others I don't want to grind them up to equivalence. You get that yet Blizzard? I don't want to grind for fun. It's not fun. (Which is one of the reasons I canceled my WoW subscription BTW.)
Dynamically generated maps and better loot drops would have made the game more enjoyable and kept me playing longer. Did I get my money's worth? Maybe. It was fun the first time through and I was looking forward to playing with friends but my friends don't like grinding the same maps/mobs either. So we don't play it.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
Yes, some of the "super-rich" can derive satisfaction from paying to win. Unfortunately most of the people playing aren't part of the super-rich. They cannot compete in the real world, so they go to a virtual world, if they cannot compete there they will move on to some place they can. So while you get a limited number of people who are willing to pay to have the best, you end up driving the majority of your user base away which then leads to just a small number of people continuing to play.
This has been a balancing act all free to play games struggle with, if they become too much to the pay to win side they die, if they don't have enough pay incentives they cannot keep the game alive.
I always thought Auction house is what make Diablo III relevant and rewarding since the game play focus on being grindy. Now that you can no longer exchange gears for actual money, what is the point? Is the game play itself fun enough?
How fun is it to do the same things over and over and over and over for very little reward? Seriously, that sounds like a minimum wage job that barely covers the bills.
But then, I play EQ2 and you can argue i do the same crap over and over and over and over. So I guess each his own.
But then I bot in EQ2, i control 6 toons at once (have to, no one plays anymore). In a guild with a few other botters and some live people. We have fun and do decently well. So it's all in the fun you make.
Still have no plans to buy diablo III.
Be seeing you...
The crafty ones are able to use AH and enjoy the game and even make the game pay for itself. The only flaw with AH is the huge cut Blizzard imposes on the transaction. They possibly made more on AH transactions than from the sale of game itself. Curious why they would slaughter the cash cow.
The WoW private servers can run on the client and they were a hacked together mess. I would think D3 server side code would be easy enough to spawn a server on the client side even for single player games.
The console version introduced offline play.
http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/review/a513600/diablo-3-review-ps3-a-devilishly-good-console-port.html
"Introducing offline play was essential given the nature of consoles, and the option to tackle the game with three other players in local multiplayer mode is among the new version's highlights."
But you don't need to do that either. You could just play the game normally.
Why is grinding seen as a achievement in games (or at least games like Diablo)? Sounds more like a job than a fun pastime at that point.
Yeah would have been news if I hadn't beaten the game after a week then took a few more weeks to beat the other difficulties. That is one game I won't be getting the upgrade for.
I recall reading that player activity in D3 dropped by 80% within two months of the PC release, so there's your RMAH audience. The other 80% (plus those who didn't buy) prefer the game without that.
If D3 comes without the always online requirement they will have two sales from me.
Meh. I think the 4 slots is fine. Yeah it sucks having to throw stuff out, but really - if you could keep every legendary you ever found, starting a new character would be no challenge at all. A maximum of 4 slots gives your new character/alt a little bit of a leg up, but you're not going to be a walking death machine right out of the blocks.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Exactly. Depends how YOU play and who you play with. I treat it like a LAN game with friends. That said the whole online only thing can eat a dick.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
they fixed the bee.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Why is grinding seen as a achievement in games (or at least games like Diablo)? Sounds more like a job than a fun pastime at that point.
A game doesn't have to be always fun to be satisfying. Grinding mimics real life, in that you work hard for a long time, and with a lot of tedium and a little bit of luck, you can look at your house and car with satisfaction. You've achieved something, and that's gratifying and worth playing for.
The gimme generation will never understand this.
4 tabs is a joke. In Path of Exile you can have as many tabs as you can afford, can color code them & name them. Don't under-estimate the ability to organize all your phat loot where a games sole purpose is to collect loot.
PlugY was a godsend custom plugin for D2 that allowed infinite stash tabs.
Agreed there are better games out there. The free Path of Exile comes to mind ...
Torchlight 2 is not bad, not bad at all. The free Path if Exile is better yet: Custom color coded and named stash tabs, 6 linked sockets, items as currency, tons of custom builds, skills as gems, Official ladder seasons, etc.
Agreed the D3 devs didn't have a freakin clue about "itemization" and what D2 great. The first week of D3 and I'm already getting spam?! Didn't they learn *anything* from WoW where I can block & report spammers???
Huh? D2 key and organ farming so you can unlock and beat Ãoeber Trist isn't end game???
Which is where the RNG boss kicks your ass. Based on the drops I was getting, I estimated it would take around a month per act to get good enough gear to progress through the next act (hell mode). Now I'm definitely not a top player so people who are better at dodging crap might not require quite as much gear in order to progress, but it'll still be a hell of a long haul to do what? See the same levels and ending sequence you saw in hell (and nightmare and normal.)
I personally think Blizzard is doing their usual swing from one extreme to the other. Currently the AH is almost required in order to kit out with a decent set of gear unless you happen to like killing demons enough to put a couple of months of your life into it.
The new plan is to remove the AH all together (and presumably this "loot 2.0" thing will be significantly improving the drop rates of gear your class cares about in order to compensate -- whether by increasing the drops overall or more likely by giving your class' stats a higher chance to be rolled.)
I think there's a great middle ground though -- make the drops high enough that using the AH isn't one-step-from-essential but still allow it to be there for people who are really having a hard time getting that last set piece or whatever. A 1% usage rate rather than a 99% usage rate (or the upcoming 0% usage rate.) Its how the AH is balanced in almost all MMOs and I don't see why it would be any different in D3 if they lined it up that way.
Sure some people with more money than time would still try to kit out completely through the AH but for the rest of us, we could use it as a last rather than the first resort for getting useful gear.
As for RMAH vs GAH.. I'm not a huge fan of the RMAH concept (though I understand Blizzard's wanting to nab a few extra $$$.) But its essentially legitimized gold selling and it frags the game's economy almost as badly. People who can afford it are simply better off than those who can't -- in one of the few arenas where the have-nots are supposed to be on equal ground (give or take a graphics card upgrade.)
Any particular reason you're trying to lable me?
Gaming should be about being fun. I like challenges in gaming, but if I'm going to be spending a lot of time grinding before I get a satisfying outcome, I might as well do it in real life. No-one recognizes an achievement in gaming with any level of seriousness, but if you can build a quad-copter with an Arduino and your own flight-control code, well that's much more impressive to show off and makes you feel genuinely proud about something worthwhile.
Games are a make-believe world you spend a few hours in every so often to escape. Nothing wrong with that, but please don't inflate any successes you accomplish in a game to be worth THAT much. Hence, spending time mindlessly grinding in a game doesn't seem like a good effort-to-reward ratio.
And? What's your point? Is it a better game because of it? 4 slots is part of the challenge. If you could have unlimited slots it would make running up a second character quite trivial.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I stopped playing because of the AH. maybe I'll start again.
The RMAH was an unmitigated disaster. This isn't because it was a bad idea, it's because Blizzard made it one by trying to stick their fingers in the pie instead of just regulating the inevitable like they were supposed to.
The GAH is the main thing that was missing from Diablo II.
Trading will happen, with or without support. Trading, by itself, doesn't make the game any less of what it is. There was plenty of it in Diablo II. But because it wasn't supported, it was inconvenient, untrustworthy, and generally garbage. All Blizzard is doing here is opening the way for old-school scammers and farmers to screw everything up. They could just fix the problems with their moronic implementation of the auction house concept, 90% of which would be gone just by temporarily removing the RMAH, letting the market stabilize, and turning it back on as a facilitator instead of a goddamn business model.
No, though. We'll just wash our hands of the whole goddamn thing and trade this set of problems we created for the set of problems the playerbase created years ago. Why fix anything if it'd take actual work and won't cause customers who have already paid us to keep paying? Screw that.
Is your jealousy so out of control that you demand that not only your own sense of achievement be kept 'pure' but everyone else's?
Blizzard has built themselves up as an e-sports powerhouse. All their games have a competitive bent.
Unsurprisingly, competitive people like to compete with others but competition only works when the rules of the competition are 'fair' to everyone.
Yea you can't, because they thought everyone would use the AH, so the drops are generally very crappy. I jsut don't believe it's possible to balace the drops and AH in a way that doesn't make the highend items completely unavailable to casual players, but at the same time doesn't make everything just 1 point off from the highend items throwaway cheap. Basically everyone has the second best gear, and only the ones paying or playing A LOT(or botting, or getting very lucky) have the best gear. In D2 you saw all kinds of builds, each with their own preferred gear, and the trading was so time consuming the level of gear differed a lot.
>But you don't need to do that either. You could just play the game normally.
Up until Act 2 Inferno. Then the game just got fucktardedly difficult unless you used the AH.
If Blizzard feels the need to tailor the game for the 'masses', and the 'masses' use the auction house, then they increase the difficulty, under the assumption that people use the auction house. This can hurt the people who choose not to use the auction house. Removing the auction house allows them to tailor the game for people who have to find all of their own items, which can be argued is how the game was meant to be played in the first place.
In a purely PVE game there are no valid reasons to remove the AH except to appease the crybabies. In Diablo 3, what are those players paying to win?
Why do I care? Because the RMAH allowed me to buy WOW for my kid and SC2 for my girlfriend. I got lucky and it turned out that someone else was willing to pay for what I didn't need. Other than being butt hurt over knowing someone else has better gear than you, what is the point in claiming you were hurt by that?
The worst part is, Blizzard is in the business of making money. With the amount of cash they make off of the AH, they will have something else in the works to recoup those lost monies. Knowing Blizzard, the only reason to do this is to change all items to bind on pickup and open their own P2W shop where they create the items and keep all of the cash.
You are just wrong. The game and drops are designed with the AH in mind, so not using the AH isn't really an option. And AH is BORING. I play to have fun. I don't really care if someone dupes items, or cheats, or gets to the end credits as soon as they buy the game, I want the experience to be fun. It's not easy to analyze what makes something fun, but for me, it wasn't the AH. Maybe because I was expecting something different. I do like money manager type of games, auction games and such, and I know some people liked to play AH a lot, but with diablo I wanted to kill monsters and find treasures, not kill monsters, find 30 gold from each, then go to the AH and buy whatever I could afford. No sense of finding something great there. Also, diablo is PVE, but still there _should_ be leaderboards and ladders, and statistics. And that kinda means you should not be able to "cheat" with money.
It's silly to suggest removing the AH will magically make things fair.
It's always been the case that games where you have to farm for goods are dominated by the unemployed or people with few commitments like housewives or students.
The reason Blizzard made the auction house in the first place was to allow those who work to be able to use that fact to compete against those who do not.
So you'll never achieve fairness by removing it. It just sways things back towards society's non-contributors and spongers unless Blizzard has basically made rare drops no longer rare such that someone who can only fit in 4 hours a week can get all the uber gear they need to compete with someone who can fit in 100 hours a week.
You know, that's boring. That means there aren't any big "YESSSS!" moments. Just the "meh, this will sell for 400000", 100 more and I can afford something worthwhile.
Basically the game has like 3 or 4 difficulty levels, and to level up a character all the way to the highest level (60) you have to play through each difficulty level. That means to get a single character to level 60 you have to play through the game about 4 times anyway.
So it's not unusual for people to play the game many times, just levelling up two different character classes to the top to unlock all their skills and abilities means 6 or 8 playthroughs or whatever.
But he's right, you can do this and not get any kind of legendary drop. He played through so many times not looking for a legendary drop, but to level his characters up.
They fixed that in the console version. Good loot actually dropping when playing the game, instead of Auction House requirement for everyone. The console version is, for this very reason, the superior version of the game. Apparently, they want to shift the PC loot system to something similar to console version with their "Loot 2.0" system.
Maybe that's what they're trying to reduce - the numbers of people using the AH to finish easily and going on to play other games (and tell other people about them), and the numbers of people not using the AH and finding it too hard to finish and going on to play other games etc...
If so I think it's too late by now. How many new players will go "ooh no more AH, I really should buy and try D3 now"? I suspect many of those who bought D3 have long stopped playing it.
Even so I think they made plenty of money already. Maybe this is in preparation for a future expansion.
If you like controlling many toons at once maybe you can try getting Guild Wars 1 Nightfall - it has "heroes" which are a bit like toons that you can equip and control somewhat (the server controls them if you don't, but you can fully micromanage 3 if you are coordinated enough) to help your main toon.
That said there aren't that many GW1 players nowadays, so sticking with EQ2 might make more sense for you.
I currently play GW1 for the "Guild vs Guild" PvP which I still find interesting.
The problem with the rmah isn't inherit to the rmah idea itself. The problem was that they deliberatley designed the game around it that left people with the choice to either buy gear from it or extend their grind by a factor of 20. They forced you into using this and ruined the game for everyone who just wanted the single player experience without having to fork out cash in order to advance.
Uhhh...I think you aren't following the conversation friend, i'm not talking about the weapon slots ON THE CHARACTER I'm talking about the weapon slots ON THE TRADING LOCKER. Having only 4 slots on the trading locker is plain retarded as it makes you needlessly switch between characters just to share loot with your characters. A MUCH better design would be to have a tab at the bank for each character you have that has made it to Sanctuary or at the very least have the trade slots grow when you buy slots in your bank.
Oh and while they tuned down the Bee IMHO all they did was turn it from "extreme overkill" to just "major overkill", less than 2 weeks ago I was slaughtering enemies a good 8+ levels above me with no effort, in fact the only threat I had was from running out of ammo.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It has that room. It's usually a room immediately following a boss.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Big yes moments are only big YESSS because you ridiculously devalued your own time with that pointless grinding.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
It had more content, never had an auction house, and was cheaper. Also, people are *still* playing Diablo III?
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
I didn't read everyones response, but many people here seem to be ignorant of the point. The reason D3 is grindy and boring is because in their attempts to force success out of the auction house, they made drop rates of loot so low that it lost all the fun of treasure hunting on your own. Even though these sort of games are repetitive, they are fun because you are taking our hordes of guys, doing boss runs, etc because there are good chances of better gear being dropped. I couldn't personally care less about the existence of the auction house, provided that it doesn't result in the drop rates being gimped to the degree that they did in order to try and force you to use them.
Obviously with the fun drop rates, the economy of the auction houses would be pretty jacked up, and if their intent was to make money off of it, they would have to keep releasing better and better gear in order to capitalize on the initial surge in sales of that gear before it becomes common place via drops. In that sense at least people can choose to earn stuff on their own in a game that is still fun. The relationship in the drop rate economy and a marketplace is certainly related, but the core reason this game was ultimately rejected by many fans is precisely because they ruined the core magic of the game, which is fighting for better shit. It's the only logical choice to remove the auction houses altogether, because the fun drop rates and the auction houses are not really compatible. If stuff is dropping at the fun rates, it will have trivial worth very quickly in the economy of the auction houses. At least with old school trading 'in game', there is an economy of time being part of it, having to track down people that may have something you want for sale, or encouraging you to play with other people and not just solo and use the AH. I'm leaning toward it being too late though. I'll give it another shot but it's difficult to imagine it capturing the same interest after this long as it would have if they didn't flounder in failure this whole time.
D3 is still a success (regardless of how much the haters out there say it isn't) with the auction house.
Almost ALL online games have RMT. Just illegally done in the black market.
Anyone that plays any online game knows that if the games has items/gold to trade, there's always the RMT in the black market.
Prices must have really crashed since I was playing it. I got the game on release and did the grind up through A2 Inferno. Even with all the gold I had accumulated to that point I could only afford gear good enough to get me to A3 and then I hit another wall. I ended up quitting, stuck in A3 Inferno, because I was tired of grinding to get drops not good enough to help me progress and not valuable enough to sell for something good enough to help me progress.
yes..once. after that, with the levels NOT being randomly generated like they were in D2, its utterly boring and mindnumbing and i dont care for it.
walk 3 steps, whack 2 mobs, walk a few more, kill the miniboss...for a series built around replayability, D3 is sorely lacking.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
If so I think it's too late by now. How many new players will go "ooh no more AH, I really should buy and try D3 now"?
Unless they bump the difficulty and introduce new loot to the point that existing equipment already sold through the auction house becomes worthless, it won't help. Otherwise, I won't know whether the guy in great gear got it because he's good, or just bought it.
This smells of closing the barn door after the horses have run out.
You have it quite backward imho.
The grindy shitty gameplay was there to facilitate the potential goldmine that was the auctionhouse.
Seems however the drawbacks were larger then the gains and they now canned it, they'll also rebalance the loot system and possibly the game modes.
I think you've got Blizzard's motivations all wrong there. In Diablo 2 there was a relatively huge market for good items and people were willing to pay cash for them. Since there was no in game way to arrange these transactions that business was conducted outside of Blizzards realm of control. Businesses sprung up to fill this niche and scammers in droves. When naive or just plain ignorant players got scammed or felt they were wrong in some way they would take up blizzards time complaining. Additionally many of these third party businesses cheated via botting and item duping which affected the entire community because this screwed up the item economy, frequently involved crashing game servers to dupe items, and spamming every available in game channel with advertisements. Those scammers and businesses were making money off of damaging Blizzards game and reputation.
So with Diablo 3 they realized that they couldn't let people trade items, a core game mechanic of the franchise, and at the same time keep real money out of the picture. So they attempted to create a venue under their control where anyone could buy and sell their items. Blizzard would also take a cut to increase their revenue and offset the cost of maintaining such a system.
Where all this fell down was that apparently most of their customer base never really bothered trading before. Now that there was an authorized and easy to access venue for trading nearly everyone participated. Because of the games reliance on gear this meant that people could progress much faster than they might have expected. This meant that the super harsh change in difficulty when starting Inferno was that much more pronounced. And because of the way loot drops were scaled, poorly in my opinion, even using the Gold Auction House wouldn't help much with Inferno progression. The Real Money Auction House became a more viable option for those people that just absolutely had to finish the game on all difficulty levels.
So now a year later they have nerfed the difficulty of Inferno but have implemented what is essentially ten more difficulty levels. The difficulty scaling is much better now but you still have the issue of loot generally being horrible and everyone feeling like they absolutely have to use the AH to progress.
In my opinion the design of the character classes is what has actually broken the system. Practically every single class and build of those classes wants the exact same 3 to 5 attributes on every piece of gear. Those stats are Critical Chance, Critical Hit Damage, All Resist and Vitality. The only variance will be depending on what class you also want all the Strength, Dexterity or Intelligence you can get. The only class unique item attributes that I can think of is that Wizards would also like Arcane Power on Critical Hit, Witch Doctors would like some Pick Up Radius, and Monks would like passive Spirit Regen. But even those unique bits aren't absolutely necessary for those classes except for specific builds, they are just perks to get if you can.
My conclusion is that unless the loot patch, that is supposed to coincide with the AH removal, is perfectly balanced they will just be pushing all of the trading business to third party businesses again or kill the trading aspect of the game because no one will need to bother trading.
I don't think the sellable rate of rares is even that high, I might have sold 1% of the rares I've found, and even that seems pretty high. I go into runs with only six spots in my inventory taken up with potions, gems and tomes. I usually pick up all the rares and fill up my inventory 2 and a half times per game. I get a sellable item maybe every third game. And with several hundred hours in the game I've only ever sold a few items for more than a few million gold. So far all of them have been valuable for only one stat, reduced level requirement of 10+ on a weapon with 800+ DPS.
>Prices must have really crashed since I was playing it
Pfft, I haven't played it recently either. I quit maybe a month? after the game released. Maybe two, since we had a baby in there some time.
Yeah, early on gear to beat Diablo was super expensive, but as people kept grinding out the magic items, the cost to kit yourself out for Diablo Inferno plummeted.
And since it's not like there was anything to do *after* Diablo, most people quit at that point and dumped their gear on the RMAH.
There are 6 character classes and 4 tabs in your locker:
The default tabs should have been 7 so that:
* You have 1 dedicated tab per character
* You have 1 shared tab (for things such as economy: gems, blueprints, etc.)
> If you could have unlimited slots it would make running up a second character quite trivial.
Uh, it already is. "Rushing" has existed in D2 for ages. D3 doesn't change that concept of having a friend "power-level" you through the content.
I don't get what you're saying. You obviously don't have inordinate amounts of time or you would have been able to farm your own gear without having to use the AH. Since you don't have 16 hours a day to play you have ZERO chance to ever be anything but a loser on a leaderboard. You honestly think people will throw their hands up and praise the loss of not having an AH to deal with for the 'fun' of being ranked 250, 000th on the leaderboards? Unless you're really just full of shit and want to be handed the best gear without really trying for it, which is exactly what Loot 2.0 is aiming to accomplish. Loot 2.0 is about appeasing the masses with easier "I'm awesome" moments. Shortly after they gear completely up they will move on to another game or decide to completely restart from zero with nothing in a ladder they have no hope to win. In what realistic scenario does any of the information they've released make sense for the long term health of their game unless they are only planning on monopolizing the AH by replacing it with a P2W shop where they get all the cash? D3 does not have the fun factor of killing monsters that D2 had. Unless they are somehow redesigning the entire game from the ground up how can they nullify that lacking by nullifying everything that is interesting in the game for long term players?
Well for me the boring part is the grind. I'm not interested in beating a boss for a +1 sword of twinkie spearing. For me it's not a "YESSSS!" moment to get the reward on try 5 when it can drop on try 1. I'm not a slot machine player either.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
"I think you've got Blizzard's motivations all wrong there."
I suspect not as it was one of the cited reasons by them for it's introduction in the first place. In fact, I think there was even a Slashdot article on exactly that aspect of it.
"My conclusion is that unless the loot patch, that is supposed to coincide with the AH removal, is perfectly balanced they will just be pushing all of the trading business to third party businesses again or kill the trading aspect of the game because no one will need to bother trading."
That's assuming you can still trade and that everything doesn't just become account bound.
To me that sounds like pure marketing spin for the same root cause I listed. Let me rephrase there statement less politely.
"We know some of you assholes are going to pay each other real money for items and that others of you will exploit the shit out of our game to get stuff to sell as a comercial venture so we're going to head all that off by making you compete with everyone else."
Yes, they could entirely kill the idea of an item economy by making everything account bound. Hopefully they don't resort to that as one of the big draws for a significant part of the player base is the item trading.
I kind of liked the idea of the gold auction house because it let you grid less time and spend more time thinking about how you want your build to play. If you want to play a glass cannon, then you can get lots of damage gear, lots of attack speed and critical % and go out and play the way you wanted.
One of the (very few) problems I have with Borderlands 2 is that when you get to the higher levels (true vault hunter or higher) you have to change your build after you get any new weapons in order to still be effective, and you cannot play the way you want. For example, if you get a shotgun with very few bullets and very high critical you have to go back to Sanctuary and respec to get the talent that makes your reloads faster and doubles the damage of your first bullet. If you wanted to play with snipers, tough luck.
That said, I always felt the real money auction house was just a gigantic money grab and Blizzard purposefully broke Diablo 3 on Inferno so that you could not pass it unless you spent a lot of money (which has since been fixed in patches, I've been told).
"I see undead people" Warcraft III - Necromancer
It disappeared for those rich enough to waste that kind of money. For the rest of us, earning real cash for grinding was awesome.