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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?
Now they just need to bring back the ability to choose where your attribute points go on level up.
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...
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
Of the people I know who still play the game, most of them only do so to sell items for cash.
Apparently that's something they'd like to change.
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".
It's not too late because an expansion is coming. Most likely that will include ladders with a fresh economy.
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.
Isn't it too late? Who plays this anymore?
I'd say given that they just released the game for PS3 & XBox 360 on September 3rd, there's bound to be some people playing it.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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)
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.
Yes, it's called trading
The article does state that the loot drop rate will change... or in D3 lingo: Loot 2.0
Inferno wasn't broken. It was intentionally made impossible unless you bought RMAH gear. With the removal of RMAH, I assume Inferno difficulty will be adjusted as well.
It was meant to take months to clear inferno, regardless of how you received the gear. You don't see end-game dungeons in MMOs being cleared within a few weeks of a game being launched.
Problem was Diablo players are used to mindless fun, not excruciating difficulty. The other problem was some classes were based on avoidance, while others mitigation. Better mitigation comes from better gear, meaning these players were behind the curve. Players who played the avoidance classes well were able to clear Inferno very quickly. A game that can be completed solo should not favor one type of class over another.
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).
How do you even run Diablo 3 on that typewriter?
In Diablo, the real problem was the loot itself. They were all random drops, and even the named epic drops had random stats.
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.
If there is one thing I'm becoming exceptionally tired of, where RPGs are concerned, it is this scenario where the end game is the only thing anyone talks about. I've spent some time on the Borderlands 2 forums. That has a fairly long levelling game. Not months long, but getting to UVHM took me probably a month, playing on and off; I've got about 270 hours logged on Steam, now.
In said forums, however, whenever newbies tried to get advice about weapons, the only thing that anyone would answer them with, was information about end-game named uniques or legendaries, for the most part. There was precious little info offered about the manufacturing corporations, the different elemental damage types, etc; stuff that people needed to know for the whole game. There was also the usual bullshit insistence that some character builds were not "viable," for end game content, when I've been going through UVHM with a Survival Commando, (probably the class/spec combo which attracts the largest amount of shit) with no problem at all.
We have a couple of different problems here. The main one, is that forums in particular, and possibly these games in general, end up infested with a certain type of person who does not actually enjoy the game, and who is not there purely in order to play said game, but is motivated purely by a desire to be viewed as good at the game, for the purposes of ego gratification. It got to the point in the WoW forums where people were admitting that fairly openly.
The second problem, as an extension of the first, is that you have a very large number of frankly terrible players, in terms of their actual level of ability, who criticise the developers for adding talent trees to the game which are supposedly not "viable;" when again, said trees are usually fine. It will be the players themselves who suck, not the trees.
I'm not saying that D3 in particular was not an attrocious game; although I haven't played it myself, everyone I've spoken to about it, has consistently said it was terrible. At the same time, however, it needs to be acknowledged that the above problems do occur; particularly on forums.
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.
Inferno was already nerfed into the ground nearly a year ago. You can go straight through Inferno on your first playthrough without using auction house gear (unless you're not very good at the game or extremely unlucky with drops). They added a "monster power" setting which exponentially increases monster difficulty and drop quality on Inferno (and linearly increases difficulty and reward on normal/nightmare/hell) for those who still want to grind ad infinitum.
Then you probably shouldn't have bought an online, multiplayer game.
Have you considered that someone has to be buying those items for cash? I can guarantee you that blizzard isn't buying them all up out of the goodness of their heart.
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.
Have you considered that someone has to be buying those items for cash? I can guarantee you that blizzard isn't buying them all up out of the goodness of their heart.
Yep. That "someone" is also a paying customer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Have to agree that all this focus on End Game - whether in Diablo or in WoW, totally cheeses me off.
I hate end game. Everyone shouts and yells and gets upset if you don't do it perfectly - it's a GAME. you're supposed to have FUN.
-- 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?"
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.
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
Agreed there are better games out there. The free Path of Exile comes to mind ...
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.)
There is NO solution to the MMO economy for one sime reason:
Time = Money
The more a person plays the more money/gear they will have. This isn't a design fault - every MMO has infinite supply to match the infinite time a player can invest.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.