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Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

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Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#2

Post by patio11 »

I don't know how they're going to manage this with the money-laundering/fraud angle. This makes Epic Boots of the Whale into a transfer medium for money between virtually anonymous endpoints, including internationally. (Long story short: You can run an auction which is honest or you can run an auction which is anonymous, but you cannot do both at the same time. Virtually any information flow from the system to any participant in the auction compromises the anonymity, since the attacker has perfect knowledge of the state of the system from both ends of the trade.)

That is guaranteed to draw heavy adversarial attention from both the bad guys and the good guys.

Business-wise, even Blizzard is going to eventually bow to reality and realize that INSERT ... INTO ITEMS; is the most profitable line of code any game company can ever write. They've experimented a few times in WoW with making folks pay for e.g. cosmetic mount improvements. Eventually they're going to realize that their core audience pays hundreds but values their gamerhood at (conservatively) thousands, and start monetizing that gap. After doing so, they'll be able to treat the base product as "Free 2 Play", assuming they think America has enough bandwidth to play their games without needing the assist from a truck of DVDs shipped to every Best Buy and Walmart.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#4

Post by BenSS »

patio11 wrote: post #2

I don't know how they're going to manage this with the money-laundering/fraud angle. This makes Epic Boots of the Whale into a transfer medium for money between virtually anonymous endpoints, including internationally. (Long story short: You can run an auction which is honest or you can run an auction which is anonymous, but you cannot do both at the same time. Virtually any information flow from the system to any pa…

I'm more worried about how it'll effect the game from a personal/player angle than a laundering/fraud issue. Gold farmers are a problem in any MMOG, but this will likely exacerbate the issue.

There's also the question of accounts nailed for abuse. What happens to the distributed items and trades? The company will be far less likely to forgive innocent parties connected to the original abuse account since there is real money on the line.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#5

Post by onemoreact »

patio11 wrote: post #2

I don't know how they're going to manage this with the money-laundering/fraud angle. This makes Epic Boots of the Whale into a transfer medium for money between virtually anonymous endpoints, including internationally. (Long story short: You can run an auction which is honest or you can run an auction which is anonymous, but you cannot do both at the same time. Virtually any information flow from the system to any pa…

First off they make far more money than any of the free2play games even with a far smaller playerbase so I don't think they have much to learn from the F2P comunity. They already make money from people changing names and servers and non combat pets not just mounts. There are even benifits introducing another player to the game so it's got a fairly strong viral component. Also, as a wow player I would mention that you don't need a physical copy to play wow the DVD's are just there for marketing / gift giving.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#6

Post by trotsky »

Hasn't blizzard been previously quite aggressive about how game breaking player driven cash economies are - i.e. gold selling and the such? But now they think it's a fine idea as long as they're getting a real world cash fee? Seems to suggest they never saw it as game breaking as much as revenue stealing.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#7

Post by starwed »

guildchatter wrote: post #3

This will be interesting. Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game. Ah... Fond memories of duping items in the original Diablo game -- Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, Godly Plate of the Whale, King's Sword of Haste... =]

>Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game.

Does WoW have duping problems? I was under the impression that it was the particular way D2 handled items[1] that allowed duping, not a necessary part of any game.

[1] Probably at the time, the trade-off for being secure would have been unacceptable performance and/or database bloat.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#8

Post by noarchy »

guildchatter wrote: post #3

This will be interesting. Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game. Ah... Fond memories of duping items in the original Diablo game -- Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, Godly Plate of the Whale, King's Sword of Haste... =]

Duped Stones of Jordan were so prevalent in D2 that they introduced a mob (Diablo Clone) that spawned only when those duped SoJs were sold to merchants. I look forward to D3's dupe economy :)

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#10

Post by MrJagil »

starwed wrote: post #7
guildchatter wrote: post #3

This will be interesting. Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game. Ah... Fond memories of duping items in the original Diablo game -- Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, Godly Plate of the Whale, King's Sword of Haste... =]

> Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game. Does WoW have duping problems? I was under the impression that it was the particular way D2 handled items[1] that allowed duping, not a necessary part of any game. [1] Probably at the time, the trade-off for being secure would have been unacceptable performance and/or database bloat.

There have been some duping bugs in WoW, but I think they're gone now.
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