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Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

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Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#41

Post by sukuriant »

coffeeaddicted wrote: post #39
sukuriant wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it strange that I like the extreme rarity of certain items? You don't ~need~ any particular item to beat the game, or be amazing. When weapons and buffs are procedurally generated, it realy doesn't matter. But, if you desperately want the "Flawless Arcane Hammer of The Middle-Aged Gods", then you can sell your current items. Oh, and another thing I just thought of as I was writing this. During that time that you'r…

It seems you have not yet reached the point where you got so frustrated that you decided to buy items instead anyway. The kind of players that buy items are often building up certain configurations and there is no way in the game to do that without spending days doing repetive runs just to find out in the end if that configuration of items will work or not. Money really only comes into play at a certain point and I t…

And, when they're on their quest, they'll also find rare items they can sell or trade to get the thing they want. So we have trading. An economy! Now they're participating in another part of the game that didn't exist before. Perhaps they'll enjoy it.

Look at Eve Online as another example. Would you make the following declaration? "Eve Online has a problem because the Titan Class vessels are hard to get. You have to spend years training for the skills necessary to pilot those things; and, at the same time, you have to go out and mine all the resources and find all the blueprints yourself, to build them. What should happen instead is that, with a reasonable amount of time, you should be able to find a Titan Vessel yourself."

Also "A particular build"? ... this is Diablo. The weapons are procedurally generated. Frankly, a feature, to me. I love procedural generation in games where that results in millions upon millions of potential combinations. Go play WoW if you want a particular, precise build.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#42

Post by cube13 »

alnayyir wrote: post #30
cube13 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter what Blizzard does to make it easier to get, really. If there is even a perception of rarity, someone will try to sell it for real money. An entire economy has developed around buying virtual items, and Blizzard is only the latest ones to try to cash in on it. EVE Online does this with the PLEX licenses, which are 1 month subscriptions that players can buy with real money, then sell them in-game to…

Eve is hemorrhaging accounts and the player outrage from the aftermath of their attempts to directly monetize the playerbase beyond PLEX accounts make them a VERY bad example to follow. http://beefjack.com/news/eve-online-revolts-could-cost-ccp-1... $1mm is a big deal for a small, niche company like CCP.

>Eve is hemorrhaging accounts and the player outrage from the aftermath of their attempts to directly monetize the playerbase beyond PLEX accounts make them a VERY bad example to follow.

I would argue CCP's issues are more with their marketing and customer-facing people than anything else. Valve did that with TF2 hats(some cost $20 or more to buy), and didn't have nearly the same level of fallout with it. Blizzard's done the same thing with purchasable vanity pets and in-game mounts, and hasn't had really any backlash from it.

CCP was charging US$70 for a virtual pair of jeans, then made forum posts trying to convince people since people spend that much on actual clothing, they could charge the same thing for the virtual item. The userbase, predictably, wasn't happy with this idiotic argument, and the fact that a LOT of development time went to these features versus things that actually impacted the player's experience.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#43

Post by coffeeaddicted »

sukuriant wrote: post #41
coffeeaddicted wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you have not yet reached the point where you got so frustrated that you decided to buy items instead anyway. The kind of players that buy items are often building up certain configurations and there is no way in the game to do that without spending days doing repetive runs just to find out in the end if that configuration of items will work or not. Money really only comes into play at a certain point and I t…

And, when they're on their quest, they'll also find rare items they can sell or trade to get the thing they want. So we have trading. An economy! Now they're participating in another part of the game that didn't exist before. Perhaps they'll enjoy it. Look at Eve Online as another example. Would you make the following declaration? "Eve Online has a problem because the Titan Class vessels are hard to get. You have to…

These are details. (Yeah the weapons in Diablo 2 are procedurally generated,but only within certain limits so you can look up on D2 sites exactly within which ranges each unique item can be. So nearly all character guides start with build recommendations). It doesn't matter much if you just play for winning the game, but once people start playing for highscores or pvp they usually don't just play with the random stuff they get. I can't say anything about Eve Online as I've never played that game - if people buy those "Titan Vessel" with real money then yes, I would say the game mechanics are broken. Trading does also not really make a difference anymore - calculate the average amount you'll get for your stuff each hour (there's probably calculators out there just for that...) and you still have an unholy amount of hours just collecting and trading stuff which obviously people hated enough to create an industry living from doing that for them.

And it's also about fairness. Once you introduce money it means players no longer have equal chances. With that happening outside the system you could at least complain - making the system itself unfair - I just call this broken.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#44

Post by jarin »

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.

It might not be such an issue either, because with a subscription-based game like WoW, item rarity has more value to Blizzard because the longer it takes to get an item the more subscription revenue they get.

With Diablo III being a one-time purchase, item duping would devalue items on the player side and may or may not result in increased commission revenue for Blizzard (depending on how many players will actually purchase the item on the auction house).

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#45

Post by guildchatter »

Cushman wrote: post #20
MrJagil wrote: post #13

I wonder if there's going to be a cap on how much you can trade/earn. What's stopping this from becoming a full-time occupation for someone?

I've always wondered what the ballpark was for people employed full-time playing Diablo 2. Thousands?

I dusted off my old copy of Diablo 2 last summer and played for a little while. The entire multi-player experience was dominated by bots spamming ads or bots that instantly pick up any rare items that dropped.

The botting was completely out of control.

I chatted with another player who used bots to farm for rare items and he claimed to have 24+ instances of the game running 24/7 split across several machines. He would check once a day to see if any of his bots managed to get a really, really rare item.

Kinda crazy... =]

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#47

Post by rexf »

sukuriant wrote: post #33
coffeeaddicted wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not just about easier/harder to get items but also a lot about the value of item vs. the value of player skill. As soon as you no longer get better by playing more skilled but only by playing longer you will get such gold mining markets as many people value their time and don't want to spend it completely meaningless. Set a sane upper limit how long it takes to reach items and from there on only skill decides…

Is it strange that I like the extreme rarity of certain items? You don't ~need~ any particular item to beat the game, or be amazing. When weapons and buffs are procedurally generated, it realy doesn't matter. But, if you desperately want the "Flawless Arcane Hammer of The Middle-Aged Gods", then you can sell your current items. Oh, and another thing I just thought of as I was writing this. During that time that you'r…

Agreed

As long as you can beat the game with normal sword on the ground, you don't need to buy $$$ items. While $$$ sword will make your life easier, you don't need it to quest with friends or beat the game.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#48

Post by mey »

BenSS wrote: post #4
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 rea…

The nice thing about virtual goods is they can make both the seller and the buyer whole at the same time if they wish by simply duplicating the item/good. The scarcity is artificial.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#49

Post by Shenglong »

seanalltogether wrote: post #23
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 disagree, Blizzard has done a good job with managing their in game economies and they wouldn't be so stupid as to screw it up by competing against their own players for control of assets, they stand to make way more money by just skimming off the top.

I don't know what experience you have with online game economies, but saying they've done a good job "managing" their economies is misleading. World of Warcraft has had a good go, not because of any economic management, but because of innovative economic planning... to an extent. The economy in WoW is very artificial, and they've eliminated the majority of their economic issues by releasing new armor sets, and using the bind-on-pickup system.

More so than any other game, I've found arbitrage to be most difficult on WoW.

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