21–30 of 145 posts
This is a good and smart move, but it's only one step towards fixing the nature of the game.
I'm curious as someone who has never played the game: What else do they need to fix? I've only heard complaints about the auction house
All this will do is make users use external auction houses. As long as they keep in-game trading of rare and legendary items, people will just take it to eBay or some other site, and then arrange the swap in-game. It makes it less instant gratification, but won't stop the buying of items.
So, I have a bit of a personal episode here I'd like to share. I played a lot of Diablo 2, more than I care to admit, and so the launch of Diablo 3 was a really big deal to me. I pre-ordered it on day 1, I pre-installed the game weeks before launch and I read every piece of information about the game. When the game came out, I initially loved it; just an absolute pleasure to play. It was great, until I found the auct…
This is truly one of the gaping holes in human cognition, this idea that a single participant in a larger system can make a change and then model the results of that change without accounting for the reactions of all the other actors. Especially when the participant in question is by far the largest participant.
I actually disagree that the root problem is that they put "profit over gameplay". The root problem is that they made changes designed to create profit, but failed to correctly understand how the rest of the system would react. There probably is a way to "monetize" the Diablo community more successfully, but whatever that way is it's going to be something more subtle than the Auction House was.
I'd suggest looking at how Valve has monetized the hell out of Team Fortress 2 if you're trying to find a positive example. It's mind boggling what they've pulled off there, and observe that, like I said, it's a great deal more subtle than "let's just put up some payment gates!!1!". MMORPGs also provide a variety of interesting compare & contrasts, especially with the recent successes of the free-to-play models to compare to the WoW subscription/expansion model.
All this will do is make users use external auction houses. As long as they keep in-game trading of rare and legendary items, people will just take it to eBay or some other site, and then arrange the swap in-game. It makes it less instant gratification, but won't stop the buying of items.
So, I have a bit of a personal episode here I'd like to share. I played a lot of Diablo 2, more than I care to admit, and so the launch of Diablo 3 was a really big deal to me. I pre-ordered it on day 1, I pre-installed the game weeks before launch and I read every piece of information about the game. When the game came out, I initially loved it; just an absolute pleasure to play. It was great, until I found the auct…
I'm sure this will become a seminal case study for online game design in the future.
Wow, this is a surprising reversal of trends as far as user generated content and micro-transaction based economies go, but the auction house really did change the core mechanics of Diablo 3. As a player I really did kind of like the auction system during the initial grind from level 1 to 60, but when there was no more level progression and the only progression was item progression, it just stopped being fun because…
They are just removing the convenience now.
So, I have a bit of a personal episode here I'd like to share. I played a lot of Diablo 2, more than I care to admit, and so the launch of Diablo 3 was a really big deal to me. I pre-ordered it on day 1, I pre-installed the game weeks before launch and I read every piece of information about the game. When the game came out, I initially loved it; just an absolute pleasure to play. It was great, until I found the auct…
D2 was just complex enough to be extremely interesting. The incredible diversity in skills, items and stats allowed an immense variety of viable builds, leaving players to hunt for specific legendary items which totally changed the gameplay experience (teleporting barbarians, whirlwhind assassins, etc etc).
D3 is the complete antithesis to this design philosophy. Everything was made so simple that there is zero depth. Gameplay is not altered by any acquired items. Your character's strength increases linearly as a value of a few stats. Boring, repetitive, and linear.
The failure of D3 was that it failed to capitalize on what D2 got right, and also failed to invent anything to replace that massive loss.