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Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014

arstechnica.com

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Re: Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014

#61

Post by Steko »

The AH wasn't really the problem for D3. The problem was the basic stat balance issues created huge lottery items.

At launch for a Monk basically there were a handful of god stats (attack speed, life on hit, dex, all resist, your specific resist, magic find), a handful of ok stats and a large number of garbage stats. Now even a good stat can be worthless because of the large value ranges.

Back of the envelop numbers: say god stats are a 10, ok stats are 4 and dump stats are 2's. Now the MEDIAN item is (roughly) 1% of one with an avg amount of ideal stats (ideal stats with all high end values might be 30 times better).

Re: Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014

#63

Post by gknoy »

lreeves wrote: post #40
ryeguy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thing is there is still a trading economy in the game. It will still exist, it's now just unofficial. In diablo 2 you traded items by joining chat rooms and spamming your wares or joining message boards. You then traded by arranging a game together and trading in person. They are just removing the convenience now.

Actually no; when they made the auction house they reduced the quality of items that dropped. This is evident in the console versions, which have vastly different "loot tables" and no auction house. So they didn't just make it convenient for players, they tailored the items that drop around the fact that anyone could sell and buy items. For the small group of players that always did trading that's probably a good thi…

As a new player, I really liked the AH: Every single thing that dropped for me was either completely useless, or orders of magnitude worse than what people were throwing away on the AH for a pittance. (Sub-optimal stats went for cheap.) So, I could basically always find something that would be a significant upgrade every few levels.

If I had actually been seeing drops that were any good (due to a non-depressed drop rate), I'd have not felt the need for it ... but using the AH basically quadrupled my character's effectiveness. Using it was definitely part of "playing the game".

It made leveling great: You can freely vendor/DE almost everything you pick up if you want, and use the cash to buy things on the AH. Profit! At the end game, though, I can absolutely understand why that would kill the fun.

Re: Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014

#64

Post by DigitalJack »

josh2600 wrote: post #8

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…

The idea of grinding doesn't make sense period.

Re: Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014

#65

Post by jakebellacera »

Wow, hats off to Blizzard for recognizing that the auction house was undermining the overall experience. Obviously this doesn't stop people from trading in-person, but Diablo 2 had it right and I'm pleased to see they went back to that route.

Re: Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014

#66

Post by stonemetal »

oconnor0 wrote: post #47
rholdy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the gear progression is very linear. On every gear slot you are looking for the same affixes.

Affixes?

postfix, prefix. Gear gets a randomly generated name based on what special properties it has. So the red club of the owl is a club that has added fire damage(has red prefix) and a health bonus(has owl suffix)(or something I only play diablo causally so I don't know the affixes off hand.)

Re: Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014

#68

Post by josh2600 »

DigitalJack wrote: post #64
josh2600 wrote: post #8

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…

The idea of grinding doesn't make sense period.

It does if the rewards aren't monetizable because of their ability to break the game. People grind for hats in TF2 all day, and by getting a hat you don't break the game. The problem is when you reward people with things that break the game.

Don't break the game for profit; simple, no?

Re: Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014

#69

Post by chc »

ordinary wrote: post #41
alex_c wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your experience, but I disagree with your conclusions re: cause and effect. Specifically: * Penalizing players for dying for longer and longer periods of time * Penalizing players for playing in groups I suspect these were simply misguided design decisions aimed at making the game "challenging". Difficulty was entirely out of whack at launch across the entire game (yes, partly because the developers vast…

There have been public complaints from Blizzard employees about Battle.net. Community managers and developers both have stated that improvements to Battle.net are far harder to push through than changes to the games proper. Why exactly this is, I'm not sure. My guess would be that it's either seriously understaffed or drowning in bureaucracy.

I'd bet it's drowning in bureaucracy for a reason — Battle.net is a common component in virtually everything the company creates, so any change to it will impact a lot of people's work in unforeseen ways.
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