Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

ausgamers.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 55 posts

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#21

Post by cube13 »

trotsky wrote: post #6

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.

At one point, they were pretty protective about WoW's economy. In vanilla, there were a lot of gold sinks, like skill/spell training costs, riding skills, etc. Those are sill present, but don't impact the game nearly as much. They're mostly vanity things like gigantic bags and non-combat pets. In-game currency was relatively rare, with most endgame bosses giving less than 1 gold per person.

That changed during the middle of the Burning Crusade expansion, where Blizzard basically decided that the gold sellers won, and that they were just going to flood the market with currency. They added daily quests, which were quests that gave reputation and gold every day to top-level characters, as well as more sinks, like a character title that cost 1000 gold.

At this point, gold is basically a joke, because it's extremely easy to get with a minimal time investment. Half an hour of play can get the player anywhere between 100 and 400 gold. It appears that most of the gold sellers have moved to selling epic tradable gear and items over gold at this point.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#23

Post by seanalltogether »

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.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#24

Post by floody-berry »

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?

If you actually play the game? Probably nothing. You need armies of bots to make anything with how badly item stores and duping dilute the economy. The economy has been a joke for years now; I'd actually be surprised if bots weren't the majority of "players" by now.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#25

Post by [deleted] »

cube13 wrote: post #16
coffeeaddicted wrote: post #9

Step 1: Make getting good items so frustratingly repetitive that players start paying other people for getting those. Step 2: Instead of trying to fix that part of the game decide to monetize on this? Talk about game designers selling out badly ...

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…

[deleted]

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#26

Post by seanalltogether »

joez wrote: post #22

I'll be paying close attention to if this trend catches on. Blizzard is often a trailblazer in features it introduces (example: Exclamation Mark = New Quest, Question Mark = Completed Quest; Talent Trees).

Here is what I wish Blizzard would do with WoW. Instead of paying $15 a month for game playing time, they should sell you game items that represent a week of play time, so let's say $15 buys you a stack of 4 in game chips. The player can then activate those chips to extend their play time or they can trade them with other players or sell them on the auction house for in game gold. On the other end, blizzard can enable a program to buy back chips at say 70% of the original value. This gives people a legitimate avenue to "buy" items if they want, while also controlling the gold/item farming community.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#27

Post by coffeeaddicted »

rexf wrote: post #15
coffeeaddicted wrote: post #9

Step 1: Make getting good items so frustratingly repetitive that players start paying other people for getting those. Step 2: Instead of trying to fix that part of the game decide to monetize on this? Talk about game designers selling out badly ...

As a Diablo 2 player, Step 1 is the nature of the game. Unique Items are extremely rare, so that when you got one, it was a super big deal . You never know what items will drop when you kill the next monster, but odds are extremely low it will be something good. I think that Blizzard monetizing item auctions is acceptable if it's simply done through in-game interface instead of eBay (or shady websites). Of all compan…

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 and you can basically remove the incentive to buy items for money.

The extreme rarity of items was once a nice idea as it allowed to add meaningful trade to the game . But every modern mmorpg has a central market so basically real player-to-player trade got taken out of the game already anyway. All that's left of it now are completely meaningless inflated prices and the real currency is no longer items but player time. Which I find sad as wasting as much player time as possible is a really poor design target.

I don't say it won't work out for them, but personally I hope they fail with it. Because if it succeeds, then it's obvious that they will next try to figure out how to further improve that income. I would prefer game designers to spend their time thinking about how to improve the game-play instead.

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#28

Post by chokma »

It will be interesting to see how they get around (anti-)gambling laws, at least here in Germany. The moment you offer real money for winning in luck-based games (as opposed to skill-based ones) like Diablo3, you may run afoul of the state monopoly for lottery and related games.

A former employer once commissioned a flash game with a western setting which included a virtual casino with several games of chance. He had to shelve the idea of offering people to cash out and the game was delayed for a long time (if I remember correctly, it was turned into a game where you could buy stuff for your character, but there was no longer a way to transfer your winnings into real money accounts)

Re: Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

#30

Post by alnayyir »

cube13 wrote: post #16
coffeeaddicted wrote: post #9

Step 1: Make getting good items so frustratingly repetitive that players start paying other people for getting those. Step 2: Instead of trying to fix that part of the game decide to monetize on this? Talk about game designers selling out badly ...

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.

Post reply on HN