Auction Houses To Be Removed From Diablo III 219
An anonymous reader writes "When Blizzard built Diablo III, one of the controversial features was the inclusion of an auction house for players to buy and sell gear. On one hand, it created a safe environment for trading, which had been rife with scams in Diablo II. On the other hand, gathering loot was one of the main points of the game, and the auction house trivialized that. According to an announcement on Battle.net, both the Real Money auction house and the Gold auction house will be removed from the game as part of Blizzard's revamp of the loot system in Diablo III. The target date is well ahead of us: March 18, 2014. Blizzard said, 'We feel that this move along with the Loot 2.0 system being developed concurrently with Reaper of Souls will result in a much more rewarding game experience for our players.' Unexpected news, to be sure."
Re:I always thought Auction house is what make Dia (Score:5, Insightful)
The lack of an auction house is what made D2 (and Borderlands) such a success. Precisely that you had to grind endlessly to perhaps get the good stuff gave people a sense of achievement.
When all anyone needed to do was to flip out the credit card, that disappeared.
P2W does not give much satisfaction.
Re:huh... it's the only reason people still play. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of the people I know who still play the game, most of them only do so to sell items for cash.
Apparently that's something they'd like to change.
Re:I always thought Auction house is what make Dia (Score:4, Insightful)
P2W does not give much satisfaction.
You sorely underestimate the super-rich and their ability to derive self-satisfaction from things that involve money. I mean, apart from the fact that they play a P2W game called "real life"...
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it too late? Who plays this anymore?
I'd say given that they just released the game for PS3 & XBox 360 on September 3rd, there's bound to be some people playing it.
Re:I always thought Auction house is what make Dia (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I always thought Auction house is what make Dia (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes an assumption that everyone pulled out a credit card. You can play without it and still get the sense of achievement by grinding, and it's irrelevant what other players are doing (especially if you don't compete against them).
Re: huh... it's the only reason people still play. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I always thought Auction house is what make Dia (Score:2, Insightful)
Well I can imagine some rich guy with the "best of everything in diablo III" that use to grind in d2, who just logs his computer own to show his friend his shiny virtual pixels and doesn't "play" the game.
It is better to invest money in an MMO and time into RL endeavors. You can effectively achieve everything in an MMO with a few hard hours of work, rather than years of work. With a little left over to spare for pizza.
The "achievement" most MMO's provide is just an illusion and it does lead to less productive living. Its generally easy enough to achieve though that everyone can play at running an empire without actually putting anything other than time on the line. Yet another illusion, because if you fail at empire building IRL and die, than your just "loosing time".
But a las, pixels are safe, and serfs will be serfs, and people will farm pixels. I even do it to a small degree, because mind numbing work with a creative output is, mind-numbing.
Re: Leave the AH in: (Score:5, Insightful)
There is NO solution to the MMO economy for one sime reason:
Time = Money
The more a person plays the more money/gear they will have. This isn't a design fault - every MMO has infinite supply to match the infinite time a player can invest.