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."
Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking as a game designer, what I noted (Score:5, Interesting)
If you make it so the auction house won't let you sell gear, but crafting materials to craft end game lewt(Guild Wars2), then suddenly you make random crafting items desirable to trade with, but end game stuff can still be bought.
The auction house is almost a detriment to keeping your game survive if you allow it buy end game content. Instead of allowing people to buy their end game content(and subsequently quit because they're max powered), you maybe only let early/mid game be bought and sold on the AH.
There's two main ways to allow end game content and that is to allow people to buy crafting pieces on the AH, but instead of 100% always crafting the most powerful weapon, you give them random stats of randomized power. And you even say,"If you throw more crafting materials in the forge(more lucky rabbits feet and purple horseshoes!), you get better chance for better random stats." That way the ah goes strong even end game, but people can't just buy their way to perfect end game gear.
Of course my theory is to never let them reach max power, but constantly get incrementally powerful, at lower and lower amounts of the time. If you're worried this impacts PVP, it does, but PVP can be more dynamic than just 1v1 in a zone you can't gain power in. Anyway if you want to read more about my end game MMORPG ideas, you can read here [crystalfighter.com]
Re:Speaking as a game designer, what I noted (Score:3, Interesting)
CrazyJim, you so crazy!!!
Tell me, what games have you designed? I guess saying, "speaking as a game designer" doesn't imply you've actually built a game or anything, so you're in the clear here.
Give God my regards.
Dumping the Always Online? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So, any other changes Blizzard? (Score:5, Interesting)
First thing I thought, too. If they do remove the requirement, I'd go out and buy it right away.
Re:I always thought Auction house is what make Dia (Score:4, Interesting)
Its sad when otherwise intelligent people say things that are in the realm of 'full retard'. There is absolutely zero reason why anyone playing a video game like Diablo 3 should care what other people do outside of plain and simple jealousy. Do I care if someone else has 250k DPS? Not at all because that has zero impact on me or the game that I am playing. Is your jealousy so out of control that you demand that not only your own sense of achievement be kept 'pure' but everyone else's? I can only assume that you are sitting around waiting for a reason to get angry regardless of how stupid you look in making your argument. If there was PVP in the game from the start you would be right. That is the kind of P2W that kills games. In a purely PVE game there are no valid reasons to remove the AH except to appease the crybabies. In Diablo 3, what are those players paying to win? There is no end game and nothing to win. If someone pays cash for gear to farm faster, the only person who is hurt by taking that away is the lucky guy who won the lottery of ROG for an item he didn't need.
Why do I care? Because the RMAH allowed me to buy WOW for my kid and SC2 for my girlfriend. I got lucky and it turned out that someone else was willing to pay for what I didn't need. Other than being butt hurt over knowing someone else has better gear than you, what is the point in claiming you were hurt by that?
The worst part is, Blizzard is in the business of making money. With the amount of cash they make off of the AH, they will have something else in the works to recoup those lost monies. Knowing Blizzard, the only reason to do this is to change all items to bind on pickup and open their own P2W shop where they create the items and keep all of the cash.
Re:I always thought Auction house is what make Dia (Score:5, Interesting)