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."
I always thought Auction house is what make Diablo (Score:5, Funny)
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: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"...
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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 producti
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P2W does not give much satisfaction.
depends on who you're asking. some people like seeing big numbers and don't care how they got there.
Grinding for hours only to have the RNG give you something for a completely different class also sucks. Does D3 have a feature like Torchlight, where you can convert rare items from one class into a random rare for your own class?
Re:I always thought Auction house is what make Dia (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then you probably shouldn't have bought an online, multiplayer game.
Re:I always thought Auction house is what make Dia (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: I always thought Auction house is what make Di (Score:2)
4 tabs is a joke. In Path of Exile you can have as many tabs as you can afford, can color code them & name them. Don't under-estimate the ability to organize all your phat loot where a games sole purpose is to collect loot.
PlugY was a godsend custom plugin for D2 that allowed infinite stash tabs.
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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).
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You don't need to use a credit card. A small amount of in-game gold was all that was needed to kit your character up to beat Diablo on Inferno.
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But you don't need to do that either. You could just play the game normally.
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Which is where the RNG boss kicks your ass. Based on the drops I was getting, I estimated it would take around a month per act to get good enough gear to progress through the next act (hell mode). Now I'm definitely not a top player so people who are better at dodging crap might not require quite as much gear in order to progress, but it'll still be a hell of a long haul to do what? See the same levels and ending sequence you saw in hell (and nightmare and normal.)
I personally think Blizzard is doing the
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I stopped playing Diablo 2 after a half dozen or so complete runs through the highest act/difficulty combo my character could complete failed to drop any upgrades for my character. no futher progression. lots of time wasted.
I stopped playing Diablo 3 after I beat the game on the highest difficulty, using gear I bought off the AH with gold dropped in-game and from items I myself sold on the AH. not a single real dollar spent. reasonable playing time. fairly enjoyable.
Then I went and played other games. you k
Re: I always thought Auction house is what make Di (Score:3)
Agreed there are better games out there. The free Path of Exile comes to mind ...
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Borderlands was a success because it was fun to play and fairly unique. D2 was fun because of building different types of characters with different gear setups. D3 eliminates that in a huge way so no matter what they do with the loot system the build system is so boring and stupid that it doesn't matter what loot you get. I found it closer to Dark Kingdoms or RAW in terms of gameplay than any sort of Diablo game. D3 console version isn't always online which is nice.
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Re: I always thought Auction house is what make Di (Score:2)
Torchlight 2 is not bad, not bad at all. The free Path if Exile is better yet: Custom color coded and named stash tabs, 6 linked sockets, items as currency, tons of custom builds, skills as gems, Official ladder seasons, etc.
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.
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It's silly to suggest removing the AH will magically make things fair.
It's always been the case that games where you have to farm for goods are dominated by the unemployed or people with few commitments like housewives or students.
The reason Blizzard made the auction house in the first place was to allow those who work to be able to use that fact to compete against those who do not.
So you'll never achieve fairness by removing it. It just sways things back towards society's non-contributors and spongers unle
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I think you've got Blizzard's motivations all wrong there. In Diablo 2 there was a relatively huge market for good items and people were willing to pay cash for them. Since there was no in game way to arrange these transactions that business was conducted outside of Blizzards realm of control. Businesses sprung up to fill this niche and scammers in droves. When naive or just plain ignorant players got scammed or felt they were wrong in some way they would take up blizzards time complaining. Additionally man
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" Precisely that you had to grind endlessly to perhaps get the good stuff gave people a sense of achievement."
Not quite, what made borderland and diablo was the combat and SECONDLY getting awesome stuff. In diablo 2 the combat for melee classes like paladin acted closer to traditional fighting game mechanics (sword + shield bash + dash). Diablo was beginning to do interesting things with combat that balanced more action oriented game style with ease of use interface that is missed by the non-observant po
Re: I always thought Auction house is what make Di (Score:2)
Agreed the D3 devs didn't have a freakin clue about "itemization" and what D2 great. The first week of D3 and I'm already getting spam?! Didn't they learn *anything* from WoW where I can block & report spammers???
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Yeah I've got no problem with auction houses. I'd hate to be grinding the same quest over and over trying to get the perfect item. Grinding isn't an achievement, it's pathetic.. Just take what you get and sell it to somebody that needs it. Take that gold and buy what you need. Done and the game doesn't become a full time job.
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Big yes moments are only big YESSS because you ridiculously devalued your own time with that pointless grinding.
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Why is grinding seen as a achievement in games (or at least games like Diablo)? Sounds more like a job than a fun pastime at that point.
A game doesn't have to be always fun to be satisfying. Grinding mimics real life, in that you work hard for a long time, and with a lot of tedium and a little bit of luck, you can look at your house and car with satisfaction. You've achieved something, and that's gratifying and worth playing for.
The gimme generation will never understand this.
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The problem is, with Auction House loot didn't matter much.
You could always exchange it on AH immediately.
Completely ruined the sensation of actually see something nice drop.
There was a long long article explaining this phenomenon, done by some psychiatric I believe.
Unfortunately I cannot remember where it is.
Re:I always thought Auction house is what make Dia (Score:4, Informative)
Completely ruined the sensation of actually see something nice drop.
Which would be a valid point, if anything nice ever dropped. I played through the game 6 times, on two characters (one through hell, one half way through inferno), and never saw a single legendary item drop. True upgrades to gear petered out after Nightmare, which pretty much forced you into the AH to just be able to advance without being slaughtered. Diablo has always been about buckets of trash and vendor loot, with the occasional gem thrown in to make it worth your while. I found none of that in D3, just mounds and mounts of garbage. Unless they tune the loot rates to account for NOT having the AH, it'll be even less desirable for me to give the game another shot.
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Your saying of "give the game another shot" after playing through it 6 times (no less!) kind of becomes a paradox...
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I played through the game 6 times, on two characters (one through hell, one half way through inferno), and never saw a single legendary item drop.
So you played through the game 5 times without seeing any legendary items and though to yourself "ehhh... I'll give it one more shot." Sixth time's the charm, right?
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So you played through the game 5 times without seeing any legendary items and though to yourself "ehhh... I'll give it one more shot." Sixth time's the charm, right?
Even if a legendary dropped, the chance of it being of any use to me was extremely small, so I wasn't holding my breath. I just realized after I quit playing, that I had never seen one drop, ever.
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Even if a legendary dropped, the chance of it being of any use to me was extremely small, so I wasn't holding my breath. I just realized after I quit playing, that I had never seen one drop, ever.
This.
Before the first loot patch I NEVER saw anything drop for the class I was playing. No problem eh? Switch to another class to get loot drops for your preferred class. Right. More grinding. Despite this I still played it through to the end without buying anything on the AH and without grinding classes I didn't want to play.
After the first loot patch I picked it up again for a day. Since then I've only played a couple of hours.
Now Blizzard is going to start patching the game to make it what it shou
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If the gameplay isn't fun enough for someone, having the AH available will only burn them out faster because they'll have less to work for. None of the Diablo games have ever had much of an "end-game" or anything. It's like Mario; you play because you enjoy the game, even if it's a bit grindy at times. It's also not like an MMO, where you can at least strut around showing off your gear to random people...
Re: I always thought Auction house is what make Di (Score:2)
Huh? D2 key and organ farming so you can unlock and beat Ãoeber Trist isn't end game???
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with an AH system the loots are weighed so that maybe one in 1000, or maybe one in 10000 gets that nice loot.
if you can get actual money(£$) from it that one player isn't going to even use it himself. it becomes just a way to show that you have cash in the real world. that breaks the 4th wall and makes playing the game feel stupid quite frankly.
because you might just as well go grind the burgers at the mcd to earn that loot.
Re:I always thought Auction house is what make Dia (Score:5, Informative)
But since the itemization and character design in D3 was so poor that in order to reach end game -- each item type only had one set of ideal attributes to make it valuable, the prices on the AH were absurdly inflated. It made it worse that each class really only had one or two viable builds -- so even having small variations in ideal item attributes was rare, and getting good rolls on those build-specific attributes made items even more expensive than "standard" end-game items.
So it was a vicious circle of grinding -- you had to grind to get good items that were worth selling by default in order to participate in the AH, but since the attribute requirements for sellable items was such a short list you have to grind more and more to find drops that actually meet the requirements to actually get it to sell. I'd say I would sell maybe less than 10% of all uniques dropped, and the majority of that 10% I would sell for maybe 1-2% of the cost of the end game gear that I actually had, so it takes FOREVER to recoup costs unless you're lucky.
Even worse, in order to get good drops consistently you needed to grind at the highest monster power levels, and in order to do that you need end game gear! So vanilla D3 with the auction house was an eternal worthless grind unless you decided to put 20 bucks into your character to make him decent.
Now, hopefully with better itemization and better loot tables it will become less grindy to participate in the economy. Without the AH, trading will hopefully be more like D2 where the currency (SoJs back in the day, and later end-game runes) was much more stable than "gold".
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I always thought Auction house is what make Diablo III relevant and rewarding since the game play focus on being grindy. Now that you can no longer exchange gears for actual money, what is the point? Is the game play itself fun enough?
How fun is it to do the same things over and over and over and over for very little reward? Seriously, that sounds like a minimum wage job that barely covers the bills.
But then, I play EQ2 and you can argue i do the same crap over and over and over and over. So I guess each his own.
But then I bot in EQ2, i control 6 toons at once (have to, no one plays anymore). In a guild with a few other botters and some live people. We have fun and do decently well. So it's all in the fun you make.
Still have
huh... it's the only reason people still play. (Score:2)
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.
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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.
Usually the goal is to bring in more players, not get rid of a group of paying customers...
Re: huh... it's the only reason people still play. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Have you considered that someone has to be buying those items for cash? I can guarantee you that blizzard isn't buying them all up out of the goodness of their heart.
Yep. That "someone" is also a paying customer.
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I played a few months ago, and it was nothing like that. Most rares and a lot of common legendaries were worth fuck all on the AH, and nobody bought them.
Attribute points (Score:2, Informative)
Now they just need to bring back the ability to choose where your attribute points go on level up.
What? (Score:2)
Isn't it too late? Who plays this anymore?
Also, why didn't they do any testing with groups to determine if this was needed or even wanted?
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not too late because an expansion is coming. Most likely that will include ladders with a fresh economy.
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.
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That would be truly depressing if it were true. Diablo 2 was a staple of many gamers' diets for a decade, and retains a loyal following to this day. If Diablo 3 couldn't survive a year, it would be a terrible fail indeed.
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Diablo III's auction house sucks (Score:3)
The auction house in World of Warcraft is perfectly usable except for a few minor details, but Diablo III's auction house just plain sucks. I don't care if it is two different development teams, it is still two Blizzard games.
So, any other changes Blizzard? (Score:5, Funny)
So the reason for Diablo 3 being always online was the auction house. They are removing that.
Does this mean that Blizzard will remove the always online requirement? I don't think so, but I can dream...
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: So, any other changes Blizzard? (Score:2)
Re: So, any other changes Blizzard? (Score:2)
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Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Microsoft does 360s. I thought everyone knew that?
Too late (Score:2)
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With the removal of RMAH, I assume Inferno difficulty will be adjusted as well.
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Inferno wasn't broken. It was intentionally made impossible unless you bought RMAH gear. With the removal of RMAH, I assume Inferno difficulty will be adjusted as well.
It was meant to take months to clear inferno, regardless of how you received the gear. You don't see end-game dungeons in MMOs being cleared within a few weeks of a game being launched.
Problem was Diablo players are used to mindless fun, not excruciating difficulty. The other problem was some classes were based on avoidance, while others mitigation. Better mitigation comes from better gear, meaning these players were behind the curve. Players who played the avoidance classes well were able to clear
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> A game that can be completed solo should not favor one type of class over another.
Er? Why not? The rogue is favored over the melee-only Hunter in WoW. It's almost impossible to balance every dynamic variable to be equal across classes. Why bother trying? It doesn't happen in a multiclass game very often that they are all equal.
Re:Too late (Score:5, Funny)
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Inferno was already nerfed into the ground nearly a year ago. You can go straight through Inferno on your first playthrough without using auction house gear (unless you're not very good at the game or extremely unlucky with drops). They added a "monster power" setting which exponentially increases monster difficulty and drop quality on Inferno (and linearly increases difficulty and reward on normal/nightmare/hell) for those who still want to grind ad infinitum.
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I quit after trying the beta.
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]
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I've always wanted a way to earn skills that become a permanent part of your character (as EQ2's class epic weapons can), or perhaps part of the account (as some stats in Wizardry Online.) This came from the old school MUDs where equipment was nice, but learning a critical spell/skill was the way to go.
That way, equipment wouldn't have to keep being mudflated as much. Instead, characters could earn some permanent abilities on endgame raids that would always be useful, even in future expansions. Of course
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I hate nodrop. I make lots of new characters, play them, and nodrop just makes it so I can't transfer gear to other characters
That was solved ages ago, with gear that could be transferred to your other characters via shared bank slots. "heirloom" ?? is maybe the term used in EQ2 instead of nodrop... I forget.
friends I play with
Yeah... as one of those "friends" who constantly got gear tossed my way, thanks but no thanks. Your not REALLY doing me a favor ensuring that every time I log in everything I loot mys
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.
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When there is an auction house that lets you buy end game gear then all that happens is people grind gold and voila, the game is beaten. 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 is quite a huge market for frivolous items which make your character "look cool". It was a long time ago that I played World of Warcraft, but there was a certain % of people who paid vast sums of in-game money for basically cosmetic reasons. Similarly, Valve's Hat Fortress 2 has had great success in selling purely cosmetic items.
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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.
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This really depends on rarity. In the first expansion or two nearly everything in EverQuest was droppable, however items were actually rare, content wasn't instanced and had only a single location where they could drop. Thus for late game items a server might only see 0-2 of a particular item a day, for end game items a month or more could pass without one entering a server.
Later games fell into the trap of allowing everyone to do everything simultaneously and made drops significantly more common. Crafte
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happens in real life too (Score:2)
trivialize? (Score:2)
They should have ditched the "easy" modes (Score:2)
I played it just because the ad blitz made it sound interesting. I think I would've found the game much more interesting had it been sudden death beginning to end. Breezing through it to the end pretty much made it coaster after that.
Dumping the Always Online? (Score:5, Interesting)
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So, since the Gold Shop and the Real Money Auction House were the primary reasons they were giving for requiring the always online, does this mean that they'll be patching that "functionality" out as well?
The integrity of the economy was the reason more so than the auction houses themselves.
However it would not be trivial to rearchitect a client-server game to be client only. Lot of code to move for relatively little reward. I doubt adding the offline capability would cause a rush of new PC purchases, especially after the Xbox/PS versions are out.
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I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
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They should.
The console versions do not have an auction house nor are they always online [arstechnica.com].
So the removal of the auction house should remove the need for always online since the consoles do not require it
Otherwise from that overview, it shows that the console version is in some ways superior to the PC versoi
Sound move. (Score:2)
Does PC get any other updates, like evade rolls, or larger portraits of toons? Sounds like Blizzard is attempting to completely gimp their PC version now to raise sales on console offerings.
I know I'll be celebrating.
Classy Move (Score:2)
I recall reading that player activity in D3 dropped by 80% within two months of the PC release, so there's your RMAH audience. The other 80% (plus those who didn't buy) prefer
This Is Completely Idiotic (Score:3)
The GAH is the main thing that was missing from Diablo II.
Trading will happen, with or without support. Trading, by itself, doesn't make the game any less of what it is. There was plenty of it in Diablo II. But because it wasn't supported, it was inconvenient, untrustworthy, and generally garbage. All Blizzard is doing here is opening the way for old-school scammers and farmers to screw everything up. They could just fix the problems with their moronic implementation of the auction house concept, 90% of which would be gone just by temporarily removing the RMAH, letting the market stabilize, and turning it back on as a facilitator instead of a goddamn business model.
No, though. We'll just wash our hands of the whole goddamn thing and trade this set of problems we created for the set of problems the playerbase created years ago. Why fix anything if it'd take actual work and won't cause customers who have already paid us to keep paying? Screw that.
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There were very nice tools in the AH, like being able to search for an item selling under a specific amount. So, you would set up the minimum skill points in the specific build type you wanted on the item, and set an amount for 'less than' at something like 40k (a few minutes of kills) and you'd then order the items by the main stats, purchase the best one, and be on your way.
Or, go for the best item, and look for the less time remaining on the AH. You could often snipe items for less than 1/1000 of their v
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In Diablo, the real problem was the loot itself. They were all random drops, and even the named epic drops had random stats.
To put it in perspective, there were about 30 different random attributes. All builds require 4-5 of these attibutes.
All resist
str/dex/int depending on class
crit
crit damage
vitality
If you dont have ALL of these abilities on most of your gear, you simply cannot complete end-game content.
If there is one thing I'm becoming exceptionally tired of, where RPGs are concerned, it is this scenario where the end game is the only thing anyone talks about. I've spent some time on the Borderlands 2 forums. That has a fairly long levelling game. Not months long, but getting to UVHM took me probably a month, playing on and off; I've got about 270 hours logged on Steam, now.
In said forums, however, whenever newbies tried to get advice about weapons, the only thing that anyone would answer them with, w
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Have to agree that all this focus on End Game - whether in Diablo or in WoW, totally cheeses me off.
I hate end game. Everyone shouts and yells and gets upset if you don't do it perfectly - it's a GAME. you're supposed to have FUN.
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If you dont have ALL of these abilities on most of your gear, you simply cannot complete end-game content.
How did the first landslide of people make it through? I mean, I'm seeing that inferno/hardcore was beaten by June 20th, 2012 and then beaten regularly since then...in a game released mid May. Did they really all have a full sets of one in 15 billion drops? Of course not.
I'm skeptical that you need the best gear to win. To cake walk it, sure. To maximize your loot+gold per hour ratio absolutely... but b
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Originally done classes were broken before being nerfed and could finish the game nearly naked. These people seeded the auction house. You could still do without.... Very slowly breaking pots for loot in safe spots. From there the threshold for what is considered "effective" or viable was set. The auction house did the rest.
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If you dont have ALL of these abilities on most of your gear, you simply cannot complete end-game content.
To add to my previous post, I'm seeing that diablo 3 was beaten in 7 hours on normal on the same day it was released.
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To add to my previous post, I'm seeing that diablo 3 was beaten in 7 hours on normal on the same day it was released.
Normal was a cakewalk; almost a tutorial. The difficulty did not scale in a linear fashion after that. They also adjusted the difficulty after release, and fixed some bugs and exploits..
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Good news! They're completely overhauling the loot drop system in the expansion (and the free patch update for those who don't buy the expansion will get the benefits, too).
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/127079-Update-Diablo-IIIs-Loot-2-0-Breakdown-Less-Better-More-Epic [escapistmagazine.com]