Diablo 3 will feature auction houses much like that in World of Warcraft, but with the choice of transactions either with in-game gold or real world dollars. Blizzard has explicitly stated that the company will not sell in-game items, except perhaps cosmetic items like pets and such, and that the economy will be completely player driven.
what is your prediction on how the idea would pan out? what is your opinion on the idea itself?
is it a natural progression of virtual currency or is it a slippery slope towards whichever hell games that try to sell its customers pvp items are consigned to? will officially having most of the entire player base as gold farmers “ruin the economy”, so to speak? would it herald a new age in gaming where phat lewt officially translates to real world loot?
on one hand, i don’t see it affecting the way i play the main game at all, since i have no intention of buying virtual goods to hasten my gameplay. on the other hand, playing the auction house might be more interesting, converting your stuff to money; except i don’t see how the demand could meet the supply, but what do i know? maybe there are a great horde of people who would rather buy their Stone of Jordans than wait for one to drop. on the third hand, if i traded the gold i have for real world money, it would be an easier pill to swallow to spend that on items instead of cashing it out. the lines blur.
my prediction is that if it works, they would change the itemisation of their next MMORPG to fit the real world auction house. no more predetermined loot tables.
yes, i was referring to the loot in WoW where stats are fixed (and thus resulting in everyone looking the same or carrying the same item) , as opposed to the randomness in Diablo.
That’s interesting, in that some people will actually be able to make a living playing Diablo 3 all day and selling shit to people for real $$$. Hey, it beats working retail.
OK, so I don’t see the demand as being nearly sufficient for that, but then again high level characters and items are a brisk eBay trade in every MMO so the next step is both obvious and not novel at all. As in, the only thing changing is that eBay will be losing out on their third-party fee.
OTOH, if Diablo 3 is as cheat- and dupe-happy as both of its predecessors were, then it really won’t matter one bit whether there’s an auction house or not ;).
To late it has already happened. There was a big story about 6 months ago about a prison in china that forced their prisoners to play WoW for 15 hours a day to earn money for the prison.
This would be legit, though. Buying and selling gold for real money in WoW is against the ToS, and Blizzard does their best to shut that kind of thing down.
I was a big fan of the other Diablo games, but when I read this news earlier today, it very much soured me on it. Sure, the single-player modes were engaging for a play-through or two, but after that, the replay is in getting your toon more and more powerful. I wouldn’t mind playing in-game currency for items, but real money pretty much means that it’s likely that all the best stuff will be in real money. Sure, I suppose it might even out where some people buy things and sell things and more or less end up with the same spent and earned, but I strongly suspect it will mostly end up with the people who start playing first and playing the most earning a fair bit of money and everyone else investing real money trying to catch up.
I get that this essentially takes what’s going on already and sanctions it, but this very much stinks of the slippery slope that Blizzard said they’d never take. Sure, they’re not creating items and selling them, they’re all player earned items, but I have a hard time imagining they won’t be skimming a small percentage off the auction sales. And though Diablo is obviously not WoW, it seems to me that introducing this in Diablo, especially if it turns out to be a success, they’ll have a hard time not doing the same thing in WoW or Titan.
But really, this will just introduce the exact same problem that Diablo and Diablo 2 had with hacking, except instead of downloading a “trainer”, you’ll spend real money for that advantage. The only solution I can really see to it would be to have ways to allow players to not play with people who spent real money on items and only play with players spending in-game currency.
I don’t like this one bit. I’m not really the target customer for Diablo III, but I don’t like the prospect of people paying real money for an in-game advantage, especially a pvp advantage. I certainly don’t want it to spread to other games. The only way I could see it being tolerable is if in the course of normal playing, a typical player would get enough drops to fund his real-money purchases.
…Come to think of it, gold inflation in WoW is pretty ridiculous. Imagine someone buying a virtual item for $5, waiting a year, and then selling it for $20.
I think it at least brings the reality out of the shadows. People certainly buy gold and other stuff in WoW all the time, though it’s against the rules and Blizzard does everything they can to shut it down or at least keep it under control by banning people when they catch them. People still do it though.
I doubt I will actually buy anything for my Diablo III character, since I don’t think I’ll get into the game that much…but I’m always paying for DLCs and add ons to my other games (like the special units in Total War Empire or the various DLCs for Fallout New Vegas)…to me it’s pretty much the same thing. I’ve paid extra money for games where the extra money gets you some sort of pet to follow you around (just cosmetic) or a unique mount…why not this as well?
And this is, IMO, the entire point. The demand exists, and it’s apparently a rather substantial demand. It doesn’t matter if Blizzard had rolled this out or not, there would have been people paying real money for game items anyway, just like there already is for Diablo 2. They can’t stop it, and attempting to stop it just pushes it into a black market style transaction, which comes with all sorts of shady business such as account stealing that makes life harder for everyone. By legitimizing the transactions, they pull out the only incentive for people going to the crooked gold farmers with all the security risks entailed.
IMO it’s a smart move. I’m actually surprised they’ve got the balls to do it, because this is the kind of thing that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. It’ll be seen as Blizzard trying to squeeze more money out of their players in skimming a cut of the microtransactions, but even as cynical as I am, I actually don’t think that’s the primary motivator behind it. I think they’re just owning up to the reality that a significant portion of the player base wants this feature and will have it regardless of their best attempts to prevent it.
It’s not unlike a lot of the arguments for legalizing drugs, really.
It’s worth noting that nobody admits to buying gold except anonymously. They’re not just trying to avoid the banhammer; anyone who admits to buying gold is branded as a baddie (and for good reason). It’s also worth noting that hackers hack accounts in order to steal pretend money only so they can sell it for real money. Adding this system to WoW would just make things much more convenient for hackers. Admittedly, it would get rid of goldspamming (the least annoying aspect of current goldselling).
Paying money for new content or for cosmetic pets/mounts isn’t remotely the same as paying for items that will make you harder to beat in pvp. Even the Total War DLC doesn’t really give a pvp advantage; the stronger units cost significantly more in-game money (and players have an equal budget in multiplayer battles), so a force of elite DLC units will be smaller and not necessarily more formidable.
I couldn’t tell you how pvp rankings will work in D3, but I can imagine how much grinding honor/conquest in WoW would suck if you had to constantly fight against players who paid to skip the grind.
Buying gold is awesome. Keeps you having to waste a lot of time on nonsense. The only people think buying gold makes you bad are those wacky MMOers who believe that progression = ability instead of ability = ability.
It’s the exact same for this. Why you’d want to skip the progression is beyond me though, since that’s what the game is. You play to see what drops next.
I think it’s a good idea. As noted above, the market for virtual items will exist regardless of whether Blizzard supports it or not. By bringing it out of the shadows, they can reduce the amount of scamming that takes place, much like decriminalizing marijuana or prostitution.
I like that they’re planning to offer both virtual-money and real-money trading, and I expect that both markets will be busy ones.
That seems to me to be more indicative of bad game design than of the inherent unfairness of paying for stuff. Grinding is not a pleasant experience - by definition, it’s spending a lot of time doing something that is not fun in order to get a reward.
Games should be fun. I quit WoW because I didn’t need a second job, especially one that paid me negative fifteen bucks a month for about 15-20 hours a week.
I’ve heard numbers tossed around but does anyone really know what % of sold gold is stolen instead of farmed? I’m extremely dubious whenever anyone tries to claim anything above 40% or so. The big firms wouldn’t bother paying kids to farm gold in sweatshops all day if they were just stealing accounts. No doubt they don’t ask questions of where the gold comes from when they buy from market to re-sell but in that they’re no worse than pawn shops.
Really? Remember all the cookie cutter MF Skelly Necros and older Whirlwind Barbs, and Hammerdins? Just like in WoW, the randomness only lasted as long as you were poor in-game. Once you found an item worth a bunch of duped SoJs, or a few duped high runes, you tossed your old junk and kitted up in D2’s version of Tier 11, whatever the best exapmles of your character all wore.
Something I just thought of (I am not sure if it will be a problem for Diablo 3, most people won’t make money here): If I, a Norwegian, sell some items to people from Italy, Canada, South Korea and Australia, all on a server placed in the US…
Which country gets the taxes from my income? Quite a few countries are trying to place VAT on electronic items like ebooks and computer games (for example from Steam), even is the store is located in a different country. Who is responsible for collecting these when I sell my gear on Blizzard’s auction house?
Also, how will Blizzard move this cash between countries? Especially if they implement this in WoW as well, which has a rather large economy already. Some sort of Blizzard Bank?
I think the price of items will be the opposite of WoW, though. In WoW there is a steady increase of gold into the economy leaving people with ever-increasing amounts of gold to spend on the AH. In Diablo it will IMHO be the other way, the Übersword of Slaying +5 will cost 5$ one week, then 1$ a few weeks later as the supply increases.
