How do they do that? Seems like most things are based on tokens and points, which are disconnected from gold.
Most of the highest-end D2 items were along the lines of “pay 10 times as much for something that’s 10% more effective”. You could make a competent character just with things you were guaranteed to find, and upgrade that to a quite killy character with things you were pretty likely to find, or that were easy to trade for. I don’t see why they couldn’t design D3 the same way.
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/08/05/diablo-iii-secrets-of-the-new-game/
[QUOTE=Rob Pardo, Blizzard’s executive VP of game design]
The World of Warcraft economy is really different than how I see the Diablo III economy playing out, mainly because of how you get the items, and restrictions we put on the items themselves. In World of Warcraft the item system is much more deterministic and it’s also a much more crafting-based economy. The people with the best items in the game are generally the achievers—they’re the ones that kill the toughest bosses in the game. All their items at the really high level can’t be traded. It really ensures that there’s an almost achiever item economy in WoW.
Diablo is not like that—all the items are randomized, so you don’t really know when and where the best items are going to drop. And also all the items are freely tradable at all times. So you end up with a much more merchant economy.
[/QUOTE]
i never did really questioned why World of Warcraft had predetermined loot tables, and now i see. items were soulbound in WoW so you would spend the time (and the subscription) to get them, while items in Diablo were random because they wanted to trigger the gambling instinct, so you would just click one. more. time.
it had better be free to play. mmorpgs have regular, new content added to them and their servers have to host a sizable amount of players. actually, subscription based mmorpgs seem to be dying, now that free-to-play models have proved to be viable.
i can see why they might want to disable real money trading for hardcore mode, not allowing people to permanently lose items they bought. though i’m not sure if that’s reason enough. perhaps they simply want to remove any incentive (and thereby accusations) to mess around with drops as it relates to the economy? they did make both posting and transaction fees flat..
gold in D2 were never really useful for progression, and items were level locked. since items will have to come from players themselves, i see this as an improvement over the other free-to-play, microtransaction models that is becoming common. some of which has a sense where a player would need to spend money to access higher level content in a mortal amount of time.
Gold per se wasn’t useful, but money was. It’s just that the money took a different form. Mostly, trades between players were priced in high runes, or perfect gems for lower-value items. It was a minor annoyance if you lost all of your gold somehow, but a problem if you lost all your pgems, and a tragedy if you lost all your high runes.
I shudder to think what might happen if hardcore gamers find that they can actually make a decent wage by farming items in diablo III. Seriously, why flip burgers when you can sit at home and make 6-8 bucks an hour playing diablo III? Blizzard is setting up a situation where gaming addicts have no motivation to go out into the real world and find jobs.
Something that provides a regular income isn’t a job?
It’s a job, just work-at-home.
Joe
Yeah! And don’t date robots!!!
You might be surprised. The Russian mob runs a LOT of money (in the six figures or so in USD) through laundering activities in EVE Online, last I heard–largely because you can pass money INTO EVE relatively anonymously and legitly from the POV of the game designers.
That potential only gets higher when the money can legitimately transfer both directions, I think.
It’s my understanding that once you’re putting in enough effort to make minimum wage in a game, it’s enough work that it ceases to be fun for its own sake. Hence why gold farming is mostly confined to China and the third world, where US minimum wage is considered really good pay.
But I don’t see how flipping burgers is any more of a “real job” than gold farming. Both are providing a service that others are willing to pay for. If anything, I’d think the gold farming would be better job experience, since you’re likely to be self-employed.
Zeriel, got any cites on the Russian mob thing? Or is this from personal experience? 
They won’t be able to make a decent wage, remember they are competing against people who do this 24/7 for pennies a day. Chinese farmers will drive the prices down far enough that is not worth doing for regular people.
Of course, I can’t find any cites other than rumors now, so we can downgrade the status to that. On the other hand, I HAVE personally observed groups of 40-50 accounts trading in PLEX (the in-game item that you can buy legitimately with real money) in the 5-figure amounts in some places heavily populated by Russian-speaking players. The way I hear it, stolen credit cards are used to buy PLEX, which are then turned into game currency, and then that’s turned around using e-bay and other trading sites back into real money.
Even if it’s not actually happening and it is just rumors, the fun part is that the possibility is there–estimates on non-legitimate virtual currency trading range from 20mil to 300mil per year just in China alone. And there HAVE been busts of Russian mob elements using virtual transactions for laundering before, see Flooz.com - Wikipedia
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2011/08/steam-trading-update/
i’m not sure what’s happening, since i assume you could buy the virtual item directly(?), but now Valve is monetising their something somehow.