I think this is a good thing. The auction house ruined the experience mainly because the drop rates were so bad in order to support the AH. It got to where it was extremely rare to find a usable item in 10+ hrs of game play. I think there is someway to implement a trade-house of some sort but either way I’m glad it’s gone. The console version doesn’t have one and it’s got a MUCH better loot system than the PC. Like night and day difference. Makes the game MUCH more fun when you are farming for items your character can use vs farming for items you can sell for gold.
I enjoyed D3 but the drop rates and the fact you pretty much had to use the AH to survive took a lot of fun out of things. This change will be enough to get me to re-install the game and may even buy the DLC.
The auction house turned what was the joy of winning a new car playing slots into the drudgery of working a minimum wage job until you could afford one.
Maybe it’s 'cause I mostly played hardcore, but I never had much issue with the auction house. You could rarely find anything on the damn thing and, even if you did, you couldn’t afford it anyway. Maybe things changed in the year that I wasn’t playing though.
The problem is not the auction house, it’s deliberately crippling drop rates to force people to use it. Fix the drop rates, and would it matter if the auction house still existed?
I’ll probably give D3 another chance when the expansion comes out.
So, why does the AH work in some games and not others? I haven’t played WoW in years, but that game was all about getting loot too. The AH seemed to work fine from what I remember. Was it because of the real money side? When the best loot was found it would only be put up on the RMAH? Was it because of the adjusted drop rates in D3? Does WoW, or other MMOs, not have adjusted drop rates?
Good news, but I’m done with D3 until new content hits. It’s a great game, but without better loot drops and more content, well, there’s a lot of other games to be playing.
I play WoW, never played Diablo. Not sure what you mean by “adjusted drop rates,” but loot drops like candy in WoW. With the patch they released last week, a level 90 character can go from greens to full epics in the space of a week or two with very little effort. The LookingForRaid functionality means you can queue alone to do a 25-person raid dungeon and you will usually (not necessarily always) get something good. And even if you get unlucky and nothing drops, you get points for doing dungeons and raids that you can spend on epic gear.
WoW’s auction house works because random drops and the gear players can make is usually worse than what drops in raids. Rarely are crafted items or BoEs best-in-slot.
It’s a combination of items only being usable on a single character in WoW (whereas an item is infinitely usable in Diablo) and the best items in WoW not being available on the auction house. Plus WoW has gameplay besides item progression.