8 ms·

Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014

185 points by freeman478 13y ago

aaronbee 13y ago
This sounds like a great idea and should make the game a lot more rewarding. For one, it will make crafting useful instead of a waste of money.
freeman478 13y ago
Official annoucement here : http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/ http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/ but i felt ars added some useful context and commentary.
EpicEng 13y ago
Finally. This was the absolute worst aspect of DIII. It completely ruined the gearing up aspect of the game. Loot drops were tuned down because of it, so how did everyone get gear? They bought it. Lame. The new direction of this game looks really good. These kind of changes make me want to play the xpac. I had previously sworn off the game entirely.
- craigyk 13y ago
  ditto. I even asked for (and received) a refund as I was quite irate that the game mechanics had obviously been tuned with something other than fun as the top priority. This makes me think of giving it another go. I was hoping stuff like this would start happening after they broke away from their parent.
debacle 13y ago
This is a good and smart move, but it's only one step towards fixing the nature of the game.
- tieTYT 13y ago
  I'm curious as someone who has never played the game: What else do they need to fix? I've only heard complaints about the auction house
  - FedRegister 13y ago
    The game is always-online, even for single player or local LAN. Which means you can get lag-killed in single player, or the server is full (which happened at launch) so you can't play your single player game. The game also kicks you out if you lose your connection while you're playing.
  - rholdy 13y ago
    Also, the gear progression is very linear. On every gear slot you are looking for the same affixes.
    - oconnor0 13y ago
      Affixes?
      - stonemetal 13y ago
        postfix, prefix. Gear gets a randomly generated name based on what special properties it has. So the red club of the owl is a club that has added fire damage(has red prefix) and a health bonus(has owl suffix)(or something I only play diablo causally so I don't know the affixes off hand.)
  - JTon 13y ago
    One of my favourite complains is rooted in the lightning and colour palette choices of D3 when comparing to D2. http://www.diablowiki.net/Art_controversy http://www.diablowiki.net/Art_controversy
programminggeek 13y ago
Wow, this is a surprising reversal of trends as far as user generated content and micro-transaction based economies go, but the auction house really did change the core mechanics of Diablo 3. As a player I really did kind of like the auction system during the initial grind from level 1 to 60, but when there was no more level progression and the only progression was item progression, it just stopped being fun because the only purpose of playing was to kill things for the best drops that you could sell on the auction house. There was no longer a use for almost everything that dropped. The auction house mechanic might work on a MMO style game, but Diablo 3 isn't a MMO and the auction house broke the one mechanic that made the game a lot of fun - random loot drops. It's treasure hunting basically. Auction house turns treasure hunting into a job, and thus it's less fun after a while. This is a good lesson for game designers. The treasure hunting random loot mechanic works only if it can't be short circuited. The moment you can "buy" treasure, it's no longer treasure, it's a commodity and collecting commodities is a job, not a game. Treasure hunting is a game.
- pekk 13y ago
  > the only purpose of playing was to kill things for the best drops which is not different from what people were doing on Diablo II for ages.
  - cheald 13y ago
    You truncated what he said. He qualified it with "that you could sell on the auction house", which is exceptionally important. Grinding bosses for drops to build the character that you want offers great direct feedback - you kill the boss 84 times, and he finally drops the thing you've been looking for. The reward is tangible and exciting. Compare to the AH structure, where it's basically "well, I'll grind for things that might sell, and then hope they sell well enough that I can save up for that thing I need which I know will never actually drop for me". The direct feedback and chance for excitement is practically gone, because the things that you are actually excited for come from the auction house rather than the gameplay.
    - 13y ago
josh2600 13y ago
So, I have a bit of a personal episode here I'd like to share. I played a lot of Diablo 2, more than I care to admit, and so the launch of Diablo 3 was a really big deal to me. I pre-ordered it on day 1, I pre-installed the game weeks before launch and I read every piece of information about the game. When the game came out, I initially loved it; just an absolute pleasure to play. It was great, until I found the auction house. Within a few days, I had enough gear to handle most everything in the game and after a week or two I had a max-leveled character of each class. What was left to do? I hit the level cap, and even though they eventually came out with a second cap, the idea of grinding made no sense when the auction house existed. The most practical thing to do was trade and that got so boring so quick :/. The design choices that Blizzard made as a direct result of the auction house are both terrifying and a fantastic lesson for anyone in the startup world. As a direct result of making money off of the activities of people in the game, Blizzard made the following game inhibiting decisions: * Penalizing players for dying for longer and longer periods of time * Limiting in-game communication systems severely * Penalizing players for playing in groups I could go on, but the bottom line was this: Activision put profit over gameplay and burned one of the best franchises in the history of gaming for little profit. The game was absolutely atrocious as a direct result of the goddamn auction house. It took my favorite game and turned it into a stock simulator. What made Diablo great was the camaraderie, the lack of a driving arching focus on optimization/monetization, and an amazing community of folks. Diablo 3 tried to turn all of that into money and it sucked. Thank god and good riddance to that rubbish auction house.
- pdenya 13y ago
  I agree with you 100% and I'm coming from a similar situation. The question is, are you going to play again once it's removed? I almost definitely won't give it another shot. Still play D2 on occasion though.
  - TheCraiggers 13y ago
    I'm sort of done of D2, but I've found Torchlight 2 to be an excellent replacement for Diablo. No auction house, and it fixes the most annoying parts (IMHO) of D3 and D2: weak, boring bosses and weak skills, respectively. I played a ton of D2, but I always was disappointed that, with the exception of gimmick builds which could barely make it to Nightmare, you were limited to one or two viable builds for each character. Put more than one point into Firebolt? Too bad for you. As for D3, I almost finished my first playthrough without drinking a single health potion. Not exactly the nail-biting, walking the razor's edge gameplay I had come to expect from Diablo.
cromwellian 13y ago
All this will do is make users use external auction houses. As long as they keep in-game trading of rare and legendary items, people will just take it to eBay or some other site, and then arrange the swap in-game. It makes it less instant gratification, but won't stop the buying of items.
- cheald 13y ago
  Which is fine, IMO. Removing the AH as a crux of gameplay design is the important thing here. Trade isn't inherently bad, but building the entire game around trade (and more specifically, trying to build the game around incentivizing people to trade through your system for real currency of which you get a cut) is a really crappy thing to do to a loot grinder.
  - lackbeard 13y ago
    Do you have any sources which confirm that Blizzard built the game around AH monetization? I see this claim made frequently, but I've never actually seen anything that wasn't pure speculation.
    - cheald 13y ago
      They've never explicitly said "Yeah, we built to game to try to juice as much out of you through the RMAH" if that's what you're asking. It's pretty clear if you actually played the game, though. The game was tuned, both in terms of difficulty and drops, with the expectation that the player would be using the AH[1], and Blizzard built the RMAH in order to attempt to capitalize upon the sales that previously happened through D2JSP or whatnot. It's exceptionally clear that Blizzard's idea was to control scarcity of desirable items so that people were incentivized to buy and sell these most desirable items for real money, giving Blizzard their 15% cut on every sale. We have a scenario in which the same entity that brokers sales (for a fee!) is the same entity that (arbitrarily) controls the production of items sold -- it doesn't take an MBA to connect the dots there. No, I can't prove any of this. I would be exceptionally surprised if anyone could. But companies of Blizzard's scale don't do things like a real-money marketplace (from which they take broker's fees) just because "the community demands it" - that absolutely was the monetization strategy for the game. People don't pay a subscription fee, or purchase microtransaction items in the traditional sense. How else are you going to monetize it? (They had a similar monetization strategy for Starcraft 2, IIRC. Something about a marketplace for community-created content that, again, they would take a cut of. Let the players do the work, take a cut of it. I don't play SC2, so I'm not sure how this shook out.) [1] http://i48.tinypic.com/2cwsg3q.png http://i48.tinypic.com/2cwsg3q.png (sorry, original thread is now gone)
rholdy 13y ago
I was among the many D2 fans that felt let down by Diablo 3. I never went so far as to grab a pitchfork like some other people, but the auction house really sucked the fun out of the game. Honestly, I'm very proud of Blizzard for making this decision. I never expected them to do something this drastic, but ultimately, it is what is best for the game.
jamesaguilar 13y ago
This is the right thing to do, from my perspective. The AHs killed the fun of finding items for me, because there was always something way better you could buy for just a tiny amount of money. This could restore the game to the feeling it is meant to have.
ars 13y ago
Seems like there will be a huge divide between pre-auction house characters and post. Is there any sort of PvP in the game?
- EpicEng 13y ago
  Why? With the implementation of "loot 2.0" you will catch up to "paid for" characters by, you know, actually finding good gear that you can use. This change (as well as others they have planned) works because they are overhauling the loot system.
  - thefreeman 13y ago
    Are you really going to just jump on the "loot 2.0" bandwagon assuming they will right all previous wrongs. I can almost guarantee this expansion will be just another money grab.
    - EpicEng 13y ago
      I'm not assuming anything; I'm just going by what the new lead has been saying. Like everyone else, I'll wait and see. However, it really does seen like they're (finally) listening.
deleted 13y ago
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mumbi 13y ago
Maybe we'll finally move back to SoJ currency, like it's supposed to be.
- Sheepshow 13y ago
  It's truly the gold standard, if alchemy worked.
thisisnotatest 13y ago
Great move. I remember the first time I stopped by the auction house and bought some powerful gems for my level 20 character. I'd been collecting crappy gems planning to upgrade them, but then for a pittance of gold I had suddenly (almost accidentally) twinked my character with gems with huge stat bonuses and no level requirements. I tried to swear off the auction house after that, but the psychological damage was done, and I never played Diablo 3 after the first time I beat normal difficulty. (To be fair, I might just have been in a different stage of my life than when I was a Diablo 2 addict in high school.) I'm sure this will become a seminal case study for online game design in the future.
mmxiii 13y ago
A reasonable direction go to would be: 1. reduce the range of gear power, make the average gear drop 80-90% of the maximum roll for the piece. 2. make the best pieces account bound and available in the ladder season. This would encourage replayability of the game and remove the need to spam AH.
meerita 13y ago
Best news ever. I wrote extensively on the spanish forums about how bad the game was with the RMAH and the AH itself. They claimed many things like "good economy" and nice balance between real money and virtual, but it was all a lie. In fact, the same became dull really fast. This is a wonderful news for the Diablo fans, who really love to trade char by char, using items. Diablo is that, an itemfinder game, trade items for items, not for realmoney. But well, you can sell them outside the game anyways, people did it even with the current AH.
devanti 13y ago
they already sucked the money out of it (what little there was). And hoping making this change will get users back. Too late, Blizzard.
brownbat 13y ago
The prevailing opinion is that the AH killed the fun of hunting for rare drops, and it should be abandoned. Over time, I've found games that involve grinding for rare drops resembling more and more the psychology of slot machines.[1] It's hard for me to be sympathetic to people who claim the fun thing is now too easy, because it doesn't involve as much mind-numbing work. If your game only works with a slot machine mechanic, maybe it has other design issues? Also relevant: [2]. [1] http://99percentinvisible.prx.org/2013/04/29/78-no-armed-bandit/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=78-no-armed-bandit http://99percentinvisible.prx.org/2013/04/29/78-no-armed-ban... [2] http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/31 http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/31 (There may be one that's more on point...)
- cheald 13y ago
  The Skinner Box is a well-known and understood psychological data point. The problem is that if you undercut the joy of pressing the reward button, all the reinforcement conditioning goes into teaching your audience that your game is Not Fun, rather than teaching them that "just one more run" will grant them the thing they want. The problem with the AH and its accompanying miniscule drop rates is that it quantified things too solidly. You can't do "just one more run" with the hope of getting your item. You know that your chances of getting your item on your own are virtually nil, and you can calculate that you need to do 634 more runs to earn the currency needed to buy the item you're looking for. People get addicted to gambling because of the endorphin rush you get when you win big. Blizzard killed the "win big" and reduced it to going to a 9-5 job to earn a paycheck to eventually buy that big screen TV you want.
mentos 13y ago
I was able to get through the game relatively quickly with items purchased on the auction house. Afterwards my friends and I were glad we were done with the addiction of 'chasing' the next level/item. If they could make a larger more satisfying endgame, possibly large PvP areas where guilds can fight for territory, claim land, place houses/structures, I'd be happy to grind. But endlessly chasing a carot on a stick? I'm glad the auction house 'ruined' the 'game' for me..
xer0x 13y ago
"March 2014" WHAT! They should have done that immediately!
- cheald 13y ago
  Without a loot reset, it would likely leave much of the playerbase feeling like they've been hung out to dry. Coupling it to the expansion is the right move here.
Steko 13y ago
The AH wasn't really the problem for D3. The problem was the basic stat balance issues created huge lottery items. At launch for a Monk basically there were a handful of god stats (attack speed, life on hit, dex, all resist, your specific resist, magic find), a handful of ok stats and a large number of garbage stats. Now even a good stat can be worthless because of the large value ranges. Back of the envelop numbers: say god stats are a 10, ok stats are 4 and dump stats are 2's. Now the MEDIAN item is (roughly) 1% of one with an avg amount of ideal stats (ideal stats with all high end values might be 30 times better).
- mehwoot 13y ago
  And this is different to D2? D2 was even worse, with the amount of time you needed to spend to get that perfect item.
  - Steko 13y ago
    To me the itemization was far and away better in D2. A decade of MMO popularity may have changed player expectations as well. And yes, circling back to the linked article, the AH exposes the poor itemization in a way that D2 didn't have so even if D3 itemization is the same as D2 it needed to be better.
gboudrias 13y ago
A good decision terribly too late. The cash cow is dead and they're not going to bring it back and unsoil the franchise.
jakebellacera 13y ago
Wow, hats off to Blizzard for recognizing that the auction house was undermining the overall experience. Obviously this doesn't stop people from trading in-person, but Diablo 2 had it right and I'm pleased to see they went back to that route.
venomsnake 13y ago
Too little too late. The only thing that can redeem D3 in my eyes is the removal of always online requirement. With AH gone there is absolutely no excuse for it to be present.
borgchick 13y ago
so many kids will become unemployed in China... those poor poor item farmers... won't someone think of the children!
faet 13y ago
It doesn't matter at this point. They've milked it. Gold per dollar has dropped so far it's hard to sell anything except the very best. By the time march rolls around they'll have squeezed everything they could from it. At launch people where busying 'average' items for ~$100+. Now, unless it's best in slot it won't sell
thefreeman 13y ago
Fuck Blizzard. I will never forgive them for the cashgrab they called D3 I don't care how they change it.
- diminoten 13y ago
  How is this attitude rational? I can't understand how people react like this. Is it left over anger from when the situation was in the undesirable configuration? Can they not see how their opinions have had an influence in something they're passionate about? I can't see how someone who wanted this to happen would consider Blizzard to be still in the wrong.
  - thefreeman 13y ago
    Because they already made all of their money from it in the first place. Now they are pretending they give a shit in order to try to get more money from people. They showed their true colors when they destroyed my favorite franchise of all time. I will never give them another cent.
    - diminoten 13y ago
      What makes you say that greed is their "true colors" when this could be their true colors, finally shining through when the changes they were forced to make for D3 didn't pan out like the money-grubbing overlords wanted? I just don't see how you can claim one completely fabricated story is true but the other isn't.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    Why should it be rational? Who cares if you understand it or not? Frankly, no one has to. Fact is people do end up feeling that way, and it costs sales. Worse still, it costs loyalty. So know it exists, the accept it as a reality to deal with. Lastly, ever had a boy/girl friend who cheated? Were you still interested after the other person was dropped? Did all return to normal? Is that rational? Some people are still human, with human emotions, and no, they are not rational.
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shadowmint 13y ago
While I broadly speaking applaud this move, I do feel a little bit like the guys from blizzard need to eat just a little bit of humble pie. 'this is really exciting for us'? really? how about, 'we're really sorry we took a franchise you loved and set fire to it, and are now really concerned about the viability of the expansion we're making' Too late; I'll play torchlight thanks. You have a nice diablo romp over there. You've lost my support; I no longer have confidence the team on diablo 3 can deliver a game I actually want to play.
- thefreeman 13y ago
  Thanks for putting it way better then I could have. Substituting Torchlight for PoE
diziet 13y ago
Reduce search by stats flexibility of the AH. Allow only one item per account. Make custom games with custom names available and browsable. Make chat channels relevant by placing everyone in one and having it take a lot of the screen estate. You can still have the AH for one-off items, but reduce the volume by a large margin.
- yannyu 13y ago
  >Reduce search by stats flexibility of the AH. Why would you intentionally cripple your UI unless you just wanted to frustrate your users?
talmir 13y ago
I see what they say are the reasons for closing it down.. But here is what I am hearing between the lines: "So guys, we are closing down the auction house! We are not really breaking even anymore between the cost of running the auction house (servers, maintenance, etc) and the profits we get from sold items so we are closing it down and hiding it behind a smokescreen of 'we are totally doing it for the player, lol'. Oh yeah, its still always online so lulz I guess. Please buy our expansion!"

185 points by freeman478 13y ago

This sounds like a great idea and should make the game a lot more rewarding. For one, it will make crafting useful instead of a waste of money.

freeman478 13y ago

Official annoucement here : http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/ http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/ but i felt ars added some useful context and commentary.

EpicEng 13y ago

Finally. This was the absolute worst aspect of DIII. It completely ruined the gearing up aspect of the game. Loot drops were tuned down because of it, so how did everyone get gear? They bought it. Lame. The new direction of this game looks really good. These kind of changes make me want to play the xpac. I had previously sworn off the game entirely.

craigyk 13y ago
ditto. I even asked for (and received) a refund as I was quite irate that the game mechanics had obviously been tuned with something other than fun as the top priority. This makes me think of giving it another go. I was hoping stuff like this would start happening after they broke away from their parent.

debacle 13y ago

This is a good and smart move, but it's only one step towards fixing the nature of the game.

tieTYT 13y ago
I'm curious as someone who has never played the game: What else do they need to fix? I've only heard complaints about the auction house
- FedRegister 13y ago
  The game is always-online, even for single player or local LAN. Which means you can get lag-killed in single player, or the server is full (which happened at launch) so you can't play your single player game. The game also kicks you out if you lose your connection while you're playing.
- rholdy 13y ago
  Also, the gear progression is very linear. On every gear slot you are looking for the same affixes.
  - oconnor0 13y ago
    Affixes?
    - stonemetal 13y ago
      postfix, prefix. Gear gets a randomly generated name based on what special properties it has. So the red club of the owl is a club that has added fire damage(has red prefix) and a health bonus(has owl suffix)(or something I only play diablo causally so I don't know the affixes off hand.)
- JTon 13y ago
  One of my favourite complains is rooted in the lightning and colour palette choices of D3 when comparing to D2. http://www.diablowiki.net/Art_controversy http://www.diablowiki.net/Art_controversy

programminggeek 13y ago

Wow, this is a surprising reversal of trends as far as user generated content and micro-transaction based economies go, but the auction house really did change the core mechanics of Diablo 3. As a player I really did kind of like the auction system during the initial grind from level 1 to 60, but when there was no more level progression and the only progression was item progression, it just stopped being fun because the only purpose of playing was to kill things for the best drops that you could sell on the auction house. There was no longer a use for almost everything that dropped. The auction house mechanic might work on a MMO style game, but Diablo 3 isn't a MMO and the auction house broke the one mechanic that made the game a lot of fun - random loot drops. It's treasure hunting basically. Auction house turns treasure hunting into a job, and thus it's less fun after a while. This is a good lesson for game designers. The treasure hunting random loot mechanic works only if it can't be short circuited. The moment you can "buy" treasure, it's no longer treasure, it's a commodity and collecting commodities is a job, not a game. Treasure hunting is a game.

pekk 13y ago
> the only purpose of playing was to kill things for the best drops which is not different from what people were doing on Diablo II for ages.
- cheald 13y ago
  You truncated what he said. He qualified it with "that you could sell on the auction house", which is exceptionally important. Grinding bosses for drops to build the character that you want offers great direct feedback - you kill the boss 84 times, and he finally drops the thing you've been looking for. The reward is tangible and exciting. Compare to the AH structure, where it's basically "well, I'll grind for things that might sell, and then hope they sell well enough that I can save up for that thing I need which I know will never actually drop for me". The direct feedback and chance for excitement is practically gone, because the things that you are actually excited for come from the auction house rather than the gameplay.
  - 13y ago

josh2600 13y ago

So, I have a bit of a personal episode here I'd like to share. I played a lot of Diablo 2, more than I care to admit, and so the launch of Diablo 3 was a really big deal to me. I pre-ordered it on day 1, I pre-installed the game weeks before launch and I read every piece of information about the game. When the game came out, I initially loved it; just an absolute pleasure to play. It was great, until I found the auction house. Within a few days, I had enough gear to handle most everything in the game and after a week or two I had a max-leveled character of each class. What was left to do? I hit the level cap, and even though they eventually came out with a second cap, the idea of grinding made no sense when the auction house existed. The most practical thing to do was trade and that got so boring so quick :/. The design choices that Blizzard made as a direct result of the auction house are both terrifying and a fantastic lesson for anyone in the startup world. As a direct result of making money off of the activities of people in the game, Blizzard made the following game inhibiting decisions: * Penalizing players for dying for longer and longer periods of time * Limiting in-game communication systems severely * Penalizing players for playing in groups I could go on, but the bottom line was this: Activision put profit over gameplay and burned one of the best franchises in the history of gaming for little profit. The game was absolutely atrocious as a direct result of the goddamn auction house. It took my favorite game and turned it into a stock simulator. What made Diablo great was the camaraderie, the lack of a driving arching focus on optimization/monetization, and an amazing community of folks. Diablo 3 tried to turn all of that into money and it sucked. Thank god and good riddance to that rubbish auction house.

pdenya 13y ago
I agree with you 100% and I'm coming from a similar situation. The question is, are you going to play again once it's removed? I almost definitely won't give it another shot. Still play D2 on occasion though.
- TheCraiggers 13y ago
  I'm sort of done of D2, but I've found Torchlight 2 to be an excellent replacement for Diablo. No auction house, and it fixes the most annoying parts (IMHO) of D3 and D2: weak, boring bosses and weak skills, respectively. I played a ton of D2, but I always was disappointed that, with the exception of gimmick builds which could barely make it to Nightmare, you were limited to one or two viable builds for each character. Put more than one point into Firebolt? Too bad for you. As for D3, I almost finished my first playthrough without drinking a single health potion. Not exactly the nail-biting, walking the razor's edge gameplay I had come to expect from Diablo.

cromwellian 13y ago

All this will do is make users use external auction houses. As long as they keep in-game trading of rare and legendary items, people will just take it to eBay or some other site, and then arrange the swap in-game. It makes it less instant gratification, but won't stop the buying of items.

cheald 13y ago
Which is fine, IMO. Removing the AH as a crux of gameplay design is the important thing here. Trade isn't inherently bad, but building the entire game around trade (and more specifically, trying to build the game around incentivizing people to trade through your system for real currency of which you get a cut) is a really crappy thing to do to a loot grinder.
- lackbeard 13y ago
  Do you have any sources which confirm that Blizzard built the game around AH monetization? I see this claim made frequently, but I've never actually seen anything that wasn't pure speculation.
  - cheald 13y ago
    They've never explicitly said "Yeah, we built to game to try to juice as much out of you through the RMAH" if that's what you're asking. It's pretty clear if you actually played the game, though. The game was tuned, both in terms of difficulty and drops, with the expectation that the player would be using the AH[1], and Blizzard built the RMAH in order to attempt to capitalize upon the sales that previously happened through D2JSP or whatnot. It's exceptionally clear that Blizzard's idea was to control scarcity of desirable items so that people were incentivized to buy and sell these most desirable items for real money, giving Blizzard their 15% cut on every sale. We have a scenario in which the same entity that brokers sales (for a fee!) is the same entity that (arbitrarily) controls the production of items sold -- it doesn't take an MBA to connect the dots there. No, I can't prove any of this. I would be exceptionally surprised if anyone could. But companies of Blizzard's scale don't do things like a real-money marketplace (from which they take broker's fees) just because "the community demands it" - that absolutely was the monetization strategy for the game. People don't pay a subscription fee, or purchase microtransaction items in the traditional sense. How else are you going to monetize it? (They had a similar monetization strategy for Starcraft 2, IIRC. Something about a marketplace for community-created content that, again, they would take a cut of. Let the players do the work, take a cut of it. I don't play SC2, so I'm not sure how this shook out.) [1] http://i48.tinypic.com/2cwsg3q.png http://i48.tinypic.com/2cwsg3q.png (sorry, original thread is now gone)

rholdy 13y ago

I was among the many D2 fans that felt let down by Diablo 3. I never went so far as to grab a pitchfork like some other people, but the auction house really sucked the fun out of the game. Honestly, I'm very proud of Blizzard for making this decision. I never expected them to do something this drastic, but ultimately, it is what is best for the game.

jamesaguilar 13y ago

This is the right thing to do, from my perspective. The AHs killed the fun of finding items for me, because there was always something way better you could buy for just a tiny amount of money. This could restore the game to the feeling it is meant to have.

ars 13y ago

Seems like there will be a huge divide between pre-auction house characters and post. Is there any sort of PvP in the game?

EpicEng 13y ago
Why? With the implementation of "loot 2.0" you will catch up to "paid for" characters by, you know, actually finding good gear that you can use. This change (as well as others they have planned) works because they are overhauling the loot system.
- thefreeman 13y ago
  Are you really going to just jump on the "loot 2.0" bandwagon assuming they will right all previous wrongs. I can almost guarantee this expansion will be just another money grab.
  - EpicEng 13y ago
    I'm not assuming anything; I'm just going by what the new lead has been saying. Like everyone else, I'll wait and see. However, it really does seen like they're (finally) listening.

deleted 13y ago

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mumbi 13y ago

Maybe we'll finally move back to SoJ currency, like it's supposed to be.

Sheepshow 13y ago
It's truly the gold standard, if alchemy worked.

thisisnotatest 13y ago

Great move. I remember the first time I stopped by the auction house and bought some powerful gems for my level 20 character. I'd been collecting crappy gems planning to upgrade them, but then for a pittance of gold I had suddenly (almost accidentally) twinked my character with gems with huge stat bonuses and no level requirements. I tried to swear off the auction house after that, but the psychological damage was done, and I never played Diablo 3 after the first time I beat normal difficulty. (To be fair, I might just have been in a different stage of my life than when I was a Diablo 2 addict in high school.) I'm sure this will become a seminal case study for online game design in the future.

mmxiii 13y ago

A reasonable direction go to would be: 1. reduce the range of gear power, make the average gear drop 80-90% of the maximum roll for the piece. 2. make the best pieces account bound and available in the ladder season. This would encourage replayability of the game and remove the need to spam AH.

meerita 13y ago

Best news ever. I wrote extensively on the spanish forums about how bad the game was with the RMAH and the AH itself. They claimed many things like "good economy" and nice balance between real money and virtual, but it was all a lie. In fact, the same became dull really fast. This is a wonderful news for the Diablo fans, who really love to trade char by char, using items. Diablo is that, an itemfinder game, trade items for items, not for realmoney. But well, you can sell them outside the game anyways, people did it even with the current AH.

devanti 13y ago

they already sucked the money out of it (what little there was). And hoping making this change will get users back. Too late, Blizzard.

brownbat 13y ago

The prevailing opinion is that the AH killed the fun of hunting for rare drops, and it should be abandoned. Over time, I've found games that involve grinding for rare drops resembling more and more the psychology of slot machines.[1] It's hard for me to be sympathetic to people who claim the fun thing is now too easy, because it doesn't involve as much mind-numbing work. If your game only works with a slot machine mechanic, maybe it has other design issues? Also relevant: [2]. [1] http://99percentinvisible.prx.org/2013/04/29/78-no-armed-bandit/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=78-no-armed-bandit http://99percentinvisible.prx.org/2013/04/29/78-no-armed-ban... [2] http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/31 http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/31 (There may be one that's more on point...)

cheald 13y ago
The Skinner Box is a well-known and understood psychological data point. The problem is that if you undercut the joy of pressing the reward button, all the reinforcement conditioning goes into teaching your audience that your game is Not Fun, rather than teaching them that "just one more run" will grant them the thing they want. The problem with the AH and its accompanying miniscule drop rates is that it quantified things too solidly. You can't do "just one more run" with the hope of getting your item. You know that your chances of getting your item on your own are virtually nil, and you can calculate that you need to do 634 more runs to earn the currency needed to buy the item you're looking for. People get addicted to gambling because of the endorphin rush you get when you win big. Blizzard killed the "win big" and reduced it to going to a 9-5 job to earn a paycheck to eventually buy that big screen TV you want.

mentos 13y ago

I was able to get through the game relatively quickly with items purchased on the auction house. Afterwards my friends and I were glad we were done with the addiction of 'chasing' the next level/item. If they could make a larger more satisfying endgame, possibly large PvP areas where guilds can fight for territory, claim land, place houses/structures, I'd be happy to grind. But endlessly chasing a carot on a stick? I'm glad the auction house 'ruined' the 'game' for me..

xer0x 13y ago

"March 2014" WHAT! They should have done that immediately!

cheald 13y ago
Without a loot reset, it would likely leave much of the playerbase feeling like they've been hung out to dry. Coupling it to the expansion is the right move here.

Steko 13y ago

The AH wasn't really the problem for D3. The problem was the basic stat balance issues created huge lottery items. At launch for a Monk basically there were a handful of god stats (attack speed, life on hit, dex, all resist, your specific resist, magic find), a handful of ok stats and a large number of garbage stats. Now even a good stat can be worthless because of the large value ranges. Back of the envelop numbers: say god stats are a 10, ok stats are 4 and dump stats are 2's. Now the MEDIAN item is (roughly) 1% of one with an avg amount of ideal stats (ideal stats with all high end values might be 30 times better).

mehwoot 13y ago
And this is different to D2? D2 was even worse, with the amount of time you needed to spend to get that perfect item.
- Steko 13y ago
  To me the itemization was far and away better in D2. A decade of MMO popularity may have changed player expectations as well. And yes, circling back to the linked article, the AH exposes the poor itemization in a way that D2 didn't have so even if D3 itemization is the same as D2 it needed to be better.

gboudrias 13y ago

A good decision terribly too late. The cash cow is dead and they're not going to bring it back and unsoil the franchise.

jakebellacera 13y ago

Wow, hats off to Blizzard for recognizing that the auction house was undermining the overall experience. Obviously this doesn't stop people from trading in-person, but Diablo 2 had it right and I'm pleased to see they went back to that route.

venomsnake 13y ago

Too little too late. The only thing that can redeem D3 in my eyes is the removal of always online requirement. With AH gone there is absolutely no excuse for it to be present.

borgchick 13y ago

so many kids will become unemployed in China... those poor poor item farmers... won't someone think of the children!

faet 13y ago

It doesn't matter at this point. They've milked it. Gold per dollar has dropped so far it's hard to sell anything except the very best. By the time march rolls around they'll have squeezed everything they could from it. At launch people where busying 'average' items for ~$100+. Now, unless it's best in slot it won't sell

thefreeman 13y ago

Fuck Blizzard. I will never forgive them for the cashgrab they called D3 I don't care how they change it.

diminoten 13y ago
How is this attitude rational? I can't understand how people react like this. Is it left over anger from when the situation was in the undesirable configuration? Can they not see how their opinions have had an influence in something they're passionate about? I can't see how someone who wanted this to happen would consider Blizzard to be still in the wrong.
- thefreeman 13y ago
  Because they already made all of their money from it in the first place. Now they are pretending they give a shit in order to try to get more money from people. They showed their true colors when they destroyed my favorite franchise of all time. I will never give them another cent.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    What makes you say that greed is their "true colors" when this could be their true colors, finally shining through when the changes they were forced to make for D3 didn't pan out like the money-grubbing overlords wanted? I just don't see how you can claim one completely fabricated story is true but the other isn't.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Why should it be rational? Who cares if you understand it or not? Frankly, no one has to. Fact is people do end up feeling that way, and it costs sales. Worse still, it costs loyalty. So know it exists, the accept it as a reality to deal with. Lastly, ever had a boy/girl friend who cheated? Were you still interested after the other person was dropped? Did all return to normal? Is that rational? Some people are still human, with human emotions, and no, they are not rational.

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shadowmint 13y ago

While I broadly speaking applaud this move, I do feel a little bit like the guys from blizzard need to eat just a little bit of humble pie. 'this is really exciting for us'? really? how about, 'we're really sorry we took a franchise you loved and set fire to it, and are now really concerned about the viability of the expansion we're making' Too late; I'll play torchlight thanks. You have a nice diablo romp over there. You've lost my support; I no longer have confidence the team on diablo 3 can deliver a game I actually want to play.

thefreeman 13y ago
Thanks for putting it way better then I could have. Substituting Torchlight for PoE

diziet 13y ago

Reduce search by stats flexibility of the AH. Allow only one item per account. Make custom games with custom names available and browsable. Make chat channels relevant by placing everyone in one and having it take a lot of the screen estate. You can still have the AH for one-off items, but reduce the volume by a large margin.

yannyu 13y ago
>Reduce search by stats flexibility of the AH. Why would you intentionally cripple your UI unless you just wanted to frustrate your users?

talmir 13y ago

I see what they say are the reasons for closing it down.. But here is what I am hearing between the lines: "So guys, we are closing down the auction house! We are not really breaking even anymore between the cost of running the auction house (servers, maintenance, etc) and the profits we get from sold items so we are closing it down and hiding it behind a smokescreen of 'we are totally doing it for the player, lol'. Oh yeah, its still always online so lulz I guess. Please buy our expansion!"