EPTD3 Auction Houses close 3-18-2014 - Page 13
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Lylat
France8575 Posts
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Nilrem
United States3684 Posts
On September 21 2013 07:22 Lylat wrote: So gold will become useless ? No--there will be more goldsinks in the game (such as Mystic). | ||
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MoonfireSpam
United Kingdom1153 Posts
On September 20 2013 18:40 pedduck wrote: On the second week of release, i found a socket immortal king. Sold it for something like 10 m and use that money to upgrade everything for my character. And since then, 99%of the upgrade come from AH not from my own loot. My diablo experience was to tried to sell and make the most of the AH as much as possible. After 2 or 3 months, i can not keep up with the inflation. I didnt make money fast enough so I can not upgrade my character. So at that time , I can only upgrade with a gear that were considered mid- low tier. Market was inflated with good item for inferno act 1-2. On the other hand , HI END gear become very expensive and out of reach now. I clock out at 400 hours on 4th or 5th month after game released. I really enjoy the game especially the first 100 hours. The last 100 hours feel little bit boring. What i want to say is the AH is the most powerful way to upgrade your character. It become the core of the game's experience. Player who were active in AH will go 10 time faster than player who just farm for them self. The game is tune to accomodate the AH, the drop rate, the difficulty. I would love to see item trading as part of the game not the core of the game. I hope blizzard can find the middle ground for player who like the game this way and the player who dont like Ah. That was how shit went down in D2 as well (farm item you can't use, sell item, buy item you can use). Except you did it through forums or retarded chat channels or sitting in a trade game for hours. If people were so inclined, you could Stock Market (i.e. flip items repeatedly) yourself into wealth in D2 as well and gear up without acually playing the game. | ||
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Cascade
Australia5405 Posts
On September 21 2013 08:21 MoonfireSpam wrote: That was how shit went down in D2 as well (farm item you can't use, sell item, buy item you can use). Except you did it through forums or retarded chat channels or sitting in a trade game for hours. If people were so inclined, you could Stock Market (i.e. flip items repeatedly) yourself into wealth in D2 as well and gear up without acually playing the game. Except that the vast majority of D2 players didn't trade at all. | ||
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oneofthem
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
On September 21 2013 01:57 dAPhREAk wrote: you would expect this with increased drops and for low end items it did happen, but high end items did not devalue, they actually got absurdly expensive. well yea, that's true. under time and attention constraint though, i was mostly speaking about the problematic aspect of value change, namely that player income falls as the average loot they sell decrease in value. | ||
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TheRabidDeer
United States3806 Posts
On September 21 2013 09:28 Cascade wrote: Except that the vast majority of D2 players didn't trade at all. TL is blowing my mind on what D2 was for other people... There was apparently a huge PvP population and very few people traded. How did people PvP with found gear against all of the enigma's/runeword items/super gear? | ||
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willoc
Canada1530 Posts
On September 21 2013 10:11 TheRabidDeer wrote: TL is blowing my mind on what D2 was for other people... There was apparently a huge PvP population and very few people traded. How did people PvP with found gear against all of the enigma's/runeword items/super gear? Because they all played hardcore. | ||
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TheRabidDeer
United States3806 Posts
I am not sure this makes sense. Duping was just as common as softcore. | ||
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MoonfireSpam
United Kingdom1153 Posts
On September 21 2013 10:11 TheRabidDeer wrote: TL is blowing my mind on what D2 was for other people... There was apparently a huge PvP population and very few people traded. How did people PvP with found gear against all of the enigma's/runeword items/super gear? Yeah all those Enigma runewords, legit self found. Didn't ya know? | ||
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TheRabidDeer
United States3806 Posts
On September 21 2013 10:41 MoonfireSpam wrote: Yeah all those Enigma runewords, legit self found. Didn't ya know? Oh, of course. Every ladder season too! | ||
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Cascade
Australia5405 Posts
On September 21 2013 10:51 TheRabidDeer wrote: Oh, of course. Every ladder season too! And people say that the D3 economy is messed up...  | ||
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Black Gun
Germany4482 Posts
the top players farm at a faster rate than the rest, so they find more of those low- to midtier items than those other players. therefore, those items lose value rapidly while increasing the wealth of the already rich players. once the trailing guys have upgraded with midtier stuff, the gap between them and the rich players has increased and the rich players still farm at greater efficiency than them, so that it is still those guys who dominate the market and determine prices. the "perfection level boundaries" between low, mid and highend tier items are necessarily increasing over time in a game like d3, but the accessability of the ah had the consequence that the speed with which those boundaries grow is determined largely by the farming speed of the top players. in this sense, the ah facilitated a situation in which the poor are destined to remain forever poor unless they hit the jackpot and find that 2b item. another factor that contributed to this situation is that there is only "one sort" of highend items in d3. contrast that to d2: what can be considered highend items was much more varied because of pvp and low level pvp. farming the place with the best exp/hour (throne of destruction) didnt allow to farm ALL top items at once. for rares, bossruns were better. for uniques, bossruns were better. for crafting materials, the usual runs were better, but picking up crafting materials would reduce efficiency of exp grinding. for socketables, the cow level was optimal. for low level dueling items, you were better off doing bossruns on lower difficulties. the effect of this diversity in sellable gear, differnt kinds of highend gear and farming places meant that the top players couldnt cover all markets by doing just one sort of farming. picking up gems/skulls and crafting materials was not worth it to top players, but crafted items were BiS for some pvp situations. (block%, ias amus, bleed etc.) therefore, the top pvpers always had to rely on some poorer players to farm crafting materials for them. someone who specialised in lld/mld didnt farm the same places as top (ordinary) pvp guys or the ladder exp grind guys. for these reasons, the item inflation was much less pronounced in d2 compared to d3. and the pace with which the gap between rich and poor players widens over time was much lower. and farming was more diverse, it offered true variety. and the item markets were more diverse, making trading more interesting. and the hassle of trade chats or d2jsp made flipping much harder, so that there was less "effortless profit". these advantages of d2 farming compared to d3 farming can be attributed to three pillars in my eyes: - pvp, because it increased the set of items that were potentially sought after by top players - lack of an accessible ah, see first paragraph - more crafting materials and farming places that were worthwhile to farm as a poor or mid-range player. therefore, the shutdown of the ah is probably for the better, even though i will certainly miss how easy it made trades. but removing the ah wont save d3 singlehandedly, we also need to change itemization, so that a broader array of properties or items have their place in the game. and we need pvp, as it gives players an additional endgame goal besides exp grinding and helps with making more items useful and thus valuable. | ||
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Monkeyballs25
531 Posts
On September 21 2013 01:20 MoonfireSpam wrote: Don't buy it. Doubt the core gameplay will change. If you hate D3, you will likely hate D3X. I liked the core gameplay, but hated the AH minigame that started to take over after a certain gear level. | ||
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Arkani
Austria60 Posts
but hey, i like it. im no fan of the ah anyways, just sucks up time you could play the game instead. | ||
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Burrfoot
United States1176 Posts
Diablo 3 has been out for almost a month now. A good number of launch day players have one or several level 60 characters, and they’re working on and learning about Hell and Inferno. They’re experiencing the entirety of what this incredibly-anticipated title has to offer. And many of them are coming up disappointed. If they’re like me, they’re enjoying the feel of the combat, love the art style and animation, appreciate the diversity and challenge of the four acts, and realize that it’s a top-tier game in every sense of the word. But what they’re realizing is that the overall feel of character progression, the all-important “item grind” has been deeply diminished by the Auction House. In theory, using the Auction House is an “option”, but it turns out that it’s optional in much the same way that a keyboard is an “option” for using a personal computer. For whatever the Auction House’s interface short-comings, it’s proven to be more than enough to let millions of Diablo 3 players saturate the market with items of all shapes and sizes, and more importantly to filter those items well enough to generate intense competition. It’s so easy to find items, in fact, that it’s become by far the path of least resistance for overcoming any challenge in the game, because there’s not a whole lot between levels 1 and 59 that can’t be blown apart by an infusion of cheap Auction House items. Hitting 60 and delving into Inferno, that trend explodes into a requirement, where progress is essentially stalled until gear of the appropriate nature is filtered and purchased at the best price available. In that way, the nature of character development in Diablo has shifted drastically. The previous titles in the Diablo series were all about getting that loot to drive you a hair closer towards mastery of the game’s challenges. In Diablo 3, it’s only about the items only in a roundabout way; now it’s about the gold. Farming the gold and spending it in the most efficient way possible. Budgeting your gold has become drastically more important than strategy or skill, and knowing the Auction House is the key to success. The Background Let’s take a step back and consider how the Diablo itemization scheme came to be, by taking a look at how it worked in Diablo 2. Much like D3, items in D2 were freely trade-able to anybody and everybody. Similarly, they were scarce. Couple scarcity with demand, and the natural result is that people have a strong incentive to trade items they don’t desire for ones they do, for their given class, playstyle, etc. At a basic level, D2 supported this trade interaction in the form of built-in trading channels. This level of support was quickly demonstrated to be insufficient for the complexity of the trading environment, and it moved on to trading forums across the Internet where players were able to express their offerings and their desires with greater clarity. It gave rise to an informal-but-variable set of exchange rates, which was flexible and dynamic but frankly a giant pain in the !@# to operate under. For better or worse, the next level of sophistication involved schemes for exchanging real money either directly for items or indirectly for imaginary currency that could be traded for desired items. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these unsupported transactions were fraught with headaches and often undertaken by shady characters. And yet, the attraction of a powerful Diablo avatar was such that a great many people were willing to undertake the risk. Compared to modern MMO’s it seems like a fairly quaint idea, but it was what it was. Ultimately, only a small fraction of players participated at this level, or even to the level of trading at all, but it was nonetheless considered a fairly large part of the game. Enter Diablo 3 It was ostensibly with good intentions that Blizzard announced their plans to implement two options for players to trade their goods in Diablo 3, the Gold Auction House, for use with their in-game gold currency, and the Real Money Auction House, for use with… duh, real money! Avoid unscrupulous rip-off artists with a Blizzard approved transaction channel! Can’t go wrong, right?? Well, you can. But in a much different way. The Gold Auction House has been so “successful” that it’s come to dominate just about everything else in the game. The proof is in the pudding: Look through just about any Internet conversation about how to succeed in Diablo 3, and you’ll see as more discussion about what items to purchase off the Auction House and how to make the money to afford those purchases than you will anything else about the game. Buying low and selling high has become the language of Diablo 3. And it gets particularly ugly because the farmers caught on to this before the game was even released. World of Warcraft had gold farmers. Lots of them. And that was a game where, frankly, gold didn’t even get you a whole lot. Now they’ve got a game where gold is a real currency, where every single item in the game is a trade item. Gold will continue to be a powerful currency after the RMAH, and they’ll be selling you items on the RMAH while they’re selling you gold to buy items on the GAH. They will be farming and flooding the market basically tirelessly, and there’s nothing Blizzard can do to prevent this, because they’re just *playing the game*. This *is* the game. Frankly, the glut of players reaching level 60 and getting into Inferno are going to be doing exactly the same thing. And it’s going to get messy. The Consequences Here are some ways that it’ll probably shake out. For one, as the high-end gamers start to crunch into Act 3 and 4, there’s going to be a trickle of high-level items into the AH that eventually becomes a flood. High-end items that really actually desirable for tackling the hardest content in the game will surge upward in prices, because gold is entering the system at a substantially greater rate than it’s leaving. Even now, barely four weeks into the game, high-end item costs far exceed what the average player can actually grind out. Meanwhile, low- and medium-end items are depressing in price *rapidly*, in direct proportion to well players can search for them. As players start really grinding against Act 3 and Act 4, producing a glut of level 63 items, you can expect most of those items to quickly become dirt cheap, and those at the top end to go out of sight. Once the top-end becomes the playground of the serious player, you’re going to see, for example, 1500 dps items basically become the norm, because on the whole, they’ll be dropping en masse, and the players picking them up won’t have anything to do with them but slap them up on the AH until it’s not even worth their time to do so. Because these items essentially never leave the system, it’s just going to be a war at the top with a huge glut at the bottom. A player will hit level 60 and get a ton of gear at firesale prices that propels them immediately to Act 3 and 4, sailing right past Acts 1 and 2, where again they’ll slam into a brick wall when it takes forever to grab an upgrade to complete the sliver of content they have left. And then they’ll get bored and stop playing. The only people left will be the addicts. The Bad and the Ugly The state of affairs in the Diablo 3 end game right now already stinks. It’s already turned into an unfulfilling grind where knowing how to set your Auction House filters is more important than successfully playing the game. But here’s the sad truth: it’s only going to get worse. Prices are going to get even more out of wack with the expected progression of game content, further trivializing any attempt Blizzard made at creating a well-balanced progression curve. Most players are, right now, able at level 60 to practically instantly buy themselves to victory in Act 1 Inferno, and very soon they’ll be doing the same for Act 2. And it won’t stop; the “playable area” of the Diablo 3 end game will just continue to shrink. Solutions There are a bunch of solutions and a lot of room for discussion, but here's what I consider to be the best one: Refocus the game back to the individual's own personal progression, and give good benefits for playing with friends. Get rid of both Auction Houses, regardless of whatever PR shaming that might involve. Revive the concept of Bind-on-Pickup that's become basically universal in the 12 years since Diablo 2. Make every bound item basically be Bind-on-Account, usable by every character on your account. Also make every item that drops in the game be tradeable to any other player in that game within an hour after the drop occurred. So, you've got some incentive to play in a multiplayer game with other classes, since items that aren't auctionable anyway might as well be tradeable to other members of your party. Retain gold and gems as tradeable items, still useful for repairs and crafting. Crafting materials, however, should largely be the limiting factor in the actual crafting of items, and those would also be soulbound to give some incentive to keep running dungeons and grabbing items. The "consolation prize", as it were, for item drops that aren't directly useful. In fact, it seemed like this was their original purpose in the game, which just happened to be completely negated by the allure of the Auction House. Some people believe that "trading" is one of the core aspects of the Diablo series, but I disagree. I feel that it was largely primitive and inconvenient in those games, which were perfectly playable without it and even enhanced like that. So bring back that feel of searching for *your own* loot upgrades, not for gold, and create a game that you're encouraged to play for your own progression. Pretty spot on eh? | ||
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Monsen
Germany2548 Posts
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Cascade
Australia5405 Posts
On September 21 2013 21:11 Monsen wrote: I'm surprised. I guess the RMAH revenues have trickled down to insignificant numbers. This comes way, way too late to be a "whoops, we made a mistake, the AH actually hurts the quality of the game" kinda move. Watch Blizzard reintroduce the AH "due to popular demand" after the hopeful masses have given them another chance. I think it is related to the new guy replacing Jay Wilson, and taking the opportunity now that they do the sequel. Not saying I'm not surprised, but I can very well see how this is a "oops this was a mistake" move. Actually, I am a bit disappointed. Most (even blizz it seems) agree that the AHs in it's current state do not make the game better, but I would expect them to find a way to make it work with the AHs. Through bind to account or other trading limitations, item/gold sinks, or whatever. This move admits that they have no good solutions in mind, and don't expect to come up with any. Disappointing. | ||
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Monkeyballs25
531 Posts
On September 21 2013 21:11 Monsen wrote: I'm surprised. I guess the RMAH revenues have trickled down to insignificant numbers. This comes way, way too late to be a "whoops, we made a mistake, the AH actually hurts the quality of the game" kinda move. Watch Blizzard reintroduce the AH "due to popular demand" after the hopeful masses have given them another chance. The best reason to wait for an expansion to remove the AH in 6 months rather than right now is that it involves a hefty gear reset anyway, so it'll be less disruptive. | ||
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Grovbolle
Denmark3813 Posts
On September 21 2013 23:35 Monkeyballs25 wrote: The best reason to wait for an expansion to remove the AH in 6 months rather than right now is that it involves a hefty gear reset anyway, so it'll be less disruptive. Plus without loot 2.0, it will be hard for new players (not that I think there are any) to gear for inferno. | ||
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willoc
Canada1530 Posts
On September 21 2013 10:24 TheRabidDeer wrote: I am not sure this makes sense. Duping was just as common as softcore. Was going along with the joke. Oh well. | ||
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