Auction House FAQ

[SlickBoy]

I feel this could back fire on blizzard. Firstly i see why they have decided to do this, the chinese gold farmers will flood the auctions houses now, and blizzard will make a nice cut from the sales. However i feel alot of players will be leaving the game for this. At the moment the pride and admiration has drivin players to get better gear. If everything is purchaseable there will be no challenge. Remember Age of Empires and how little you played it after you learnt bigmomma, E=mc2trooper and pepperonipizza?

Those who can't afford to use the auction house system will also feel cheated, A significant amount of the player base is under 18 and therefore wont have credit cards, source of income or jobs.

This is a huge change for diablo III and will be interesting to see how it plays out. They are definetly testing the water for the real cash cow, World of Warcraft. If it works and blizzard make even more money we will definetly be seeing it in other blizzard games and probably games across the board.

 

[Dzil]

Well, this is going to create the exact situations I have said will be the downfall of gaming. The moment real life money has a direct impact on game balance is the moment gaming goes downhill. Good items are going to end up on the RMAH for the most part and the in game currency one will have crap.

This, lots of this.

You know, throw back to old school dungeons and dragons, it was not unheard of for a group of friends to throw down some cash on a new book full of interesting loot for their characters, essentially buying more options and such to draw from. BUT - they still played the game to acquire the loot. It wasn't like "well Johnny bought the book, so he gets the +5 sword of amazazing".

This spend to win concept is a complete turn off to me from the concept of persistent, progressive gaming. Worse still is when a game insists on coupling spend to win with PVP. There may be some out there that just don't care, but I cannot find enjoyment in a pvp game that boils down to who spent the most money on the game. And as market forces continue to drive for RMT in persistent games, it makes me more and more pushed towards games that have little to no persistent connection between one game and the next, such that I can start a game on even footing without a necessary massive investment of time and/or money.

And yea, the online only game: very shady. Thing is Blizzard/activision probably won't go under anytime soon: but if they do you are 100% f'ed. Hellgate london was a perfect example. The game developer flagship studios went under, and all the folks purchasing the game went dark for 2 years when the servers shut down. Now, adding insult to injury, their IP has been grabbed by Hanbitsoft, who is charging them AGAIN for the second half of the game, unlocks of basic features, etc.

In the end, I might play this if enough of my friends hop on the bandwagon, because principles aside I enjoy spending gaming time with my friends, but I'm not all that excited about the game given recent news.

 

[4ged]

personaaly i feel this cuts down on the steps it takes for a hacked account to be profitable, to think that they don't have to vender sell your items equipped but can just send them directly to the ah from the mail is scary to me. just gives the gold farmers more incentive to steal accounts then actually farm and if you've been hacked in wow you know what i mean. i can for see this system not going over too well just for the fact that blizzards security is shit for all its games and the ability for blizz to combat gold farmers and account security issues being sub par at the most this game will be populated by a whole bunch of gold farmers selling to each other (aka the death of an mmo)

 

[Shifty Tortoise]

-.-
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Yeah, that's about all i have to say on this...

 

[Uszi]

It was already happening in Diablo 2; I remember being told a Stone of Jordan was worth ~$10 or something.

Why not just make it official so you can better police it?

Agree!

I guess what I don't understand is that the criticisms of sanctioned RMT seem to also come from people who want to play the game by themselves off line.

The game supports you playing through all the content, as long as you have an internet connection. I fail to see how this auction house system will affect single player play throughs that at all.

Maybe I'm over generalizing, though.

 

[Frost27]

Yep. You'll have to be always online to play Diablo 3. It's essentially an MMO now.

Edit: To poster above me, Diablo 3 doesn't have an offline single player component.

Starcraft 2 had exactly the same online requirement and constant battle.net connection. Why now is this such a big deal for people? It's not like this is in any way new ground for this generation of Blizzard's games.

As far as the real money auction house, it makes perfect sense and I think it's a great thing. Blizzard has been testing the waters in the realm of microtransactions for a long time now and this is the natural progression. One of the big roadblocks with microtransactions is the ethics and viability of a developer selling items that can be potentially economy ruining or game breaking. Thus why WoW's microtransactions have been limited to non combat pets and mounts.

With items going from players in the game to other players in the game, it helps preserve some manner of balance while generating additional revenue. Add to that the fact that the entire "work force" is the players themselves, lured in by the chance to make money on what they sell, all the while allowing Blizzard to sit back and enjoy a new revenue stream they have to do absolutely nothing to maintain. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint and when it comes to players, if you don't like it, don't partake.

As an aside, I give it about 8 months after release until I am reading an article on the escapist about the first "self made diablo millionaire" who has made his fortune selling cloth and bone chips in the auction house. I also predict far less time will elapse before the issue of Chinese companies dominating the service arises. Probably a matter of days.

 

[Sovereignty]

I was so worried for a while there.

Until I saw the things about Hardcore mode.

The fact that there is a mode (Especially the most fun mode) that has NO cash shop what-so-ever is redeeming.

Let the little kids run around in the best gears. As long as there is a perma-death mode where no one can augment their char with cash I'm happy.

 

[XT inc]

I was disappointed to see that there were no servers for people who strictly wanted to play with gamers who earned their gear and not bought it.

I remember when AAA developers made games I'd buy and love on day one, without having to debate on which of 7 editions I want, out of what retail store. Then having to pay 50 bucks on dlc that together amounts to less than a 30 dollar expansion would be. Then throw that game away because the games housing corporation has a second dev team making a sequel so they can pop out a new one every year.

This game has been to long in the making and I don't think it can come to the plate in a form that will meet anybodies expectations. This is not Duke Nukem forever, people actually expect greatness from this huge wait.


When It comes down to it, which Will I be playing, well all torchlight 2 has to have is an Identify All character in town and I am more sold that what d3 will ever be.

 

[Catalyst6]

Well, this is going to create the exact situations I have said will be the downfall of gaming. The moment real life money has a direct impact on game balance is the moment gaming goes downhill. Good items are going to end up on the RMAH for the most part and the in game currency one will have crap.

No one is forcing you to buy the items. In fact, since Blizzard is not going to seed the market, it's going to have no effect on the game besides what was already present in D2, just more legitimate. So there's really not going to be anything like that, as the high-level players are just going to keep the best gear for themselves.

OT: I can't say that I'm against it. It kind of kills the "slaughter your way to the top" that the others have, but I'd rather have the selling legitimized than subject the servers to the scum of the earth. And hey, if you get bored of playing with the farmers then you can just, y'know, play single player.

(Also, everything is online these days, kids. Don't throw tantrums when you can't go back to the tech of the ninties. LAN is dead, and DRM is here to stay. Just enjoy the game because it's fun, please).

 

[Nimzar]

So... I guess the Diablo clones will out-diablo Diablo3 as a result of this?

Also, as the recent Extra Credits episode on microtransations pointed out

buying power = bad

 

[Hitchmeister]

"I don't know how this works or what it really means, but I'm sure I'm supposed to hate it."

"Oh yeah... and, 'Kotick.'"

That's pretty much what I've been reading today.

 

[CommanderKirov]

CAPITALISM HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOES!!!!

Good job Blizzard, where one think it would be immoral to make money, YOU JUST KEEP PUSHING THAT ENVELOPE FULL OF TURD!

Shine on!

 

[ASnogarD]

This is what you get when a company grows big enough to ignore customers.
If Blizzard was ONLY intrested in combating RMT and safeguarding customers, why does it feel compelled to charge customers 3 times ( 4 if you include the initial purchase of the game ) ?

Charge 1 (excl game purchase) : Fee for listing an item
Understandable as it discourages players from listing the 300 rat tails they farmed in the absolute start area.

Charge 2 : Fee for a successfull sale
If not to squeeze more money from your customers, why ?

Charge 3 : Fee for transfering your in game profits to your real life account
Possibly to pay for 3rd party transfer fees , but the article also says that the player will be charge by thier 3rd party choice to transfer the fees anyways, so the player takes a double fee hit to take money out of the Diablo3 system.
Quote : "Cashing out" would then be handled through the third-party payment service. Note that this process will be subject to applicable fees charged by Blizzard and the third-party payment service.

This is clearly more a cash grab, and a not so much 'protecting' the customer... in fact its seems more like muscling out the gansters so they can con the customer instead.
The only way to get a company the size of Bliz / Activision to listen is to hit thier profit margin, to do that players must be prepared to boycott the product line up... this aint happening, players are mere sheep and will bleat to whatever tune the company demands them to.

Our choice, decide if you want to play Diable 3 or not.
We cant influence the direction this game or the company takes so it a personal choice.
Personally I will wait for the reviews and decide then to buy or not, then if I buy I will just ignore the AH and pretend its a single player game... like I did with Diablo 2.

 

[Hisshiss]

Everything about this system seems great, but there was one detail that confused me, did they say that aside from a limited amount of freebies per account, your actually required to pay real currency to blizzard in order to sell an item on the real currency auction house?

I read the interview with them about this and one of them mentioned that players could choose to never spend any actual money on the game aside from the initial purchase, opting instead to sell things on the currency auction house and then using that money for transactions, which I was psyched about cus then I could use diablo to pay my WoW sub xD. But if they are gonna charge me money to do that, it seems to kind of destroy the point, especially considering I could end up losing more than 15 bucks a month on failed auctions.

That being aside, the gold based AH is just gravy. Always awesome to have that in a loot game <3.

 

[Nesco Nomen]

Hisshiss no one knows what the percentages will be, or how the AH would end up exactly.
Blizzard makes design changes all the time.
But that's no reason not to get all worked up and offended, right

As this wise man once said:

Argue all you want about DRM and the ethics of micro-transactions. Just know that when the time comes for the Diablo III beta to kick off you're going to have way fewer people to preach to. Just like me they'll all be sucked in.

 

[BrotherRool]

This is going to change gaming forever and Blizzard are going to make a crud load of money out of this. They're creating an actual economy and a real way of making money from just data, data that they control and they're making it, so it's far more convenient for that money to then be given it to them.

They basically giving fans of their games, a source of money from other people, for the purpose of buying more Blizzard. They're getting other people to pay Blizzard fans for playing Blizzard games.

People are going to buy this game just for the chance to make money out of it, no matter how unfeasible it is to make a lot. And this income is attached to a lottery style skinners box. It's just incredible