Diablo III's Auction House

[viranimus]

Ok Pardo.. ive got a real easy solution. Seeings how your the organization who controls the code of the game, Perhaps, maybe, you can code to prevent these transactions all together. Yeah go ahead, cut the connectivity cord. Wouldnt that be easier than making a system you are trying to sound like you dont want?

Yes...clear and blatant cash grab. At least have the decency to admit its a blatant cash grab.

How do you code in game for people logging onto the internet outside of the game, and giving account/credit card information to item traders?



Are you even aware of what the problem is? [http://www.d2ok.com/]

Yes I am aware, and how do you do it? Simple. Cut the cord. How about Blizzard try making a game that isnt internet connected and we wouldnt have to deal with gold/item farmers, always on DRM (which dont kid yourself thats part of what it is) and other negatives that are practically inherent from online games.

Seems like the most logical, easiest and most effective solution to me, with little or no adverse effects. (though Im sure some people cant even conceive of playing this game without someone to help them)

 

[Uszi]

Yes I am aware, and how do you do it? Simple. Cut the cord. How about Blizzard try making a game that isnt internet connected and we wouldnt have to deal with gold/item farmers, always on DRM (which dont kid yourself thats part of what it is) and other negatives that are practically inherent from online games.

Seems like the most logical, easiest and most effective solution to me, with little or no adverse effects. (though Im sure some people cant even conceive of playing this game without someone to help them)

Alright.

If we want to discuss anecdotes about our own experiences with the game, I've invested maybe 10 hours tops in the single player experience, and countless hours online playing with friends and trading with strangers.

Do I have a right to demand, based on my own experience, that they game be designed a certain way for me?

How would blizzard choose between your and my competing interests?

What if the majority of players prefer to play online with others, and rarely if ever play by themselves offline?

 

[Uszi]

so your saying its a poorly designed game that ends up being much more of a grind then most mmos?

Diablo 2?

Hell yeah it was. If you think "grinding" in WoW is bad, you've never ground out 80-99 doing Hell Baal runs in Diablo 2. I'm pretty sure the design philosophy of every game since Diablo 2 has been, "Never again!"

Which is why I'm glad that D3 looks to be keeping the fun parts of D2 while fixing the parts that weren't fun as well.

 

[TheDooD]

I play Diablo for the story and the gameplay not because I can validate my time by ripping people off for some chump change fuck that.

Fine. Do you think that the majority of players play like you do? Or do you think that you might represent a smaller portion of players who are still playing the game for the story and gameplay, even though it's 11 years old now?

I'm inclined personally to think that your position is the minority one, and that Blizzard shouldn't design games around the demands of smaller player demographics.

So you're saying money is everything even if it breaks a game and splits the community. They should just design a game around farming, grinding, making a quick buck and basically throw away what made the game great in the first place the story.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

'Farmers make the game better.'

Granted, that still doesn't imply that they're somehow turning it into a farmers game, which is the criticism at the heart of all of the, "Blizzard is encouraging farming," arguments. Or that they're encouraging it. Maybe you can use this as an argument that they're facilitating it, but I still don't see why this as a reason to cause a fuss.

Because making money off the illegal activities of others is usually seen in a bad light?

I guess the EULA is important to you? I sure as shit don't care about it.

See above, and the parenting argument, and the Californian attack due to 18+ games.

Well, why wouldn't you or I have done it?

For you, you've said so. For me, everyone was still using pound notes.

Therefore, if a parent allows access to their card, and here I'm including leaving your purse in Junior's reach unsupervised, without attempting any sort of moral lesson on the value of money or respecting other people's property, or failing in successfully delivering that lesson, then that is purely an issue parent side.

So, from what I can gather, the entire onus of payment/age lies in the hands of the parent/guardian. An admirable notion, but not one the court supports at the moment.

Quick question: Do you think that the no-reimbursement policy is borne of some greedy philosophy of Blizzard's, or do you think it's a pretty fair and understandable policy given the nature of the electronic goods they are selling?

Would you say the same about Apple's policy of allowing you to use the same credit card for purchases up to 15 minutes later? Or Steam's ability to save the credit card permanently?

Steam CAN re-imburse. Apple...well...we all know Apple.

Quick question aside, I fail to see how they're refusal to reimburse non-fraudulent purchases makes them culpable.

I come to that later in PTW.

If you have a PayToWin mentality...

They don't. You don't have to pay to "win," there are valid non-pay alternatives that result in winning. Therefore, they are not "PayToWin."

But you can win faster with money. You are buying the ability to win. Therefore PTW. Simply having ways of doing it without money is swapping timesinks (And RNG drops) for dosh.

... you also have a CheatToWin mentality. And Duping. And Farming. And all the rest of the problems associated with games that work with real money.

This isn't really an argument, but rather a series of declarative statements. Why should I accept what you've said?

Well...are you disputing that Gold Farmers do wrong? or that they exist? Or that desperate first world players won't pay second/third world players to grind for them? I think I can find a number of articles for all of them. Duping etc. is even easier.

Lets say I grant, purely for the purposes of discussion, that hypothetically Blizzard has a "PayToWin" mentality. How does it follow that they have a "CheatToWin" mentality as well?

You're mixing what I'm saying. The players develop a PayToWin, get frustrated (as any MMO GM can tell you), and then go to "CheatToWin".

We already know that cheaters, hackers, dupers exist in all games, no matter what the security. Now, if this is happening with real money instead of fake money, then that's in the realms of theft. And if Blizzard bans someone unfairly (and a false positive is highly likely) then they've just "stolen" from that person.

Or is that just your opinion? If so, then I merely disagree with you.

And I've no problem with that. I'm just stating a likely scenario that Blizzard haven't sought to address as of yet.

That probably would be nice. But I don't expect them to do it at all, and certainly not one of the least things I expect from them.

Given the size of this, you would have thought that any company dealing with large amounts of real money would put their security first. Blizzard seem to have said "We let criminals bank with us as well."

You can see why people are concerned.

 

[StrixMaxima]

The raucus going on in each and every message board now tells me that players really do want their games to become enmeshed with their bank accounts. I could say a lot about it, but, looking at the previous posts, it seems kinda futile. People's minds are already set.

Good bye, Blizzard. Know that once I found you pretty.

 

[frehls]

hue

 

[TheDooD]

The raucus going on in each and every message board now tells me that players really do want their games to become enmeshed with their bank accounts. I could say a lot about it, but, looking at the previous posts, it seems kinda futile. People's minds are already set.

Good bye, Blizzard. Know that once I found you pretty.

The thing about this that I can't stand is that people aren't gonna be playing for fun. It basically becomes a job, they'll end up playing like bastards just to keep their profit margins high and basically shit on newer players keeping them down. The only way I validate making money of games is straight up gambling you can the other person bet and you have a neutral moderator. It's also why I only see Fighting and Sports games as legit means to making money through playing the game. Because everything is clear cut there's less bullshit then other means of making money in video games.

 

[-Samurai-]

Remember how in D2 gold was worthless and runes/items were currency?

Yeah, let's stick with that.

Keep your WoW in WoW, Blizzard. It's sad to see them destroy the Diablo franchise.

 

[Uszi]

Because making money off the illegal activities of others is usually seen in a bad light?

Specifically which illegal activity? I'm asking purely so I know exactly what we're talking about.

The gold farming sweatshops in SE Asia?

Or teenagers using their parents credit cards?

These two things seem to operate in different realms of moral space, at least to me, so I just want to make sure which one I'm addressing.

In regards to profiting off gold farmers:

Who is to say that the new policy won't be more effective in stopping gold farming than their old policies? The FAQ states that in order to receive cash for selling a gold or item on the AH, you'll need to pay blizzard three separate "nominal" fees which will be adjusted per region. Since the gold farmers are forced to act dependently on Blizzard, Blizzard might be able to completely shut them down by leveraging those fees, or other additional control structures.

That's all theoretical, mind. Have other games tried this approach? Do we have any track record for how gold farmers fare? I admit that I do not know.

The quote you found, wherein they compare farmers to dedicated players, might have indicated a desire to profit off of sweatshops, though this is your paraphrase and not stated directly. I am not convinced that this was an intentional implication of the quote. I would need to see this attitude in multiple quotes before I believe that it was more than poor word choice.

In regards to stealing credit cards and not reimbursing them:

Two things, strike me here:

ONE:
My take on reading the FAQ was that Blizzard has blanket reimbursement policies, and only does reimbursements in the case of serious fraud. Reimbursing parents seems to exist under the blanket of non-fraudulent purchases.

Having a blanket non-reimbursement policy seems to make sense to me, since it requires man hours and resources to process and investigate reimbursement claims, and because as a business model these micro-transactions often depend on impulse buys. If you don't have a relatively high threshold for which reimbursement claims you will consider, then you will quickly devote a lot of resources and man hours to losing money.

TWO:
These transactions are between players, and not between a player and Blizzard. Blizzard has, in my opinion, different responsibilities if it is the vendor and it refuses to reimburse a purchase directly from Blizzard itself. It has a different set of responsibilities when it is asked to preform a reimbursement for a trade between two players through the auction house.

To discuss the issue any further would seem, to me, to start to talk about RMT and micro transactions in general and whether or not it is fair to consumers. Since that discussion isn't really about Diablo 3 specifically, I'm not inclined to discuss it here

See above, and the parenting argument, and the Californian attack due to 18+ games.

Above I believe I addressed. Parenting argument doesn't seem to apply, and the California attack failed.

For you, you've said so. For me, everyone was still using pound notes.

Well then.

So, from what I can gather, the entire onus of payment/age lies in the hands of the parent/guardian. An admirable notion, but not one the court supports at the moment.

If that is the case then someone will take Blizzard to court and win. Nothing said here will affect that.

Quick question: Do you think that the no-reimbursement policy is borne of some greedy philosophy of Blizzard's, or do you think it's a pretty fair and understandable policy given the nature of the electronic goods they are selling?

Would you say the same about Apple's policy of allowing you to use the same credit card for purchases up to 15 minutes later? Or Steam's ability to save the credit card permanently?

Steam CAN re-imburse. Apple...well...we all know Apple.

Personally, I don't think they're greedy at all. I meant, if I can state it more civilly and directly, do you think that there are legitimate or logistic reasons for a non-reimbursement policy? Could you be convinced that there were?

But you can win faster with money. You are buying the ability to win. Therefore PTW. Simply having ways of doing it without money is swapping timesinks (And RNG drops) for dosh.

Well...are you disputing that Gold Farmers do wrong? or that they exist? Or that desperate first world players won't pay second/third world players to grind for them? I think I can find a number of articles for all of them. Duping etc. is even easier.

You're mixing what I'm saying. The players develop a PayToWin, get frustrated (as any MMO GM can tell you), and then go to "CheatToWin".

You're right, I was. I thought that you were arguing that Blizzard as a company had adopted a PayToWin philosophy by virtue of selling player achievement, which in my defense, is an argument being made in this thread.

Do players who begin to PTW necessarily jump to CTW? I don't think so. I think there might exist a slippery slope for some individuals, but certainly not for anyone. Certainly not for so many as to say boradly that if you have a PTW attitude you also likely have a CTW attitude.

I'm also not certain that one adopts a PTW attitude prior to a CTW attitude. Certainly many individuals jump straight to cheating.

We already know that cheaters, hackers, dupers exist in all games, no matter what the security. Now, if this is happening with real money instead of fake money, then that's in the realms of theft. And if Blizzard bans someone unfairly (and a false positive is highly likely) then they've just "stolen" from that person.

Now that is interesting, and not something I'd considered as of yet. And I suppose I could see how this would be an ethical problem for Blizzard if they continue to profit by it. Are you suggesting that they won't attempt to stop people from cheating, jacking and duping?

Would the attempt to control it mitigate the effect of profiting by it, even if it sill occurs?

And I've no problem with that. I'm just stating a likely scenario that Blizzard haven't sought to address as of yet.

And not one I had even thought of until you mentioned it directly. Though of course, we're talking about a couple of articles, so we do not know the full extent to which they've sought to address it.

Certainly, I would agree, something they should seek to address.

Given the size of this, you would have thought that any company dealing with large amounts of real money would put their security first. Blizzard seem to have said "We let criminals bank with us as well."

You can see why people are concerned.

I'm not sure they haven't. They haven't publicly addressed the issue, that is for sure.


Ultimately, your take on the whole issue has been about 100x more complicated than I initially assumed, so I apologized if my initial responses seemed over simplified to you.

Do you think that not using a RMT Auction House and allowing a 3rd party black market to creep up around the game is a better solution? Or do you think that the RMT Auction House could work if implemented better?

 

[Uszi]

So you're saying money is everything even if it breaks a game and splits the community. They should just design a game around farming, grinding, making a quick buck and basically throw away what made the game great in the first place the story.

Not at all.

I'm disagreeing with you that what made the game great was the story.

Like many other players, I played the trading metagame in Diablo 2 almost exclusively.

And to be completely reasonable, nothing about real money transactions indicates that Blizzard has abandoned the single player experience at all.

See above, and the parenting argument, and the Californian attack due to 18+ games.

(Kind of irrelevant to the subject at hand)
Hey now. I've been playing M-rated games since I was 13 (15 now), and I'm fine. My mother knows what's in the games that I play and I go out of my way to make sure she does.
I really take offense when people say "ALL PARENTS WHO LET THEIR KIDS PLAY THESE GAMES ARE HORRIBLE". It simply isn't true. Its not illegal or even wrong as long as the parent knows what their doing and know their child well enough to make an informed decision.
I'm still against stupid parents giving their 8-year old kids GTA, but don't go making broad, arrogant generalizations.

To be fair, that it is pretty irrelevent.

Root of all evil is essentially arguing your position, and I had been arguing that regardless of the reality of the situation, Blizzard's official policy should recognize that legally, someone younger than 18 shouldn't be playing the game, or if they are, they should be doing so with the blessing and supervision of a parent since the content is supposedly above their maturity level.

Not sure anyone is arguing that you're a bad parent if you're kid is playing an 18+ game at 11. I am saying that as a parent you're responsible for the outcome, having allow it to happen.

 

[Nurb]

"Spend and Earn Real Life Money"

So players pay full price for a game and spend 5 bucks a pop on items that will be made incredibally rare to create demand for an auction house instead of focusing on player experience while Blizz-Ack gets a cut... LOL fuck you, Bobby. I knew Blizzard would go into the shitter the moment Kotick got his greedy mits on new projects.

The more time goes by, the more I cheer on pirates.

 

[Levethian]

This literally makes Diablo 3 a Pay2Win game! If I wanted that, I'd go play an Asian Hack n Slash MMO

Valid fear, but
i) this is inevitable - 3rd party item-shops will exist in any case.
ii) how do you 'win' at Diablo 3?

Relieved not to have to use D2JSP or similar. Trading was such a time-sink.

 

[BruceyBaby]

Gah, sorry, something screwed up

What the fuck are you doing?

 

[Nurb]

Gah, sorry, something screwed up

What the fuck are you doing?

There was lag in viewing posts or something, seems to have cleared up now.

 

[Uszi]

Diablo fans has an interview with Jay Wilson up about the AH system:

http://www.diablofans.com/

Q: How do you feel about the obvious separation between the gold and the real-world AH? They?re both the exact same in terms of features and functionality and everything? In terms of use from the player base, clearly as a player, I would prefer to sell, for real money, any item, but as a buyer, I?d prefer to buy with gold. Do you feel it?s going to swing heavily to one side or the other? I feel it?s going to favor heavily the real-world one overall because, obviously again, I would prefer real money for selling an in-game item.

A: I think people are going to lean more towards the real money AH and I think there is an answer for the person who says ?I don?t want to trade in real money, I?d rather trade in gold?I mean, the gold AH is one of them and I think the gold AH will be viable to find a good amount of items, but one of the reasons we?re doing the free listings every week is to allow people to sell items to generate an e-balance so they never have to put real money into the system if they don?t want to. That allows someone to circumnavigate that option if they don?t want to buy with real money. And yeah, the e-balance is technically real money, but I earned it from items I sold and not from putting in a credit card.


Q: I guess the biggest thing would be if everyone prefers to sell with real money on the AH then there won?t be nearly as many items in the gold AH, but I guess you kind of answered that.


A: Yeah, and if the vast majority of people prefer the real money AH ? or if the vast majority of people prefer the gold AH ? that?s what the vast majority of people prefer.


Q: Will there be some kind of mechanisms to balance out the need for gold so maybe there would be a way to counteract that? Like to actually need gold, let?s say I have $100 in my e-account, but I actually need some gold for whatever, maybe I would feel more inclined to sell it for gold if there was actually a need for gold. Like with D2 I never really felt it was important?once I had a million I didn?t really feel like I needed more.

A: So the Artisan system we put in the game is really designed to be a constant gold recycling element, so crafting items has a lot of similarities to gambling; it?s just gambling with a little better understanding of what?s coming out the other side and every time you craft an item, there?s a material cost and the material cost pulls items out of the world, items equal money, also there?s a gold cost, so you have a big gold sink there. Enhancing items, combining gems, pulling gems out of things, socketing things, all of these have gold costs that increase as you get further into the game. So those are our primary elements of gold sinking.


Q: What?s the party size gonna be for multiplayer?

A: 4. That was easy!


Q: Will gold be a sellable item? Because I think that the balances could become the currency exchange rate between gold to the dollar?


A: Gold is a tradable item, and I make the distinction because Blizzard doesn?t sell gold. We will not create any items or commodities. Players are able to sell gold.


Q: Will that be regulated then? X gold sells for?

A: Nope, it?s a player-driven market, so one of the things that we?re really focused on is making sure that we have as few inputs and incentives into the market as possible. We want it to be really a player-driven market and a player-driven service. So it?s one of the reasons we talk about having flat fees instead of a percentage. If we have a percentage, there would be an incentive for us to drive up the value of items to get bigger percentages. It?s one of the things we considered: let?s do a flat fee because we don?t need more of a perception that there?s an incentive there for us. We want it to be a very player-driven trading economy and that?s what the core of Diablo is, is a trading game.


Q: As far as keeping the economy not stagnant and still exciting, one thing I notice about D2 is once I had my items, they never degraded, I was pretty much good to go; I never really needed to upgrade. I see that in a player-driven economy as kind of a big problem, because eventually prices will taper off and at some point, it?s not worth even putting my item on the AH because everyone has one. That leads to a lot of pressure, I think, on you guys having to create a lot of items and expansion sort of content so there?s new stuff. What is the plan for that?

A: So the plan at release really comes back to the crafting system again. A lot of the crafting system is focused on pulling items out of the economy, so certainly the most highly-valued items people aren?t going to salvage, but everything slightly below that they are, which is going to drive a lot of items out of the economy. The enhancing system is actually one of the?basically our enhancing system kind of works like enchanting from WoW, but it has a random value to what you?re getting. So you input the enchantment, and let?s say it?s somewhere between 80-100 attack that it?s gonna give you. So if you roll 83, you could roll that again and you have a chance of getting a better number. You won?t get a lower one, and it might say ?aww, you didn?t get any better.? But you can try over and over again and you need to essentially recycle items to do that. Eventually you?ll get to perfect, but you?ll really have to pull out a lot of items. And at that level, you?re really talking about rares and legendaries that you?re actually going to have to be melting to be able to do this. So we do have some systems in. Even so, there is going to hit a saturation point and what will we do about that? We have a bunch of ideas on how to deal with that, most of them do revolve around extending the item database at some point. Whatever we do, we?ll try to make sure that the player base has a lot of forecasting, like they will know long before we do anything what we?re going to do so that they can prepare. We don?t want people to go on the AH and spend basically $100 and then us change the item database the next day. We want them to know, in 3 months we?re changing the database ?OK, well that gives me time to plan and think about what I want to do.? So we may not?it?s still up in the air. But it?s one of those things where we really want to see what happens to the economy and to a certain degree, we don?t know because we?ve never done something like this before.


Q: So you?re throwing out the idea of character resets like in D2?

A: Umm?I would say that we are not that fond of the ladder reset. I kind of feel like the ladder resetting thing is like??wow, I can?t believe people fell for that!? I kind of feel like that feels really simplistic. We can do better than that. If we really want to reset things, let?s reset them for real. And I?m not saying that?s what we?re going to do; we honestly don?t know at this point. But I think we can do a better job than ladder races, which?the other side of it is, how many people really get to participate in that? You?ve got your crazy guildies who essentially do run shifts to get a character up and once the first 100 or so hit the top, who gives a crap? I don?t want to be 150, who cares? Much less 150,000. So we think we can do better than that.


Q: Are there any restrictions as to what items can be bought or sold on the AH?

A: Right now, there are some, but they?re pretty light and most of the things that we don?t allow are things that don?t really have any business being there in the first place like quest items, elixirs (which are junk drops meant to fill out the database, not provide like super-compelling items), and there?s a bunch of little power-up kind of things like that. I don?t think we?ve actively gone through and restricted them yet, my guess is we probably will and not because we don?t want people to trade them, but because we just don?t think people probably will. So generally, no, we?re going to let people trade as much as possible.


Q: Do you feel that since people are going to be able to buy items, and therefore essentially power, do you think that will polarize the community based on the top elite, especially in PvP, versus the casual player and what repercussions might there be if that is the case?

A: I think if you look at a lot of games where power gets sold, you run into a lot of different types of games. Take a game like WoW: if we started selling items there, it would pretty much destroy the game. The core of the game is guild/raid progression; that is your top tier and that?s where everyone is focusing on. If you now give me the ability to circumvent that using money, you?ve kind of destroyed the need for having guilds in the first place. Microtransaction games tend to be very successful, but have very short lives because people tend to buy out everything. Essentially, it?s like ?what if the government started printing money?? It?d be really awesome for a short time, and then we?d all be screwed. That?s kind of what a microtransaction game is; the key difference between them and this system is that it?s player-driven so we?re not generating items, players are. We?re not doing anything different than what D2 already did. Players could trade items in D2 and buy them using real money. All we?re doing is facilitating it so that it?s a good experience for everyone. We don?t expect that it?s going to feel very different from D2 at all, and to kind of separately address the PvP issue, will people buy power to be more successful in PvP? Yes they will, that?s why our PvP system is very casual and not an e-sport. It?s meant to be a ?I wanna go in and see what this build can do against people who are of equivalent power.? The nice thing is with a really good match-making system, you?re going to have a good game regardless because you?re going to get matched with someone who?s roughly equivalent to you and gear?s a part of that.

 

[Azure Sky]

Given that before I had my soul stolen by WoW I was a rather avid DII player.
I find this system quite interesting, albeit Blizzard are walking a very fine line with this one.

On one hand, there is no way Blizzard have been able to stop RMT in their games in the 10 plus years it has been happening, they can barely even make a dent. So by giving the players their own secure system in which they can utilize RMT, they can effectively force the RMT sites to play by their rules.

I am sure that everyone is aware that a popular MMO model these days is the micro transaction system, correct? While it is mainly a F2P model, it is a highly successful one, proving there is a huge market that have no qualms about paying money in this fashion, hell some people may even prefer it. And there is always the standard AH for those that have no interest in the system.

Just remember, there is another game on the market that has a self-integrated RMT system, albeit only one way to my knowledge. The PLEX system in EVE.

If they wanted to combat people selling items and gold outside the game the most reasonable option would have been to simply use the gold based Ah like wow does.

Please tell me you are joking...
...you're not joking are you?

The day I log into WoW and DON'T get flooded with gold-sellers spam/whispers will be a great day indeed, unfortunately it will never happen.

 

[fundayz]

As far as PVP balance goes: D3 PVP is not going to be an e-sport. It's not going to be tracked or rewarded in anyway. It's purely a value added, for-fun activity, like it is in D2.

As such, I fail to see players paying money for the best PvP load-out being an issue.

I find it boggling how you fail to see the issue: Competing against an opponent that has an unfair advantage is NEVER fun, regardless of how competitive an activity is.

"PvP isn't an eSport" is not a valid argument. This will diminish the PvP experience even for casual players who only play for fun.

How fun do you think it's gonna be to enter a PvP area only to be pounded on by players that have clearly bought gear? This problem already exists in Diablo 2. Allowing a safe and easy way to buy items is just going to make it worse.

You do realize this is currently the case in D2, and there are still plenty of legitimate players who manage to trade their way up to those items. I've never purchased an item from an online 3rd party store, but I have, once or twice, managed to trade a lot of good items for 1 epic item. I've never begrudged the people who spent hundreds getting all their toons pvp ready.

So just because RMT does not affect YOUR game experience then it's okay to wreck or minimize other players' experience? That's incredibly narrow-minded.

A point of clarification: I'm assuming you have no objection to the gold based auction house or player-to-player item based trades? These are alternative routes that will allow you to acquire the best PvP gear without paying real money. It will take you longer, but that's what capitalization is about, folks: time is money.

To wit: Because you do not have to pay to win, the system is not pay to win.

If I'm wrong and you think that gold based auction houses or trading in general is unfair, because the hardcore players who spend 12 hours a day trading will have better gear than you, then your objections have become silly. Again, D2 is a trading game. D3 will need to at least kind of be a trading game if they want the D2 players to give them more money.

/facepalm on multiple levels

First of all, Pay2Win doesn't mean that you HAVE to pay to win. Pay2Win means that you CAN pay in order to win. When enough people Paying2Win winning without paying becomes incredibly difficult. Sure, some players will obtain the strongest equipment without paying a cent but the average non-paying player WILL be weaker than the average paying player.

Secondly, buying items with in-game gold is NOT the same as buying items with real money. To obtain the gold necessary to buy items requires an in-game effort and time, buying them with real money does not.

They aren't encouraging or facilitating it. All they did was stop road blocking it.

I can't believe you just said that. Removing a roadblock is, by definition, facilitating.

Facilitate: Verb - Make (an action or process) easy or easier.

Road Block: Noun - Any hindrance: "the tax has become a roadblock".

Removing a road block = facilitating.

As far as facilitating, I don't see Blizzard making it easier for gold farmers to do their thing. In fact, it seems more difficult to me. The gold farmers are unable to set their own prices or operate independently because they'll be forced to integrate into a wider system. Why would you go to a shady third party site and give strangers access to your account when you can use the much safer system that is run by Blizzard itself?

What on earth makes you think that RMT "companies" will operate their own third party sites when Blizzard provides a simpler, more accessible option at a comparable prices? Blizzard is LITERALLY giving RMT companies the framework from which to perform their business.

Also, do you seriously think that RMT organizations will be unable to set their own prices? Regular players will not be able to compete with Asian RMT organizations because they have built a business model(that is perfectly translatable to Blizz's AH)around it.

Simply put, X amount of gold will be worth MUCH LESS to a business that revolves around making as much gold as possible than a player that acquires it casually playing a game and therefore they will be able to offer it at a much lower price.

Don't kid yourself, this is going to do NOTHING to minimize the effect of RMT's, it's just Blizzard's way of getting their share of the pie.

Here's an analogy, which John Funk made earlier, but I'll expand upon for clarification:

During the period of Alcohol prohibition, America spent a lot of money and resources persecuting people who manufactured illegal alcohol. During this time, there was hardly a dip in alcohol availability, and instead of the profits going to local businesses and tax revenues, they fueled a violent black market. And because the alcohol was made illegally, it wasn't controlled by safety measures like FDA controls.

Similarly, when Blizzard tried to shut gold farming down, it merely pushed the practice beyond the reach of their control, and it became less and less safe for players to purchase gold because they need to trust credit card or account information to people they can't trust.

Now, Blizzard has more say in the gold economy, like the government has more say in the sale and distribution of alcohol.

That analogy is COMPLETELY inadequate:

1. Prohibition was bad because it caused violence; prohibition of RMT has no downside for legitimate players.

2. The drinking of alcohol has no inherent downsides aside from your health, the ABUSE of alcohol does; RMT has the inherent downside of allowing players to gain an advantage over other players without having to put any in-game effort whatsoever.

3. Alcohol has factors such as safety testing, sale to minors, etc that require regulation; RMT has no such factorsit is either legal to buy/sell or it isn't)and therefore there is nothing for Blizzard to regulate.

It is clear that Blizzard has simply given up on preventing RMT and instead opted to profit from it.

My question to you is: What makes you believe that this is going to remove any of the problems associated with RMT?

 

[Icehearted]

So, if you badmouth them on their forum, can they suspend your ability to play the game like BioWare did to that Dragon Age 2 dude? Suppose they have a refund system in place in case the item fails to live up to expectations? No, that would be asking too much, since gaming really is one of the only legitimate businesses where the customer is always wrong and there are NO REFUNDS!

As usual, this is further proof the industry's tanking since it's all about the gouge and barely about the game anymore.

 

[Azure Sky]

If they wanted to combat people selling items and gold outside the game the most reasonable option would have been to simply use the gold based Ah like wow does.

Please tell me you are joking...
...you're not joking are you?

The day I log into WoW and DON'T get flooded with gold-sellers spam/whispers will be a great day indeed, unfortunately it will never happen.

I didnt say it would eliminate it but it goes a very long way towards combating it. I doubt even this system will eliminate it completely. Hell I could still see sites selling items outside the game for less then the auction house.

Having played since early BC, I have seen the RMT rise in leaps and bounds. It doesn't combat it in the slightest. Even Blizzards new automated countermeasures are barely making a dent.
(Said countermeasures include, but are not limited to: Trading large sums of gold, Transferring toons with large sums of gold and my personal favorite, Receiving large sums of gold.)

Seriously, I log in and within 5 minutes I see the gold spam of no less than 3 different sites. =/