For this issue I chose not to make guesses and suppositions. I just cited what I've seen, what I've witnessed. That being, the majority of players who do play this game, who espouse a desire to continue playing this game, seem to land in a majority support for the Bind On Account system.
You don't really think it's a 75/25 issue now because half of the haters suddenly fell in love with BoA, do you?
Well......I did. I did a 180 turnabout. So it's not hard for me to understand that many others have followed the same path of progression into an unfamiliar dynamic in the ARPG genre.
Remember, the concept of "self-found" took root and gained a great following (including myself) well in advance of the implementation of BoA. This is very important, and quite note-worthy. Kinda remarkable that this "find it yourself" approach is actually a player-born idea, is it not? Many of us did not need a software giant to dictate such a challenging limitation upon us. We made the call ourselves. When D3V was at it's lowest point, I forsook my Softcore account and started straight HC Self-Found.
BoA is Self-Found, yet another testament to D3's progression being greatly player-driven.
I'll also make the argument that many others may have been quite turned off if they had gone the 'open-trading' route, due to the many many insidious, invasive and corroding factors that trading brings with it. If trading had been implemented, you would likely hear a collective "YES" emanating from the nation of China (How do you say "yes" in Chinese?).
With all this I ask; Is it really the right thing to do to continue to call into question the BoA system?
Why do I defend BoA? Because I think it's for the best of the game. And unlike other people, I think there's not even an alternative to "reduce" the amount of BoA. My guess is that Blizzard came to that same conclusion and shut down the trading forums for exactly that reason.
An alternative that many people (including myself!) suggested was to allow clan trading, i.e., instead of giving an item to your group only, it becomes accessible to all clan members who were in the clan at the moment when it dropped. I've stepped away from that idea as well. Clan trading, friends list trading, a cherry-picked list of up to 20 people who are eligible for trading - all those are features that sound nice for us, the players, but are even more so features the "gold farmers" are waiting for. Third party sites already exist, and they still have a thriving business, despite the shackles of BoA; there are many drawbacks, however, and it's a risky business for the customer as well (there was a thread recently about that, can't find it). Basically... if you have a bit of sanity left, stay out of it. If clan trading or anything like that would make a comeback, third party sites would simply create their own AH (as a website) and sell "clan spots" in combination with a guaranteed item drop. A clan "run" by only 10-20 bots - and those still exist - could guarantee you any item in a relatively short amount of time.
Blizzard can't control these third party sites, that's fairly obvious. They also will never be able to completely get rid of bots. It's like the "virus vs anti-virus" war - if you talk to any senior developer from the big anti-virus software companies they'll tell you that this is a war that can never be won. They can try to react faster to new developments, and Blizzard could try to have more frequent banwaves and more sophisticated bot detection algorithms, but in the end a bot that purely simulates player behavior, is freshly released and/or only used by a limited number of people is almost impossible to detect. However: as long as BoA is around and as limited as it is, bots don't affect most players. We know that there are shady gold/item/service selling sites around (they frequently spam these forums, but thankfully most of it is caught by the spam detection or reported quickly so that we can delete it fast enough), but their effect is nowhere near as big as in D3V. And this brings me to the most important point...
BoA absolutely worked in making bots and gold-selling sites basically ineffective.
When the plans for "unlimited paragon" were released, many people said that the top of all rankings would be occupied by bots only. Well, the #1 paragon player is streaming 24/7 so he's not a bit; I know many people in the top 5000 paragon, DPS, or other rankings and they're not botting. Hell, even I'm relatively high up in some rankings and as far as I'm aware, I've never botted either. What's more important is that those people I just mentioned not only have not botted themselves, they also did not use any third party services like buying items or whatever. The only "cheesy game mechanic" that allows you to get better gear and bypass playing yourself is Rift it Forward; if you're high paragon you get thousands of rifts for free. But again, those players have put in hundreds of hours already to get that paragon which allows them to "exploit" RiF. It's nowhere like the AH in D3V which allowed you to create a new account, go to the AH, and buy all gear to be MP10 ready. With RoS this is just not gonna happen, at least not on a similar scale.
So... why is this important? Why do I care if people can "buy their way to the top"?
If you go back to my previous point, the top 5000, those matter for game design. Right now most of those (certainly not all, just to make that clear) deserve to be there, it was their own hard work of many hundreds of hours. If you'd allow any way of bypassing content to get there, i.e., open up trading so that a very efficient clan could get 100 people to get BiS gear due to better gear distribution, this effect would quickly magnify. Gearing characters would not be a matter of how much time you personally played, but with how many and how active players you would be in the clan. You can say I'm speculating here, but honestly, after all we've seen from the days of the AH - how much are people willing to pay for even decent gear, let alone those BiS items that got traded for thousands of dollars - this business would thrive for sure. The money you can make in this business by far outweighs the risk of getting banned (just look at the 100k dollars thread next door). Now, I don't care about either sides; if people want to earn or burn money in this game it shouldn't affect me. Unfortunately, it does. The game's drop rate would have to be adjusted - just like for the AH.
That is why I defend BoA.
Well, one of the reasons. I also completely agree with ruksak on that it's nicer to find items myself. A clan mate told me the other day that shortly I went offline he started playing and found a second Wand of Woh. With clan trading, I would finally have that damn weapon now. But I'm not even mad, I actually want to find that weapon myself. I think the second big issue in this thread is that BoA implicitly leads to a different game experience, and that's not for everyone. It's not the one that shaggy likes, it's not the one that any of the people enjoy who liked the auction house or D3V in general, it's not the one that anyone who participated in public trading in D2 likes.
Since the release of RoS, I played well more (probably even twice as much) as I did in all of D3V, and the reason was the auction house. You could buy everything for very little money, perfecting your character was just about getting one more stat or increased that stat on a trifecta item. Finding an item did not have this sense of accomplishment as in "nice item, let me switch to skill X to try out how it works" or "yay, I found an upgrade" but it was rather like "hooray, I just found a 150 million gold Nat Ring". Despite all the shortcomings in itemization 2.0, the "few" game-changing legendaries, it still kinda works. I am still looking for items that let me change to a certain playstyle: a Velvet Camaral to try out lightning, a Wand of Woh to play the build I'm most looking forward to, a Slanderer so that I can try the Istvan's Paired Blades set on my monk in 2.1. And that's after playing for hundreds and hundreds of hours.
For me personally this is just the core essence of Diablo. Unlike what other people have said, trading was never an essential part in Diablo for me (and as we have figured out in many previous discussions, it wasn't for the majority of D2 players either). I think D3V and the AH "spoiled" many people - especially millions of new players - with an experience that was not what Blizzard intended; that the main source of items was trading rather than playing. They sought to provide us with a way to give away few items (hence the 10 auction limit, delays, and 15% fee) but they never predicted that it would be used to that extent and turn into the *one* way to gear your character. It's no surprise that most D3V players are not coming back to RoS: it's not for everyone. But Diablo was never a game meant for everyone. Casuals and hardcore gamers, PvE and PvP enthusiasts, RPG/lore fans and action-focused hack'n'slay players - it is impossible to make one game that fits everyone's needs. Diablo is no different. The auction house took it to one extreme, we're now seeing a different one, but it is a necessary evil in this day and age, and it works for many players. Not all, but many.
While I generally agree with your take on trading, there are a couple of important things to note.
1) Tweaking the drop rates because of the AH was part of the problem. I know this is anecdotal and maybe not representative of the player base as a whole, but the only reason I used the AH was because as soon as I hit Inferno, I felt some serious stagnation in gearing, and it became boring. I used the AH to increase my power enough to be effective and have some fun. So I don't agree that if trading were to be opened slightly (such as clan trading) that drop rates would have to adjusted to compensate (which is how all of the botting affects players like you and I). If they were to adjust the drop rates to compensate, it would just create the cycle of needing to exploit via clan to have reasonable power curve. I personally like the current power curve.
2) I think that trade exploits might be a bigger problem in seasons, as being in an active Clan would allow that clan to distribute items and empower each other. So maybe, since seasons are meant to be competitive, Seasonal characters should continue to have the current BOA restrictions.
3) This one is again more of a personal opinion, but I have a few close friends that I play with, and with the current restrictions, it feels pointless to play without them, should I have an hour to kill when they aren't on. If I were to find something that one of those friends could use during that play session, it just infuriates me. For instance, when we first started playing ROS, everyone but 1 guy in our group found a SOJ that they could use (even though he played far more often than we did), and one day playing by myself I found a really good one that would have worked for that friend, but sadly I could not give it to him. He has still yet to find a SOJ for that character, despite like 200 hours of play time on it. Sometimes RNG stings a ton, and opening trading up a little bit could decrease that.
I know this is tired argument, but for the most part, if people want to ruin the game for themselves, let them. This goes back to adjusting drop rates to compensate for potential exploits. As you said, BOA has hindered 3rd party trading, but it still exists. Opening up trading to clans (or some other non-global trading system) does increase the likelihood for exploitation, but is it really worth the cost? Is stopping those who would join a clan (which they can only be in one) simply to bypass the games intended grind, worth punishing other players for bad luck with more restrictive rules? Obviously the full extreme of that statement (the AH) didn't work, but is the polar opposite really necessary?
I think the second big issue in this thread is that BoA implicitly leads to a different game experience, and that's not for everyone. It's not the one that shaggy likes, it's not the one that any of the people enjoy who liked the auction house or D3V in general, it's not the one that anyone who participated in public trading in D2 likes.
It's not that I don't like it. I fully acknowledge that BoA > AH. My issue is that, personally, if I were to put them on a continuum of "goodness" it would look like this:
And it's that way because I don't give two fucks about 3rd party sites or anything like that. It doesn't factor into my opinion on the situation. I think it's ridiculous to worry about the "sanctity" of the top 5000 players in standard.
That being said, I'd FULLY support BoA for seasons because there is some "sanctity" there to preserve. But, while I think BoA is an improvement over the AH, I don't think it has any place in the non-competitive part of the game. I don't go to diabloprogress and think "wow, those guys earned it" .... because things like loot-sharing games still exist, RiF still exists, split-farmed bounties still exist. People with high paragon still got it from dubious methods. There are still tons of work-arounds so BoA doesn't preserve anything. The list is still majorly tainted with people finding their own ways to "cheat."
Anyone wearing a RoRG they got from split-farming bounties "earned" that about as much as someone who went into a D2 game and got a freebie Vamp Gaze. Anyone wearing items gambled with blood shards from RiF (or any other manner of gratuitously sharing keystrone fragments) or from a loot-sharing game (where you stack the odds in your favor by having 4 of one class) "earned" that about as much as someone who duped a few SoJs to trade for a Windforce. It's one and the same. To look with disdain on one but not the other is hypocritical.
I made about $10,000 off of the RMAH. Once I learned I could make more $ playing the AH than I could at my shitty job, I quit and flipped ah items for a living for about 3 months. I didn't kill a single monster during that time. I thoroughly enjoyed it though. But, I also am very happy with BoA, so not all people that abused the RMAH are against BoA. I now am back to a real job ( a much better one than the one I quit to be a pro diablo ah flipper) and I have had a great time actually playing Diablo. People don't seem to realize that if there was trading, it would be very similar to if there was still an ah. Instead of spending all day on the ah, they would spend all day in the trading forums/channels looking for good deals to trade up and make profit. I'm glad that now every time I log in to D3, I will be logging in to slay monsters and find the loot that falls from their corpses. BoA may not be a perfect system, but I don't believe a perfect system is possible. I also believe people against BoA are definitely the minority.
I think this idea but this is just my 2 cents. Enabled trading among players. NO RMAH or GoldAH at all! Make Legs harder to find. Reduce their drop rate. I think that would take care of the trading scene. Will their be bots and 3rd market websites that take money for items? Of course their will. Who the hell cares? If someone is will to spend $$$ on pixels then let them. Its their money to do what they want with. No one has the right to tell them how to spend it. Is it pointless to spend money on pixels? Of course it is, but some dont see it that way or atleast will say its stupid and not admit that they have spent money on pixels. Bots wont stop no matter what course Blizzard takes. Just the way it is. D2 had free trade and bots out the &*%$ and no one cared. Why? PVP. PVP made it to where players could make a character and actually have fun killing one another. Trade helped PVP. PVP helped Trade. They go hand and hand I believe. If Blizzard dont want to bring back trading, then dont bring PVP. Will others agree with that? Nope. Dont care either because Im not here to try and please everyone. Some will back me, others wont. But like I said, just my 2 cents worth.
BOA isn't perfect and might never be perfect, but it works. I finally found a fate of the fell and was excited. Back in D3V, i bought a Skorn and used it for a year continuously. I never really thought about my weapon slot again because the odds of finding or being able to afford a significantly better weapon were basically nil. I had fun back in D3V but not as much as fun as I am having now.
I think the game is getting better because Blizzard realizes that all legendaries need a purpose. If a legendary doesn't at least serve a role in a niche build, its basically automatic shard bait. So Blizzard is yet again tuning the legendaries (and I don't think they'll ever stop tuning to be honest which is fine by me.) BOA bothers me less and less when the legendaries I find have a higher probability of being useful. I may not have found the legendary that I want, but if I find a useful legendary, I'm still happy at the end of the day.
I don't like full on BoA (plus party trading) but it's a lot better than the old system. I would have preferred it if they had kept trading, kept the GAH, changed the RMAH so that you could only sell gold on it not items (why make people look through both and compare prices and conversions), made items BoA when you trade them, added kadala, and had drop rates around what they were at RoS launch. There would still be tons of bots in that system but they would be generating items through farming and driving prices down instead of sniping all the undervalued items and driving prices up.
They can say they didn't balance around the AH all they want but if the AH's had never been there then progression would have been completely broken. There were huge brick walls every time you reached a new difficulty because the previous ones didn't prepare you for the steep transition. Loot was way too random and you had to comb through piles of it looking for that needle in a haystack. Now loot is incredibly easy to get and you can nearly perfect it makes it feel mundane. Hell, I have a Unity with 4x perfect main stat rolls and a single resist roll that would be unimaginable in the old system but is just slightly better than an average one in the new system.
The worst thing that ever happened to Diablo was that f***ing auction house. I still curse Jay Wilson's name for the awfulness he introduced to the Diablo franchise. While endurable we still have to put up with dumb ass spammers trying to peddle virtual wares. It's a game and BoA is one step to ensure it remains just that, anyone who is looking to make a buck by selling weapons in online games has really lost touch with relaxation and fun.
while having a buddy to hand you down a real cool piece he might not use atm was fun.. the whole sipirit of the game is to adventure to find loot. if all you do s buy it from an auction house wat fun is there to play the game..
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Remember, the concept of "self-found" took root and gained a great following (including myself) well in advance of the implementation of BoA. This is very important, and quite note-worthy. Kinda remarkable that this "find it yourself" approach is actually a player-born idea, is it not? Many of us did not need a software giant to dictate such a challenging limitation upon us. We made the call ourselves. When D3V was at it's lowest point, I forsook my Softcore account and started straight HC Self-Found.
BoA is Self-Found, yet another testament to D3's progression being greatly player-driven.
I'll also make the argument that many others may have been quite turned off if they had gone the 'open-trading' route, due to the many many insidious, invasive and corroding factors that trading brings with it. If trading had been implemented, you would likely hear a collective "YES" emanating from the nation of China (How do you say "yes" in Chinese?).
With all this I ask; Is it really the right thing to do to continue to call into question the BoA system?
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
An alternative that many people (including myself!) suggested was to allow clan trading, i.e., instead of giving an item to your group only, it becomes accessible to all clan members who were in the clan at the moment when it dropped. I've stepped away from that idea as well. Clan trading, friends list trading, a cherry-picked list of up to 20 people who are eligible for trading - all those are features that sound nice for us, the players, but are even more so features the "gold farmers" are waiting for. Third party sites already exist, and they still have a thriving business, despite the shackles of BoA; there are many drawbacks, however, and it's a risky business for the customer as well (there was a thread recently about that, can't find it). Basically... if you have a bit of sanity left, stay out of it. If clan trading or anything like that would make a comeback, third party sites would simply create their own AH (as a website) and sell "clan spots" in combination with a guaranteed item drop. A clan "run" by only 10-20 bots - and those still exist - could guarantee you any item in a relatively short amount of time.
Blizzard can't control these third party sites, that's fairly obvious. They also will never be able to completely get rid of bots. It's like the "virus vs anti-virus" war - if you talk to any senior developer from the big anti-virus software companies they'll tell you that this is a war that can never be won. They can try to react faster to new developments, and Blizzard could try to have more frequent banwaves and more sophisticated bot detection algorithms, but in the end a bot that purely simulates player behavior, is freshly released and/or only used by a limited number of people is almost impossible to detect. However: as long as BoA is around and as limited as it is, bots don't affect most players. We know that there are shady gold/item/service selling sites around (they frequently spam these forums, but thankfully most of it is caught by the spam detection or reported quickly so that we can delete it fast enough), but their effect is nowhere near as big as in D3V. And this brings me to the most important point...
BoA absolutely worked in making bots and gold-selling sites basically ineffective.
When the plans for "unlimited paragon" were released, many people said that the top of all rankings would be occupied by bots only. Well, the #1 paragon player is streaming 24/7 so he's not a bit; I know many people in the top 5000 paragon, DPS, or other rankings and they're not botting. Hell, even I'm relatively high up in some rankings and as far as I'm aware, I've never botted either. What's more important is that those people I just mentioned not only have not botted themselves, they also did not use any third party services like buying items or whatever. The only "cheesy game mechanic" that allows you to get better gear and bypass playing yourself is Rift it Forward; if you're high paragon you get thousands of rifts for free. But again, those players have put in hundreds of hours already to get that paragon which allows them to "exploit" RiF. It's nowhere like the AH in D3V which allowed you to create a new account, go to the AH, and buy all gear to be MP10 ready. With RoS this is just not gonna happen, at least not on a similar scale.
So... why is this important? Why do I care if people can "buy their way to the top"?
If you go back to my previous point, the top 5000, those matter for game design. Right now most of those (certainly not all, just to make that clear) deserve to be there, it was their own hard work of many hundreds of hours. If you'd allow any way of bypassing content to get there, i.e., open up trading so that a very efficient clan could get 100 people to get BiS gear due to better gear distribution, this effect would quickly magnify. Gearing characters would not be a matter of how much time you personally played, but with how many and how active players you would be in the clan. You can say I'm speculating here, but honestly, after all we've seen from the days of the AH - how much are people willing to pay for even decent gear, let alone those BiS items that got traded for thousands of dollars - this business would thrive for sure. The money you can make in this business by far outweighs the risk of getting banned (just look at the 100k dollars thread next door). Now, I don't care about either sides; if people want to earn or burn money in this game it shouldn't affect me. Unfortunately, it does. The game's drop rate would have to be adjusted - just like for the AH.
That is why I defend BoA.
Well, one of the reasons. I also completely agree with ruksak on that it's nicer to find items myself. A clan mate told me the other day that shortly I went offline he started playing and found a second Wand of Woh. With clan trading, I would finally have that damn weapon now. But I'm not even mad, I actually want to find that weapon myself. I think the second big issue in this thread is that BoA implicitly leads to a different game experience, and that's not for everyone. It's not the one that shaggy likes, it's not the one that any of the people enjoy who liked the auction house or D3V in general, it's not the one that anyone who participated in public trading in D2 likes.
Since the release of RoS, I played well more (probably even twice as much) as I did in all of D3V, and the reason was the auction house. You could buy everything for very little money, perfecting your character was just about getting one more stat or increased that stat on a trifecta item. Finding an item did not have this sense of accomplishment as in "nice item, let me switch to skill X to try out how it works" or "yay, I found an upgrade" but it was rather like "hooray, I just found a 150 million gold Nat Ring". Despite all the shortcomings in itemization 2.0, the "few" game-changing legendaries, it still kinda works. I am still looking for items that let me change to a certain playstyle: a Velvet Camaral to try out lightning, a Wand of Woh to play the build I'm most looking forward to, a Slanderer so that I can try the Istvan's Paired Blades set on my monk in 2.1. And that's after playing for hundreds and hundreds of hours.
For me personally this is just the core essence of Diablo. Unlike what other people have said, trading was never an essential part in Diablo for me (and as we have figured out in many previous discussions, it wasn't for the majority of D2 players either). I think D3V and the AH "spoiled" many people - especially millions of new players - with an experience that was not what Blizzard intended; that the main source of items was trading rather than playing. They sought to provide us with a way to give away few items (hence the 10 auction limit, delays, and 15% fee) but they never predicted that it would be used to that extent and turn into the *one* way to gear your character. It's no surprise that most D3V players are not coming back to RoS: it's not for everyone. But Diablo was never a game meant for everyone. Casuals and hardcore gamers, PvE and PvP enthusiasts, RPG/lore fans and action-focused hack'n'slay players - it is impossible to make one game that fits everyone's needs. Diablo is no different. The auction house took it to one extreme, we're now seeing a different one, but it is a necessary evil in this day and age, and it works for many players. Not all, but many.
And in the end, I'd just like to quote Don Vu (in this video, about 29 minutes in):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOlWo6Up_ic
"BoA is here to stay".
1) Tweaking the drop rates because of the AH was part of the problem. I know this is anecdotal and maybe not representative of the player base as a whole, but the only reason I used the AH was because as soon as I hit Inferno, I felt some serious stagnation in gearing, and it became boring. I used the AH to increase my power enough to be effective and have some fun. So I don't agree that if trading were to be opened slightly (such as clan trading) that drop rates would have to adjusted to compensate (which is how all of the botting affects players like you and I). If they were to adjust the drop rates to compensate, it would just create the cycle of needing to exploit via clan to have reasonable power curve. I personally like the current power curve.
2) I think that trade exploits might be a bigger problem in seasons, as being in an active Clan would allow that clan to distribute items and empower each other. So maybe, since seasons are meant to be competitive, Seasonal characters should continue to have the current BOA restrictions.
3) This one is again more of a personal opinion, but I have a few close friends that I play with, and with the current restrictions, it feels pointless to play without them, should I have an hour to kill when they aren't on. If I were to find something that one of those friends could use during that play session, it just infuriates me. For instance, when we first started playing ROS, everyone but 1 guy in our group found a SOJ that they could use (even though he played far more often than we did), and one day playing by myself I found a really good one that would have worked for that friend, but sadly I could not give it to him. He has still yet to find a SOJ for that character, despite like 200 hours of play time on it. Sometimes RNG stings a ton, and opening trading up a little bit could decrease that.
I know this is tired argument, but for the most part, if people want to ruin the game for themselves, let them. This goes back to adjusting drop rates to compensate for potential exploits. As you said, BOA has hindered 3rd party trading, but it still exists. Opening up trading to clans (or some other non-global trading system) does increase the likelihood for exploitation, but is it really worth the cost? Is stopping those who would join a clan (which they can only be in one) simply to bypass the games intended grind, worth punishing other players for bad luck with more restrictive rules? Obviously the full extreme of that statement (the AH) didn't work, but is the polar opposite really necessary?
AH ---- BoA --------------------------------------- item-for-item bartering
And it's that way because I don't give two fucks about 3rd party sites or anything like that. It doesn't factor into my opinion on the situation. I think it's ridiculous to worry about the "sanctity" of the top 5000 players in standard.
That being said, I'd FULLY support BoA for seasons because there is some "sanctity" there to preserve. But, while I think BoA is an improvement over the AH, I don't think it has any place in the non-competitive part of the game. I don't go to diabloprogress and think "wow, those guys earned it" .... because things like loot-sharing games still exist, RiF still exists, split-farmed bounties still exist. People with high paragon still got it from dubious methods. There are still tons of work-arounds so BoA doesn't preserve anything. The list is still majorly tainted with people finding their own ways to "cheat."
Anyone wearing a RoRG they got from split-farming bounties "earned" that about as much as someone who went into a D2 game and got a freebie Vamp Gaze. Anyone wearing items gambled with blood shards from RiF (or any other manner of gratuitously sharing keystrone fragments) or from a loot-sharing game (where you stack the odds in your favor by having 4 of one class) "earned" that about as much as someone who duped a few SoJs to trade for a Windforce. It's one and the same. To look with disdain on one but not the other is hypocritical.
BOA fixed some of the problems in the game but blizzard still has a ton to fix.
No trading!?!?! I QUIT!
....*buys the xpac 2 days later*
and here we are again gentlemen. Complaining about the same shit that was finalized a months before release.
Are YOU NOT ENTERTAINED!?!?!?
http://www.diabloprogress.com/player/ambient-1624
I think the game is getting better because Blizzard realizes that all legendaries need a purpose. If a legendary doesn't at least serve a role in a niche build, its basically automatic shard bait. So Blizzard is yet again tuning the legendaries (and I don't think they'll ever stop tuning to be honest which is fine by me.) BOA bothers me less and less when the legendaries I find have a higher probability of being useful. I may not have found the legendary that I want, but if I find a useful legendary, I'm still happy at the end of the day.
They can say they didn't balance around the AH all they want but if the AH's had never been there then progression would have been completely broken. There were huge brick walls every time you reached a new difficulty because the previous ones didn't prepare you for the steep transition. Loot was way too random and you had to comb through piles of it looking for that needle in a haystack. Now loot is incredibly easy to get and you can nearly perfect it makes it feel mundane. Hell, I have a Unity with 4x perfect main stat rolls and a single resist roll that would be unimaginable in the old system but is just slightly better than an average one in the new system.