First: I looked for a previous topic on this and couldn't find one, if there is one than direct me to it please.
Okay, I know that they are going to make the currency actually worth something in this game this time, but how are they? Didn't they say that trading[ items was the main way to get new stuff?
Also are they going to have it just be "Gold" or something like "gold/mithril/silver/copper...ect". If it's just gold I can easily see that later in the game things going for 12 digit numbers, and when they're not necessary big number annoy me.
I think that BoE items is one of the nest things they are implementing to help control the economy. D2 has always been an item currency as oppose to gold. What ever the high-end necessary item was at the time became the new currency. Stopping people from trading such items makes gold remain the main form of currency. I could easily see the "best" skill rune quickly becomig the currency.
As for gold sinks, there are 100 ways any game can handle this. The easiest is to have a gold cost for many and all services in the game. Merchants, crafting new items, an auction house.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find any Diablo news? Contact me or anyone else on the News team
I think that BoE items is one of the nest things they are implementing to help control the economy. D2 has always been an item currency as oppose to gold. What ever the high-end necessary item was at the time became the new currency. Stopping people from trading such items makes gold remain the main form of currency. I could easily see the "best" skill rune quickly becomig the currency.
As for gold sinks, there are 100 ways any game can handle this. The easiest is to have a gold cost for many and all services in the game. Merchants, crafting new items, an auction house.
BoE = epic failure. The games still going to get overloaded with gear, its just going to make experimenting with different builds/gear set ups far more aggravating and time consuming. Not to mention, its just going to flat out decrease the volume of trading, and any design that causes people to interact less in an online game is bad imo.
As far as currency, every hard coded sink that amounts to the computer removing gold from the game is meaningless. If 30% of an average players total gold farmed eventually ends up going to pay for various sinks...why not just make monsters drop 30% less and items sell for 30% less? Any sink thats going to effect everyone equally, is worthless.
I enjoyed the D2 system with gems/runes. They essentially became the currencies becuase everyone always had a use for them. Gems obviously for crafting and re-rollings gcs, and runes for crafting and making runewords. You could save them and trade them if your trying to gain some wealth to get some top end items, or trade for them in mass if your already rich and want to roll some items, everybody won with this design.
This again, dovetails right back to BoE being stupid. How much time and resources are people going to devote to trading for mid grade versions of items when they have no retrade value? Without binding, I'd be totally excited upgrading from a 34 hoto to a 35, knowing I turn around and make a little wealth back trading off my 34 hoto. If hotos were BoE and I had a 34, I'd say screw it to anything less then 40, so all those mid grade trades inbetween that would happen without binding, will no longer exist.
Anyways to sum it up, I think for D3 they should really focus on what worked in the D2 economy, and improve and expand on it for D3 rather then just turn to the same boring gold based economy every mmo uses. D2 was great because it was different then everything else, why do things to make D3 conform when you could be focusing on things to make it stand out from the rest of the genre, like its predecessor did.
I'm assuming you're talking about the currency you use and not the economy around it.
At first I was sceptical about the whole gold/silver/bronze aspect that many games seem to adhere to. It seems that the gold is the only thing that's worth something and silver and bronze are just small change.
I prefer the currency D2 uses. Finding 132 gold coins somehow feels better than 1 silver and 32 bronze.
Im going to collet $100000000 gold and trade it for epic items lol that would be cool if gold was really worth some awesome stuff.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
www.myspace.com/mpotatoes for all your Trans Siberian Orchestra listening pleasure
If you want to arrange it
This world you can change it
If we could somehow make this
Christmas thing last
By helping a neighbor
Or even a stranger
And to know who needs help
You need only just ask
You will be able to sell your BoE !! and with the money you'll be able to buy something in the trade room !! You just don't keep the goods items in the outstanding.
Didn't they say that trading[ items was the main way to get new stuff?
They said they promote trade, but not necessarily item for item trades. Which means that gold, or some other standardized currency, will be used between players.
Quote from "nickm83" »
BoE = epic failure. The games still going to get overloaded with gear, its just going to make experimenting with different builds/gear set ups far more aggravating and time consuming. Not to mention, its just going to flat out decrease the volume of trading, and any design that causes people to interact less in an online game is bad imo.
I must still agree that utilizing BoE items as an item sink might not be the best solution to promoting trade.
Quote from "nickm83" »
As far as currency, every hard coded sink that amounts to the computer removing gold from the game is meaningless. If 30% of an average players total gold farmed eventually ends up going to pay for various sinks...why not just make monsters drop 30% less and items sell for 30% less? Any sink thats going to effect everyone equally, is worthless.
This however I disagree with. Gems, if used as currency, work exactly like gold.
Gold is gained from monsters.
Gems are gained from monsters
Gold can be traded for items.
Gems can be traded for items.
Gold is returned to the system when repairing, bying stuff from NPC's, dying etc.
Gems are returned to the system when used in cube recipies, when socketed into items etc.
The one difference is of course that there are seven gems and only one kind of gold. And I don't see the benefit of juggling seven potential currencies as opposed to one.
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
Supporting big shoulderpads and flashy armor since 2004.
I would like gold to stay in the game. It was useful in D2 classic since you could gamble for rares. In the expansion most players just went to the high end Uniques/Sets/Runewords. A few would use some of the crafts due to getting a valuable mod(s)
I take it you have not played any mods of D2. In most mods I have played, gold find is more important than magic find. Gambling is useful and shops are very useful to get the resources that you need.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
On Strike and supporting Fallout 4 Mod Makers
Some fallout 4 mod makers have had their mods stolen and uploaded and downloaded on Bethesda's site for the Xbox One.
You will be able to sell your BoE !! and with the money you'll be able to buy something in the trade room !! You just don't keep the goods items in the outstanding.
Judging how D2 worked, or any online rpg I've ever played for that matter, npcs give you a fraction of what you get from a player for a high end item. I just don't see how stripping my items of 99.999% of their value for equipping it is going to promote trading or build experimentation.
Just an example, let's pretend you want to try out a poisonmancer in D2. You trade a boatload of things for a dweb, try it out for 10 minutes, hate the way poison works, but oh wait, you can't do anything with your dweb now since you equipped it. Pretty laaaame.
Gold is returned to the system when repairing, bying stuff from NPC's, dying etc.
Gems are returned to the system when used in cube recipies, when socketed into items etc.
The one difference is of course that there are seven gems and only one kind of gold. And I don't see the benefit of juggling seven potential currencies as opposed to one.
Your missing the major difference. Any use for gems are completely voluntary. You can horde/trade them as much as you want, or cube/socket every gem you get. You can play it safe and build wealth by trading up gems for runes, or popular crafting runes for higher runes, or if your rich your gonna be trading for the crafting materials. Theres shift of wealth amongst players with this design.
When you introduce a single generic currency with sinks, your often forced into them. Using repair as a sink for example, its just gonna roughly work out to something like 10% of what you farm goes back to repairing gear. Why not just remove item damage and make everything worth 10% less, save us all from a pointless aggravating feature. When everyones paying the same forced sinks, its not doing anything to promote trade in any way, or doing anything to shift wealth from player to player, so why bother?
It wasn't lack of uses in D2 that made gold undesireable, it was how easy it was to get it, and how little you could safely store. Considering you could get GG rares gambling, everyone had use for gold, but why on earth would you ever trade for it when the most you could get via trade safely was equivalent to what you could farm following bots in 10-15 minutes, with no skill/effort/luck required? If I could have traded for 300m gold to go on a gambling binge with, I'd totally offer some awesome stuff for it, but even wasting the time trying to make a deal to trade someone for 2m just isnt worth it.
You're probably the only person who thinks that the D2 system worked well. You and the dupers, that is.
If your main reason for the D2 economy not working is becuase of dupers...I got news for ya...duping ruins gold based games just as easily. Duping was the problem, not the design.
Your missing the major difference. Any use for gems are completely voluntary. You can horde/trade them as much as you want, or cube/socket every gem you get. You can play it safe and build wealth by trading up gems for runes, or popular crafting runes for higher runes, or if your rich your gonna be trading for the crafting materials. Theres shift of wealth amongst players with this design.
How does that make the currency better or worse whether it is optional to use? Fact remains that, just as with gold, a certain amount of gems will be funneled into the playerbase from regular drops.
Quote from "nickm83" »
When you introduce a single generic currency with sinks, your often forced into them. Using repair as a sink for example, its just gonna roughly work out to something like 10% of what you farm goes back to repairing gear. Why not just remove item damage and make everything worth 10% less, save us all from a pointless aggravating feature. When everyones paying the same forced sinks, its not doing anything to promote trade in any way, or doing anything to shift wealth from player to player, so why bother?
If I recall, Blizzard removed repairing. So let's ignore repairs, since it won't have any bearing on D3.
Quote from "nickm83" »
It wasn't lack of uses in D2 that made gold undesireable, it was how easy it was to get it, and how little you could safely store. Considering you could get GG rares gambling, everyone had use for gold, but why on earth would you ever trade for it when the most you could get via trade safely was equivalent to what you could farm following bots in 10-15 minutes, with no skill/effort/luck required? If I could have traded for 300m gold to go on a gambling binge with, I'd totally offer some awesome stuff for it, but even wasting the time trying to make a deal to trade someone for 2m just isnt worth it.
Easyaccessibility of gold is not an argument against using gold as a currency, it is an argument against it's validity as a currency in D2. Gold has always suffered from immense inflation in D2, but it was not because of gold itself.
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
Supporting big shoulderpads and flashy armor since 2004.
How does that make the currency better or worse whether it is optional to use? Fact remains that, just as with gold, a certain amount of gems will be funneled into the playerbase from regular drops.
Its not optional to use if you want to gain wealth, your gonna want your runes/gems. Its optional to dump into sinks.
If I recall, Blizzard removed repairing. So let's ignore repairs, since it won't have any bearing on D3.
It doesn't matter what the sink is. If you pay some npc 5 mil to upgrade your armor on a piece of gear 5%, everyones gonna do it, thereby just increasing your grind time gathering gold for a half hour per piece or whatever that you want to upgrade. Any form of sink that requires the computer basically deleting gold simply to set you back to even, or give you something everyone buys for the exact same amount is meaningless and only a temporary solution to players hording mass amounts of gold. What are they gonna patch in new sinks every month just to keep people mindlessly grinding gold? Its not pay per play, hopefully anyhow, so they should have no reason to use that generic template all the monthly charge games do.
Easyaccessibility of gold is not an argument against using gold as a currency, it is an argument against it's validity as a currency in D2. Gold has always suffered from immense inflation in D2, but it was not because of gold itself.
Gold had pretty much 0 exchange in trades, how was there inflation? It was all about easy accessibility. If you could fill up your stash with high runes fast as you could fill it with gold, guess what, nobody would trade for high runes either.
Yes it was. The value of a commodity money is derived from its use(s). If gold had no use(s), people use something else that has uses ― like runes or Gems as money. For further information, link in the second paragraph. Gambling was an use, obviously, but the amount required to get something was in no relation to how much gold you could hold. Runes on the other hand, were used for all the end-game rune words. And before that, everybody basically needed two SoJ's for most of their characters.
I'm just gonna answer your argument with something I already said, maybe itll sink in the second time around.
If I could have traded for 300m gold to go on a gambling binge with, I'd totally offer some awesome stuff for it, but even wasting the time trying to make a deal to trade someone for 2m just isnt worth it.
Look at it this way, if the next patch removed limits to how much gold you could carry/stash, and made it so death didn't effect gold in stash so you could horde a ton of it, you would see people looking to trade for mass amounts of gold to gamble, and people saving mass amounts of gold to trade to those people looking for it to gamble with.
I could offer you runes that would take you a month to collect in a trade window, yet I can only offer you gold that takes you 10 minutes to collect, which is why gold was useful but not sought after in D2.
Its not optional to use if you want to gain wealth, your gonna want your runes/gems. Its optional to dump into sinks.
I don't get what you mean.
I find 5 gems. I can either save them, cube them for something, or trade them to another player in exchange for an item.
I find 100 gold. I can either save the gold, buy something from a vendor for it, or trade it to another player in exchange for an item.
I can farm gems just as easily as I can farm gold, it just depends on how much of a reward farming gives me. Of course no one farms gold in Diablo, because it's useless. Likewise, no one farms runes because it's impossible to anything more than killing lots of whatever monsters. Except for duping, but we don't want that.
I don't get where optional comes in.
Quote from "nickm83" »
It doesn't matter what the sink is. If you pay some npc 5 mil to upgrade your armor on a piece of gear 5%, everyones gonna do it, thereby just increasing your grind time gathering gold for a half hour per piece or whatever that you want to upgrade. Any form of sink that requires the computer basically deleting gold simply to set you back to even, or give you something everyone buys for the exact same amount is meaningless and only a temporary solution to players hording mass amounts of gold. What are they gonna patch in new sinks every month just to keep people mindlessly grinding gold? Its not pay per play, hopefully anyhow, so they should have no reason to use that generic template all the monthly charge games do.
Cubing things for gems is a sink. Socketing items with gems/runes is a sink. Bying shit from an NPC is the same thing, except you replace an item with a vendor and a gem with gold.
There has to be a sinks, no matter what the currency is called or what it looks like. Otherwise the economy will continuously be filled with more and more money.
Quote from "nickm83" »
Gold had pretty much 0 exchange in trades, how was there inflation? It was all about easy accessibility. If you could fill up your stash with high runes fast as you could fill it with gold, guess what, nobody would trade for high runes either.
If gold was much less common in D3, would you accept that as a currency? If not, why? That seems to be your main point: gold is common, runes/gems are not.
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
Supporting big shoulderpads and flashy armor since 2004.
I'll probably be flamed for this but i like a currency of money/gold/etc, not trading, however trading is like a side currency. But mainly i prefer gold currency.
As is Gold is not the currency and has about as much use as it did in D2 and that was pretty much just to take from kids I killed. If gold was totally useless to everyone then why do so many people get so angry when I take their gold or they go and try and hide it?
Either way gold will remain at end game..pretty much useless.
As far as the d2 economy it was fine. I see nothing wrong with it. It fluctuated like a normal economy, you had booms, you had recessions, items varied over time with how much they were worth. You could trade those easily found gems and get a good item and then repeat and trade those good items for a better item, and thus forth. It should be like this, an easy avenue for not that great of players to get a decent amount of wealth (Gem/rune trading), and an avenue for the fanatic who is MFing all day long to find that really rare item. In the end it compliments everyone and the economy is where it belongs and that is within the fans hands, much like PvP.
Either way gold will remain at end game..pretty much useless.
No way man, we're gonna have sinks. That means, the games gonna remove a % of everything you farm by forcing you to pay for random crap. This is going to totally prevent everyone from hording mass amounts of gold over time. You'll never actually get ahead, because every time you get a leg up they're gonna patch in a new batch of sinks for you to grind out! Its gonna be a blast! You'll see!
As far as the d2 economy it was fine. I see nothing wrong with it.
Hello gold based economy and BoE garbage.
Goodbye to the days of being able to build wealth just off a string of good trades.
Its gonna be so much more fun when every item you sell is gonna go for xxx gold rather then haggling over items where the value depends on its rarity, how bad the person wants it, and how slick you are at getting him to offer more.
Nobody would still use it for money, because if such a thing happened, it'd inflate like Zimbabwe, and something more stable in value would be preferred.
Not really, if its only traded for in mass for gambling, there'd be no reason to save more then what becomes the common offering for a pul rune, or hr, or whatever you desire to trade it for, and whoever traded you for it would just gamble it away, otherwise why would they want it?
Its the same as high runes, with the exception of dupers how many people really horde them in mass quantities. Most people say, I'm gonna make an enigma, they trade for jah/ber, and make an enigma.
I find 100 gold. I can either save the gold, buy something from a vendor for it, or trade it to another player in exchange for an item.
Yeah and none of those are sinks really. Your not forced into doing any one of those. I'm talking about sinks that everyones forced into that adds nothing to the game other then grind time.
If you want a prime example of why gold based economies suck, try the game Last Chaos, its a free downloadable game. You have to buy all your gear from vendors, so up until you get the best gear its essentially a 100% gold sink, at which point, gold becomes worthless to you and you just horde vast amounts since you have nothing to spend it on. Every rpg with a strict currency I've ever played, as far back as the old school single player D&D games, this is what happened to in game currency. You got to a point where you just didnt need it, even repeating sinks like paying daily taxes on items or having to pay rent or buy food become irrelevant to how fast you can farm, and so you just horde gold. Have you played any strict currency based games where people didn't eventually get to a point where this was the outcome, I'd like to try them if you know of any.
Meanwhile, I've played D2 since its release, and can't recall any point in the history of the game where I didn't have any use for gems/runes.
Only way for trade based economy to work is farming on high lvls or steal items that drop to the floor when others are fighting. It happened to me countless times when I let idiots to join my game at low lvls. They just run around and pick items.
All item drops in this game are private for each person. You can't see what someone else can pick up.
Quote from "vladdracul" »
If gold was totally useless to everyone then why do so many people get so angry when I take their gold or they go and try and hide it?
Because you're taking something that belongs to them.
I don't know if BoE is a good thing or not, I can see why it's bad and why it's good though.
Quote from "nickm83" »
Hello gold based economy and BoE garbage.
Goodbye to the days of being able to build wealth just off a string of good trades.
Its gonna be so much more fun when every item you sell is gonna go for xxx gold rather then haggling over items where the value depends on its rarity, how bad the person wants it, and how slick you are at getting him to offer more.
I agree, the people set the value of the items and if someone was uninformed on a item's worth than they were fucked (Happened to me when I started playing). I liked the haggling and being a gypsy.
Also if I can recall was their not something mentioned on how everything will have a set price on it already so people know how much an item is if they just randomly find it? I'm almost positive something of the sort was said where no one will NOT have a idea of how much an item is worth.
No way man, we're gonna have sinks. That means, the games gonna remove a % of everything you farm by forcing you to pay for random crap. This is going to totally prevent everyone from hording mass amounts of gold over time. You'll never actually get ahead, because every time you get a leg up they're gonna patch in a new batch of sinks for you to grind out! Its gonna be a blast! You'll see!
Your point about removing a % does not make any sense. That's not what a sink is. It can be, but it does not have to be.
Quote from "nickm83" »
Its gonna be so much more fun when every item you sell is gonna go for xxx gold rather then haggling over items where the value depends on its rarity, how bad the person wants it, and how slick you are at getting him to offer more.
This only holds true if there is an auction house like system in place, because it depends on the traders being able to judge how common an item really is. If there is an auction house, I can go in and see "oh, this items sells for around 200 gold", meaning I can then expect a price like that from someone else.
If there is no auction house however, then I have no statistical data to value an offer by other than my own experience, and haggling can still occur. This is not a fault of gold, so don't put the blame there.
Quote from "nickm83" »
Yeah and none of those are sinks really. Your not forced into doing any one of those. I'm talking about sinks that everyones forced into that adds nothing to the game other then grind time.
Yes it is. Bying shit from vendors is a sink. Cubing gems to get charms is a sink. Anything that removes value from the players and returns them to the game is a sink. Anything.
Bying a potion is a sink.
Getting recoloring kit or something from a vendor to recolor your armor is a sink.
Bying a guild hall is a sink.
Gambling is a sink.
None of those are set percentages, and all are optional. They add a gold sink to remove gold from the players, as well as an incentive for the player to value gold. There are hundreds more possibilities to make gold useful besides those four examples. Gold cannot be a stable currency in D2, but in D3, with proper incentive to get gold, it can.
Quote from "nickm83" »
Have you played any strict currency based games where people didn't eventually get to a point where this was the outcome, I'd like to try them if you know of any.
World of Warcraft. You always need gold, and there are pleny of sinks that are not percentage-based that give you the ability to spend gold. In the case of WoW, this is easily characterized by epic mounts.
Gold is always useful (except for a few who have everything, but I'm not going to judge the balance of a game based on a minute part of the playerbase). Yes, people grind for gold. Why? Well, some do it for raiding to keep up with repair costs. That's not something that will happen in Diablo 3, so ignore that aspect. It belongs in WoW and not Diablo.
Some do it to get better stuff, like Epic mounts. And who's to blame them? Obviously there is a worth in gold, a worth that justifies grinding. And it's the exact same thing as in Diablo. You run out and kill Baal over and over and over again. That's grinding. Or the Bloody Foothills.
Now what happens in WoW is that, as the server matures, things get more expensive? Why is that? Why, because the top players are getting rich and have lots to spend, thus hurting new players. STill, this never removes the value of gold, it just changes prices on tradeable items due to inflation. More money in circulation, and things get more expensive.
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
Supporting big shoulderpads and flashy armor since 2004.
Okay, I know that they are going to make the currency actually worth something in this game this time, but how are they? Didn't they say that trading[ items was the main way to get new stuff?
Also are they going to have it just be "Gold" or something like "gold/mithril/silver/copper...ect". If it's just gold I can easily see that later in the game things going for 12 digit numbers, and when they're not necessary big number annoy me.
What do you think will happen?
♣Strength and Honor♣
As for gold sinks, there are 100 ways any game can handle this. The easiest is to have a gold cost for many and all services in the game. Merchants, crafting new items, an auction house.
Find any Diablo news? Contact me or anyone else on the News team
I don't think !! I like better only one kind !!
When you will die you will lose cash !!?! It's the only true penalty that I see.
BoE = epic failure. The games still going to get overloaded with gear, its just going to make experimenting with different builds/gear set ups far more aggravating and time consuming. Not to mention, its just going to flat out decrease the volume of trading, and any design that causes people to interact less in an online game is bad imo.
As far as currency, every hard coded sink that amounts to the computer removing gold from the game is meaningless. If 30% of an average players total gold farmed eventually ends up going to pay for various sinks...why not just make monsters drop 30% less and items sell for 30% less? Any sink thats going to effect everyone equally, is worthless.
I enjoyed the D2 system with gems/runes. They essentially became the currencies becuase everyone always had a use for them. Gems obviously for crafting and re-rollings gcs, and runes for crafting and making runewords. You could save them and trade them if your trying to gain some wealth to get some top end items, or trade for them in mass if your already rich and want to roll some items, everybody won with this design.
This again, dovetails right back to BoE being stupid. How much time and resources are people going to devote to trading for mid grade versions of items when they have no retrade value? Without binding, I'd be totally excited upgrading from a 34 hoto to a 35, knowing I turn around and make a little wealth back trading off my 34 hoto. If hotos were BoE and I had a 34, I'd say screw it to anything less then 40, so all those mid grade trades inbetween that would happen without binding, will no longer exist.
Anyways to sum it up, I think for D3 they should really focus on what worked in the D2 economy, and improve and expand on it for D3 rather then just turn to the same boring gold based economy every mmo uses. D2 was great because it was different then everything else, why do things to make D3 conform when you could be focusing on things to make it stand out from the rest of the genre, like its predecessor did.
At first I was sceptical about the whole gold/silver/bronze aspect that many games seem to adhere to. It seems that the gold is the only thing that's worth something and silver and bronze are just small change.
I prefer the currency D2 uses. Finding 132 gold coins somehow feels better than 1 silver and 32 bronze.
Join the chat!
If you want to arrange it
This world you can change it
If we could somehow make this
Christmas thing last
By helping a neighbor
Or even a stranger
And to know who needs help
You need only just ask
They said they promote trade, but not necessarily item for item trades. Which means that gold, or some other standardized currency, will be used between players.
I must still agree that utilizing BoE items as an item sink might not be the best solution to promoting trade.
This however I disagree with. Gems, if used as currency, work exactly like gold.
Gold is gained from monsters.
Gems are gained from monsters
Gold can be traded for items.
Gems can be traded for items.
Gold is returned to the system when repairing, bying stuff from NPC's, dying etc.
Gems are returned to the system when used in cube recipies, when socketed into items etc.
The one difference is of course that there are seven gems and only one kind of gold. And I don't see the benefit of juggling seven potential currencies as opposed to one.
I take it you have not played any mods of D2. In most mods I have played, gold find is more important than magic find. Gambling is useful and shops are very useful to get the resources that you need.
Judging how D2 worked, or any online rpg I've ever played for that matter, npcs give you a fraction of what you get from a player for a high end item. I just don't see how stripping my items of 99.999% of their value for equipping it is going to promote trading or build experimentation.
Just an example, let's pretend you want to try out a poisonmancer in D2. You trade a boatload of things for a dweb, try it out for 10 minutes, hate the way poison works, but oh wait, you can't do anything with your dweb now since you equipped it. Pretty laaaame.
Your missing the major difference. Any use for gems are completely voluntary. You can horde/trade them as much as you want, or cube/socket every gem you get. You can play it safe and build wealth by trading up gems for runes, or popular crafting runes for higher runes, or if your rich your gonna be trading for the crafting materials. Theres shift of wealth amongst players with this design.
When you introduce a single generic currency with sinks, your often forced into them. Using repair as a sink for example, its just gonna roughly work out to something like 10% of what you farm goes back to repairing gear. Why not just remove item damage and make everything worth 10% less, save us all from a pointless aggravating feature. When everyones paying the same forced sinks, its not doing anything to promote trade in any way, or doing anything to shift wealth from player to player, so why bother?
It wasn't lack of uses in D2 that made gold undesireable, it was how easy it was to get it, and how little you could safely store. Considering you could get GG rares gambling, everyone had use for gold, but why on earth would you ever trade for it when the most you could get via trade safely was equivalent to what you could farm following bots in 10-15 minutes, with no skill/effort/luck required? If I could have traded for 300m gold to go on a gambling binge with, I'd totally offer some awesome stuff for it, but even wasting the time trying to make a deal to trade someone for 2m just isnt worth it.
If your main reason for the D2 economy not working is becuase of dupers...I got news for ya...duping ruins gold based games just as easily. Duping was the problem, not the design.
If I recall, Blizzard removed repairing. So let's ignore repairs, since it won't have any bearing on D3.
Easyaccessibility of gold is not an argument against using gold as a currency, it is an argument against it's validity as a currency in D2. Gold has always suffered from immense inflation in D2, but it was not because of gold itself.
Its not optional to use if you want to gain wealth, your gonna want your runes/gems. Its optional to dump into sinks.
It doesn't matter what the sink is. If you pay some npc 5 mil to upgrade your armor on a piece of gear 5%, everyones gonna do it, thereby just increasing your grind time gathering gold for a half hour per piece or whatever that you want to upgrade. Any form of sink that requires the computer basically deleting gold simply to set you back to even, or give you something everyone buys for the exact same amount is meaningless and only a temporary solution to players hording mass amounts of gold. What are they gonna patch in new sinks every month just to keep people mindlessly grinding gold? Its not pay per play, hopefully anyhow, so they should have no reason to use that generic template all the monthly charge games do.
Gold had pretty much 0 exchange in trades, how was there inflation? It was all about easy accessibility. If you could fill up your stash with high runes fast as you could fill it with gold, guess what, nobody would trade for high runes either.
I'm just gonna answer your argument with something I already said, maybe itll sink in the second time around.
Look at it this way, if the next patch removed limits to how much gold you could carry/stash, and made it so death didn't effect gold in stash so you could horde a ton of it, you would see people looking to trade for mass amounts of gold to gamble, and people saving mass amounts of gold to trade to those people looking for it to gamble with.
I could offer you runes that would take you a month to collect in a trade window, yet I can only offer you gold that takes you 10 minutes to collect, which is why gold was useful but not sought after in D2.
I don't get what you mean.
I find 5 gems. I can either save them, cube them for something, or trade them to another player in exchange for an item.
I find 100 gold. I can either save the gold, buy something from a vendor for it, or trade it to another player in exchange for an item.
I can farm gems just as easily as I can farm gold, it just depends on how much of a reward farming gives me. Of course no one farms gold in Diablo, because it's useless. Likewise, no one farms runes because it's impossible to anything more than killing lots of whatever monsters. Except for duping, but we don't want that.
I don't get where optional comes in.
Cubing things for gems is a sink. Socketing items with gems/runes is a sink. Bying shit from an NPC is the same thing, except you replace an item with a vendor and a gem with gold.
There has to be a sinks, no matter what the currency is called or what it looks like. Otherwise the economy will continuously be filled with more and more money.
If gold was much less common in D3, would you accept that as a currency? If not, why? That seems to be your main point: gold is common, runes/gems are not.
Either way gold will remain at end game..pretty much useless.
As far as the d2 economy it was fine. I see nothing wrong with it. It fluctuated like a normal economy, you had booms, you had recessions, items varied over time with how much they were worth. You could trade those easily found gems and get a good item and then repeat and trade those good items for a better item, and thus forth. It should be like this, an easy avenue for not that great of players to get a decent amount of wealth (Gem/rune trading), and an avenue for the fanatic who is MFing all day long to find that really rare item. In the end it compliments everyone and the economy is where it belongs and that is within the fans hands, much like PvP.
No way man, we're gonna have sinks. That means, the games gonna remove a % of everything you farm by forcing you to pay for random crap. This is going to totally prevent everyone from hording mass amounts of gold over time. You'll never actually get ahead, because every time you get a leg up they're gonna patch in a new batch of sinks for you to grind out! Its gonna be a blast! You'll see!
Hello gold based economy and BoE garbage.
Goodbye to the days of being able to build wealth just off a string of good trades.
Its gonna be so much more fun when every item you sell is gonna go for xxx gold rather then haggling over items where the value depends on its rarity, how bad the person wants it, and how slick you are at getting him to offer more.
Not really, if its only traded for in mass for gambling, there'd be no reason to save more then what becomes the common offering for a pul rune, or hr, or whatever you desire to trade it for, and whoever traded you for it would just gamble it away, otherwise why would they want it?
Its the same as high runes, with the exception of dupers how many people really horde them in mass quantities. Most people say, I'm gonna make an enigma, they trade for jah/ber, and make an enigma.
Yeah and none of those are sinks really. Your not forced into doing any one of those. I'm talking about sinks that everyones forced into that adds nothing to the game other then grind time.
If you want a prime example of why gold based economies suck, try the game Last Chaos, its a free downloadable game. You have to buy all your gear from vendors, so up until you get the best gear its essentially a 100% gold sink, at which point, gold becomes worthless to you and you just horde vast amounts since you have nothing to spend it on. Every rpg with a strict currency I've ever played, as far back as the old school single player D&D games, this is what happened to in game currency. You got to a point where you just didnt need it, even repeating sinks like paying daily taxes on items or having to pay rent or buy food become irrelevant to how fast you can farm, and so you just horde gold. Have you played any strict currency based games where people didn't eventually get to a point where this was the outcome, I'd like to try them if you know of any.
Meanwhile, I've played D2 since its release, and can't recall any point in the history of the game where I didn't have any use for gems/runes.
All item drops in this game are private for each person. You can't see what someone else can pick up.
Because you're taking something that belongs to them.
I don't know if BoE is a good thing or not, I can see why it's bad and why it's good though.
I agree, the people set the value of the items and if someone was uninformed on a item's worth than they were fucked (Happened to me when I started playing). I liked the haggling and being a gypsy.
Also if I can recall was their not something mentioned on how everything will have a set price on it already so people know how much an item is if they just randomly find it? I'm almost positive something of the sort was said where no one will NOT have a idea of how much an item is worth.
♣Strength and Honor♣
Your point about removing a % does not make any sense. That's not what a sink is. It can be, but it does not have to be.
This only holds true if there is an auction house like system in place, because it depends on the traders being able to judge how common an item really is. If there is an auction house, I can go in and see "oh, this items sells for around 200 gold", meaning I can then expect a price like that from someone else.
If there is no auction house however, then I have no statistical data to value an offer by other than my own experience, and haggling can still occur. This is not a fault of gold, so don't put the blame there.
Yes it is. Bying shit from vendors is a sink. Cubing gems to get charms is a sink. Anything that removes value from the players and returns them to the game is a sink. Anything.
Bying a potion is a sink.
Getting recoloring kit or something from a vendor to recolor your armor is a sink.
Bying a guild hall is a sink.
Gambling is a sink.
None of those are set percentages, and all are optional. They add a gold sink to remove gold from the players, as well as an incentive for the player to value gold. There are hundreds more possibilities to make gold useful besides those four examples. Gold cannot be a stable currency in D2, but in D3, with proper incentive to get gold, it can.
World of Warcraft. You always need gold, and there are pleny of sinks that are not percentage-based that give you the ability to spend gold. In the case of WoW, this is easily characterized by epic mounts.
Gold is always useful (except for a few who have everything, but I'm not going to judge the balance of a game based on a minute part of the playerbase). Yes, people grind for gold. Why? Well, some do it for raiding to keep up with repair costs. That's not something that will happen in Diablo 3, so ignore that aspect. It belongs in WoW and not Diablo.
Some do it to get better stuff, like Epic mounts. And who's to blame them? Obviously there is a worth in gold, a worth that justifies grinding. And it's the exact same thing as in Diablo. You run out and kill Baal over and over and over again. That's grinding. Or the Bloody Foothills.
Now what happens in WoW is that, as the server matures, things get more expensive? Why is that? Why, because the top players are getting rich and have lots to spend, thus hurting new players. STill, this never removes the value of gold, it just changes prices on tradeable items due to inflation. More money in circulation, and things get more expensive.
RIP: Demon Hunter: lvl 50 | Barb: lvl 60 (plvl 5) | Monk: lvl12 & lvl70 (plvl 200)