On Bind on Equip:
The main reason I don't want to see bind-on-equip is simple, I like being able to hand off items after I use them. It makes it easier to upgrade knowing your old stuff isnt completely usless now. I hand them down to friends, or alts, and want that to continue. I do think certain things should be bound.....such as hard to get items like hellfires, because it would completely devalue the content if those could go to auction. I can see some other things being bound for this reason as well, to keep their value high, or if they are character bound it gives me a reason to play alts, which I would certainly welcome. I don't even run Ubers with my alts because the hellfire is account bound.
On the 15% tax:
I actually agree with you to an extent, but only on the high dollar items. I wouldnt mind just seeing a cap on it, like you said flipping isnt a bad thing, but I would still like to discourage people from flipping mid and low lever gear, that could still be annoying for 2 reasons: it encourages playing the AH to gear, and gives a benefit to players with tons of time to scan the AH.
On Movement Speed:
Completely agree with you. I am not sure why people would be terribly upset about this change, it would just speed up gameplay across the board....unless you didnt speed up mob speed to match. But I took this as making the whole game faster. The game does feel a bit slow with no MS. I dont think its about getting anything for free, it is just about making the game feel faster, more exciting, more updated.....as you said most ARPGs move much faster than D3.
About MS and BoE: I get your points, and I understand that you'd like to see this changed, but I guess on these points we just have different opinions. I don't feel that designers are "disrespectful" by making the default MS low; it actually makes me want to get MS items and hence provides incentive for gearing diversity. Also, on my CMWW wizard I have 0% MS and I'm totally fine with that. I agree though that MS skills need balancing (TR monks, DH and so on), but it's not as bad as in D2 where everyone would get Enigma and bypass content like hell.
"On top of this, the 15% tax encourages transactions to be held outside of the AH, and as gold continues to inflate, more and more transactions will occur outside of the AH."
Okay, I'm not buying stuff for 2 billion (and probably never will as long as I perceive it as if I just payed ~600 Euros for one item). But from what I've read on forums and in discussions with players who are active in that price segment, there is still a lot of stuff to be found in the 1-2b price range on the AH. Trades outside of the AH are mainly done to get more than 2 billion due to the cap. But even if it would be the case that people trade outside the AH, what's bad about this? All the people complaining about the AH must be happy and therefore request a tax of 50% to reduce the impact of the AH. Well.. anyways, I don't have an issue with the 15%, I also don't have a problem if Blizzard gets some revenue out of it (however, they don't get anything out of the GAH, it's just a more-than-welcome gold sink).
^ flipping may happen in real life, but when it does, it happens with taxes!
The best example I can think of is predatory scalping sites. They will buy large quantity of tickets (paying sales tax) and then resell them to consumers for much higher prices (who also pay sales tax on them again). Beyond the fact that this happens in real life, there MUST be a gold sink in this game because otherwise gold is infinite and infinitely decreasing Real Value. Unless you can think of a better way to do this, don't talk about removing the AH tax, because you're just shooting yourself in the foot in the end
Yeah, 15% AH tax is fine, the game need gold sinks, and fee on trading is as good as any.
Maybe Blizzard should implement a way to take 15% fee when trading gold outside of AH, if there is a real fear that trading would happen too much outside of AH.
Regarding Bind on Equip, if it was implemented in ANY way, it would really have to be "Bind on Account-Equip" (or whatever it should be called). The game hardly needs to be even more alt-unfriendly than it is with Paragon levels.
As for Movement speed, I don't think we need more movement speed in combat, on top of what can be gained from gear.
Would it be enough to have a free, passive MS buff that only activated when you hadnt been hit and/or hit anything yourself for 3 seconds or so? So one could get faster from fight to fight, without feeling you have to take one of the movement skills just for that, but still not have higher speed in the middle of combat.
Good points all. I don't like the arbitrary taxation on the AH, mainly because I think it is a poor gold sink that takes away from the feeling of risk/reward, rather than say gambling or crafting, which reinforces it. I prefer positively reinforcing game systems.
With regards to movement speed, I would not mind the base speed staying as is, if only the cap was higher with gear. That would be good, as again, it would create the need for decision on the part of the player, or specific gearing. I just think overall, a lot of the current systems are dumbed down and appear lazy. Richer systems would be welcome. Let's see what happens.
Good points all. I don't like the arbitrary taxation on the AH, mainly because I think it is a poor gold sink that takes away from the feeling of risk/reward, rather than say gambling or crafting, which reinforces it. I prefer positively reinforcing game systems.
With regards to movement speed, I would not mind the base speed staying as is, if only the cap was higher with gear. That would be good, as again, it would create the need for decision on the part of the player, or specific gearing. I just think overall, a lot of the current systems are dumbed down and appear lazy. Richer systems would be welcome. Let's see what happens.
@ AH Cut
I totally get your point that gambling is a BETTER gold sink. But at this point in time the AH cut is the only remotely-significant gold sink in the game. It'd be best to keep the AH Cut and to implement other gold sinks on top of it. Even with the AH Cut there's still some pretty significant inflation, so I see no reason not to use the AH Cut as a baseline and move from there to implement more gold sinks that further help to curb inflation.
@ Movement Speed
It's already an amazingly-dominant farming stat. If anything it needs a lower cap so that getting multiple movement speed pieces wasn't the only way to have a viable farming toon. We don't need people trying to find movement speed in every slot. I don't see how you equate a movement speed cap with "dumbing down" anything. The stat is so radically important for farming that it's not really a decision to be made... you just must get as much of it as possible. That's the polar opposite of "dumbing down" things because it virtually elimiates choices.
Good points all. I don't like the arbitrary taxation on the AH, mainly because I think it is a poor gold sink that takes away from the feeling of risk/reward, rather than say gambling or crafting, which reinforces it. I prefer positively reinforcing game systems.
With regards to movement speed, I would not mind the base speed staying as is, if only the cap was higher with gear. That would be good, as again, it would create the need for decision on the part of the player, or specific gearing. I just think overall, a lot of the current systems are dumbed down and appear lazy. Richer systems would be welcome. Let's see what happens.
@ AH Cut
I totally get your point that gambling is a BETTER gold sink. But at this point in time the AH cut is the only remotely-significant gold sink in the game. It'd be best to keep the AH Cut and to implement other gold sinks on top of it. Even with the AH Cut there's still some pretty significant inflation, so I see no reason not to use the AH Cut as a baseline and move from there to implement more gold sinks that further help to curb inflation.
@ Movement Speed
It's already an amazingly-dominant farming stat. If anything it needs a lower cap so that getting multiple movement speed pieces wasn't the only way to have a viable farming toon. We don't need people trying to find movement speed in every slot. I don't see how you equate a movement speed cap with "dumbing down" anything. The stat is so radically important for farming that it's not really a decision to be made... you just must get as much of it as possible. That's the polar opposite of "dumbing down" things because it virtually elimiates choices.
Just my 2 cents here.
I think they capped movement speed because they were afraid of everyone stacking it, much like everyone had the Enigma runeword in D2. Teleporting was 100x faster for farming than just running. Likewise, if you have 100% movement speed you're going to farm obscenely fast and everyone will take it without question.
On Bind on Equip:
The main reason I don't want to see bind-on-equip is simple, I like being able to hand off items after I use them. It makes it easier to upgrade knowing your old stuff isnt completely usless now.
It's not useless if your character needed that item, and it could still be re-purposed into crafting materials after it's no longer useful. Of course, this assumes a better crafting system - and I'd highly encourage you to listen to our crafting episode to understand what I mean here. It's too much to explain - I won't do it.
While binding does introduce some drawbacks, they are nowhere near as bad. You have to pick - do you want the ease of sharing items, or do you want the economy to be destroyed? Take your pick. I choose the former. No choice is perfect, but one is better than the other.
I actually agree with you to an extent, but only on the high dollar items.
For me, the wasted/stolen effort is wasted/stolen effort. It makes very little difference what the amount is. The game should be consistent in this matter.
I wouldnt mind just seeing a cap on it, like you said flipping isnt a bad thing, but I would still like to discourage people from flipping mid and low lever gear, that could still be annoying for 2 reasons: it encourages playing the AH to gear, and gives a benefit to players with tons of time to scan the AH.
I wouldn't want to discourage flipping on any items. I see no reason to favour one group of players over another by doing this. We don't want any economic controls at all.
^ flipping may happen in real life, but when it does, it happens with taxes!
The best example I can think of is predatory scalping sites. They will buy large quantity of tickets (paying sales tax) and then resell them to consumers for much higher prices (who also pay sales tax on them again). Beyond the fact that this happens in real life, there MUST be a gold sink in this game because otherwise gold is infinite and infinitely decreasing Real Value. Unless you can think of a better way to do this, don't talk about removing the AH tax, because you're just shooting yourself in the foot in the end
Just because the government taxes people for economic production doesn't make it right for blizzard to do the same. Taxing production in the real world is also counter-productive (and I say immoral, since no government has the right to steal from the fruits of your labour) as well.
I wouldn't want to discourage flipping on any items. I see no reason to favour one group of players over another by doing this. We don't want any economic controls at all.
They have an AUCTION house which is modelled after REAL WORLD AUCTION HOUSES which typically have FEES (sometimes %ages on the sale, sometimes flat fees, sometimes both).
It is not an "economic control." It's a goddamned fee for using the service. If you don't want to use the service then feel free to use the chat channels which have no fees associated. You are paying for the convenience of listing your items and then moving on and not having to spend hours in chat trying to sell them. It's not some governmental scheme to dick you out of your money. Get a grip.
I wouldn't want to discourage flipping on any items. I see no reason to favour one group of players over another by doing this. We don't want any economic controls at all.
They have an AUCTION house which is modelled after REAL WORLD AUCTION HOUSES which typically have FEES (sometimes %ages on the sale, sometimes flat fees, sometimes both).
It is not an "economic control." It's a goddamned fee for using the service. If you don't want to use the service then feel free to use the chat channels which have no fees associated. You are paying for the convenience of listing your items and then moving on and not having to spend hours in chat trying to sell them. It's not some governmental scheme to dick you out of your money. Get a grip.
I don't have a problem with a $1 fee on the RMAH, but it amounts to a $75 tax on a 2 billlion gold item - which is 30% of what you could make on the real money AH.
If you're going to have an AH in the game and not have any systems to control item saturation and gold inflation, then I don't understand why you want to also have systems to encourage not using the AH in addition to all of the other economic problems this game has.
$75 is not worth using it as a service fee. That's insane. That's 75x the auction fee on the RMAH. That's more than the cost of the damn game itself, even at launch! That's also 1-2 weeks worth of gold pick ups if you were constantly farming this game every day.
I'm sorry you don't see a problem with this, but using an electric service to help you sell/transfer a digital item is not worth $75. People can eat for an entire week for that amount.
And the difference with a real auction house is that there is no people to pay to run the auction, no security guards that need to be hired and no building to rent to host the auction. If you want to account for the fact that someone had to build the software, I thought that is what the 10+ million sales @ 59.99 was supposed to be for!
Also unlike the real world, there isn't different auction houses competing against one another, so there's no way to drive the fees down. It is whatever Blizzard says it is. It's a monopoly, just like government. In Diablo 3, the internal government and blizzard are one in the same. It's nothing like the real world at all. Of course, all the 'black markets' have fees nowhere near these amounts, which says a lot.
Just because the government taxes people for economic production doesn't make it right for blizzard to do the same. Taxing production in the real world is also counter-productive (and I say immoral, since no government has the right to steal from the fruits of your labour) as well.
In my humble opinion, the fees to level the blacksmith is also robbery if you're not doing the whole self-found thing, but that's another topic altogether.
Nor is it really Blizzards problem that you decide put some dollar value unto your in-game gold.
Man, I couldn't agree more. This whole "in-game gold = real money" is getting way out of hand.
No individual simply "decides" to put a value on in-game gold. It has a value.
Do you decide that your house has no value? Your car? Your computer? It has a value. If it didn't, you wouldn't have worked to obtain them in the first place.
In-game gold has a value. It is basically a conversion of time/effort. It is not very valuable - especially these days as you need to transfer billions of in-game gold to get anything worth-while - but it does have economic value nonetheless.
Ignoring this fact won't make the value of that in-game gold go away.
Gold has "real" value on RMAH, but not on GAH. They are separate entities, and the sad existence of RMAH should not in any way have an influence on what happens with GAH (or what happens with the rest of the game for that matter).
No, the reality is that they are inter-related. Even in D2, you had to constantly compare your items with d2jsp fg for example because otherwise you could lose wealth very quickly in similar ways. That's just the way it is. Everything has some economic value.
Weird, I don't remember that I had to compare my items to d2jsp all the time, maybe my inner economic man took care of it while I was sleeping.
I guess I might also lose potential wealth when walking down the street, as my shoes are in theory losing value by being worn down. Oh, the horror.
Why it should matter while I'm playing a game, I have no idea.
In the end, nothing in Diablo 3 has any monetary value unless you decide to use RMAH (or shady alternatives). Until that point, any gold or otherwise I might have in the game, only has value within the game mechanics.
When designing said game mechanics (such as GAH), RMAH (or D2jsp) ought to be just about irrelevant, since it is not part of the game mechanics - and as such Blizzard has no reason to think that the 15% GAH fee is anything other than an effective in-game gold sink with no monetary value whatsoever.
I give up. You're basically saying my argument is flawed because you personally choose not to give value to certain things in the game, while I am simply using the facts of reality.
Perhaps if I just didn't speak during the shows, they would half as long and all of the points that you disagree with would not be put into the shows, then you guys would certainly have a lot less to complain about.
I'm not exactly complaining about the show - I have never listened to it - hell, I didn't knew you were in that show
From the "show notes list", there seemed to be plenty of things I both agreed and disagreed on. Hooray.
Merely pointing out that it's (imo) weird (and a bit sad that people do this) to translate gold costs in the game to real currencies.
I'm having a hard time grasping how this could happen to something that was supposedly a game.
Are you also annoyed that Blizzard steal real money from your character when enemies hit you and you lose durability?
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The main reason I don't want to see bind-on-equip is simple, I like being able to hand off items after I use them. It makes it easier to upgrade knowing your old stuff isnt completely usless now. I hand them down to friends, or alts, and want that to continue. I do think certain things should be bound.....such as hard to get items like hellfires, because it would completely devalue the content if those could go to auction. I can see some other things being bound for this reason as well, to keep their value high, or if they are character bound it gives me a reason to play alts, which I would certainly welcome. I don't even run Ubers with my alts because the hellfire is account bound.
On the 15% tax:
I actually agree with you to an extent, but only on the high dollar items. I wouldnt mind just seeing a cap on it, like you said flipping isnt a bad thing, but I would still like to discourage people from flipping mid and low lever gear, that could still be annoying for 2 reasons: it encourages playing the AH to gear, and gives a benefit to players with tons of time to scan the AH.
On Movement Speed:
Completely agree with you. I am not sure why people would be terribly upset about this change, it would just speed up gameplay across the board....unless you didnt speed up mob speed to match. But I took this as making the whole game faster. The game does feel a bit slow with no MS. I dont think its about getting anything for free, it is just about making the game feel faster, more exciting, more updated.....as you said most ARPGs move much faster than D3.
"On top of this, the 15% tax encourages transactions to be held outside of the AH, and as gold continues to inflate, more and more transactions will occur outside of the AH."
Okay, I'm not buying stuff for 2 billion (and probably never will as long as I perceive it as if I just payed ~600 Euros for one item). But from what I've read on forums and in discussions with players who are active in that price segment, there is still a lot of stuff to be found in the 1-2b price range on the AH. Trades outside of the AH are mainly done to get more than 2 billion due to the cap. But even if it would be the case that people trade outside the AH, what's bad about this? All the people complaining about the AH must be happy and therefore request a tax of 50% to reduce the impact of the AH. Well.. anyways, I don't have an issue with the 15%, I also don't have a problem if Blizzard gets some revenue out of it (however, they don't get anything out of the GAH, it's just a more-than-welcome gold sink).
The best example I can think of is predatory scalping sites. They will buy large quantity of tickets (paying sales tax) and then resell them to consumers for much higher prices (who also pay sales tax on them again). Beyond the fact that this happens in real life, there MUST be a gold sink in this game because otherwise gold is infinite and infinitely decreasing Real Value. Unless you can think of a better way to do this, don't talk about removing the AH tax, because you're just shooting yourself in the foot in the end
Maybe Blizzard should implement a way to take 15% fee when trading gold outside of AH, if there is a real fear that trading would happen too much outside of AH.
Regarding Bind on Equip, if it was implemented in ANY way, it would really have to be "Bind on Account-Equip" (or whatever it should be called). The game hardly needs to be even more alt-unfriendly than it is with Paragon levels.
As for Movement speed, I don't think we need more movement speed in combat, on top of what can be gained from gear.
Would it be enough to have a free, passive MS buff that only activated when you hadnt been hit and/or hit anything yourself for 3 seconds or so? So one could get faster from fight to fight, without feeling you have to take one of the movement skills just for that, but still not have higher speed in the middle of combat.
With regards to movement speed, I would not mind the base speed staying as is, if only the cap was higher with gear. That would be good, as again, it would create the need for decision on the part of the player, or specific gearing. I just think overall, a lot of the current systems are dumbed down and appear lazy. Richer systems would be welcome. Let's see what happens.
Cheers 0/
RTG Sibcoe
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@ AH Cut
I totally get your point that gambling is a BETTER gold sink. But at this point in time the AH cut is the only remotely-significant gold sink in the game. It'd be best to keep the AH Cut and to implement other gold sinks on top of it. Even with the AH Cut there's still some pretty significant inflation, so I see no reason not to use the AH Cut as a baseline and move from there to implement more gold sinks that further help to curb inflation.
@ Movement Speed
It's already an amazingly-dominant farming stat. If anything it needs a lower cap so that getting multiple movement speed pieces wasn't the only way to have a viable farming toon. We don't need people trying to find movement speed in every slot. I don't see how you equate a movement speed cap with "dumbing down" anything. The stat is so radically important for farming that it's not really a decision to be made... you just must get as much of it as possible. That's the polar opposite of "dumbing down" things because it virtually elimiates choices.
Get a SSD.
Just my 2 cents here.
I think they capped movement speed because they were afraid of everyone stacking it, much like everyone had the Enigma runeword in D2. Teleporting was 100x faster for farming than just running. Likewise, if you have 100% movement speed you're going to farm obscenely fast and everyone will take it without question.
It's not useless if your character needed that item, and it could still be re-purposed into crafting materials after it's no longer useful. Of course, this assumes a better crafting system - and I'd highly encourage you to listen to our crafting episode to understand what I mean here. It's too much to explain - I won't do it.
While binding does introduce some drawbacks, they are nowhere near as bad. You have to pick - do you want the ease of sharing items, or do you want the economy to be destroyed? Take your pick. I choose the former. No choice is perfect, but one is better than the other.
For me, the wasted/stolen effort is wasted/stolen effort. It makes very little difference what the amount is. The game should be consistent in this matter.
I wouldn't want to discourage flipping on any items. I see no reason to favour one group of players over another by doing this. We don't want any economic controls at all.
Just because the government taxes people for economic production doesn't make it right for blizzard to do the same. Taxing production in the real world is also counter-productive (and I say immoral, since no government has the right to steal from the fruits of your labour) as well.
They have an AUCTION house which is modelled after REAL WORLD AUCTION HOUSES which typically have FEES (sometimes %ages on the sale, sometimes flat fees, sometimes both).
It is not an "economic control." It's a goddamned fee for using the service. If you don't want to use the service then feel free to use the chat channels which have no fees associated. You are paying for the convenience of listing your items and then moving on and not having to spend hours in chat trying to sell them. It's not some governmental scheme to dick you out of your money. Get a grip.
I don't have a problem with a $1 fee on the RMAH, but it amounts to a $75 tax on a 2 billlion gold item - which is 30% of what you could make on the real money AH.
If you're going to have an AH in the game and not have any systems to control item saturation and gold inflation, then I don't understand why you want to also have systems to encourage not using the AH in addition to all of the other economic problems this game has.
$75 is not worth using it as a service fee. That's insane. That's 75x the auction fee on the RMAH. That's more than the cost of the damn game itself, even at launch! That's also 1-2 weeks worth of gold pick ups if you were constantly farming this game every day.
I'm sorry you don't see a problem with this, but using an electric service to help you sell/transfer a digital item is not worth $75. People can eat for an entire week for that amount.
And the difference with a real auction house is that there is no people to pay to run the auction, no security guards that need to be hired and no building to rent to host the auction. If you want to account for the fact that someone had to build the software, I thought that is what the 10+ million sales @ 59.99 was supposed to be for!
Also unlike the real world, there isn't different auction houses competing against one another, so there's no way to drive the fees down. It is whatever Blizzard says it is. It's a monopoly, just like government. In Diablo 3, the internal government and blizzard are one in the same. It's nothing like the real world at all. Of course, all the 'black markets' have fees nowhere near these amounts, which says a lot.
Except that it is more effective of course.
The fee isnt exactly stopping the majority from using the AH.
Nor is it really Blizzards problem that you decide put some dollar value unto your in-game gold.
Personally I cant buy dinner with my gold :/ I tried!
You didnt build that /joke
No individual simply "decides" to put a value on in-game gold. It has a value.
Do you decide that your house has no value? Your car? Your computer? It has a value. If it didn't, you wouldn't have worked to obtain them in the first place.
In-game gold has a value. It is basically a conversion of time/effort. It is not very valuable - especially these days as you need to transfer billions of in-game gold to get anything worth-while - but it does have economic value nonetheless.
Ignoring this fact won't make the value of that in-game gold go away.
I guess I might also lose potential wealth when walking down the street, as my shoes are in theory losing value by being worn down. Oh, the horror.
Why it should matter while I'm playing a game, I have no idea.
In the end, nothing in Diablo 3 has any monetary value unless you decide to use RMAH (or shady alternatives). Until that point, any gold or otherwise I might have in the game, only has value within the game mechanics.
When designing said game mechanics (such as GAH), RMAH (or D2jsp) ought to be just about irrelevant, since it is not part of the game mechanics - and as such Blizzard has no reason to think that the 15% GAH fee is anything other than an effective in-game gold sink with no monetary value whatsoever.
Perhaps if I just didn't speak during the shows, they would half as long and all of the points that you disagree with would not be put into the shows, then you guys would certainly have a lot less to complain about.
From the "show notes list", there seemed to be plenty of things I both agreed and disagreed on. Hooray.
Merely pointing out that it's (imo) weird (and a bit sad that people do this) to translate gold costs in the game to real currencies.
I'm having a hard time grasping how this could happen to something that was supposedly a game.
Are you also annoyed that Blizzard steal real money from your character when enemies hit you and you lose durability?