Judging by fan reactions so far however, it seems clear that many people are intent on exclusively using the gold AH regardless of the economic rationality to this. So long as that remains true, there will be use for both, and assuming that the people preferring gold will still want the best gear, the two have a good chance of reaching an equilibrium.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but something tells me that's right up there with New Year's Resolutions and the "I'M NOT GONNA BUY THIS GAME NOW" decree. We both know those things have lifetimes measured in hours, at best.
I think the simple economic reality is going to be that people are going to HAVE to go to the RMAH for loot they actually want. It's just too tempting to be able to make real cash on an item that is valuable, but not of particular use to you. Even if you sell it for gold, how much sense does it make to have billions of gold sitting around which you're never going to use? Sooner or later someone's going to see their huge pile of gold, and they're going to dump a lot of it for cash. All they've REALLY done is just sell that original item for cash which they THOUGHT they were selling for gold.
If you're right about the Diablo Arbitrage Moneymaking Metagame (and I believe you are), then the PRICE between comparable items will be about the same on either, but that's another issue - there are no such things as identical items in Diablo, even among legendaries. Those still have ranges of randomness to their stats.
So, a player is trying to see the difference between one on the RMAH, one of the gold AH, toss in some exchange rate math to see if there is any absolute price difference, and then divine what the difference in stats are worth. And, all the while, closing out one AH and opening the other back and forth, or at BEST page flipping between windows or tabs. Seems like a "compare" checkbox would be useful here.
Or, you could just see two similar items on one AH, not have to do any conversion, and look at the difference in prices in the same currency. You'd be able to do all of this on the same window, without having to bounce back and forth.
I just can't see a majority players who are playing an ACTION rpg sitting on the sidelines for even a spare minute to go through all that comparison mess. I think the RMAH is going to win out, particularly for hi-end loot.
Well, then I guess you have to be careful about which one you pick to stick the rune into, don't you?
Explain to me why, in a game where the developers have said in public that they want to encourage experimentation, that a game mechanic should exist that discourages experimentation. That's what "being careful" is, by the way - the opposite of just trying something to see what happens.
Since when did a little gear-hunting scare off a Diablo player?
The problem isn't looking for gear. The problem is having to waste rune after rune because you don't know what they are until it's too late to change your mind.
2) You can't ever socket that rune to another skill once you do socket it (big deal)
Well Jay Wilson said that not only is this only, as you pointed out, only a matter of discussion amongst the D3 team, but if this became a problem then they would implement something that allows you to 'wipe' a rune. Again, this system hasn't even been iterated upon. All it is is very early discussion, so obviously there are going to be holes in the proposed system.
I just don't get what's wrong with the way things are now. They haven't explained any deficiencies in the current system that justifies taking an ostensibly bad idea and putting a lot of work and time into to make it not a bad a idea when the current idea/system appears to be pretty good.
Sometimes, you CAN think about something too much.
The Rune system is awesome! So what if you don't know what you're getting? You certainly didn't hate unidentified items, did you? That's all this is.
Not really. While nothing has been thusfar changed, what has been DISCUSSED is making it so:
1) You don't know what a rune is until you socket it (no big deal)
2) You can't ever socket that rune to another skill once you do socket it (big deal)
What this means is you won't know if the rune you socketed for Magic Missile is the one you ACTUALLY wanted for Arcane Orb until you socket it in Magic Missile - and by that point, it's too late, because you can't ever use it in any other skill but Magic Missile. If runes weren't known until you socketed them and you could change them to other skills once they WERE known, nobody would really be issuing forth serious complaints about the change.
Right... except the reason those system failed were the huge distribution and production costs associated with having two separate systems active at the same time, and both were run and maintained by two different competing companies.
Sorry, that's not why those competing formats failed. They failed because the marketplace saw them as doing the exact same thing, and picked the one they liked the best. Whenever there are two products the market believes do the EXACT same thing, or close enough to exact such that the differences are irrelevant to the market, one will fail. Period. That's just how it happens.
//ed - Okay, I think I see what you were saying here. You took "fail" to mean "ceased to exist." I mean "fail" in the context of the gold AH, to mean "exists but isn't being used." Obviously it won't cease to exists if the market rejects it, but it'll be largely irrelevant if that happens.
The REAL question is going to be will the gold AH serve a purpose not served by the RMAH? If the answer is no, then the gold AH will be irrelevant. I can foresee a situation where the gold AH will be used for non-endgame gear, and the RMAH will be used for the really valuable stuff, but at this point that's just theory. Who knows if the market will end up using it that way.
Still, in situations like these, the tendency for the market is to just default to one location to do all their business. Ever play EVE Online? Ever try to jump into JITA on a Sunday afternoon? Jita is the system the market determined was the most ideal for trading - it had to do with its central location to the galaxy, its abundance of stations, and a couple of reasons. There were literally HUNDREDS of other systems the market could've picked, but it picked that one. Interestingly, the market even endured MISERABLE game performance in that system in order to attain a central trading location rather than splitting off into multiple sub-markets to improve performance. That shows just how important a central location for doing business really is.
If you remember, the same thing happened in the early days of WoW before all the faction AHs were linked. Despite having three capital cities each, ALL the commercial traffic for the faction concentrated heavily on ONE. It created some terrible performance issues until Blizz wisely linked them all, allowing you to access the same market from anywhere. The AH itself became the central market, independent of a geographic location.
So, like I said...unless one AH does something the other does not, one of the two is going to become irrelevant.
//ed - fixed some spelling errors and clarified some grammar.
Right, because just because you can buy items with money means gold is useless. Its not like you have to use it for everything else.
Not really sure what point you're trying to make here. I will say, however, that I have read Phrozen's article, and a couple of things were brought to light that have changed my opinion SLIGHTLY.
Gold can be sold for cash. That part is KEY because what it does is establish an exchange rate between real currency and gold. You're not stuck trying to divine the exchange rate by looking at two identical items (which will rarely/never exist in Diablo because of random stats even on legendaries) on either AH and then doing math to intuit what the echange rate is - because it will be whatever gold is selling for on the RMAH.
As much as it pains me to say this, I can understand now why Blizz is doing it this way. I think the simple fact of the matter is that in a computer game, they could never create enough "demand" for gold to give it an actual value. I'm not talking about gold sinks, that only fights inflation (an overabundance of money), but will never lend inherent value to a currency. What I AM talking about is creating enough items of worth within in the game which you can ONLY buy with in-game currency. That's what lends value to currency - people wanting to use it to buy things. An in-game economy can NEVER been as complex or "accurate" as a real-world economy for literally millions of reasons - not the least of which is the fact that you're having to "invent" something in game in 5-ish years to match something in the real world that evolved naturally over thousands. Blizz can not ever create enough things in Diablo to make gold a stable currecy with inherent value.
Well...when they "back up" the in-game currency with REAL WORLD currency, they solve that problem. Instead of relying exclusively on an in-game economy to give gold value, what they're REALLY doing is relying on the currency of the region to give gold value. That'll work, I think, because (presuming of course the dollar is still worth anything by launch date - highly questionable right now, IMO) a real-world economy is logarithmically more complicated than Diablo could ever be. Essentially what they're doing is using the gold-cash exchange to create, by proxy, real world economic complexity within Diablo. Because Diablo gold WILL have some real-world value, that means it is lent value by that real-world economy. It's never been done before (unless you count EVE Online, but not on the same scale players-wise), so we'll see if it works. It certainly has potential to work.
That's the pragmatic side of me. The principled side of me still balks at the idea of buying power for cash, and to me, it detracts from the purity, integrity, and "meaningfullness" of accomplishing anything in the game when you know people bought items for real money. Diablo is a gear-centric game, so when you're buying items directly, you're also buying accomplishment indirectly. You're also affecting others' experiences with your purchases, and as a player I think I would feel less proud of my accomplishments if I knew I was aided, even partially, by someone who put in no time and paid for their success without earning it. I was sorta planning on playing Normal-Hell by myself anyway and only going MP when I had defeated those on my own, maybe I'll still do that. Now, with the introduction of a fourth "difficulty" or "mode" or whatever it is - called "Inferno" - maybe we've got an endgame after all and by that point, I think everyone will have mostly earned what they've got, either before or after the fact.
SELLING items that you've farmed for real money and then using an e-balance you have thusly obtained to purchase an item to me still isn't the same thing as someone putting in no time whatsoever and just buying their way to power - at least you still had to farm a drop you didn't want, but still had value to someone, and then sold it at a price you both deemed was fair. It still required you to put in time and effort. All you've done is commoditze that time and effort in an item and exchanged it for currency, another commoditization of the same time and effort.
Oh, so you mean securely trading items like in WoW? Where theres a comprehensive AH and trade window? And still people who sell gold and items for money?
Meh, not really the same thing. In D2, players were using third-party sites because there was no other reasonable alternative. In WoW, people are using third-party sites DESPITE a reasonable alternative. The motivations in those two instances are completely different.
It still has its place, both for that and for the people who don't want to use real money (aka a lot of people who have used up their free listings). If anything making people use real money to list something only discourages them from doing so and promotes trying the gold AH in any scenario where you need gold.
Like I said, the fact that gold can be bought and sold for real money changes the landscape. This sets up the opportunity for arbitrage, which Phrozen did a decent job of explaining. And, the best part of arbitrage is that it forces everything to an equilibrium, so in THEORY there won't be a long-lasting, meaningful difference between the two markets.
I still believe one will end up being used more than the other, and I still believe that will be the RMAH. It's just too troublesome for MOST people who don't get into the Diablo 3 Arbitrage Moneymaking Metagame (and there will be those people, I might even dabble)to deal with two markets, and the natural human tendency is to just default to one. If anything, the gold AH will be used for crap loot that isn't worth the risk of a real-money listing fee.
Again, this brings the question of salvaging - how is salvaging going to be affected by all of this? That's an interesting question, because if the mats you get from salvaging are worth less than what you can garner for selling them item outright, I daresay salvaging and leveling artisans and crafting could take a back seat and never be fully realized by most players.
Official Blizzard Quote:
You'll have access to all the systems by the end of Normal, but that doesn't mean you're going to scratch the surface with them.
You'll be leveling your artisans, teaching them to make new items, finding higher quality runes, finding higher quality gems, combining gems, finding loot in Nightmare that doesn't drop in Normal, finding loot in Hell that doesn't drop in Nightmare, etc. and really continuing to max out use of each of the available power adjustments.
Plus the need to really tighten up builds, get a good mix of skills, pick the right passives to support them, and gear out in specific directions becomes more and more important as the game gets tougher.
I don't think having to become a better player and invest more in all the game systems is a "deadzone", it's where the game gets challenging.
Thanks, I read that already. I'd like to point out that none of what Bashiok listed is character progression. It's ancillary to character progression, but it's not personal, character progression.
At the end of the day, I think people just want to click and put a point into something, even if it is largely illusory. Heck, if you want to get right down to it, the entirety of any computer game is illusory, and could easily be boiled down to a console application that solicits an input from the user, and spits some lines of text back out in the screen. That's all that's REALLY going on anyway, we're just throwing an interface and a story between the user and the computer. Getting all your skills at certain level milestones and have them auto-scale is currently what's being done in WoW, but there is customization in the talent trees. I hope we're able to attain that same level of cusomtization through runes. It sounds like we can, but I hope they don't actually implement that "unknown until socketed" garbage. Sometimes, it's best to let ideas stay internal until you've actually tested them so you don't rile up the herd, and I think this is one of those cases.
//ed - fixed some spelling errors and clarified some grammar.
Or make something that would have existed anyways more controlled and accessible by everyone.
Right right, the "everyone's going to do drugs anyway, so let's just make it legal so we can tax it and regulate it" argument. Didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now. You don't 'solve' bad behavior by changing the rules and calling it 'normal' behavior. Cold hard fact is that players are now going to be allowed to buy in-game power from each other. That's a result of a failed attempt to make a meaningful in-game currency and economy, and nothing else.
See, blizz got the reasons for the existence of D2JSP completely wrong. The forum gold and third party trading didn't come around because players wanted to make real money selling items - it came around because players just wanted to be able to SECURELY trade items, and had no other way to do it. Had a robust, in-game system been present with an in-game currency that had value, there would've been no need for D2JSP.
And everyone keeps trying to point out that the cheater AH is going to optional - news flash, no it ain't. Anytime two things which do the same thing exist, the market will choose one, and the other will fail. Don't believe me? Ever hear of betamax cassette tapes? What happened to records when cassettes and CDs came out? Familiar with the format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD? One will win, the other will lose, and unless something really weird happens, the OBVIOUS conclusion is that the cheater AH will win, if for no other reason than it allows you to cash out real money. AT BEST, the gold AH will exist for all the lower-tier items that aren't worth the risk of a listing fee, and the cheater AH will be where all the desirable stuff goes. This is just basic economics 101, and any game designer who is going to be authoring a major release and wants a stable economy needs to understand these concepts.
Furthermore, you seem to be completely missing the part where there is going to be a system where anyone can list a certain amount of items (or items during a certain day of the week) for free. As in, everyone will be able to engage in the cash AH without ever spending money that they didn't gain through buying other items.
Yeah...let's think about that for a minute Jack. SOMEONE'S going to have to spend money in for you to earn it through selling it. If they don't...there'll never be any in the system. In fact, this system presumes and requires that there be a LOT of someones doing that. If everyone took the approach of "I won't put in my own money, I'll just soak up some of what's already there" then there wouldn't be any "already there" to begin with.
Actually, you would have to open your character sheet every single time you switch a skill. The only difference between the current system and the old system is that you don't have to pay gold every time you reach a certain point.
It's called hyperbole, Jack - literary exaggeration to make a point. At level 24 you stop getting meaningful level milestones, and to me, that seems shallow and console-ish.
And you're forgetting the part where its only a conversation about it, and it hasn't made it into the game yet.
I am doing no such thing Captain Jack. What I AM doing is fearing for where that conversation will go, particularly in light of the other crap these crazies at Blizz have come up with in the past year.
Geez, the more I find out about this game, the less I like it.
- A real-money cheater auction house. Great, destroy the integrity of accomplishing anything in-game by selling in-game power. Good call Blizz, way to renege and do something you said you'd never do.
- No more skill points. And the reason offered? "People save up their points or respec into something new when a better ability comes along." Well...so what? Why does that mean you have to just everything to everyone at certain level milestones? Now once you hit level 24, there is no reason to ever again open up your character sheet unless you're equipping something new.
- Unidentified rune color. I don't care that we won't know what the secondary stats are on the runes - but not even knowing what COLOR they are until you socket them and forever bind them to a skill? Total, utter, complete garbage. That FORCES you onto the AH for the runes you want, FORCES you onto the AH for the garbage you don't, and causes you to WASTE runes on skill A you REALLY wanted for Skill B.
I never thought it was possible for a game to be in development for too great a period of time, but Blizz has proved me wrong. This game would've been better had it come out a year ago. Someone check the cafeteria at the Blizz campus in Irvine, because it seems like they're putting crack in all their food.
I'll probably still buy the game, probably still like it, but I an NOWHERE near as excited about this game today as I was on Saturday.
Now getting rid of skill points... could or could not work. The idea of having items and level effect it mostly is interesting, but I don't think I'll have an opinion on it until I play.
I also don't have much of an opinion other than I think that deciding on a skill should have more weight to it than "Oh well, I can just switch it out if it sucks". I guess in d2 though i found one build I liked and never messed with it after that, so I doubt I will even notice all that much once I find the right build.
I kind of liked having to level up a new char though just to test a new build. Even after all the years D2 has been out.
I'm wondering if they're just going to introduce an ability for the game to play itself while you watch and eat popcorn. That's the direction this BS is headed with autoskills and loot for cash.
They got the reasons for D2JSP's existence completely wrong. It didn't exist because they was an overwhelming demand for items for cash - it existed because there was literally no other system that allowed players to commodotize their time spent in the game and then trade it to another player (i.e. trading cash or items in a secure fashion across the entirety of the playing base). D2JSP existed because, as we all know capitalism and the free market will find a way.
If you provide players with the ability to trade gold and loot in-game with each other and take steps to ensure the in-game currency has value, you destroy the reason for D2JSPs existence, and the amount of folks that actually spend real cash for items is so small, you don't need to worry about it. If anything, adding a cheater AH DEVALUES in-game currency since nobody's going to use that.
As things look right now, I'm afraid I'll have to agree with you - though I have faith in that Blizzard will not screw this up. Hopefully they will listen to the majority of the community, and change it soon, or they will most likely later from complaints.
The outrage expressed today makes the color palette dust-up look like a bingo parlor fist fight between two pensioners. I just can't believe they'd reverse their long-held anti-cash-for-power stance so suddenly and so late in the development cycle like this.
Yeah so I'm posting here now to complain since Blizz slapped me with a 3-day ban on the D3 official forums for calling them out about their rampant purging of all threads that dared to criticize Blizz selling out to cheaters with their cheater auction house.
This destroys the integrity of the game - all of it. Since literally everything you could possibly accomplish within D3 is tied to the gear you have, the ability to buy gears means you're buying success everywhere else. You don't have to work for it or earn it anymore, you just have to pay a couple of dollars and deck yourself out with legendaries.
Why those idiots think this is a good idea and good for the game is beyond me.
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Maybe I'm being cynical, but something tells me that's right up there with New Year's Resolutions and the "I'M NOT GONNA BUY THIS GAME NOW" decree. We both know those things have lifetimes measured in hours, at best.
I think the simple economic reality is going to be that people are going to HAVE to go to the RMAH for loot they actually want. It's just too tempting to be able to make real cash on an item that is valuable, but not of particular use to you. Even if you sell it for gold, how much sense does it make to have billions of gold sitting around which you're never going to use? Sooner or later someone's going to see their huge pile of gold, and they're going to dump a lot of it for cash. All they've REALLY done is just sell that original item for cash which they THOUGHT they were selling for gold.
If you're right about the Diablo Arbitrage Moneymaking Metagame (and I believe you are), then the PRICE between comparable items will be about the same on either, but that's another issue - there are no such things as identical items in Diablo, even among legendaries. Those still have ranges of randomness to their stats.
So, a player is trying to see the difference between one on the RMAH, one of the gold AH, toss in some exchange rate math to see if there is any absolute price difference, and then divine what the difference in stats are worth. And, all the while, closing out one AH and opening the other back and forth, or at BEST page flipping between windows or tabs. Seems like a "compare" checkbox would be useful here.
Or, you could just see two similar items on one AH, not have to do any conversion, and look at the difference in prices in the same currency. You'd be able to do all of this on the same window, without having to bounce back and forth.
I just can't see a majority players who are playing an ACTION rpg sitting on the sidelines for even a spare minute to go through all that comparison mess. I think the RMAH is going to win out, particularly for hi-end loot.
In the new system they are proposing, you won't know even what color the rune is until you socket it, forever binding it to that particular skill.
Explain to me why, in a game where the developers have said in public that they want to encourage experimentation, that a game mechanic should exist that discourages experimentation. That's what "being careful" is, by the way - the opposite of just trying something to see what happens.
The problem isn't looking for gear. The problem is having to waste rune after rune because you don't know what they are until it's too late to change your mind.
Given that runes can drastically alter the way a skill works, that conclusion is a non-sequitur.
Nothing. The problem comes with wasted effort when you have to waste a rune just to find out what it is.
I just don't get what's wrong with the way things are now. They haven't explained any deficiencies in the current system that justifies taking an ostensibly bad idea and putting a lot of work and time into to make it not a bad a idea when the current idea/system appears to be pretty good.
Sometimes, you CAN think about something too much.
Not really. While nothing has been thusfar changed, what has been DISCUSSED is making it so:
1) You don't know what a rune is until you socket it (no big deal)
2) You can't ever socket that rune to another skill once you do socket it (big deal)
What this means is you won't know if the rune you socketed for Magic Missile is the one you ACTUALLY wanted for Arcane Orb until you socket it in Magic Missile - and by that point, it's too late, because you can't ever use it in any other skill but Magic Missile. If runes weren't known until you socketed them and you could change them to other skills once they WERE known, nobody would really be issuing forth serious complaints about the change.
Sorry, that's not why those competing formats failed. They failed because the marketplace saw them as doing the exact same thing, and picked the one they liked the best. Whenever there are two products the market believes do the EXACT same thing, or close enough to exact such that the differences are irrelevant to the market, one will fail. Period. That's just how it happens.
//ed - Okay, I think I see what you were saying here. You took "fail" to mean "ceased to exist." I mean "fail" in the context of the gold AH, to mean "exists but isn't being used." Obviously it won't cease to exists if the market rejects it, but it'll be largely irrelevant if that happens.
The REAL question is going to be will the gold AH serve a purpose not served by the RMAH? If the answer is no, then the gold AH will be irrelevant. I can foresee a situation where the gold AH will be used for non-endgame gear, and the RMAH will be used for the really valuable stuff, but at this point that's just theory. Who knows if the market will end up using it that way.
Still, in situations like these, the tendency for the market is to just default to one location to do all their business. Ever play EVE Online? Ever try to jump into JITA on a Sunday afternoon? Jita is the system the market determined was the most ideal for trading - it had to do with its central location to the galaxy, its abundance of stations, and a couple of reasons. There were literally HUNDREDS of other systems the market could've picked, but it picked that one. Interestingly, the market even endured MISERABLE game performance in that system in order to attain a central trading location rather than splitting off into multiple sub-markets to improve performance. That shows just how important a central location for doing business really is.
If you remember, the same thing happened in the early days of WoW before all the faction AHs were linked. Despite having three capital cities each, ALL the commercial traffic for the faction concentrated heavily on ONE. It created some terrible performance issues until Blizz wisely linked them all, allowing you to access the same market from anywhere. The AH itself became the central market, independent of a geographic location.
So, like I said...unless one AH does something the other does not, one of the two is going to become irrelevant.
//ed - fixed some spelling errors and clarified some grammar.
Not really sure what point you're trying to make here. I will say, however, that I have read Phrozen's article, and a couple of things were brought to light that have changed my opinion SLIGHTLY.
Gold can be sold for cash. That part is KEY because what it does is establish an exchange rate between real currency and gold. You're not stuck trying to divine the exchange rate by looking at two identical items (which will rarely/never exist in Diablo because of random stats even on legendaries) on either AH and then doing math to intuit what the echange rate is - because it will be whatever gold is selling for on the RMAH.
As much as it pains me to say this, I can understand now why Blizz is doing it this way. I think the simple fact of the matter is that in a computer game, they could never create enough "demand" for gold to give it an actual value. I'm not talking about gold sinks, that only fights inflation (an overabundance of money), but will never lend inherent value to a currency. What I AM talking about is creating enough items of worth within in the game which you can ONLY buy with in-game currency. That's what lends value to currency - people wanting to use it to buy things. An in-game economy can NEVER been as complex or "accurate" as a real-world economy for literally millions of reasons - not the least of which is the fact that you're having to "invent" something in game in 5-ish years to match something in the real world that evolved naturally over thousands. Blizz can not ever create enough things in Diablo to make gold a stable currecy with inherent value.
Well...when they "back up" the in-game currency with REAL WORLD currency, they solve that problem. Instead of relying exclusively on an in-game economy to give gold value, what they're REALLY doing is relying on the currency of the region to give gold value. That'll work, I think, because (presuming of course the dollar is still worth anything by launch date - highly questionable right now, IMO) a real-world economy is logarithmically more complicated than Diablo could ever be. Essentially what they're doing is using the gold-cash exchange to create, by proxy, real world economic complexity within Diablo. Because Diablo gold WILL have some real-world value, that means it is lent value by that real-world economy. It's never been done before (unless you count EVE Online, but not on the same scale players-wise), so we'll see if it works. It certainly has potential to work.
That's the pragmatic side of me. The principled side of me still balks at the idea of buying power for cash, and to me, it detracts from the purity, integrity, and "meaningfullness" of accomplishing anything in the game when you know people bought items for real money. Diablo is a gear-centric game, so when you're buying items directly, you're also buying accomplishment indirectly. You're also affecting others' experiences with your purchases, and as a player I think I would feel less proud of my accomplishments if I knew I was aided, even partially, by someone who put in no time and paid for their success without earning it. I was sorta planning on playing Normal-Hell by myself anyway and only going MP when I had defeated those on my own, maybe I'll still do that. Now, with the introduction of a fourth "difficulty" or "mode" or whatever it is - called "Inferno" - maybe we've got an endgame after all and by that point, I think everyone will have mostly earned what they've got, either before or after the fact.
SELLING items that you've farmed for real money and then using an e-balance you have thusly obtained to purchase an item to me still isn't the same thing as someone putting in no time whatsoever and just buying their way to power - at least you still had to farm a drop you didn't want, but still had value to someone, and then sold it at a price you both deemed was fair. It still required you to put in time and effort. All you've done is commoditze that time and effort in an item and exchanged it for currency, another commoditization of the same time and effort.
Meh, not really the same thing. In D2, players were using third-party sites because there was no other reasonable alternative. In WoW, people are using third-party sites DESPITE a reasonable alternative. The motivations in those two instances are completely different.
Given that gold can be bought with real money, I believe the main way to get large amounts of it will be the RMAH.
Like I said, the fact that gold can be bought and sold for real money changes the landscape. This sets up the opportunity for arbitrage, which Phrozen did a decent job of explaining. And, the best part of arbitrage is that it forces everything to an equilibrium, so in THEORY there won't be a long-lasting, meaningful difference between the two markets.
I still believe one will end up being used more than the other, and I still believe that will be the RMAH. It's just too troublesome for MOST people who don't get into the Diablo 3 Arbitrage Moneymaking Metagame (and there will be those people, I might even dabble)to deal with two markets, and the natural human tendency is to just default to one. If anything, the gold AH will be used for crap loot that isn't worth the risk of a real-money listing fee.
Again, this brings the question of salvaging - how is salvaging going to be affected by all of this? That's an interesting question, because if the mats you get from salvaging are worth less than what you can garner for selling them item outright, I daresay salvaging and leveling artisans and crafting could take a back seat and never be fully realized by most players.
Thanks, I read that already. I'd like to point out that none of what Bashiok listed is character progression. It's ancillary to character progression, but it's not personal, character progression.
At the end of the day, I think people just want to click and put a point into something, even if it is largely illusory. Heck, if you want to get right down to it, the entirety of any computer game is illusory, and could easily be boiled down to a console application that solicits an input from the user, and spits some lines of text back out in the screen. That's all that's REALLY going on anyway, we're just throwing an interface and a story between the user and the computer. Getting all your skills at certain level milestones and have them auto-scale is currently what's being done in WoW, but there is customization in the talent trees. I hope we're able to attain that same level of cusomtization through runes. It sounds like we can, but I hope they don't actually implement that "unknown until socketed" garbage. Sometimes, it's best to let ideas stay internal until you've actually tested them so you don't rile up the herd, and I think this is one of those cases.
//ed - fixed some spelling errors and clarified some grammar.
Right right, the "everyone's going to do drugs anyway, so let's just make it legal so we can tax it and regulate it" argument. Didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now. You don't 'solve' bad behavior by changing the rules and calling it 'normal' behavior. Cold hard fact is that players are now going to be allowed to buy in-game power from each other. That's a result of a failed attempt to make a meaningful in-game currency and economy, and nothing else.
See, blizz got the reasons for the existence of D2JSP completely wrong. The forum gold and third party trading didn't come around because players wanted to make real money selling items - it came around because players just wanted to be able to SECURELY trade items, and had no other way to do it. Had a robust, in-game system been present with an in-game currency that had value, there would've been no need for D2JSP.
And everyone keeps trying to point out that the cheater AH is going to optional - news flash, no it ain't. Anytime two things which do the same thing exist, the market will choose one, and the other will fail. Don't believe me? Ever hear of betamax cassette tapes? What happened to records when cassettes and CDs came out? Familiar with the format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD? One will win, the other will lose, and unless something really weird happens, the OBVIOUS conclusion is that the cheater AH will win, if for no other reason than it allows you to cash out real money. AT BEST, the gold AH will exist for all the lower-tier items that aren't worth the risk of a listing fee, and the cheater AH will be where all the desirable stuff goes. This is just basic economics 101, and any game designer who is going to be authoring a major release and wants a stable economy needs to understand these concepts.
Yeah...let's think about that for a minute Jack. SOMEONE'S going to have to spend money in for you to earn it through selling it. If they don't...there'll never be any in the system. In fact, this system presumes and requires that there be a LOT of someones doing that. If everyone took the approach of "I won't put in my own money, I'll just soak up some of what's already there" then there wouldn't be any "already there" to begin with.
It's called hyperbole, Jack - literary exaggeration to make a point. At level 24 you stop getting meaningful level milestones, and to me, that seems shallow and console-ish.
I am doing no such thing Captain Jack. What I AM doing is fearing for where that conversation will go, particularly in light of the other crap these crazies at Blizz have come up with in the past year.
- A real-money cheater auction house. Great, destroy the integrity of accomplishing anything in-game by selling in-game power. Good call Blizz, way to renege and do something you said you'd never do.
- No more skill points. And the reason offered? "People save up their points or respec into something new when a better ability comes along." Well...so what? Why does that mean you have to just everything to everyone at certain level milestones? Now once you hit level 24, there is no reason to ever again open up your character sheet unless you're equipping something new.
- Unidentified rune color. I don't care that we won't know what the secondary stats are on the runes - but not even knowing what COLOR they are until you socket them and forever bind them to a skill? Total, utter, complete garbage. That FORCES you onto the AH for the runes you want, FORCES you onto the AH for the garbage you don't, and causes you to WASTE runes on skill A you REALLY wanted for Skill B.
I never thought it was possible for a game to be in development for too great a period of time, but Blizz has proved me wrong. This game would've been better had it come out a year ago. Someone check the cafeteria at the Blizz campus in Irvine, because it seems like they're putting crack in all their food.
I'll probably still buy the game, probably still like it, but I an NOWHERE near as excited about this game today as I was on Saturday.
Four legs good, two legs BETTER!
I'm wondering if they're just going to introduce an ability for the game to play itself while you watch and eat popcorn. That's the direction this BS is headed with autoskills and loot for cash.
They got the reasons for D2JSP's existence completely wrong. It didn't exist because they was an overwhelming demand for items for cash - it existed because there was literally no other system that allowed players to commodotize their time spent in the game and then trade it to another player (i.e. trading cash or items in a secure fashion across the entirety of the playing base). D2JSP existed because, as we all know capitalism and the free market will find a way.
If you provide players with the ability to trade gold and loot in-game with each other and take steps to ensure the in-game currency has value, you destroy the reason for D2JSPs existence, and the amount of folks that actually spend real cash for items is so small, you don't need to worry about it. If anything, adding a cheater AH DEVALUES in-game currency since nobody's going to use that.
The outrage expressed today makes the color palette dust-up look like a bingo parlor fist fight between two pensioners. I just can't believe they'd reverse their long-held anti-cash-for-power stance so suddenly and so late in the development cycle like this.
This destroys the integrity of the game - all of it. Since literally everything you could possibly accomplish within D3 is tied to the gear you have, the ability to buy gears means you're buying success everywhere else. You don't have to work for it or earn it anymore, you just have to pay a couple of dollars and deck yourself out with legendaries.
Why those idiots think this is a good idea and good for the game is beyond me.