First off, Bashiok made a long reply to this thread on the subject of what types of trading systems will be in Diablo 3:
Next up, and this isn't too surprising, Bashiok responded to the same overly enthused member in this thread about how the user interface and icons we've seen in Diablo 3 so far are really just placeholders.I'm not sure I understood all of what you said, sorry, it sort of read like stereo instructions written by the guy that scares people away from using the pay phone at the 7-11 down the street.
Just a couple of my own cents on the system. First off we really don't have a solid plan for any sort of external trading system, that is anything beyond being in the same game with the person. We know we'd like something like that though if at all possible.
Foremost - spamming is bad. I think trade channels usually suck because of the requirement to spam. The amount of time and effort spent just to get your items noticed borders on brain-explosiony. Throw in the lack of easily gauged economy and you're usually left out in the dark, laughed at, ripped off, etc. Your suggestion seems to mix the idea of an auction house and trade channel, in that you can use a channel in-game to spam, and then have some sort of UI to trade the item. That definitely solves one issue, which is needing to leave the game and just sit in a chat channel. What it doesn't solve is needing to sit in a chat channel and spam. Sure, you could probably play and spam the channel every once in a while but it's really not the cleanest approach. You're still spamming a chat channel, you're still limited to the people that want to see that spam (ie not many).
Since you brought it up let's move on to the World of Warcraft's auction house. World of Warcraft did not invent the auction house trading system. It may have certainly refined it, but an irrational hatred of the game that some of you seem to have really shouldn't translate to game systems that aren't original to it. There are some major advantages to an auction house similar to WoW's. You don't have to be present being the biggest and best. You can be playing with friends, PvPing, asleep, at school or work, and someone has the ability to see your items, and you have a greater chance to sell/trade them. You don't have to spam a channel, you don't have to even be online and playing. That's HUGE, and really the main reason so many people use trading systems such as websites and forums for Diablo II. You want to focus on playing the game or not playing the game, not sitting around hoping someone wants your item.
It also helps form a visible and easily identified economy. I'm a new player, I got a sword I think it's probably pretty nice, I can go on an auction house and search for it or similar swords and get an idea of how much it should sell for. In this case being in a trade channel is no better whether it's in-game or out of game. What you'd probably end up with is people still going to forums and more static styles of trading found on websites, but even then any unified sense of economy is spread thin. Maybe that's not such a bad system in itself, and an official trading site could work. Of course what you lose either way though, auction house or website, is in-game player interaction. Which is what I assume you're striving to keep.
When it comes down to it, any change or addition or removal of any systems have to be weighed. Do the positives outweigh the negatives?
I'll go back to what I said at the beginning and state we don't know what if any types of trading systems will be in the final game. Maybe there won't be, it may be that eventually we settle on leaving it Diablo II style. We have some ideas of what would be cool, but at the end of the day we're not going to do anything that isn't far and away a more positive change for the game.
So there you have it. As far as the UI and icons go, we've yet to see what's really going to appear in the game."Wow... well you're obviously very excited.
Uhm, well out of all the things you said I guess I could probably talk about the icons. All of the Diablo III UI and icons are created by the Diablo III team, mainly our UI designer Mike Nicholson. We're not taking any art from other games, it's all created for Diablo III. It should also be noted that everything seen thus far should be considered placeholder, a lot of the UI has already changed fairly significantly."
Moving right along, another member asked Bashiok questions about whether or not Blizzard plans on making use of Direct X 10 in Diablo 3. Here's what he had to say:
Plenty to digest for one day, eh? Let the discussions begin!"We're not currently using any specific DirectX 10 features in Diablo III. That could potentially change of course, but if it did we don't have any plans to then require DirectX 10 to play the game."
Someone posts an item that they want to sell and people are allowed to offer anything they want for the item. One person could get multiple offers for the same item. They log on the next day and choose which offer they want.
If for some reason the person who offered an item no longer has the item or has money to pay for it than it will shoot back an error and he goes on to the next offer that was given to him.
I agree that the barter system would be best for a game like diablo. I dont like the idea of a standardized market economy cause I think it will take the fun out of player player interaction and the merchant of death feeling I got pawning off my items the old fashioned way. I think some risk and uncertainty was what made trading so fun in the first place. dont lie and pretend you didn't love ripping someone off for twice or more the item value. no risk = lameeeeee
What happens as you get lots of gold -- and everyone else does too?
The "standard" price becomes a drop in the bucket, compared to how much money you have. Everything will cost 0.0001% of your treasure chest.
Except for the newbies. But what can you get from a newbie? Everything they have is worthless to you, including their tiny little purse.
What I'm saying is that in games where the players get more and more gold & loot, hard-coded prices don't work. The way NPC vendors charge for stuff is the big culprit. (Stuff with level requirements 'windows' is the small culprit).
If they charged according to what players bought/sold things for yesterday, then the market would self-correct. A loaf of bread could cost $100, and everyone would be ok with it because they were actually buying/selling it to each other for that price yesterday.
Even better than yesterday's price would be to take the average price of an item for the last week. And throw out the top 5% and bottom 5% prices before figuring the average. This eliminates market griefers. Note that these are the actual sold prices, not the for sale offers on a trader.
Another major advantage of letting NPCs price according to what's really going on, is that the players will be able to look up the price that vendors charge. And knowing this is the last week's average, they will buy/sell at that price. End result? The price spread quickly narrows, and settles around the averages.
It can also be quite useful to the dev team. If the price of an object soars way out of what they thought it was worth, or if it drops to nearly worthless, then they can look into why. Maybe it's got too many nerfs and no one wants it. Or maybe it is really hard to come by, which could raise the price if it's worth having, or lower the price if it's just not worth the effort. Or maybe there's a better one for just five more minutes of playtime.
[Note: The game staff stated reduced griefing is a project goal]
A ingame trading system would be ideal. It levels the field somewhat between experienced and newbie players. A system that presents option for both barter and cash trading would be better too (i.e. implicite offline messaging, trading system).
- UI. Premature until we do see a later build.
- DX10. Blizzard has smartly made their game more accessible by delibrately benchmarking system requirement at the median (arguably below even). DX10 is likely not going to take off within the next 1-1.5 years. Therefore their stating that it will not be a requirement is not surprising.
D2 subsequently introduced (Glide, I think?) in a patch for the gfx whiz-bang but most of us were happily doing well without it.
I can't believe they would consider not having any sort of auction house system. He tells whats bad about a D2 system, but then goes and say how they wouldn't add something if it didn't make things better... but you just said that it WOULD. Geeze.
Blizzard have said that gold will actually be worth something, and I take them at their word.
The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is making items need repairing more often, and the cost being related to the player's level. (It will obviously be something better than that, but you get the idea)
Also, the idea that at high levels, players will be able to farm for gold at specific locations which have high gold drops/high item drops which can be sold for gold (if such a location exists) the player will amass piles and piles of gold.
I'm sure all the creative minds at blizzard will think of something though