This, is one of the many features that us Diablo players have been rather skeptical about. In a rather lengthy post, Bashiok explained why BoE will be in Diablo III, and why it is an effective way to manage the economy. The following will be a highly condensed version, but see here if you wish to read the all of the related blue posts.
Official Blizzard Quote:
I want to downplay or even kill this notion now. We do NOT need to drop items more frequently because of Bind on Equip. Let's not kid ourselves here - the economy in Diablo II is broken. The "fix" for this broken economy is to, every so often, wipe it clean. All characters and items are swept into the trash bin that is non-ladder and we have a pristine economy ready to welcome trading with open arms... until it turns to crap and the whole cycle begins again. This wonderful dystopia also comes with incentives to play there (rankings/unique items/etc.) and it all works to help create a somewhat stable economy. For a little while.
While the Diablo II economy was fun for a while, we have to admit, Bashiok is right. The economy in Diablo II was horribly broken, do you remember having the first wave of Shakos worth several high runes, then plummet down to a Pul rune about a month into the ladder reset?
It is this kind of flooding that BoE will be preventing. Without BoE, stockpiles of the highest items can be amassed, and freely traded between characters. While this does allow you to amass wealth, it does not keep a stable economy, as it will be flooded with items, with no way to remove them from the economy aside from losing them, or ladder resets.
With BoE, we'll see a much more stable economy. This is, of course, because items will be regularly removed from the trading pool once bound to a player. This will also force us to put a lot more thought into our builds, we will have to plan them out, and figure out exactly what we want to bind to our characters. So for those of you who think that Diablo III will be "carebeared", think again, BoE has got your back.
Official Blizzard Quote:
We could have drop rates in Diablo III with the exact same frequency as Diablo II, and by making the highest items BoE, create a far more stable economy.
To me, this made perfect sense.
Most often, the highest items were the ones that drove the economy. This was because they were the rarest, and in the highest demand for builds. With BoE, that demand will stay high, since the economy will not be saturated with items several months into the ladder.
Official Blizzard Quote:
But just adding in BoE items obviously isn't going to totally fix things all by itself. It's important to note that BoE items are not the one stop fix for all economic issues. It's going to take a lot of different attacks from a lot of different angles to ensure we have a nice stable economy. Bind on Equip items are just one of those attacks.
This has me quite hopeful for the economy in Diablo III. Honestly, we can easily guess that not much thought went into stabilizing the economy in Diablo II, aside from the ladder resets, and the occasional rust storm to weed out all those duped items.
However, in Diablo III, not only will we be getting what Diablo II began, but we'll be seeing all sorts of new methods of stabilization. BoE just happens to be one of the crowd, and I'm quite excited to see what else they've got in store for us.
Wait and watch, friends. The fun ain't over yet. Obviously, they're learning from D2.
Except that will happen anyway because of the random nature of the games loot. BOE makes sense when X mob has a % chance to drop an item. This way, a player, or group of players, can farm said mob until everybody gets what items they want and then they turn around and sell the leftovers for profit.
So, unless Blizzard is telling us that Tal-Rasha has a 15% chance to drop Tal-Rashas Whip of Ancient Wrappings with this, they've essentially started down the path of an incredibly broken in game economy, an uninteresting small-group environment where hand-me-downs function to create equality amongst members, and a slightly less interesting single-player experience where a handed down item might complete a character build.
A better solution is to just have all items be BOP and completely ignore the economy altogether.
This. Remove dupes, the economy is fine. Items naturally lose value as more of them exist.
There's a reason SoJ's are the currency of choice in Diablo 2 :|.
Removing duping from the game wouldn't solve the economy by itself (although it'd help a lot). Without BoE, unique and set items would simply be hoarded and would eventually lose all value as the game is played longer by more people.
If you find a great item, you must decide whether to keep it or trade it (just like any BoE in WoW). You can't just slap it on knowing you'll be able to pawn it off to the next newbie when you find something better. The destruction of items for gold is the only way to lower the amount of those items in circulation, thus keeping the economy relatively balanced.
You may not like it, but it's a good decision by Blizzard and they have way more experience with in-game economies than anyone here could possibly begin to lie about.
Diablo 2 economy would still fail without dupes. Just as the poster above me said, SoJs would just replace the runes. Either way we are stuck using in game items as a de facto currency since the gold system is broken.
At least with the dupes we can have runewords. I seriously doubt most of you would actually enjoy it with dupes gone (or even worse with no hacks and no bots). We've all become accustomed to being able to actually build our characters.
I've been playing Diablo 2 since it came out. I've seen exactly one SoJ since I first started playing, and that dropped in the Chaos Fortress for my amazon before LoD even came out. That's 10 years of playing, probably close to a hundred thousand farming runs, clearing probably millions of hell difficulty mobs and millions of nightmare difficulty mobs. Do you HONESTLY believe that if dupes weren't in the game, the market would have anywhere near the amount of items it does? The astronomical values of high end loot dropping alone guarentees that the market wouldn't become saturated.
Let's not forget the time when rares(pre-LOD, post LOD rings/crafted amulets) were THEE BEST items you could get. Now lets add low-ish drop rate into items that come with completely random stats.
If anything, they should make the mid tier stuff that is easier to find BoE since it is well....easier to find. The high end stuff that is much more difficult to find, remains tradeable.
This is taking into account that every mob you kill in hell difficulty doesn't drop a unique or set item or high rune or awesome rare.
I"m agreeing with the others that are saying duping destroyed D2 because it did.
I played that game like a crack addict literally. I've probably wracked up a couple thousand hours playing from the start to the end and I have never in my entire play time seen a SOJ drop for me. Meph runs, pindle runs ect... I've gotten a couple elite items like Stormshield... But nothing to brag about.
Dupes are what caused the problem. But, if blizzard thinks that BOE will make the economy better in a NEW game with a NEW economy then I trust them.
Then later on, you found a higher defense Shako, and you would want to equip that on your build again. The old Shako is immediately gone from the economy, instead of being able to trade it away again, generating infinite amount of Shakos.
And you know how Diablo is, everyone wants to have that perfect raven frost and 6bo cta
so I guess BOE make alot of sense! Good job blizzard!!
As for D2, duping really did mess everything up. However without duping, there wouldn't be very many runewords out there. *cough LW* So basically, blizz screwed that one up from the beginning. No BoE wouldn't fix D2's problems, but since D3 will be a different game (I hope quite a bit different, and a whole hell of a lot better), it could work. As for SoJ's, again another item which just doesn't follow the rest of the high-end gear drop rates. Which is just mind-numbing stupid, especially since the addition of the Annihilus crap. Why blizzard decided to implement a system in which the most valued item (with the absolute lowest drop rate) should be thrown away dozens+ at a time to obtain 1 charm is crazy. (I realize that many people could obtain a Anni at the same time, becuz all games on the server will spawn uberD, but it's still stupid) And since the Annihilus is the most valued item, due to the 10% exp gain, a lot of SoJ's get spent this way, and thus their value increases even more.
Fixing D2's economy is probably a lost cause, it would require too many changes to the way the game functions, because it just wasn't well designed to start with. Hopefully Blizz takes that into consideration and works very hard with an ample amount of beta testing to get it right.
On a personal side, even by doing NM Andy and Meph countless times in the last 7-8 years, I still have found only 2 SoJ's. During different ladder seasons of course, and the limited amount available for trade led me to exclude them as gear choices (even when I had 20-30 hrs in stash from trading and hoarding wealth). And I've never been too big on Annihilus ever, but as it's not possible for me playtime wise to lvl a char past 94, it's really just not that helpful to me.
The best current solution for D2 (although an incomplete fix, it would be easy to implement) imo would be to fix duping completely, and increase the drop rates of runes (which they did in 1.13 thankfully), and also the drop rates of SoJ's.
The economy in DII is just broken.
The drop rate is low (patch 1.13 is gonna help i guess), the ladder make us to restart so there's only dupe to help us to have what we want.
I 'm not saying that I dupe because i'm not, i'm just saying that witout dupe we wouldn't have a haft of what we have.
Anyway if we keep the same drope rate in Diablo 3 it should be better for one reason (even without dupe), we're gonna have our own drop... what you see is yours.
How many time you didn't jump enought fast on an item?
At least this way if you play a lot you're gonna have much more chances to get what you want wihout having someone else to jump on a good drop before you.
And if the economy is better i'm gonna be happy!
^ This
hi mom!
As far as the economy, if you took it in school and actually understood it you won't be arguing on how this will kill it. Its going to fix prices and not have them fluctuate like crazy. What is the number one risk to currency? Inflation. How do you cause hyper inflation, de-value a currency and destroy it? Flood the market with the currency. That’s why countries, for example Canada, have a central bank. They fix how much currency is floating around in the market in order to keep the value some what stable. Take Vietnam. A while back they built a bunch of infrastructure. To pay for it they just began printing money and devalued the absolute crap out of it. Now the Dong is so low its really not even worth dirt. I know this is long and there are many more factors that go into currency valuation but this is just simple short example to try and demonstrate supply and demand.
Supply and demand is the basis of economics. What I was trying to show with the example is if you can control the supply you can fix prices somewhat. The demand for high level items will always be high of course, so fix the supply as well, you fix the price. There will be a little fluctuation of course but that’s what you want. BOE will help control this supply. Again it won't be a magical fix but its a step in the right direction for sure. I think we are all taking the D2 economy as well and applying the changes to that to see what the effect will be. This is just simply flawed. The D3 economy will be completely different and my guess is it won't be an item based economy. Expect a shift to the gold standard; it’s the easiest thing for them to manipulate the levels of in the game.
Again, I apologize for making this post long but I want to give one more example of the effects of controlling supply to kind of drive the point home. Everyone remembers when oil prices per barrel went crazy, up into the $150 per barrel at one point. There are a lot of reasons why this happened and that will be WAY to long to go into but for arguments sake let’s say it was completely because the supply and demand was out of whack. Again before I get some people trying to pick that apart I know that’s not the only reason why, again, arguments sake. Anyways the Saudi Arabians came out and said they wanted, and felt, oil should be at around $75 a barrel. Check the prices I believe it’s at around $78 today. It took a while to come to that level and there were fluctuations as with any open market but look at a 12 month chart and you can see it come up and level off around $75 for around the last 4 months. How did they do this? Controlled supply. When your one of the largest oil producing nations you can do this.
BOE is just one of the engines Blizzard is going to use to accomplish these ends. As I said before my bet is we are moving to a monetary standard so controlling the supply of the items will fix the monetary value of the item. Now, to control inflation of the actual monetary unit we will use there will be many gold sinks the game that they have already talked about. Same basic principles apply to that. So now Blizzard will control all supply and therefore fix prices and demand. Demand moves as an adverse function of supply (forgot to mention this). As one increase the other decrease and visa versa. Fix one you basically fix the other.
So, in my opinion, bravo :thumbsup: Blizzard your head is on the right track and you are well on your way to making a much more viable economy! God I can’t wait for this game haha.
(Wish this would have happened in university could have used this for the beginnings of a paper :P)
lol
BOE (binds on Equiped) means the item is tradable till u put it on.. This means if someone finds a way to dupe in D3 and has not equiped one of the items he may be able to dupe the rare BOE items ne way. If the items was BOP (bind on Pickup - i would be ok with) only then woud it put dupes out of the picture, but in doing so the economy would be horrible.
Back to the numbers.. 5 million players. If there was 5 million players playing every day... Farming a single boss for a rare and valuable .1% drop that took 1 hour to farm... there could potentially be 1000 of them items found ever hour.. thats 24,000 a day. Not everyone finding the item will be using it... so there will be plenty of items to trade off for what u want and need. Everyone will get there items so dont fret.
Seeing as how Blizzard is designing the entire game (and hence, the economy) from scratch, I think it's safe to say they know a hell of a lot more about what they're doing than you ever could.
I'm having a pretty difficult time understanding what you're even getting at with your post. Are you trying to say that you wan't all players to have equal gear? Why would anybody want that?