The Future of Item Selling
As we all know, the purchasing and selling of digitized goods is a huge problem in Blizzard games, particularly Diablo II and World of Warcraft. With Diablo III on the horizon, I am curious as to how Blizzard may deal with this problem. As there are no plans for having absolutely BoE/BoP items, anything can easily be traded in-game, or sold on a third party website for cash. Some may argue that it's fair because the hardcore players can obtain items by playing, while the casual players, who still want epic gear, can spend a few bucks and be just as good. Others would say that purchasing items isn't fair in the least bit, because they spend countless hours farming for all that epic gear, that others may be able to get by spending 10 minutes and using a credit card. To resolve this issue, Blizzard could go about it a few different ways...
Blizzard-Hosted Store: Instead of having Blizzard attempt to crack down, or ignore item stores, they could simply open up their own "official" store, where everyone could potentially purchase items from. If item selling is going to be going on, Blizzard could use the money from this store to put into the game, to help make the game better for us. So in a sense, you'd be paying extra for some possible cool future things in D3.
User-hosted Stores: Blizzard could allow users to open up their own stores, to gain profit from. Assuming there will be no botters, these users would have to farm gear to sell themselves, so their countless hours of grinding and farming will earn them some cash.
No Stores: You would prefer Blizzard cracked down on all possible item store attempts and forced users to either trade for, or farm items.
Vanity Items only: The purchasing of only items, such as dyes, etc, that make you visually cooler, but do not affect gameplay whatsoever.
In-Game Gear: Players could purchase any item in the game that can also be found via farming, allowing casual players to be just as good as hardcore players.
Top Tier Gear: You would prefer the only way to obtain the top tier gear is to purchase it from the store, not allowing it to drop in-game.
Other: Perhaps you've come to a conclusion we haven't thought of. If so, please explain in the comments below.
All that in mind, we want to know, what is your position on Item Selling in Diablo 3?
In our previous poll, we wanted to know how you decided which class to play. The results showed "playstyle" as the biggest factor, with a majority of the votes. After playstyle, "archetype" and "skills and traits" tied for second place, with just barely a quarter of the votes that playstyle had.
Casual players should not be able to spend a few bucks and instantly get the gear that the hardcore spent hours trying to get. The economy should only be within the game itself... outsourcing the economy basically makes all in-game trading worthless.
I do agree that players shouldn't be able to buy items to basically shoot their way up to a prestige that they didn't earn by playing, I think we can all agree to that. The same goes for unique things like visuals, dyes, stuff like that.
no stores is better
Seeing as Blizzard aims to use in game gold as the main currency, I doubt there will be much item trading and the need for sites as d2jsp etc. However, goldfarming and gold selling sites will most likely be a fact a few months after release, and unless they find an effective way of eliminating/punishing these offenses, some people will always "cheat" their way to the top, but that's their loss.
If people want to cheat, just provide another open-battle.net service for cheating.
Granted buying it makes you excited to play again, because you are godly the moment your card clears. However, that's a cheap thrill and ultimately not in the spirit of this game.
All the same, clearly a lot of people like the idea of being able to buy things that offer them no real use or benefit, so more power to them and companies that cash in on them, I suppose.
I think it's also important to point out that the sales of in-game or otherwise virtual items are considered illegal in some places, as well as simply violating the ToS of many games as well as selling sites such as eBay.
Blizzard hosted stores is an unacceptable if it contains anything that affects gameplay, the end.
Even Valve lowered themselves to that shit already. Does Blizzard also needs to do it? Or is there really no game companies that deserves a ounce of respect?
If people can buy dyes, dyes become a useless commodity, and I can't sell my super-unique dark red dye for hella goldz anymore.
Any item that is difficult to get is more useful. If one of the dyes has a 0.001% chance of dropping off of the end boss, then it's obviously going to be worth more.
Hah, problem not solved. Person X just bought the $5 dye from the Blizzard store. But person X was the person who was going to buy some other dye from me for in-game gold.