12 replies to this topic

[Crashhh1]

Having considered it. I think this would actually be the best way to fix both the economy and botting issue.

I would support a diablo 3 where there were many servers, which locked after a certain max population of characters. There could be a variety of sizes from big to small servers. They could unlock if characters were deleted. New ones could be created if necessitated, and transfers to other servers could be allowed similar to WoW.

I believe diablo 3's economy is not designed well for numbers in the millions, neither is it designed for extremely smallscale play. I could be okay with droprate altering for different servers.

This would be great for the economy because extremely old characters would be less likely to affect new characters, and gold inflation on an old server would not be linked to a normal, booming economy on a new server.

This would be absolutely gold for hardcore servers because you'd always have a chance to enter an old server when a character dies (if the game isn't too easy as it currently is).

I believe the key to combatting botting isn't to try to stop very small scale botting, but massive scale organized botting which can be stopped or slowed or prevented if a server were locked, and it would be much much easier to spot in smaller localized servers. Blizzard themselves could clear out servers a few at a time and move on. Economies would strongly benefit.

The final benefit of this is that it would give incentive to reroll even without stat/skillpoints on both softcore and hardcore - if you got tired of an aged, locked server, you could start anew with a friend on a fresh economic server.
It would create endgame replayability and PvE incentive to continue playing without wiping servers because you might get excited to try to be the first paragon 100 on a different server, or find the best item there first.

I would personally expand on this by then allowing open world PvP so that an element of community can be brought back into the game. (Small localized servers + PvP = competition & community)

What are others' thoughts on this?

Edited by Crashhh1, 27 December 2012 - 06:49 AM.

[dexteriade]

i myself hate the ideea

i would hate to finnaly reach a 100 lvl paragon (which is quite hard to reach - months of gameplay) and have my character in a dead server or a soond to close one because of botters... why should i be punished? terrible idea.
about replayability - i actually disliked d2 because you had just one or two builds and had to make a new character for it.

as the game is now if one wants to level another character - is open to do it. if he wants to do it quick - he can through a hellfire ring and mp10. But if someone just wants to play his hard worked character - he can - he can have a challenge through MP system. at the same time i can always try a new build any time. i see a build on a forum i can instantly try it and maybe have fun with it.

economy wise - the bigger the numbers - the better. small economy it usually plagued by monopole or oligopoly... (an economist speaking).
botting concerned - D3 is allready split into servers see EU, America, Asia... and that is enough segmentation - the asia servers as expected being the most botted ones as expected... more segmentation would hurt the game as d3 is not as WOW that is an open game and needs a limit to players running around. d3 has no group play - only open games - that can consist of only 4 players, some chat channels, and maybe the future PVP that will as well limited to 4 players (i believe)...

so i see no upside to servers... ]

first to paragon 100 really - how many players do you see playing 8-10-12hr a day/daily for some weeks in order to achieve that? you may count them on the fingers of one hand...

[TheDemokin]

So if i play a main, 2 months later create an alt and my alt is on a different server from which i cannot share / use items that i farmed with my main? WDF?!

As dextriade said: smaller numbers in a market = more monopoly / oligopoly or any other market control which will lead to certain servers having high end weapons going for trillions of gold while on other for a few 100k.

Terrible idea in every sense of it

[baron01]

No {10char}

[Nilhathak]

I get your point. However the downsides have already been explained.

I believe the real answer here to keep the game fluid would be a ladder system, like D2.

[Litheum]

I think there are better ways of fixing the game.

Servers would reduce the number of items in the market, but would cost a whole bunch of other issues. Especially since the game discourages multiple characters so much.

In wow or similar MMOs, starting on a new server to be with friends makes sense because everytime you log in, you can find them in the game world, and do stuff together. In a linear game with 4 difficulties, it wouldnt make sense to do that, it would just be frustrating not being able to play with who you want. And the benefit is transparent.

To the average casual gamer logging in, they would not see the benefit of servers.....but would see the negative result when they tried to play with family and friends and cant.

[dexteriade]

and just to throw an example on the table economy wise - even on a big market as the actual EU server - there was a Norse player with a topic here on diablo fans bragging about his 6000 eur gain on rmah - and part of his achievement was the fact that at a certain time he bought every high end echoing fury that entered the market in order to keep the price of this type of item at his desired (high) price...
so - he had a monopole on echoing fury - bad for the market as one had to pay an inflated price.
in a way bigger market that player should not have had the power to buy all those items. neither one or two players... the market should be so big that it would be free and the price would be regulated by a pure demand and offer.

the same thing is happening now with leoric signet.... there are maybe 10 players tops that hold most of these items (probably hardcore farmers that ran act 2 normal mp10 milions of times to get them). One can easily spot this fact - there are at least 20 items 18-19mil a piece all posted/reposted at the same time...

cut the number of players down or servers up and these kind of people would have a better chance at making business at the expense of the average player who gathers money through gameplay to spend on 1 or 2 good items not snipping the ah for countless hours for bargains.

or maybe Crashhh1 is one of these players having the fun on the ah not the game and is lobbying for better conditions for his type of fun time

Edited by dexteriade, 27 December 2012 - 02:23 PM.

[egervari]

Splitting up the player base will not solve economic problems. If the economy model doesn't work for million players, it will be even worse if there are less players. Imagine an economy of 10 players. Once those 10 people get the best gear, everything they find is even more worthless than it probably is now. At least with newer players, the gear they pickup might have been valuable to someone. You will basically have 10 people compete for the best items, so you can expect items to go for insane amounts in ratio to what that economy has produced up to that point.

The best way to solve the economy is to have purposeful item destruction and binding. It needs to be designed to work with 10 players or 10 million.

[Crashhh1]

dexteriade, on 27 December 2012 - 02:20 PM, said:

and just to throw an example on the table economy wise - even on a big market as the actual EU server - there was a Norse player with a topic here on diablo fans bragging about his 6000 eur gain on rmah - and part of his achievement was the fact that at a certain time he bought every high end echoing fury that entered the market in order to keep the price of this type of item at his desired (high) price...
so - he had a monopole on echoing fury - bad for the market as one had to pay an inflated price.
in a way bigger market that player should not have had the power to buy all those items. neither one or two players... the market should be so big that it would be free and the price would be regulated by a pure demand and offer.

the same thing is happening now with leoric signet.... there are maybe 10 players tops that hold most of these items (probably hardcore farmers that ran act 2 normal mp10 milions of times to get them). One can easily spot this fact - there are at least 20 items 18-19mil a piece all posted/reposted at the same time...

cut the number of players down or servers up and these kind of people would have a better chance at making business at the expense of the average player who gathers money through gameplay to spend on 1 or 2 good items not snipping the ah for countless hours for bargains.

or maybe Crashhh1 is one of these players having the fun on the ah not the game and is lobbying for better conditions for his type of fun time

uh.... what? how can someone have a monopoly on something in diablo 3? it doesn't make any sense

what you just described was someone farming an item in a standard working economy and making a profit off of it because other people weren't doing that, aka how the real world works.

if you cut the number of players you'd have a fraction of the gold inflation and the average player would be able to afford things just by playing the game. do you.. understand economics at all?

seems like you're someone who enjoys a game with zero economy and likes having 99% of items worthless.
btw lots of people enjoy playing the game of economics, that's what an economist is. look it up.

Edited by Crashhh1, 28 December 2012 - 01:59 AM.

[Crashhh1]

egervari, on 27 December 2012 - 06:04 PM, said:

Splitting up the player base will not solve economic problems. If the economy model doesn't work for million players, it will be even worse if there are less players. Imagine an economy of 10 players. Once those 10 people get the best gear, everything they find is even more worthless than it probably is now. At least with newer players, the gear they pickup might have been valuable to someone. You will basically have 10 people compete for the best items, so you can expect items to go for insane amounts in ratio to what that economy has produced up to that point.

The best way to solve the economy is to have purposeful item destruction and binding. It needs to be designed to work with 10 players or 10 million.

That's not only incorrect but unrealistic.
You're assuming 10 people all play an extremely high amount and found top-tear gear after a few hundred to thousand hours (Think that millions of people even now with their combined playtime haven't flooded the AH with perfect gear, so 10 people might take years and years)

Realistically you'd have something like 1-2 people who play lots every day, 2-4 people that play on average a few hours a week (medium) and the rest of the players who only play somewhat.

In the current economy, botters and people at the top level farm and spam out tons of midtear gear for incredibly cheap, trickling their progression down much faster.

Items can't go for more than the 10 players can afford, and since there would be significantly less gold inflation, the most ridiculous price would probably be nothing near what we see today. Rate of gold making by farming and grinding barely increases, but the amount of gold in the server goes sky-high with the number of players sharing a server.

However yes, some gear breaking and BoE items are nice, but not every item should be BoE.

Edited by Crashhh1, 28 December 2012 - 01:58 AM.

[egervari]

I never said the prices of items would go for what they go for today. I said they would go for as much as that economy could support. Proportionally, it would be the same as it is now - way too much.

Really, sound economic models work for 2 people to billions. There is no "different economic model" that works for different sizes of populations. That is silly. If your economy doesn't work with 10 million, it sure as hell won't work for 10 or 10,000 either.

Bots don't destroy economies either. They only accelerate problems in the design of the game that exist whether the bots were there or not. I don't like bots. In fact, I hate them. But even if bots didn't exist, the problems would still exist if the game were to remain exactly the same. Bots merely accelerate the economy by making it more productive, so if there are problems with its design, the bots will uncover those design problems much more quickly than the player base will.

The only thing that is going to fix the economy is a measured amount of incentives to destroy items - probably for crafting supplies for an entirely new crafting system - and bind on equip on all rares and up. Whether bots exists in this economy or not, the item saturation would slow down to a crawl and items would maintain their value for much longer periods of time. I am not saying they would always maintain their exact value - it would still depreciate, but not nearly as fast. In fact, there would be a bottom for many items if the crafting components were always desirable, and the goal would be to create so many craftables that even garbage items would be valuable to some extent in large quantities.

Typically in games where crafting is always a good thing to be doing, the bottom for the crappiest items is actually quite high, and they may even see higher value as a ladder season were to go on. This is not unheard of. Crafting components in d2 were worth more as the season went on, even with the existence of bots, so this is already proven to be true. Crafting just has to be desirable for this to happen, and in d2, it was.

Of course, even very high 5- and 6-property rares and higher quality legendaries should salvage to the best crafting components. The combination of high-rolled mods should dictate what craftables you should get. This makes all items useful to some extent. Even if you get a highly rolled bleeding, thorns, life on kill, etc. item, it may salvage to a really nice craftable. You can have themes where combinations of certain properties produce a very specific craftable, like a combo of life on kill, life steal and life on hit.

And those near-perfect rare shoulders that are always outclassed by Vile Wards could potentially salvage into one of the best crafting supplies, making it much more useful than it is today currently.

There should be lots of unique crafting recipes to take advantage of all of these permutations of craftables. All of the recipes should be worth making, and offer different things that you can't find on dropped gear. These recipies should make use of lots of common craftables - perhaps 10 or 15 different kinds - or just a few very rare crafting components. Some of the best crafts will be a combination of them. You want to enrich the itemization of the game and make the item find more enjoyable while also improving the state of the economy.

Having gold sinks, like crafting, enchanting, socketing, buffs, etc. will also help, but item saturation is a bigger problem which item destruction and binding both take care of. If gold continues to inflate, at least you'll be able to find safe-havens in commodities and unbounded, quality gear with the kind of system I'm talking about. You'll be able to leave the game for a month and not have half of your wealth wiped out.

Edited by egervari, 28 December 2012 - 05:04 AM.

[Crashhh1]

egervari, on 28 December 2012 - 04:31 AM, said:

I never said the prices of items would go for what they go for today. I said they would go for as much as that economy could support. Proportionally, it would be the same as it is now - way too much.

Really, sound economic models work for 2 people to billions. There is no "different economic model" that works for different sizes of populations. That is silly. If your economy doesn't work with 10 million, it sure as hell won't work for 10 or 10,000 either.

Bots don't destroy economies either. They only accelerate problems in the design of the game that exist whether the bots were there or not. I don't like bots. In fact, I hate them. But even if bots didn't exist, the problems would still exist if the game were to remain exactly the same. Bots merely accelerate the economy by making it more productive, so if there are problems with its design, the bots will uncover those design problems much more quickly than the player base will.

The only thing that is going to fix the economy is a measured amount of incentives to destroy items - probably for crafting supplies for an entirely new crafting system - and bind on equip on all rares and up. Whether bots exists in this economy or not, the item saturation would slow down to a crawl and items would maintain their value for much longer periods of time. I am not saying they would always maintain their exact value - it would still depreciate, but not nearly as fast. In fact, there would be a bottom for many items if the crafting components were always desirable, and the goal would be to create so many craftables that even garbage items would be valuable to some extent in large quantities.

Typically in games where crafting is always a good thing to be doing, the bottom for the crappiest items is actually quite high, and they may even see higher value as a ladder season were to go on. This is not unheard of. Crafting components in d2 were worth more as the season went on, even with the existence of bots, so this is already proven to be true. Crafting just has to be desirable for this to happen, and in d2, it was.

Of course, even very high 5- and 6-property rares and higher quality legendaries should salvage to the best crafting components. The combination of high-rolled mods should dictate what craftables you should get. This makes all items useful to some extent. Even if you get a highly rolled bleeding, thorns, life on kill, etc. item, it may salvage to a really nice craftable. You can have themes where combinations of certain properties produce a very specific craftable, like a combo of life on kill, life steal and life on hit.

And those near-perfect rare shoulders that are always outclassed by Vile Wards could potentially salvage into one of the best crafting supplies, making it much more useful than it is today currently.

There should be lots of unique crafting recipes to take advantage of all of these permutations of craftables. All of the recipes should be worth making, and offer different things that you can't find on dropped gear. These recipies should make use of lots of common craftables - perhaps 10 or 15 different kinds - or just a few very rare crafting components. Some of the best crafts will be a combination of them. You want to enrich the itemization of the game and make the item find more enjoyable while also improving the state of the economy.

Having gold sinks, like crafting, enchanting, socketing, buffs, etc. will also help, but item saturation is a bigger problem which item destruction and binding both take care of. If gold continues to inflate, at least you'll be able to find safe-havens in commodities and unbounded, quality gear with the kind of system I'm talking about. You'll be able to leave the game for a month and not have half of your wealth wiped out.

the system i'm suggesting is taken exactly from WoW and many other games and they have very successful economies.
I agree that we need crafting, enchanting, socketing and many other things but I still believe that huge unchecked economies in a totally randomized game full of botting is very bad. I've played many, many MMO and similarly styled games and almost all of them have servers which are broken up into smaller "countries" so to speak. I've never played a game until now with a running economy that was purely randomized, where gear was just spit out into the masses and cheapened rapidly. It "progresses" people when they shouldn't be "progressed".

A really succesful 400k dps barbarian can chuck out a weapon just a few tiers worse than his for a very cheap price, and somebody who's running mp0 or mp1-2 could buy it when they shouldn't be able to afford it.

Today I can gear up a char with a few million gold that I couldn't even begin to do just a few months ago. I'm not asking for progression raiding in Diablo 3 but linking veteran players who have no need for moderately good gear with newbie players or casuals is really bad and destructive when the game can be cleared so easily on the hardest difficulty, because not many things have any value.

This is also partially due to the game being too easy.

Edited by Crashhh1, 28 December 2012 - 07:07 AM.

[egervari]

WoW

Crashhh1, on 28 December 2012 - 07:05 AM, said:

egervari, on 28 December 2012 - 04:31 AM, said:

I never said the prices of items would go for what they go for today. I said they would go for as much as that economy could support. Proportionally, it would be the same as it is now - way too much.

Really, sound economic models work for 2 people to billions. There is no "different economic model" that works for different sizes of populations. That is silly. If your economy doesn't work with 10 million, it sure as hell won't work for 10 or 10,000 either.

Bots don't destroy economies either. They only accelerate problems in the design of the game that exist whether the bots were there or not. I don't like bots. In fact, I hate them. But even if bots didn't exist, the problems would still exist if the game were to remain exactly the same. Bots merely accelerate the economy by making it more productive, so if there are problems with its design, the bots will uncover those design problems much more quickly than the player base will.

The only thing that is going to fix the economy is a measured amount of incentives to destroy items - probably for crafting supplies for an entirely new crafting system - and bind on equip on all rares and up. Whether bots exists in this economy or not, the item saturation would slow down to a crawl and items would maintain their value for much longer periods of time. I am not saying they would always maintain their exact value - it would still depreciate, but not nearly as fast. In fact, there would be a bottom for many items if the crafting components were always desirable, and the goal would be to create so many craftables that even garbage items would be valuable to some extent in large quantities.

Typically in games where crafting is always a good thing to be doing, the bottom for the crappiest items is actually quite high, and they may even see higher value as a ladder season were to go on. This is not unheard of. Crafting components in d2 were worth more as the season went on, even with the existence of bots, so this is already proven to be true. Crafting just has to be desirable for this to happen, and in d2, it was.

Of course, even very high 5- and 6-property rares and higher quality legendaries should salvage to the best crafting components. The combination of high-rolled mods should dictate what craftables you should get. This makes all items useful to some extent. Even if you get a highly rolled bleeding, thorns, life on kill, etc. item, it may salvage to a really nice craftable. You can have themes where combinations of certain properties produce a very specific craftable, like a combo of life on kill, life steal and life on hit.

And those near-perfect rare shoulders that are always outclassed by Vile Wards could potentially salvage into one of the best crafting supplies, making it much more useful than it is today currently.

There should be lots of unique crafting recipes to take advantage of all of these permutations of craftables. All of the recipes should be worth making, and offer different things that you can't find on dropped gear. These recipies should make use of lots of common craftables - perhaps 10 or 15 different kinds - or just a few very rare crafting components. Some of the best crafts will be a combination of them. You want to enrich the itemization of the game and make the item find more enjoyable while also improving the state of the economy.

Having gold sinks, like crafting, enchanting, socketing, buffs, etc. will also help, but item saturation is a bigger problem which item destruction and binding both take care of. If gold continues to inflate, at least you'll be able to find safe-havens in commodities and unbounded, quality gear with the kind of system I'm talking about. You'll be able to leave the game for a month and not have half of your wealth wiped out.

the system i'm suggesting is taken exactly from WoW and many other games and they have very successful economies.
I agree that we need crafting, enchanting, socketing and many other things but I still believe that huge unchecked economies in a totally randomized game full of botting is very bad. I've played many, many MMO and similarly styled games and almost all of them have servers which are broken up into smaller "countries" so to speak. I've never played a game until now with a running economy that was purely randomized, where gear was just spit out into the masses and cheapened rapidly. It "progresses" people when they shouldn't be "progressed".

A really succesful 400k dps barbarian can chuck out a weapon just a few tiers worse than his for a very cheap price, and somebody who's running mp0 or mp1-2 could buy it when they shouldn't be able to afford it.

Today I can gear up a char with a few million gold that I couldn't even begin to do just a few months ago. I'm not asking for progression raiding in Diablo 3 but linking veteran players who have no need for moderately good gear with newbie players or casuals is really bad and destructive when the game can be cleared so easily on the hardest difficulty, because not many things have any value.

This is also partially due to the game being too easy.

The system I am proposing would also prevent people from progressing faster than they otherwise would, as just below best-in-slot would not tank in value nearly as quickly as there is no "hand-me-down" gear. Everything is bound, just like in WoW.

The system I propose is the best at protecting wealth, and even allowing wealth to be gained. This is by far the most important factor in an electronic economy, and my proposal solves this problem. While the currency problem - I think - is unsolvable, at least the commodities and good unbound gear will maintain their values across very long periods of time.

The difference between what I'm proposing and WoW is essentially the way crafting works. You want crafting to pretty random and varied, unlike in WoW. D2's crafting system was pretty close to correct. While I do think it took many trials to get a "good" craft (it could take all season to make 1 good item for example), the fundamentals of how it works are sound. The items produced through crafting should essentially be best-in-slot if rolled the maximum values. But they should also be unique and do things that the dropped items can't do, just as D2 did with its craftable items.

By creating the massive incentive to destroy gear, this is how you deal with the highly randomized items in an action RPG. You need to setup salvage rules that I outlined in my last post that consider all of the randomized properties, and they need to be carefully designed to make use of all of the permutations.

Splitting up the servers is not going to solve the problem. Any problems that exist in an economy will only show themselves sooner when the population is smaller. This is why governments like massive programs that bring everyone in the country into the program. They don't blow up until very far down the road - long after they are no longer in office. But nonetheless, those programs and controls always fail eventually. They only get away with it for as long as they do because the population size is massive.

The same thing would have happen in D3. In D3, we have a failed economic model. It doesn't work. We see the problems more and more not because it's a 10-million person economy, but because less and less people are actually playing the game. Bots are incredibly productive, and most people playing the game have little need for almost all of the items that drop. This is a train wreck economy. Making the population even smaller will just make the problems worse.

Frankly, if you want to fix the economy, you have to take population size out of the equation altogether. It frankly doesn't matter. What matters is having low item saturation, low currency inflation and very strong wealth preservation.