Hahaha Jay... I think he is just lying now. How any clear minded person can think that most people won't use AH? If you think that way then you never even played D2, because D2 was all about trading and items.
D2 was not all about trading. Majority of people in D2 never traded publicly. This was discussed over and over and over again here before.
I still can't understand WHY players would even use the AH to begin with. Diablo is a progression based game. You play to find better to loot and to get stronger. Why on earth would you cheat on that? It's like playing a strategy game for its difficulty and then use "godmode". The progression is the fun of the game, so why would anybody use the AH? Is it to skip the fun?
It was passed on to us as a replacement for creating trade games. It is convenient and it does work. It works too well. It's too easy to trade up and players find themselves playing this twisted E-bay game.
It's doubtful that Blizzard as a whole regrets the AH and in fact embraces it as it is an existing part of the game and will continue to be so for the games duration. Rather than saying they regret it, perhaps it would be best to say they wish it were more balanced and that is what brings me to my second point. They are not driving people away from the AH with BoA items, they are simply balancing the games itemization thus balancing the use of the AH.
That's exactly what Travis said. He said they want to diminish the role of the AH, but that they think that going back to the D2 style of trading is not a good move.
I'm very much OK with that, but getting people around here to take a chill pill and understand that the AH can exist for those of us who want to use it (I like to sell much more than buy, for example), but still not intrude in their game ..... well that's not going to happen. When it comes to talking about the AH we exist in a world that has only 0s and 1s. There's no in-between.
Hell, we're already back to throwing snide insults that the "real" Diablo fans aren't playing D3 anymore.
When did D2 players and fans turned into efficiency whores?
When Kripparian turned D3 into a temporary eSport. I don't remember anyone caring about "world firsts" in Diablo until that fuckhead came around.
People always cared about efficiency in farming (that's why Enigma was so popular). But people never cared nearly as much about efficiency in gear progression until people started talking about "world first Inferno Diablo" and diabloprogress turned EVERY ASPECT OF THE GAME into a quasi-ladder competition. That is thoroughly un-Diablo, but that's the reality of the "world" we play in too.
D2 was not all about trading. Majority of people in D2 never traded publicly. This was discussed over and over and over again here before.
Really? Would you mind giving me some statistics on this topic then or you just heard it on forums?
Every AH hater says that as a fact. So... unless it's just one of those "internet facts" that only applies when it props up your argument but stops being a "fact" when it supports the other guy's argument... it's a fact.
The randomization in this game precludes upgrades dropping normally once you hit a certain point. I would MUCH MUCH rather participate in the AH where I can sell a small percentage of my items that are good but not an upgrade for me and save my money for an upgrade from the AH than trash all of that stuff. I've put hundreds and hundreds of hours into this game, and I clearly remember the last time I got a "natural" upgrade and it was months ago. And I don't have anything nearly worth hundreds of millions. Finding a piece of loot that is an upgrade for you is awesome, but finding one that isn't good for you but you know you can sell is almost as good. Anyone who wants to take away the AH is basically taking about 90% of my "awesome!" moments because they aren't relevant for the class(es) I like to play.
In around 1000 played hours Diablo3 i found 2-3 Loots worth around 200 Million Gold each...thats it.
Only 1 piece i could use on my Mainchar as a big upgrade.
So 1000 Hours for 1 good piece...i call that pretty lame to be honest.
If you talking about being able to "somehow" manage the content with the stuff you find, then you are right.
Fun/Good Loots however you wont find yourself for your chars, you find those only in the AH, or with actual trading.
That being said, I assume you used the AH at some point during those 1000 hours of gameplay. The AH is going to give you direct access to the best items available at your level, often with your choice of affixes, often at cheap prices if you look hard. So of course you won't find a damn upgrade after that.
Did you expect to buy the best shit on AH and then find better while farming with the items you bought? A lot of people have BiS items and are bitching because they cant find better while actually killing monsters, but what they fail to understand is that the reason you cant find anything better is because you skipped everything and just bought the best item for you!
If you play this game AH free (and for effect, just start out on hardcore if you haven't already), you will find upgrades fairly often because now you are no longer getting sweet items so easily and so quickly. And don't tell me that you don't use the AH often either because the only person who would bitch about only finding a few 200+ mill items is someone who runs the AH VERY VERY OFTEN.
I won't deny the issues with the AH, but people also need to understand that not using it is a very real and very fun option. If they fixed the loot-tables, it would make it even funner.
When did D2 players and fans turned into efficiency whores?
They didn't. They just aren't playing this game anymore.
lol
Let me get my boots on, the crap is getting too deep. Of the one million people playing each day, there are no D2 players there? Yeah, keep holding on to that. I played and loved D2 but I am mature enough to accept that D3 is a different experience with some similarities. If you want to play a game like D2, then play D2 for god sakes. If you want to move forward and play something different then play D3. Your doom and gloom is getting old and with the news of there being a million players on the game at any given date.... Well, your doom and gloom is also just a bunch of BS. lol
Looks like this idiot here didn't feel like wasting 20-25 minutes of his limited playtime on another class. With a proper trading mechanism, I'd be able to get that in 30 seconds.
I didnt call you an Idiot, i called the greedy Fuck an Idiot who tried to sell you a Clarity Gem for 5 Exalted.
And Clarity is in Fact so common...when you go to the Tradechannel and type "WTB Clarity 1 Alch Orb"
you gonna get at least 10 tells within a Minute.
(That does exclude Quality Gems, rule of thumb here is around 5% Quality = 1 Gemcutter)
That being said, I assume you used the AH at some point during those 1000 hours of gameplay. The AH is going to give you direct access to the best items available at your level, often with your choice of affixes, often at cheap prices if you look hard. So of course you won't find a damn upgrade after that.
Ofc i used the AH... read Jay Wilsons Blog...everybody did.
And around 50% of the remaining community does so regulary.
Thing is... people act like the AH is the root of all evil, which isnt the case. If there wasnt a AH people would just trade...which is more of a hassle, but it`s basicly the same thing.
Its hypocrite to hate on the AH, praise "self found gameplay" and still trade. because its the same thing.
Did you expect to buy the best shit on AH and then find better while farming with the items you bought? A lot of people have BiS items and are bitching because they cant find better while actually killing monsters, but what they fail to understand is that the reason you cant find anything better is because you skipped everything and just bought the best item for you!
I know all the AH haters are glad to hear his statement but it's just more evidence that he has no fucking clue what he's talking about. The AH is only the symptom but GEAR is the cause. There are too few good stats and incredibly low odds of getting them so everyone is fighting for the same gear and things are either huge upgrades or total crap. The direction they are headed with adding more good affixes, more than one item can have, and raising the average quality of drops while reducing the amount of drops will make it so that we should have a variety of upgrade options and sidegrades instead of having having a few huge upgrades and lots of trash.
My opinion. Reduce the max price of the item you can list on GAH (currently 2b?) to atleast half. That way everything should eventually be an acceptable price.
RMAH house kind of the same but also put the blizz fee up by double so the RMAH tycoons can go get a job.
I think that would just promote selling outside the game.
Thing is... people act like the AH is the root of all evil, which isnt the case. If there wasnt a AH people would just trade...which is more of a hassle, but it`s basicly the same thing.
It doesn't matter in which color you're writing it, it still doesn't make your argument correct. Without the AH the extra "hassle" of trading would make the distribution of items much more difficult and many people would simply not trade (like in D2). Top items would still be traded, but there wouldn't be a huge market for all the 10k items with dualfecta stats, which are so easy to pick up at the AH. But most people wouldn't care about the hassle of going to a forum, ask for "a cheap mediocre item", wait for a reply, join a game with someone, and make a (possibly dangerous) trade just to get this item. On the AH, however, all this is done in less than a minute and no danger or scam involved.
This has been brought up soooo many times, even by devs (Travis Day mentioned it multiple times), I just don't get how you can say that there's no difference between trading and AH in terms of impact on the game.
It doesn't matter in which color you're writing it, it still doesn't make your argument correct. Without the AH the extra "hassle" of trading would make the distribution of items much more difficult and many people would simply not trade (like in D2). Top items would still be traded, but there wouldn't be a huge market for all the 10k items with dualfecta stats, which are so easy to pick up at the AH. But most people wouldn't care about the hassle of going to a forum, ask for "a cheap mediocre item", wait for a reply, join a game with someone, and make a (possibly dangerous) trade just to get this item. On the AH, however, all this is done in less than a minute and no danger or scam involved.
This has been brought up soooo many times, even by devs (Travis Day mentioned it multiple times), I just don't get how you can say that there's no difference between trading and AH in terms of impact on the game.
I am saying exactly the same thing, so i dont really see what point you are trying to make here.
But...if they decide to remove the AH, they should also completly remove the possibility to trade.
I agree that if the AH were removed then all trading should be disabled, except in the same game where you found the item. If that sounds like a terrible idea that's because it is, the AH isn't that evil. It's just far too powerful in its current form due to item supply inflation. My dream list of changes:
- Make items Bind on Equip to control the item supply
- Allow the blacksmith to reroll an affix or slightly increase the value of an affix for gold
- Target drops to your character: make your primary stat a guaranteed roll on all rares, combined with the changes to loot quality
- Add crafting recipes for the remaining slots
- Add more desireable affixes that can compete with the trifecta
Thing is... people act like the AH is the root of all evil, which isnt the case. If there wasnt a AH people would just trade...which is more of a hassle, but it`s basicly the same thing.
It doesn't matter in which color you're writing it, it still doesn't make your argument correct. Without the AH the extra "hassle" of trading would make the distribution of items much more difficult and many people would simply not trade (like in D2). Top items would still be traded, but there wouldn't be a huge market for all the 10k items with dualfecta stats, which are so easy to pick up at the AH. But most people wouldn't care about the hassle of going to a forum, ask for "a cheap mediocre item", wait for a reply, join a game with someone, and make a (possibly dangerous) trade just to get this item. On the AH, however, all this is done in less than a minute and no danger or scam involved.
This has been brought up soooo many times, even by devs (Travis Day mentioned it multiple times), I just don't get how you can say that there's no difference between trading and AH in terms of impact on the game.
The only functional difference is the rate of proliferation.
That's why Travis also said they want to de-emphasize the AH but not go back to the D2 bartering system. They obviously feel the AH is too efficient (currently) and that the D2 way was too inefficient and they want some solution that hits the middle ground.
As I said before, the AH is a convenient scapegoat for the general issues surrounding how items roll. Yanking out the AH won't solve that. But jazzing up the items and fixing how they roll.... THAT would actually make some people stop using the AH because they wouldn't find it as necessary.
The AH is a symptom (like bleeding) of a whole different problem (the fact that you have a cut on your knee). There is simply no way to continue dancing around that. The 1.0.7 crafting patterns have all but proven that, given alternatives, people will gravitate away from the AH. There was a point that I couldn't sell a Vile Ward, at all. They've somewhat rebounded, but they aren't worth anything close to what they used to be. Why? Because they've managed to create competition. In too many cases there aren't legitemate alternatives in many slots - Lacunis are a prime example of this because of the huge value of movement speed.
If they fix the items, which they clearly are working on, you're going to see the AH become much less in-focus by default. You'll see people with a pair of gloves with A, B, and C stats attempting to trade for gloves with A, D, and E stats.
If they fix the items, which they clearly are working on, you're going to see the AH become much less in-focus by default. You'll see people with a pair of gloves with A, B, and C stats attempting to trade for gloves with A, D, and E stats.
How will the AH lose focus if the fact that BiS items right now are one-dimensional is being fixed? I don't get that. So, in your example, people will then search the AH for a pair of gloves with A, D, E stats instead of A, B, C (or both alternatives). Crafting "fixed" Vile Wards because the crafted shoulders are BiS and BoA. Crafting did not fix Lacunis because they're still better than most crafted bracers. However, moving every single slot to BoA is not the solution Blizzard intends to go for.
I concur with many things you said, but the itemization problem (a few items overpowered for their slots, like WH; no stats diversity for many different builds; main stat/crit chance/crit damage being crucial for every class/spec) has nothing to do with the AH problem (proliferation of items - which is by the way what I said, I just used the word "distribution" instead of "proliferation"). Your post makes a few things look too simple, and you don't follow your line of argument to the very end - which would be to make everything BoA to draw people away from the AH.
Edit... @Slayardarklaws... DRM has absolutely NOTHING to do with this topic. Please don't derail this even further.
Make Affixes as interesting as you want, make uniques as interesting as you want. As long as people can still cheat their way through the content by using the AH you can be damn certain they will do so. Since nobody seems to be playing the game any more, everybody is "investing" in it hoping for some sort of payback.
Let me see....better itemization or affixies means better chances of getting what I want which means less dependancy on the AH. So lets say instead of only having a choice of 4 (Main Stat/CHC/CD/AS) out of 10 affixes that I want or 40% they add 4 new affixes which can compete with those original 4 and I get 8 out of 14 chances or 57% chance to find what I want. If I get a better chance than people wouldnt need to use the AH. As it sits for many now you are so dependant on MS/CHC/CD/AS getting something of real use is tough with the current RNGin place. You are NEVER going to stop those who want to take the easy way up. If it isnt on the AH they will go to E-Bay or the other dozen of black market sites that will or already have popped up to get there items.
As I said before, the AH is a convenient scapegoat for the general issues surrounding how items roll. Yanking out the AH won't solve that. But jazzing up the items and fixing how they roll.... THAT would actually make some people stop using the AH because they wouldn't find it as necessary.
If they fix the items, which they clearly are working on, you're going to see the AH become much less in-focus by default. You'll see people with a pair of gloves with A, B, and C stats attempting to trade for gloves with A, D, and E stats.
Why would this stop people from using the AH? So people still think it IS necessary to use the AH to play the game? How so? Everybody can clear inferno now and everybody can find items that were considered good or very good 9 months ago. So why are people drawn towards the auction house? Is it maybe because they want to take the path of the least resistance or because they want to brag? I don't know...
What would change if you introduce 8 new affixes that all compete with trifecta?! Why would people stop using the AH? You want a certain affix so derp, you just use the AH (=trainer) and get the exact affixes you want. Everything's still the same, you want something, but the chances of finding what you want decreased even further (because there 8 more rolls) so you just go back to the auction house so you don't have to look for yourself.
Make Affixes as interesting as you want, make uniques as interesting as you want. As long as people can still cheat their way through the content by using the AH you can be damn certain they will do so. Since nobody seems to be playing the game any more, everybody is "investing" in it hoping for some sort of payback.
That change alone wouldn't do much aside from possibly increasing the odds of a good item rolling depending how they tuned the odds of each affix, but they also said that they want to reduce the amount of drops and increase the quality of them. Self-found players will find useable gear more easily but most people will still use the AH to find the stats they want though we won't all be shopping for the exact same stats. For instance if I want lots of stats A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J and I my current gear has lots of A/B/C/D/E/F then I might start shopping for G/H/I/J and give up a little of the other stats, but someone else might have lots of E/F/G/H/I/J and shop for A/B/C/D.
I concur with many things you said, but the itemization problem (a few items overpowered for their slots, like WH; no stats diversity for many different builds; main stat/crit chance/crit damage being crucial for every class/spec) has nothing to do with the AH problem (proliferation of items - which is by the way what I said, I just used the word "distribution" instead of "proliferation"). Your post makes a few things look too simple, and you don't follow your line of argument to the very end - which would be to make everything BoA to draw people away from the AH.
Witching Hour and Lacunis are arguably two of the best examples as to how few options force people into the AH.
I've found a grand total of 0 Witching Hours and 0 Lacunis in roughly 1000 hours played. My options are to continue to hope I find a WH for a belt.... which, being it's legendary, is not a great proposition, especially since it could roll STR or DEX and not INT. The chances of me finding a quality WH for myself are VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY LOW. This pushes me towards the AH. The reason is there aren't really any legitemate options in that slot. Lack of viability of rares makes it that trying to self-find a belt is a tremendously tall order.
Now look at shoulders. Previously many classes had to use Vile Wards. With the addition of competing rares via crafting in 1.0.7 it's decidedly easier to obtain something as good as a Vile Ward on your own. This means that, for a shoulder slot item, you're not pidgeon-holed into trading/AH to get an item of quality. Vile Wards aren't worth close to what they used to be worth - this is direct proof that people aren't going to the AH for shoulder items unless they can get them very much on the cheap. Why? Because they have a SENSIBLE and WORKABLE alternative.
Making sure that affixes are all potent and desireable would increase the chance of you finding something good on your own. You may never find that Witching Hour, but you have a much better chance of finding something that's within a much closer margin than you could currently. You may never have outright BiS items (people have traditionally had to trade for those anyway) but the gap between what you could self-find and what is BiS would shrink. As that gap shrinks people will feel less and less incentivized to use the AH.
It's pretty simple stuff. The problem is not analyzing how difficult it is to roll the perfect item. The problem is that for many slots, having to roll a useful legendary is astonishingly prohibitive. Once you help mitigate that problem you're on your path to freeing people from feeling like they must use the AH.
Make Affixes as interesting as you want, make uniques as interesting as you want. As long as people can still cheat their way through the content by using the AH you can be damn certain they will do so. Since nobody seems to be playing the game any more, everybody is "investing" in it hoping for some sort of payback.
First off, I really don't think it helps the discussion to refer to people who use the AH as cheaters. That's categorically incorrect.
Secondly, the point is that, say there are 30 affixes available for a pair of gloves, there are really only 4 important ones - main stat, CHC, CD, AS. The general idea, taking Thorns as an example, would be - if you make it so that more than 4 of those stats are quality stats (they may not be the outright best, but they'd still be GOOD) then you suddenly are not pissed off when you roll Thorns. Thorns may not be as good as CHC... but it's still a DPS increase, it still helps you farm better.
The problem is that there are no properties that really compete with these four. We don't need properties that are better than them. We need some degree of parity among the stats, though. The current situation has almost no parity among stats. Reworking Thorns to be viable (if that's possible) is a step in the right direction. It helps close the gap between outright BiS items and what we can generally expect to find on our own.
Yeah who could of thought that AH would fuck things up... With the crappy itemization and drops no shit everybody only looked on the AH to progress. F***ing Jay Wilson...
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D2 was not all about trading. Majority of people in D2 never traded publicly. This was discussed over and over and over again here before.
It was passed on to us as a replacement for creating trade games. It is convenient and it does work. It works too well. It's too easy to trade up and players find themselves playing this twisted E-bay game.
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That's exactly what Travis said. He said they want to diminish the role of the AH, but that they think that going back to the D2 style of trading is not a good move.
I'm very much OK with that, but getting people around here to take a chill pill and understand that the AH can exist for those of us who want to use it (I like to sell much more than buy, for example), but still not intrude in their game ..... well that's not going to happen. When it comes to talking about the AH we exist in a world that has only 0s and 1s. There's no in-between.
Hell, we're already back to throwing snide insults that the "real" Diablo fans aren't playing D3 anymore.
When Kripparian turned D3 into a temporary eSport. I don't remember anyone caring about "world firsts" in Diablo until that fuckhead came around.
People always cared about efficiency in farming (that's why Enigma was so popular). But people never cared nearly as much about efficiency in gear progression until people started talking about "world first Inferno Diablo" and diabloprogress turned EVERY ASPECT OF THE GAME into a quasi-ladder competition. That is thoroughly un-Diablo, but that's the reality of the "world" we play in too.
Every AH hater says that as a fact. So... unless it's just one of those "internet facts" that only applies when it props up your argument but stops being a "fact" when it supports the other guy's argument... it's a fact.
I've asked for citation on a very similar point. I've been told that digging up a 1+ year old blue post is not going to happen, but that Blizzard did say that most people didn't play online (therefore most people weren't trading).
Please Maka, none of these empty of argument statements.
Ha. Bagstone.
That being said, I assume you used the AH at some point during those 1000 hours of gameplay. The AH is going to give you direct access to the best items available at your level, often with your choice of affixes, often at cheap prices if you look hard. So of course you won't find a damn upgrade after that.
Did you expect to buy the best shit on AH and then find better while farming with the items you bought? A lot of people have BiS items and are bitching because they cant find better while actually killing monsters, but what they fail to understand is that the reason you cant find anything better is because you skipped everything and just bought the best item for you!
If you play this game AH free (and for effect, just start out on hardcore if you haven't already), you will find upgrades fairly often because now you are no longer getting sweet items so easily and so quickly. And don't tell me that you don't use the AH often either because the only person who would bitch about only finding a few 200+ mill items is someone who runs the AH VERY VERY OFTEN.
I won't deny the issues with the AH, but people also need to understand that not using it is a very real and very fun option. If they fixed the loot-tables, it would make it even funner.
lol
Let me get my boots on, the crap is getting too deep. Of the one million people playing each day, there are no D2 players there? Yeah, keep holding on to that. I played and loved D2 but I am mature enough to accept that D3 is a different experience with some similarities. If you want to play a game like D2, then play D2 for god sakes. If you want to move forward and play something different then play D3. Your doom and gloom is getting old and with the news of there being a million players on the game at any given date.... Well, your doom and gloom is also just a bunch of BS. lol
I didnt call you an Idiot, i called the greedy Fuck an Idiot who tried to sell you a Clarity Gem for 5 Exalted.
And Clarity is in Fact so common...when you go to the Tradechannel and type "WTB Clarity 1 Alch Orb"
you gonna get at least 10 tells within a Minute.
(That does exclude Quality Gems, rule of thumb here is around 5% Quality = 1 Gemcutter)
Whats up with the hostility btw? You mad bro?
Ofc i used the AH... read Jay Wilsons Blog...everybody did.
And around 50% of the remaining community does so regulary.
Thing is... people act like the AH is the root of all evil, which isnt the case.
If there wasnt a AH people would just trade...which is more of a hassle, but it`s basicly the same thing.
Its hypocrite to hate on the AH, praise "self found gameplay" and still trade. because its the same thing.
My Gear is far from BiS:
http://eu.battle.net...262/hero/743411
Amen.
I think that would just promote selling outside the game.
Ha. Bagstone.
It doesn't matter in which color you're writing it, it still doesn't make your argument correct. Without the AH the extra "hassle" of trading would make the distribution of items much more difficult and many people would simply not trade (like in D2). Top items would still be traded, but there wouldn't be a huge market for all the 10k items with dualfecta stats, which are so easy to pick up at the AH. But most people wouldn't care about the hassle of going to a forum, ask for "a cheap mediocre item", wait for a reply, join a game with someone, and make a (possibly dangerous) trade just to get this item. On the AH, however, all this is done in less than a minute and no danger or scam involved.
This has been brought up soooo many times, even by devs (Travis Day mentioned it multiple times), I just don't get how you can say that there's no difference between trading and AH in terms of impact on the game.
I am saying exactly the same thing, so i dont really see what point you are trying to make here.
But...if they decide to remove the AH, they should also completly remove the possibility to trade.
- Make items Bind on Equip to control the item supply
- Allow the blacksmith to reroll an affix or slightly increase the value of an affix for gold
- Target drops to your character: make your primary stat a guaranteed roll on all rares, combined with the changes to loot quality
- Add crafting recipes for the remaining slots
- Add more desireable affixes that can compete with the trifecta
The only functional difference is the rate of proliferation.
That's why Travis also said they want to de-emphasize the AH but not go back to the D2 bartering system. They obviously feel the AH is too efficient (currently) and that the D2 way was too inefficient and they want some solution that hits the middle ground.
As I said before, the AH is a convenient scapegoat for the general issues surrounding how items roll. Yanking out the AH won't solve that. But jazzing up the items and fixing how they roll.... THAT would actually make some people stop using the AH because they wouldn't find it as necessary.
The AH is a symptom (like bleeding) of a whole different problem (the fact that you have a cut on your knee). There is simply no way to continue dancing around that. The 1.0.7 crafting patterns have all but proven that, given alternatives, people will gravitate away from the AH. There was a point that I couldn't sell a Vile Ward, at all. They've somewhat rebounded, but they aren't worth anything close to what they used to be. Why? Because they've managed to create competition. In too many cases there aren't legitemate alternatives in many slots - Lacunis are a prime example of this because of the huge value of movement speed.
If they fix the items, which they clearly are working on, you're going to see the AH become much less in-focus by default. You'll see people with a pair of gloves with A, B, and C stats attempting to trade for gloves with A, D, and E stats.
How will the AH lose focus if the fact that BiS items right now are one-dimensional is being fixed? I don't get that. So, in your example, people will then search the AH for a pair of gloves with A, D, E stats instead of A, B, C (or both alternatives). Crafting "fixed" Vile Wards because the crafted shoulders are BiS and BoA. Crafting did not fix Lacunis because they're still better than most crafted bracers. However, moving every single slot to BoA is not the solution Blizzard intends to go for.
I concur with many things you said, but the itemization problem (a few items overpowered for their slots, like WH; no stats diversity for many different builds; main stat/crit chance/crit damage being crucial for every class/spec) has nothing to do with the AH problem (proliferation of items - which is by the way what I said, I just used the word "distribution" instead of "proliferation"). Your post makes a few things look too simple, and you don't follow your line of argument to the very end - which would be to make everything BoA to draw people away from the AH.
Edit... @Slayardarklaws... DRM has absolutely NOTHING to do with this topic. Please don't derail this even further.
Let me see....better itemization or affixies means better chances of getting what I want which means less dependancy on the AH. So lets say instead of only having a choice of 4 (Main Stat/CHC/CD/AS) out of 10 affixes that I want or 40% they add 4 new affixes which can compete with those original 4 and I get 8 out of 14 chances or 57% chance to find what I want. If I get a better chance than people wouldnt need to use the AH. As it sits for many now you are so dependant on MS/CHC/CD/AS getting something of real use is tough with the current RNGin place. You are NEVER going to stop those who want to take the easy way up. If it isnt on the AH they will go to E-Bay or the other dozen of black market sites that will or already have popped up to get there items.
Im pretty sure it was posted in a thread but I do not remember which one.
That change alone wouldn't do much aside from possibly increasing the odds of a good item rolling depending how they tuned the odds of each affix, but they also said that they want to reduce the amount of drops and increase the quality of them. Self-found players will find useable gear more easily but most people will still use the AH to find the stats they want though we won't all be shopping for the exact same stats. For instance if I want lots of stats A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J and I my current gear has lots of A/B/C/D/E/F then I might start shopping for G/H/I/J and give up a little of the other stats, but someone else might have lots of E/F/G/H/I/J and shop for A/B/C/D.
Witching Hour and Lacunis are arguably two of the best examples as to how few options force people into the AH.
I've found a grand total of 0 Witching Hours and 0 Lacunis in roughly 1000 hours played. My options are to continue to hope I find a WH for a belt.... which, being it's legendary, is not a great proposition, especially since it could roll STR or DEX and not INT. The chances of me finding a quality WH for myself are VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY LOW. This pushes me towards the AH. The reason is there aren't really any legitemate options in that slot. Lack of viability of rares makes it that trying to self-find a belt is a tremendously tall order.
Now look at shoulders. Previously many classes had to use Vile Wards. With the addition of competing rares via crafting in 1.0.7 it's decidedly easier to obtain something as good as a Vile Ward on your own. This means that, for a shoulder slot item, you're not pidgeon-holed into trading/AH to get an item of quality. Vile Wards aren't worth close to what they used to be worth - this is direct proof that people aren't going to the AH for shoulder items unless they can get them very much on the cheap. Why? Because they have a SENSIBLE and WORKABLE alternative.
Making sure that affixes are all potent and desireable would increase the chance of you finding something good on your own. You may never find that Witching Hour, but you have a much better chance of finding something that's within a much closer margin than you could currently. You may never have outright BiS items (people have traditionally had to trade for those anyway) but the gap between what you could self-find and what is BiS would shrink. As that gap shrinks people will feel less and less incentivized to use the AH.
It's pretty simple stuff. The problem is not analyzing how difficult it is to roll the perfect item. The problem is that for many slots, having to roll a useful legendary is astonishingly prohibitive. Once you help mitigate that problem you're on your path to freeing people from feeling like they must use the AH.
First off, I really don't think it helps the discussion to refer to people who use the AH as cheaters. That's categorically incorrect.
Secondly, the point is that, say there are 30 affixes available for a pair of gloves, there are really only 4 important ones - main stat, CHC, CD, AS. The general idea, taking Thorns as an example, would be - if you make it so that more than 4 of those stats are quality stats (they may not be the outright best, but they'd still be GOOD) then you suddenly are not pissed off when you roll Thorns. Thorns may not be as good as CHC... but it's still a DPS increase, it still helps you farm better.
The problem is that there are no properties that really compete with these four. We don't need properties that are better than them. We need some degree of parity among the stats, though. The current situation has almost no parity among stats. Reworking Thorns to be viable (if that's possible) is a step in the right direction. It helps close the gap between outright BiS items and what we can generally expect to find on our own.