This brings up a thought, i am interested to see what what you can salvage from items, will salvaging some of the top gear that sells on the AH for 100000000000 gold salvage something worth while? or will it be a waste?
It all matters how they want to implement gold into the economy, which is something which has yet to be detailed. If they want a true gold standard, where every item has a set value it's worth, taking into account stat variations, than we'll see set gold prices. I honestly don't expect this kind of market.. In Diablo an items value varies greatly, not only in stat variations but how often it drops (Which is random), and its usage in common builds. I expect gold to be more mixed with the item economy instead of a perfect representation of item value.
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” - Albert Einstein
Why does popo_joe think that there won't be item for item trade through the AH? I don't see why they wouldn't include this feature as people would probably want item for item. Second item for item trading is not singular or unique to Diablo... WoW has it, hell maplestory has it. Also they have stated that the in game trade window is still there and will be used exactly like it was in D2 so I don't see why you are so upset with something that will either help you or have 0 Effect on you or your playstyle.
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I think what every one is missing is that ah (wow style) makes getting items too easy. What ever the trade system is, it wont be a copy of wow auction house. I don't want wow's ah in D3. Being able to simultaneously trade with everyone at the same time? We wouldn't ever need to farm our own gear. Just make a gf character and your done. No thanks
I think what every one is missing is that ah (wow style) makes getting items too easy. What ever the trade system is, it wont be a copy of wow auction house. I don't want wow's ah in D3. Being able to simultaneously trade with everyone at the same time? We wouldn't ever need to farm our own gear. Just make a gf character and your done. No thanks
It's a good point you raise. Thing is, where are all the items going to come from if everyone just makes a gold find character? There won't be nearly enough supply, and the very few item finders will know this. They'll jack up prices. Once prices get high enough that your average gold grinder can't keep up, the market kicks in. People will start seeking their own items again, and in the process, put the ones they don't want on the AH. The market will oscillate like this continually, shifting from low supply/high prices to high supply/low prices. The rate at which prices can change is nearly infinitely higher than the rate at which people can find gold, hence the corrective/balancing effect.
More generally, I can sympathize with people who don't want a WoW style auction house. I don't think the AH will be a copy/paste from WoW. Whatever "marketplace" they implement will fit the Diablo universe well, because that's been Blizzard's focus since the beginning.
The key I think is semantic. Let's call it a "Marketplace," not an "Auction House." AH implies WoW, so let's use some self-psychology to remember that whatever trading interface we get, it will be specifically tailored for Diablo, and it will be fun.
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"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
Good points. Another thing I thought of in terms of the flaw in tryin to give d3 wow's ah is that no matter how much gold grinding / buying (yikes) people do in wow they can never get the best of the best gear. The gear from the ah was always stepping stone gear. In d3 every item is tradeable. If nothing else a wide open ah presents a scary prospect for the rise of gold selling sites. I just think (and NO I dont think it was real) a system like the limited player trading games feels more like d2. You essentially are rolling the dice each time you join. Sounds a lot more like diablo to me than buying anything at anytime if you have the gold.
If gold still rules the economy it will still require you to have that much to buy those massive items.. That is the trick and where I believe that you will only be able to max out 1 artisian (still have others, just lower level) and then you will have to buy other 'maxed' out stuff from others keeping gold flowing so you really cant afford to stock pile it unless you are holding out.
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Good points. Another thing I thought of in terms of the flaw in tryin to give d3 wow's ah is that no matter how much gold grinding / buying (yikes) people do in wow they can never get the best of the best gear. The gear from the ah was always stepping stone gear. In d3 every item is tradeable. If nothing else a wide open ah presents a scary prospect for the rise of gold selling sites. I just think (and NO I dont think it was real) a system like the limited player trading games feels more like d2. You essentially are rolling the dice each time you join. Sounds a lot more like diablo to me than buying anything at anytime if you have the gold.
That's a really good point, I hadn't considered that. I agree that it would be tragic if best-of-the-best gear can be acquired for 10 U.S. Dollars worth of gold from a farming site.. that will kill D3 pretty fast for a lot of gamers. That's why I was a bit disappointed when Bliz announced that BoE and BoP items were removed.
At the core, I think we all want to see a large spread of character quality. Most softcore/casual gamers should have weaker characters, when you compare them toe-to-toe with a hardcore gamer's char with hundreds of hours logged.
How much will skill factor in? Quite a bit I'm sure. But we all know just how important gear is, and if joe schmoe can put in a relatively small amount of effort compared to a hardcore gamer, yet acquire the same quality gear, that would be a massive failure. Hopefully the D3 dev team has factored that in.
If a Marketplace causes everyone to be equally leet regardless of time/effort/skill, that marketplace fails, and D3 will go on the shelf really fast.
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"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
Lazy and convenient are two separate ideas. I don't have the time to wait around for hours trying to slowly comb through the few people that enter a game to see what they have for trade. For me, its not finding something quickly and being done with it. For me, the AH allows me to find buyers while I can't play the actual game. I can set something up, go to work for 10 hours and come home to my items sold. That is convenient, not lazy.
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Your assuming you can just go buy whatever, whenever, theoretically said elite items will not be that cheap o.0
your not just going to go sell all of your tier 1 gear until you can afford that tier 18: 'Bloody Merries Elite Godly Great Sword of the Murderous Butcher'
Elite items will still be rare / hard to attain / Expensive
I found the processes of buying, or selling items in D2 frustrating at best. This is also a very large reason why the amount of people who resorted to third party vendors did so.
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” - Albert Einstein
Lazy and convenient are two separate ideas. I don't have the time to wait around for hours trying to slowly comb through the few people that enter a game to see what they have for trade. For me, its not finding something quickly and being done with it. For me, the AH allows me to find buyers while I can't play the actual game. I can set something up, go to work for 10 hours and come home to my items sold. That is convenient, not lazy.
Yeah I also have a job and I know I won't be able to spend hours and hours trading my stuff, AH is convenient but imo it doesnt feel diabloish.
That's not how I spent my entire childhood playing the game.
I also did spend my childhood playing Diablo on a 1920x1280 resolution but that doesn't mean I shouldn't now. You cannot knock progress by comparing to an out dated game. I guarantee you that if they had the technology today back then, the trade system would have been improved than simple person to person trading.
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I think you mean change/progress!= better. Improvement, by definition means better.
But anyway, I think any change to the trade system would make it better from Diablo 2. I personally hated how it worked and made it impossible for someone like me to even be a part of it.
And aside from an actual AH, globalizing the economy to a universal currency, gold, is the best thing they could have ever done for trade for diablo. I mean, there is a reason the world doesn't still operate on a trade and barter system.
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I could be wrong, but I don't think any one here is asking/wishing for the trade system from d2 to come back the same way. The good folks who are arguing for a WoW style AH keep saying "face to face trading like in D2" or something to that degree. I (I guess I am in the 'please no wow style AH camp') and the other people who are talking from my perspective are NOT asking for nothing new in the trading system. We are just wanting it to feel like diablo. I can't imagine a system that allows you to post items like in wow still feeling diabloish. I'm not wanting it to be so insanely frustrating like in d2 (basically a lack of any system at all) I just think that 5 years from now, just buying all the best gear from he ah, in 1 min, would be a shame.
I think we're mostly in the same camp, Snowhammer. The main thing I want is a much more efficient way to find a buyers and sellers. Going into game after game searching for hours for an item wasn't Diablo-ish, it was bad design, and painfully annoying.
But for D3, it goes without saying that whatever marketplace feature they implement, it will feel "Diabloish." They are so laser focused on that idea there's no doubt about it. You can reason that WoW does not feel like Diablo, so it's pretty safe to assume we won't see a copy/paste of WoW's Auction House.
We all want a Marketplace. A place we can go and exchange goods safely, efficiently, and fairly, but also have fun doing it! I do agree with popo_joe in a way, just not to his extreme.. Logging into a WoW-style AH GUI would be fairly impersonal, and I'd prefer something more interactive and based in the Diablo aesthetic.
But that said, I will literally take ANYTHING over D2's trading system, and that includes a WoW AH clone.
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"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
I found the processes of buying, or selling items in D2 frustrating at best. This is also a very large reason why the amount of people who resorted to third party vendors did so.
I know I never bought anything from any website, I was in the same situation as everybody. And god knows how many times Ive been hacked or scammed, but I always restarted playing after a while.
Only people who didn't bother playing the game used to buy their stuff for $$, they ruined the fun for many people by encouraging those third party websites. That's part of what kept me from playing the game online.
I also was hacked, and scammed with duplicated items many of times. This isn't what turned me to buy third party items though. The time it took to find exactly what I was looking for is what turned me to buying items. I looked for a high/perf Arreat's Face for my Barb for weeks, every day for hours alongside high/perf Steelrends, a 40 vit Verdungo's Hearty Cord, just to name a few items, for one character. Yes, I bought plenty of third party items in my day. Looking back on it now, reason being is that the trading system failed to connect me to enough people. Spamming chats, putting the item name in your lobby name, and endlessly searching through trading games were your only options in D2 to find what you needed.
A WoW style auction house tweaked to Diablo's needs would be outstanding in my opinion. Again, as I posted before in this topic, the dev team has been working on this problem for far to long to just copy and paste the WoW AH into Diablo, so put your fears to rest over that. It's safe to assume if you like what the team has done so far that the trading system will both feel, "Diablo-y" and allow for a similar level of trading across thousands of people efficiently.
I don't understand the nostalgia for the D2, "face to face" style trading. With an AH, you could offer an item for an item, wait for the person to respond through PM (Likely a few seconds later), and ask to meet in a game lobby. There's your face to face lol. I see there being no good way to base the entire trading system on face to face interactions. Just as an example, say the AH has a drop down listing for item types. I need the Sword of Awesomeness, I'll likely have multiple options of how to find it in the AH. I can type it in the search bar (Boom, 20 hours of D2 style searching done in 2 seconds), I can click swords, filter its rarity, and scroll through thousands of swords for trade. I can likely even narrow it down by it's DPS, or other stats. The search bar could even have a kind of spell check for items, where if you don't know the exact name you can just type in letters you know are in the title, and the system brings up all the swords with those letters.
These are all ideas I just came up with on the fly, I can't fathom what the dev team has thought of over the years. Point being, I can use quick efficient methods to find the item, and if I want face time with the person I just ask them to join a game, or join their game.. There's no reason to base the system of this concept. I feel a lot of the fear it that it won't feel like Diablo with an AH. I'm confident it will feel, and play even better.
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” - Albert Einstein
I highly doubt gold will become the standard currency. The way it looks now gold is a NPC currency of sorts. Gold can be used to do many more things now than in D2. For example, upgrade your vendors (All 3), upgrade runes and gems, and likely many more that escape me at this moment. There has to be a balance struck in the importance, and amount of gold a player gets on average. If gold if very important, yet there's not enough in the economy, than items will likely be traded for gold. If gold is not very important, and the economy is saturated with it, gold will be as it was in D2. Priming the economy will take precision on Blizzards part, yes another reason why the Beta will likely be months long. As long as a balance is found both gold and items will make for the currency.
As far as face to face trading, again I feel the solution is just to invite the person into a game.
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” - Albert Einstein
I disagree, I really hope gold becomes universal and is used for trading. Creating one form of currency is the most logical and practical way to handle trade amongst millions of players. Player based currencies like items make for an ever fluctuating market that is impossible to track and organize. It also makes it impossible for some people to enter the market once it has become established. It creates a group of elitists who control the market and can exploit others. Call me whatever, but this is a game, there should never be a system that gives any else an advantage over another player. We are all here to have fun, not exploit others for our benefit.
Gold is the best solution no matter how many people still want item for item trades. Anybody with any economic knowledge would say the same. For anybody who only wants item for item trading, I feel it is because it is for a sense of familiarity to Diablo II and goes against the progress of Diablo as a franchise.
I am not saying item for item should not or cannot exist, but it should not be the corner stone of the economy.
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It all matters how they want to implement gold into the economy, which is something which has yet to be detailed. If they want a true gold standard, where every item has a set value it's worth, taking into account stat variations, than we'll see set gold prices. I honestly don't expect this kind of market.. In Diablo an items value varies greatly, not only in stat variations but how often it drops (Which is random), and its usage in common builds. I expect gold to be more mixed with the item economy instead of a perfect representation of item value.
Monk > Wizard > Barbarian > Demon Hunter > Witch Doctor
It's a good point you raise. Thing is, where are all the items going to come from if everyone just makes a gold find character? There won't be nearly enough supply, and the very few item finders will know this. They'll jack up prices. Once prices get high enough that your average gold grinder can't keep up, the market kicks in. People will start seeking their own items again, and in the process, put the ones they don't want on the AH. The market will oscillate like this continually, shifting from low supply/high prices to high supply/low prices. The rate at which prices can change is nearly infinitely higher than the rate at which people can find gold, hence the corrective/balancing effect.
More generally, I can sympathize with people who don't want a WoW style auction house. I don't think the AH will be a copy/paste from WoW. Whatever "marketplace" they implement will fit the Diablo universe well, because that's been Blizzard's focus since the beginning.
The key I think is semantic. Let's call it a "Marketplace," not an "Auction House." AH implies WoW, so let's use some self-psychology to remember that whatever trading interface we get, it will be specifically tailored for Diablo, and it will be fun.
-Thomas Jefferson
That's a really good point, I hadn't considered that. I agree that it would be tragic if best-of-the-best gear can be acquired for 10 U.S. Dollars worth of gold from a farming site.. that will kill D3 pretty fast for a lot of gamers. That's why I was a bit disappointed when Bliz announced that BoE and BoP items were removed.
At the core, I think we all want to see a large spread of character quality. Most softcore/casual gamers should have weaker characters, when you compare them toe-to-toe with a hardcore gamer's char with hundreds of hours logged.
How much will skill factor in? Quite a bit I'm sure. But we all know just how important gear is, and if joe schmoe can put in a relatively small amount of effort compared to a hardcore gamer, yet acquire the same quality gear, that would be a massive failure. Hopefully the D3 dev team has factored that in.
If a Marketplace causes everyone to be equally leet regardless of time/effort/skill, that marketplace fails, and D3 will go on the shelf really fast.
-Thomas Jefferson
Find any Diablo news? Contact me or anyone else on the News team
your not just going to go sell all of your tier 1 gear until you can afford that tier 18: 'Bloody Merries Elite Godly Great Sword of the Murderous Butcher'
Elite items will still be rare / hard to attain / Expensive
I also did spend my childhood playing Diablo on a 1920x1280 resolution but that doesn't mean I shouldn't now. You cannot knock progress by comparing to an out dated game. I guarantee you that if they had the technology today back then, the trade system would have been improved than simple person to person trading.
Find any Diablo news? Contact me or anyone else on the News team
But anyway, I think any change to the trade system would make it better from Diablo 2. I personally hated how it worked and made it impossible for someone like me to even be a part of it.
And aside from an actual AH, globalizing the economy to a universal currency, gold, is the best thing they could have ever done for trade for diablo. I mean, there is a reason the world doesn't still operate on a trade and barter system.
Find any Diablo news? Contact me or anyone else on the News team
But for D3, it goes without saying that whatever marketplace feature they implement, it will feel "Diabloish." They are so laser focused on that idea there's no doubt about it. You can reason that WoW does not feel like Diablo, so it's pretty safe to assume we won't see a copy/paste of WoW's Auction House.
We all want a Marketplace. A place we can go and exchange goods safely, efficiently, and fairly, but also have fun doing it! I do agree with popo_joe in a way, just not to his extreme.. Logging into a WoW-style AH GUI would be fairly impersonal, and I'd prefer something more interactive and based in the Diablo aesthetic.
But that said, I will literally take ANYTHING over D2's trading system, and that includes a WoW AH clone.
-Thomas Jefferson
I also was hacked, and scammed with duplicated items many of times. This isn't what turned me to buy third party items though. The time it took to find exactly what I was looking for is what turned me to buying items. I looked for a high/perf Arreat's Face for my Barb for weeks, every day for hours alongside high/perf Steelrends, a 40 vit Verdungo's Hearty Cord, just to name a few items, for one character. Yes, I bought plenty of third party items in my day. Looking back on it now, reason being is that the trading system failed to connect me to enough people. Spamming chats, putting the item name in your lobby name, and endlessly searching through trading games were your only options in D2 to find what you needed.
A WoW style auction house tweaked to Diablo's needs would be outstanding in my opinion. Again, as I posted before in this topic, the dev team has been working on this problem for far to long to just copy and paste the WoW AH into Diablo, so put your fears to rest over that. It's safe to assume if you like what the team has done so far that the trading system will both feel, "Diablo-y" and allow for a similar level of trading across thousands of people efficiently.
I don't understand the nostalgia for the D2, "face to face" style trading. With an AH, you could offer an item for an item, wait for the person to respond through PM (Likely a few seconds later), and ask to meet in a game lobby. There's your face to face lol. I see there being no good way to base the entire trading system on face to face interactions. Just as an example, say the AH has a drop down listing for item types. I need the Sword of Awesomeness, I'll likely have multiple options of how to find it in the AH. I can type it in the search bar (Boom, 20 hours of D2 style searching done in 2 seconds), I can click swords, filter its rarity, and scroll through thousands of swords for trade. I can likely even narrow it down by it's DPS, or other stats. The search bar could even have a kind of spell check for items, where if you don't know the exact name you can just type in letters you know are in the title, and the system brings up all the swords with those letters.
These are all ideas I just came up with on the fly, I can't fathom what the dev team has thought of over the years. Point being, I can use quick efficient methods to find the item, and if I want face time with the person I just ask them to join a game, or join their game.. There's no reason to base the system of this concept. I feel a lot of the fear it that it won't feel like Diablo with an AH. I'm confident it will feel, and play even better.
As far as face to face trading, again I feel the solution is just to invite the person into a game.
Gold is the best solution no matter how many people still want item for item trades. Anybody with any economic knowledge would say the same. For anybody who only wants item for item trading, I feel it is because it is for a sense of familiarity to Diablo II and goes against the progress of Diablo as a franchise.
I am not saying item for item should not or cannot exist, but it should not be the corner stone of the economy.
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They both are systems, essentially, that exist outside the game itself.
I would like to know exactly what the problem with an AH would be, because I can't think of any.