I know that auction houses have been discussed, but I haven't seen this idea so I decided to share. Forgive me if this has popped up once before.
If you've ever tried to complete a trade in Diablo 2, you know how annoying and time consuming it can be. You either have to spam on a bunch of trade channels which zoom by so fast they are hard to read or just create an open game with the trade you want to make "WF 4 SOJ" or whatever. Yeah, it worked, but I spent just as much time spamming trades as I did killing demons, and I'm really not the kind of guy who likes trading all that much.
Obviously I think this has been identified as an area for improvement in Diablo 3, for which I am very grateful. Auction houses have been discussed. Personally I think that'd be great. I love the auction houses in WoW, they make getting items and getting rid of good items you don't need so fast, easy, and fun. Someone can buy your item while you're off doing quests, which is way better than having to stand in town and spam your items for sale until someone bites, I think.
There are some people who don't like the idea of an auction house in diablo 3, and really, they might have some valid points. Firstly, gold would have to be made into a valuable currency. Obviously it was pretty worthless in D2, and although I can't imagine why, some people want it to stay that way. Also a lot of players really enjoyed the 'item based economy' of D2.
Personally I don't see any difference in using sojs, high runes, or gold as currency but whatever floats your boat. The only reason there ever was enough sojs or high runes to use as currency was because they were duped to high hell anyways. But thats beside my point.
What I'm really here to suggest, is a trade house. Don't ask me how I know this, but there is a card game called chaotic. You can get the cards in a pack like if you were buying baseball cards, but each card also has a code so you can upload it online and play with it over the internet. Or trade it. To create a trade, you simply go into the trade interface, select the card(s) you want to trade, and then select the card(s) you want to trade for. The trade is then moved into a database of different trades that other players can look through and make the trades they like.
Perhaps something like this would work in D3? You go to the trade house in game, maybe its in caldeum, which seems to be the center of trade in sanctuary. You could then talk to an npc to access the trade database to post or complete the trades you want. If you find a good item that you can't use, then you can always just post it for trade for an item you can use.
This would be a way of improving D2s trade system without destroying the item based economy.
There are a few drawbacks however. With a gold based economy you can simply charge a small fee to list an auction. That way if someone tries to sell the crappiest item in the game for a ridiculous amount of gold, noone will buy their item and they will eventually be penalized because of it. In an item based trade house, there would be no price or penalty for creating ridiculous trades. People would spam trades offering crappy items for the best items in the game, just on the off chance that someone accidently hits a few wrong buttons when they're looking at the trade interface (this had been a problem in chaotic).
Obviously I think an auction house would be superior, but some type of trade system would definitely be an improvement over D2. What do you think?
I don't know how you can see runes, sojs and gold as the same thing. Gold is the only currency with a sink, making it the only currency with a steady value. It is also the only currency that you can buy shop stuff with (and other coming features).
Ah but the value of gold does fluctuate. Just as an item that cost me 1 soj at a certain time of the day might be sold for 2 sojs later on that same day, the value of gold in terms of the items you an buy with it will change over time. An item that costs 1 gold at one time could just as easily cost 2 gold later. Yes I know 1 gold is always 1 gold, but 1 soj is always 1 soj just the same.
Say you're selling me a windforce. I could either give you 1 gold or one high rune. Either way, with gold or high runes acting as currency, you could turn around and use that currency to buy something else. They both fluctuate in value determined by the amount of items you can get in return for them. In short, they function EXACTLY the same way. The only difference is high runes take up space in your inventory.
Giving gold a purpose in the game (buying shop stuff and other coming features as you say) is roughly equivalent to using your sojs as trade bait OR equipping them to your character.
Similarly high runes can be traded for items OR be made into runewords
In Diablo 3, if there is a gold based economy, you will be able to trade the gold for items OR use it to purchase some of those upcoming in game features you mentioned.
In all three examples, gold, sojs, and hrs are used as curreny but given value because they also have a function in the game.
So really how are they any different?
I do like your point about trading in person though, and having the ability to haggle. Of course I think haggling is difficult with an item based economy. Say you're trying to trade 1 high rune for an item. What would haggling be? Asking for 2 high runes? Thats twice the original price! At least in WoW, with gold silver and copper, it would be possible to haggle more incrementally.
I don't see how it is so different from a auction system. The only difference is that you trade item > item, instead of item > gold > item. And it is likely that many trades will be with the intention of getting gold, not items. A auction system is not more complicated, but it is more versatile, and it is much easier to know the value of items. Knowing how much the items 2 people are trading are worth is a art in itself (that I never managed to master in D2) which is very non-noob friendly. But you can simply look at the other items for sale to know how much you should sell your item for.
Its not that different from an auction house, and like I said an auction house is, in my opinion superior. I just thought it might be a nice compromise for all of the "item based economy" purists out there. Really we do need some kind of improved trading system. D2 is horrible. The trading system is probably the biggest reason why I quit so many times. Just getting fed up with spamming trades for hours.
D2 style trading sucked. I want an auction house. I want gold as the currency. I have nothing else to say, everything has been said a few thousand times. WoW handled it well. And nothing stopped you from trading the old fashioned way.
Alrighty then, gold economy and auction house it is!
And SFJake if you had read my original post you might have realized I was suggesting something a little different, but I'll understand if important people such as yourself can't be bothered with the tediousness of reading something before posting about it.
Well, you are really funny. Yes, I'm really an important person here. I see a pattern with this and that other guy you called "lord of nerdz", or something. Your attitude sickens me. And I did read your post, doesn't change what I said.
Be assured I won't hear any more of your posts in the future.
1. The only way for an item sink to be as good as a gold sink is if the item is completely removed, and that is not the case when trading. You find and trade soj after soj, but does someone ever sell them to a shop to get rid of it permanently? Good gold sinks are valuable through the whole game and will continue to drain the ever increasing pile of gold that is the economy.
2. Bad items are worth nothing in an item economy because no one buys them. You buy items when you are in high level, and high level players have no use for cathan rings. The advantage of a item economy is that you can sell the item to a shop for instant gold and use that gold in the future. You can collect many low level items to purchase a better item, something that is not possible in a item economy because items takes up space.
3. Both systems suffers deflation. An item economy deflates because of an increased number of items on the market. A gold economy deflates for the same reason, but it stops at a certain point. An item can be worthless in a item economy, that can't happen in a gold economy because of the shop value. The price for an item will stop a bit over the shop sell price. It doesn't matter how many items there are on the market, they will never get worthless. But there will always be deflation, that is what ladder resets are for. The only solution to deflation is item sinks, but what use do near perfect characters have for a possible item sink? The item sink must be more valuable than gold in many cases to prevent the market from flooding, either that or items must be made rarer.
4. Rune trading is a slightly improved version of the item economy because there is a built in item sink. The downside is that the lower runes are useless, and higher runes are hard to get. It still suffers from the big item economy issue.
5. The big item economy issue: You must trade great items for great items. It doesn't matter how many decent items you find, they are worth nothing in the global market. This is not beginner friendly at all. You want to trade your life steal cathan ring for a mana regenerating manald heal? Impossible, manald heal rings are useless so no one keeps them. What do they do with the manald heal? They sell it for what? Gold! So why not allowing people to turn the item into gold, and at the same time allowing the person with the cathan to get it. Solution: The cathan ring is sold to a shop or the AH, the gold you get is used to buy the manald heal.
It all comes down to the fact that items takes up space and gold don't.
Very well put. I wish someone told me this while I was studying economics!
An auction house is just stupid. It's an mmorpg system and wouldn't fit in Diablo.
1 on 1 trading, where you can barter for items is much better and exciting.
Get out of the 90's. Tradin one on one in person in game is a hassle, takes up far too much time and distracts from the main game. Plus it's and old out dated way of doing things. I think you are just being stubborn to change. Nostalgia much?
An auction house would be perfect and allow you to buy/sell quickly and let you focus on actually playing the game. You could still sell face to face if your an old dog that can't learn new tricks.
auctions would be nice you know like if you had to go to caldeum for auctions because its the biggest world trade center and it would be nice if you go there and in any game it will show on auctions on diablo 3 i mean there would be probably lots of items but it would make a great"better"game
i liked diablo 2 trading. if they could improve it somhow. but the good thing about it was that i wasent trading with a computer or a setup like a WoW auction house. i could haggle n talk it over.
As usual, I thought about this issue for too long before responding and a whole bunch of other issues related to the economies of the Blizzard games that I've played came to mind and clouded my response.
First off: (I think I've mentioned this before) we don't really know how playing and joining games will work in the new B.net system, so games opened just for trade announcements may not even be an option. It may be a hassle or incredibly easy to join a game in which someone else wants to trade. In spite of these uncertainties, I would love to not have to undergo the same struggle to find players with whom to trade that I underwent in D2. Time spent trading was excessive and stopped me from playing/enjoying the game, and based on the tidbits from Bashiok, the people at Blizzard are trying to minimize "not playing the game."
I have an ideal in my head of an auction house which also functions as a trade house wherein a player can post items which they want to trade and for how much or which particular item(s) they want. Other players could accept the terms and conditions of the initial offers outright (AKA buyout) or submit a counteroffer if the poster of the listing were online. The player would be immediately be notified that he received a counteroffer and could then respond to it at the next break in the action. He would have many options which might include opening a direct chat window with the other player so that they could haggle remotely and even complete the trade remotely.
While it might annoy a player's allies to have to wait around while he completed a trade, the amount of time that player decided to take away from his party is completely under his control. I say this to preempt people complaining that in- or very-close-to-action trading would suck for the others in the party--the trading wouldn't be inherently bad, only the people who wasted other people's time would suck. If counteroffers got to be annoying, they could be turned off for individual or all listings. Also, items could be listed as "make offer" (possibly with suggestions from the poster) which would only appear on the trade house when the poster was online (because it's hard to remotely trade with an offline individual). In my mind this should satisfy those who like to haggle (D2 Style) and those who like to post and forget (WoW Auction House Style) and hopefully everyone who likes to take as little time away from the game to trade as is possible.
Is this a problem/issue-free solution? Highly doubtful.
Will this be implemented? Not a chance (though I specifically hoped for a Monk class for a long time, so...)
I'll end this soon before it really becomes too long.
(I may have also brought this up before:) How does everyone feel about variable item statistics? I believe that the concept was done away with in WoW, although it was a huge part of trading in D2. Before I go too far, I am referring to the quality of many items to have a range of attributes, like how Mara's Kaleidoscope can add as little as 20 or as much as 30 to resistances. I am an increasingly casual gamer as I get older and have a greatly diminished amount of free time, and in the short span of time that I played the original WoW (didn't get to 60 / the end-game), I didn't miss variable item statistics at all.
It was an exceedingly fresh change for me to find that I only needed to find a particular item once to have the best version of said item. Granted that I'm sure that many players liked grinding for really long periods of time to get the best items with the best stat values, it just seems like a pain in the ass to me to have to work so hard for that last perfect stat. I bring this up because an item's value was so variable based on the values of its random stats. Maybe this was by design so that lower level players could afford crappy versions of good items. I don't know, but I remember playing for quite a long time in like .08 (maybe it was .09) and actually finding a unique hydra bow, identifying it, and finding that it was the worst possible windforce that I could have found (6% mana leech). I guess I just don't see how variable item statistics are fun OR are easy to have to deal with in an auction or trade house type system. I really should have spent more time on how they are tricky in an auction house system and done less unrelated bitching... oh well.
I'm getting really off-topic, but I would really enjoy it if D3 had such a difficult endgame (or maybe stuff that could be done once the standard story was finished) that at no point could a player easily and quickly solo(/harvest items from) the hardest enemies in a max player game... Once a player reaches the end of D2 and masters certain bosses or areas, it's really just a numbers and patience game to determine how good their gear will be since some items' stats can have more than 100 permutations which aren't "perfect."
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All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
- Ernest Rutherford
An auction house would be nice, however, I would also like to have the option to trade item for item in person. In particular, I think that the value of higher end items will still need to be graded on an item 4 item basis. I am sure that D3 will be structured in a way that takes the following issues into consideration. But at this point I wonder how that gold caps on players inventory, the value of items to vendors, and the gold quantities dropped from monsters can be balanced into an economy that works. Are monsters still going to be dropping 1000's of gold, or are they going to drop amounts on the order of 1 or 2 gold? If gold drops from monsters are to have value, then the gold received for selling items to vendors will also need to be on the order of just a few gold. Gambling is also supposed to be included in D3. Gambling prices will need to be very cheap, or else people will just use the gold to directly buy the item that they are hoping for. Heres the real concern. Every item in the game has to have some gold value. So, lets say that a cracked helm has a value of 1 gold (to vendors). If a cracked helm is worth 1 gold, then whats the value of top end items (like a Windforce for instance). Currently, the maximum gold capacity for characters is something like 3,500,000. Would 3,500,000 be a realistic value for a Windforce? Lets say theres no inventory cap on gold, would accumulating billions of gold be realistic? I guess my fear is that gold accumulation will be fairly easy if a person is willing to sell every item that they find. I do not think that a windforce should be obtainable by people that have found and sold 1000's of junk items to vendors. More realistically, I see gold serving the function that gems have served at various points in D2. When the 3os swords were being rolled with chip gems, then chippies had value. People like to roll charms now, which gives pgems value. Low level characters can obtain these things and trade them to higher level chars for various mid-level items. However, you would not see a Windforce traded for gems. This is how it should be with gold.
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If you've ever tried to complete a trade in Diablo 2, you know how annoying and time consuming it can be. You either have to spam on a bunch of trade channels which zoom by so fast they are hard to read or just create an open game with the trade you want to make "WF 4 SOJ" or whatever. Yeah, it worked, but I spent just as much time spamming trades as I did killing demons, and I'm really not the kind of guy who likes trading all that much.
Obviously I think this has been identified as an area for improvement in Diablo 3, for which I am very grateful. Auction houses have been discussed. Personally I think that'd be great. I love the auction houses in WoW, they make getting items and getting rid of good items you don't need so fast, easy, and fun. Someone can buy your item while you're off doing quests, which is way better than having to stand in town and spam your items for sale until someone bites, I think.
There are some people who don't like the idea of an auction house in diablo 3, and really, they might have some valid points. Firstly, gold would have to be made into a valuable currency. Obviously it was pretty worthless in D2, and although I can't imagine why, some people want it to stay that way. Also a lot of players really enjoyed the 'item based economy' of D2.
Personally I don't see any difference in using sojs, high runes, or gold as currency but whatever floats your boat. The only reason there ever was enough sojs or high runes to use as currency was because they were duped to high hell anyways. But thats beside my point.
What I'm really here to suggest, is a trade house. Don't ask me how I know this, but there is a card game called chaotic. You can get the cards in a pack like if you were buying baseball cards, but each card also has a code so you can upload it online and play with it over the internet. Or trade it. To create a trade, you simply go into the trade interface, select the card(s) you want to trade, and then select the card(s) you want to trade for. The trade is then moved into a database of different trades that other players can look through and make the trades they like.
Perhaps something like this would work in D3? You go to the trade house in game, maybe its in caldeum, which seems to be the center of trade in sanctuary. You could then talk to an npc to access the trade database to post or complete the trades you want. If you find a good item that you can't use, then you can always just post it for trade for an item you can use.
This would be a way of improving D2s trade system without destroying the item based economy.
There are a few drawbacks however. With a gold based economy you can simply charge a small fee to list an auction. That way if someone tries to sell the crappiest item in the game for a ridiculous amount of gold, noone will buy their item and they will eventually be penalized because of it. In an item based trade house, there would be no price or penalty for creating ridiculous trades. People would spam trades offering crappy items for the best items in the game, just on the off chance that someone accidently hits a few wrong buttons when they're looking at the trade interface (this had been a problem in chaotic).
Obviously I think an auction house would be superior, but some type of trade system would definitely be an improvement over D2. What do you think?
Ah but the value of gold does fluctuate. Just as an item that cost me 1 soj at a certain time of the day might be sold for 2 sojs later on that same day, the value of gold in terms of the items you an buy with it will change over time. An item that costs 1 gold at one time could just as easily cost 2 gold later. Yes I know 1 gold is always 1 gold, but 1 soj is always 1 soj just the same.
Say you're selling me a windforce. I could either give you 1 gold or one high rune. Either way, with gold or high runes acting as currency, you could turn around and use that currency to buy something else. They both fluctuate in value determined by the amount of items you can get in return for them. In short, they function EXACTLY the same way. The only difference is high runes take up space in your inventory.
Giving gold a purpose in the game (buying shop stuff and other coming features as you say) is roughly equivalent to using your sojs as trade bait OR equipping them to your character.
Similarly high runes can be traded for items OR be made into runewords
In Diablo 3, if there is a gold based economy, you will be able to trade the gold for items OR use it to purchase some of those upcoming in game features you mentioned.
In all three examples, gold, sojs, and hrs are used as curreny but given value because they also have a function in the game.
So really how are they any different?
I do like your point about trading in person though, and having the ability to haggle. Of course I think haggling is difficult with an item based economy. Say you're trying to trade 1 high rune for an item. What would haggling be? Asking for 2 high runes? Thats twice the original price! At least in WoW, with gold silver and copper, it would be possible to haggle more incrementally.
Its not that different from an auction house, and like I said an auction house is, in my opinion superior. I just thought it might be a nice compromise for all of the "item based economy" purists out there. Really we do need some kind of improved trading system. D2 is horrible. The trading system is probably the biggest reason why I quit so many times. Just getting fed up with spamming trades for hours.
Well, you are really funny. Yes, I'm really an important person here. I see a pattern with this and that other guy you called "lord of nerdz", or something. Your attitude sickens me. And I did read your post, doesn't change what I said.
Be assured I won't hear any more of your posts in the future.
Very well put. I wish someone told me this while I was studying economics!
Get out of the 90's. Tradin one on one in person in game is a hassle, takes up far too much time and distracts from the main game. Plus it's and old out dated way of doing things. I think you are just being stubborn to change. Nostalgia much?
An auction house would be perfect and allow you to buy/sell quickly and let you focus on actually playing the game. You could still sell face to face if your an old dog that can't learn new tricks.
The world may never know...
First off: (I think I've mentioned this before) we don't really know how playing and joining games will work in the new B.net system, so games opened just for trade announcements may not even be an option. It may be a hassle or incredibly easy to join a game in which someone else wants to trade. In spite of these uncertainties, I would love to not have to undergo the same struggle to find players with whom to trade that I underwent in D2. Time spent trading was excessive and stopped me from playing/enjoying the game, and based on the tidbits from Bashiok, the people at Blizzard are trying to minimize "not playing the game."
I have an ideal in my head of an auction house which also functions as a trade house wherein a player can post items which they want to trade and for how much or which particular item(s) they want. Other players could accept the terms and conditions of the initial offers outright (AKA buyout) or submit a counteroffer if the poster of the listing were online. The player would be immediately be notified that he received a counteroffer and could then respond to it at the next break in the action. He would have many options which might include opening a direct chat window with the other player so that they could haggle remotely and even complete the trade remotely.
While it might annoy a player's allies to have to wait around while he completed a trade, the amount of time that player decided to take away from his party is completely under his control. I say this to preempt people complaining that in- or very-close-to-action trading would suck for the others in the party--the trading wouldn't be inherently bad, only the people who wasted other people's time would suck. If counteroffers got to be annoying, they could be turned off for individual or all listings. Also, items could be listed as "make offer" (possibly with suggestions from the poster) which would only appear on the trade house when the poster was online (because it's hard to remotely trade with an offline individual). In my mind this should satisfy those who like to haggle (D2 Style) and those who like to post and forget (WoW Auction House Style) and hopefully everyone who likes to take as little time away from the game to trade as is possible.
Is this a problem/issue-free solution? Highly doubtful.
Will this be implemented? Not a chance (though I specifically hoped for a Monk class for a long time, so...)
I'll end this soon before it really becomes too long.
(I may have also brought this up before:) How does everyone feel about variable item statistics? I believe that the concept was done away with in WoW, although it was a huge part of trading in D2. Before I go too far, I am referring to the quality of many items to have a range of attributes, like how Mara's Kaleidoscope can add as little as 20 or as much as 30 to resistances. I am an increasingly casual gamer as I get older and have a greatly diminished amount of free time, and in the short span of time that I played the original WoW (didn't get to 60 / the end-game), I didn't miss variable item statistics at all.
It was an exceedingly fresh change for me to find that I only needed to find a particular item once to have the best version of said item. Granted that I'm sure that many players liked grinding for really long periods of time to get the best items with the best stat values, it just seems like a pain in the ass to me to have to work so hard for that last perfect stat. I bring this up because an item's value was so variable based on the values of its random stats. Maybe this was by design so that lower level players could afford crappy versions of good items. I don't know, but I remember playing for quite a long time in like .08 (maybe it was .09) and actually finding a unique hydra bow, identifying it, and finding that it was the worst possible windforce that I could have found (6% mana leech). I guess I just don't see how variable item statistics are fun OR are easy to have to deal with in an auction or trade house type system. I really should have spent more time on how they are tricky in an auction house system and done less unrelated bitching... oh well.
I'm getting really off-topic, but I would really enjoy it if D3 had such a difficult endgame (or maybe stuff that could be done once the standard story was finished) that at no point could a player easily and quickly solo(/harvest items from) the hardest enemies in a max player game... Once a player reaches the end of D2 and masters certain bosses or areas, it's really just a numbers and patience game to determine how good their gear will be since some items' stats can have more than 100 permutations which aren't "perfect."
- Ernest Rutherford
I am sure that D3 will be structured in a way that takes the following issues into consideration. But at this point I wonder how that gold caps on players inventory, the value of items to vendors, and the gold quantities dropped from monsters can be balanced into an economy that works.
Are monsters still going to be dropping 1000's of gold, or are they going to drop amounts on the order of 1 or 2 gold? If gold drops from monsters are to have value, then the gold received for selling items to vendors will also need to be on the order of just a few gold. Gambling is also supposed to be included in D3. Gambling prices will need to be very cheap, or else people will just use the gold to directly buy the item that they are hoping for.
Heres the real concern. Every item in the game has to have some gold value. So, lets say that a cracked helm has a value of 1 gold (to vendors). If a cracked helm is worth 1 gold, then whats the value of top end items (like a Windforce for instance). Currently, the maximum gold capacity for characters is something like 3,500,000. Would 3,500,000 be a realistic value for a Windforce? Lets say theres no inventory cap on gold, would accumulating billions of gold be realistic?
I guess my fear is that gold accumulation will be fairly easy if a person is willing to sell every item that they find. I do not think that a windforce should be obtainable by people that have found and sold 1000's of junk items to vendors.
More realistically, I see gold serving the function that gems have served at various points in D2. When the 3os swords were being rolled with chip gems, then chippies had value. People like to roll charms now, which gives pgems value. Low level characters can obtain these things and trade them to higher level chars for various mid-level items. However, you would not see a Windforce traded for gems. This is how it should be with gold.