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Quote from Don_guillotine

Quote from FingolfinGR

I'm quite happy with the Auction House. This way I can make some money out of the game I'll be playing for years in a quite safe and legal way.

The amount of information given was (finally) huge too!

Yes, in essence, the real money AH does not differ significantly from 3rd-party trading sites like D2JSP conceptually. It will just be infinitely safer and the destination of the cash is better known.

I raged for 15 minutes myself when I learned about this. But then I started to think about D2JSP and how the economy there worked and was stable mostly due to the real money stopping any gigantic inflation.

Knowing full well just how rampant real world trading was in Diablo 2 all I can say is that this is great.

As I think the game will be relatively unhackable you won't have to worry about duped items, and there won't be exorbitant prices on items that the site claims aren't duped, everything being sold you know you're getting for real. Plus you can sell your items on the real money AH, you will get money with which you can put back into the game.

The fact is Diablo 2 had real world trading, and lots of it. So they put the system in and made it safe, and legit, and AH's in general are a great idea for Diablo 2 as it was very hard to sell items in D2 that weren't amazing (but still somewhat valuable) and you always had to worry that what you were getting was duped.

Mostly I support this based on these things:

• No duped items
• People would pay for items anyway
• People would pay for gold anyway to buy things on the AH, making it no different from spending real money on the game
• Auction houses for this game are awesome
• People would sell and buy characters/accounts anyway, happens all the time in wow, less so in D2 due to ease of leveling up a character and who wants to pay for what is not a huge time investment
• Realistically, who can remember having it easy in the D2 economy? It wasn't easy. Everyone with lots of extremely valuable stuff either botted or bought it off people who botted, it was a botting problem
• I am rather assuming there will be no bots in the game
• It is not a full-on microtransaction system, Blizzard is not putting any items artificially into the game, everything on the AH will have been dropped and found by players

On a side note: I wonder if you can sell gold on the gold-orientated AH?

Why would I? Why can't I go offf on a tangent of my own? Isn't explaining things in question form enough for you?

Hello, welcome to the forum! Why do people lurk so much? I mean, if you're gonna watch forum regularly, create an account so atleast you can post on the topics you read anyways hope you enjoy your time as a non-lurker

This was an awesomely funny thread. Just completely epic!

Quote from "edi-lupus" »

fallout 3 (plus all the DLC), will keep you going for a lllooonnnggg time

First game I'm playing when I get my new computer

I'm hoping to get a conversation going about what to expect in the Diablo 3 markets based on what we know going in, and what that suggests for early strategies. I'd love to hear from folks with actual training in Economics and new markets. :-)

Here's my initial thoughts.

-The average amount of gold generated per hour of individual playtime community-wide will go up as the average level goes up. How much real money people are willing to pay for gold scales with how much effort it saves them. So, I expect the gold exchange rate will consistently move in one direction: a dollar will buy more and more gold over time.

-I expect a level-floor effect in the RMAH. Given the above point about the exchange rate, the $1 selling fee will represent more and more gold over time, so the cut-off level (below which even the best-itemized items can't generate enough demand to justify the $1 fee) will go up over time. Below that level they will all sell on the GAH instead.

Corollary: Blizzard will eventually realize that and either lower the selling fee or change it to 15% to match the GAH and eliminate the distortion. Otherwise the RMAH will ultimately only be used for level-60 items.

-The best-rolled items for their level will tend to recirculate on the AH as players outgrow and resell them (no soulbinding). New items will continually be generated at that level as players progress through, so the quality of the top-quality items at a given level will continue to go up, approaching a limit. There will of course be variants preferred by gold-farming, magic-finding, DPS, etc strategies.

-Early on, no-one will be experienced at item valuation so all kinds of things will be posted and find buyers. As groupthink emerges eg "crit rules all" or whatever it turns out to be, desirable items will become easier to spot by buyers and sellers alike. Anything else should be salvaged.

-Speaking of salvaging: since vendor prices don't inflate, the value of salvaging compared to vendoring items will go up over time. It may initially be worth it to vendor things in order to get hard-to-acquire gold, but once the threshold is passed there'll be no going back.

(EDIT: the first market development has been that everyone salvaged like crazy and drove Subtle Essence below the vendor price. So vendoring is king for now, just buy any mats you need for crafting. But I stand by my statement above that since vendor prices don't inflate -- and neither do the BS's crafting fees -- eventually we will pass a threshold where salvaging will be the better economic choice.)

-Leveling up artisans is a major gold sink (ie money removed from the economy). It costs ~600,000g to fully level one's Blacksmith and ~140,000g for the Jeweler. That will put a damper on inflation for a while as most players will want to build those assets for themselves. Artisans are shared across all your characters so that's a single 740,000g sink per person. Once the bulk of the player base has the artisans they want, inflation will be more pronounced as people will have higher and higher gold incomes to spend on the same things.

-The ability to take one's profits in real-world currency will create a huge incentive to buy-and-repost items between the GAH and RMAH anytime there is enough of a market difference for that item in the two AHes given the current gold exchange rate. So unless you put a really low value on your time -- or "playing the market" is sufficient fun value in and of itself -- I expect these margins will be quickly narrowed to the point where it's not worth searching for them.

-The above is a GOOD thing for people who just want to sell/buy some things and get a fair price.

What are good market strategies given an expectation of inflation?

1) Don't sit on a pile of gold without doing anything with it. If there's nothing you want to spend it on right now, buy up salvage dust as a store of value and then sell it later at an inflated gold price. (EDIT: I stand by this, too. Tidal waves of gold will come spilling from lvl-60 characters back into outfitting new low-lvls for fast playthroughs. Prices for good low lvl items will go up way higher than new players could afford with their found gold. Crafting low lvl items will become profitable, and the price of salvage dusts will rise. Meanwhile, if your bank account can afford you one fantastic item today, the same amount will get you 1/20th of a fantastic item before you know it. Don't sit on gold.)

2) Put off leveling your artisans. 740,000 looks like a mountain of gold now, but that price will look cheaper and cheaper over time as it won't inflate. Moreover, since the quality-standard for the best-itemized pieces of a given level will go up over time (as the best ones recirculate and new bests get generated), it will get rarer and rarer to randomly roll a crafted item that is worth more than the mats you spent. A far better strategy will be to buy whatever you would try to craft off the GAH for the market rate and then sell it back when you're done with it. You'll comfortably be able to outspend players who sink some of their gold into artisans.

3) Put another way: artisans are content. People will level them because it's a part of the game they want to see. If that describes you too, great! No bad vibes at all playing the way you want to play. My point is that tons of people will pursue a crafting strategy regardless of whether it is an economic win for them. Therefore the actual economic win will be in the contrarian strategy: sell salvage dust to crafters, use the profits to buy what you want of their products. (Or if there's a min Blacksmith level required to salvage per item level, only level him as required for your salvage needs.)

I made a post for you here: http://www.overclock.net/intel-general/1066371-australian-pc-build.html#post14223270

But for the rest if you idiots (not saying you are all idiots), don't suggest him to go AMD, AMD is currently crap, and is just out dated. The 1100T is easily beatin by a 2500k EVEN IN MULTI THREADED BENCHS. So.. in theory the 2600k is like 2 1100Ts..

Also, please don't suggest that 8GB of RAM is overkill, I mean in most cases it is, EXCEPT in any type of rendering programs, and modeling programs. Trust me, he will use 10GB using MAYA and his other software, and since he is using an SSD he won't be able to have a 10GB pagefile, so he better have enough ram. This build is obviously not going to be your average web browsing PC or gaming machine.

Also, unless he is doing stuff for NASA, you don't HAVE to choose a workstation grade processor, as often those only have 1 use. The difference between workstation vs gaming cards (or to my understanding) is workstation cards strive for accuracy/precision, where as gaming cards strive for speed.

And I was so ready to troll. Dangnamit.

Welcome to the board

I stumbled across one of these today in act 3 and I thought to myself, should I really be afraid? How hard is it to become a champion of drowned carcasses. Did this particular carcass drown better than any other carcass? Thoughts.

Quote from Zhar

I'd much rather have Blizzard selling items, than to have 20 some odd sites selling items, and spamming the chat channels.

Plus, this would give them some actual incentive to murder the spambots, as it would interfere with their income.

Assuming that Blizzard does start selling items, they will undoubtedly be in a better position that any third-part site:

• They do not have to farm for any of their stock, they have an infinite supply that can, theoretically, be sold at any price. No third part site will ever be able to compete with this.
• Blizzard will be able to sell their items directly through the game interface, and as a buyer you will know exactly what you're getting. Blizzard can also hold a stock of a much larger amount of items more easily; even obscure items that few people will want to buy can be housed in their shop; there's no limit.
• Buyers will be able to trust their purchase. No chance whatsoever that they will get scammed by this.

These three facts do speak in Blizzard's favor. Of course, it's still a matter of competition; a third-party site could build a up a reputation, as well as a large stock containing a lot of items. If Blizzard doesn't sell at a favorable price, it still won't work. The potential for competition has thus not been removed, and this limits Blizzard in what they can do.

Because of this, Blizzard will only be able to sell top-tier items. Why? Because if top-tier items are not sold, third-part sites will still retain their market. If you can buy good items from Blizzard, but the best somewhere else, you haven't fixed the problem. Thus the best items have to be sold by Blizzard. They also cannot control the prices; their price will be regulated by what third-party sites can sell at. Place your price too high, and you will have accomplished nothing. Thus Blizzard cannot artificially make it so decent items are sold for less than great items, unless they want to give them away for a few cents, which will surely flood the market if it's that cheap to acquire decent items.


While this removes the need for spam-bots, it has only contained them: Blizzard still has to play by the rules of third-party sites. If they don't, they lose in the competition for the customer.

If bots were removed or greatly limited instead, removing their ability to advertise and farm, it would have the same effect without Blizzard having to sell items. B.net 1.0 is over ten years old now, Blizzard will be able to construct a better system this time around to cope with this. It certainly won't be perfect, but it must be better than starting to sell items.

Quote from Zhar

We can already do this, and we will always be able to do this with the amount of sites out there.
Even if they don't advertise on B-net, they'll still be there, and people will still use them.

True. But justifying a cause just because it will still happen regardless of which is faulty at best. There has to be another reason for why selling items would be beneficial.

Quote from Zhar

Aha!
Now that would work well

Also, maybe even have a slight decrease in statistics.
Nothing intense, just like a 5% decrease in defense, or damage of the item.

Except you stigmatize the buyers and make their products worth less, thus again breeding a market for illegal items. Why buy a crappier item with red text that singles me out for all to see, when I could get the better item without such text from a 3rd-part site? Suddenly Blizzard isn't just in competition, but their competitor is selling a better product as well.

As we went over back in July of last year, many players were worried when the mention of microservices for real money was mentioned to be added to Diablo III. Perhaps the biggest concern was Bashiok's reply to being able to resurrect a Hardcore character for a small fee. Many Hardcore players felt that Diablo III may become too easy and catered towards a less experienced audience. Some believe that adding a way to resurrect a dead hardcore character entirely defeats the purpose and spirit of hardcore play. If microservices of this nature were implemented, no one would have to worry about being killed, so long as money is at hand. Whichever players have the most cash would likely be top hardcore players, bringing the game back to Diablo II, where riches often triumph over work. Well fear no more. Bashiok has posted again and stated that his mention of Hardcore resurrections was merely just a thought of his. He went on to mention that Jay Wilson, lead designer for Diablo III, is definitely against this idea. Only hard work and mad skillz will help you defeat the minions of Hell, Hardcore style.

With the idea of microservices mentioned, there are a lot of possibilities out there. Many free games use this style of microservices as a means to gain revenue. They offer players the option to buy gear, skills, and new areas for real money. Blizzard has only used these services, thus far, for minor server related issues such as name changes and server transfers. However, with a possible free MMO from Blizzard on the horizon, it is possible that they will be using their new Battle.net system to test out some mocroservices with Diablo III? How do you feel about Diablo III having microservices? What microservices do you hope to see and more importantly, hope never appear?

if ptr was taken down intentially it will most likely be a new version of 1.13 on PTR rather than 1.13 going to live.

i base that on these posts:

Quote from Bashiok »

The legacy team met late last week to decide how to proceed on the 1.13 patch and the decision was made to go back into development to incorporate a few additional changes. While this patch has already seen its fair share of delays we still want to ensure we’re releasing a patch that hits some key community issues. I do want to stress though that while we did look at feedback and responses we’re obviously not going to be able to include everything requested. Our hope is to hit at least a decent portion of what we saw people discussing and correct some of the more severe issues while keeping additional development time as brief as possible.

We don’t have a current estimate for release, and because work is only just beginning on these new changes we won’t be announcing their details. We’ll be keeping everyone updated as to the progress of the patch though, and we hope to see this update on the PTR as soon as possible and then off quickly to a release and ladder reset.

Quote from Bashiok »

Things are still moving. We'll hopefully have a new version ready to hit the PTR soon. We PTR all patches now, even an update like this will need some small amount of testing.

Nothing very substantial for you really just yet.

(from here and here)

Actually she's not from Asia, so no she's not Asian.
She's from sanctuary.

And no the WD is not from Africa...so he's not African.
He's from sanctuary.

Does it really matter what the 'real' background of the characters are?

I mean if you were an Asian and you could summon lightning or an African who could summon zombie dogs, I would understand...
But I haven't yet met any that could do it.
So can we just stick with sanctuary here....

It shouldn't matter what 'real background' the characters have. You got a mixture of ethnicity in every country. So it's time we actually move forward and stop thinking...hey all Africans are black....or some other such ridiculous presumptions.

Quote from "Kracov" »

OwnSOJSoldChargeFor=100

This tells the game that each SoJ you sell increases the counter by 100

Quote from "Kracov" »

TriggerAtEachSOJSoldMin=150
TriggerAtEachSOJSoldMax299

These two tell the game that, when the counter for the game you are playing has increased by 150, D Clone can spawn. If you want DClone to spawn automatically, change those two to 1 and 2

TriggerAtEachSOJSoldMin=1
TriggerAtEachSOJSoldMax2

That will basically spawn DClone within minutes of starting up a Hell game.

Welcome to the forum. If you don't like the coffee this strong, then you'd be better off bringing your own.