DiabloFans

Quote from mattheo_majik

Haven't posted for like a year os so. But this was just too much to hold. Had to join up the Dfans forums once more.

I'll break my opinion down to two part due to length.A/B

A)

1) Blizz knows how to make games, the fact that we have so much to discuss about and that we know as much
as we do about the in game ecnomics/hacks/bots/fixes/etc. Is simply because they made it possible, they created
the universe in which these things developed. (and if not them, other brilliant gaming companies). Let them deal
with the details and outcomes of their choices. Plus nobody is twisting your arm to pay for items.

2) If they find, down the line, that this system causes more grief than good, they will either change it or remove it, why? Because that's what Blizzard does. So debate however you want, noone can predict 100% the outcome. The only one thing we do know for sure is the following ....GO TO B (1)

3)I can understand folks who run scared at the thought of a broken economy, with good items only being sold in RMAH
and voicing their complaints about it(though it may not be justified). But I do NOT for one second pity the fools who complain about others buying their items with real money and beating them in PvP. Or saying that since Blizzard encourages buying items , they are somewhat insulted and won't be buying/playing the game. Crybabies....

First off myself, and pretty much everyone, don't believe a word of it when they say they wont play. And they know noone believes them too, so they just trolling. Second, that's like saying that since my neighbour's father has more money and my neighbour has a better inheritance, it ruins my life, I cant enjoy myself thus I should just end it. WTF?

I may not have the money to spend on D3, neither would my wife let me spend if i did. But if others do, good for them, shit. Why not let them spend their hard earned cash on something they hold dear to their hearts? And if they are kids spending their parent's hard earn cash, then that's an issue with the parent itself and has nothing to do with Blizzard. Watch and see if my child in the future spends a buck on gaming if I disagreed. I as a parent wouldn't be blaming Blizzard but myself for not educating my child with the values that I hold.
If I was a parent that didnt mind this kind of spending then I would be glad that the money is going towards entertainment. Better than them buying drugs on the streets, or sending money to shady 3rd party companies. Which brings me to my next point.
_____________________________________________________
B

1)No matter how you look at RMAH, flop or success. I'd rather pay 1000 bucks to a company that's been making games we enjoy for decades, than pay 1$ to shady 3rd party companies (not necessarily chinese) for item transactions. So if I was one of those guys planning on spending in D3, I would be freaking extatic to know that the money I'm about to spend isn't gonna go to a company that underpays a bunch of kids to farm, but instead is going to go to Blizzard who in return will have the resources to keep making games for years to come. That's called an indirect investment. That means thanks to folks who will be buying and selling real cash, my kids will probably get to enjoy Blizz games like we had in our youth.

2) To all the purists who say money shouldn't be in games. Why should making money in a game be any less significant than making money at work. Blizzard is possibly opening the doors to a whole new generation of folks who might have an opportunity to make cash while playing games. I see people every day busting their asses in a dead end job that they hate. Go back home miserable with not enough money to go by. Why would giving the future an opportunity to make money while having fun be a bad thing? Where's the problem in that? Shit, is money is the root of all evil, probably. But as we are stuck with it and can't live without it, why not be able to make it in a more enjoyable fashion. Ask anyone who plays sports for a living, they will tell you the same. Sports are a game. Athletes make money for plyaying the game, why not, they are better than us at it. SO,why not let greater computer gamers make money too. If they don't you can bet your arse that others with less honorable purposes will be making it. (like they have been with online games for a decade now).

Conclusion:

This might be the beginning of a new era of online gaming. If it goes for the better, excellent. If not then it was wort a try and can always be sent the same way as the talisman, on the shelf. Who are we to criticize something that has yet come to life and that we do not yet fully understand. Be open minded and enjoy the fact that your even getting the chance to play a game. So many people don't.

Quote from Don_guillotine

Quote from Jano_El_Bozo

Quote from Don_guillotine

It's not like in D2 where I could bot for months before I got banned. In D3, a ban will be quicker (it's easy to monitor suspicious behavior when measures are built-in to the game code).

I know it's few posts ago, but those sentences made me scratch my head. Exactly on what do you base your statement that bans in Diablo 3 will be quicker? What measures are built-in to prevent Boting? I'm really interested in this info, any links would be helpful.

There are no details on specifics for D3, so I'm merely talking about how stupidly it was handled in D2, and any person that is capable of breathing (i.e. isn't brain-dead) can figure out ways to make botting harder. Making it impossible is simply not... possible, but D2 botting was too easy.


Bans in Diablo 2 followed the following schedule:

1. The bot detection software (Warden) detected a bot. That is, an account running a lot of games and acting in a very bot-like fashion (clicking faster than a human can click, doing the same tasks repeatedly with no mistakes).
2. Warden gathers enough evidence that the account is a bot, flags the account as a bot.
3. These lists sit in Blizzard's hands for weeks, possibly months.
4. Then the bots are banned in a mass-ban, and news headlines ("100,000 accounts attached to bots were banned!") are posted in battle.net front page.

By simply removing the delay between flagging bots and actually banning them, this decreases the time a bot can run without a ban. Also, since we won't be able to make more than 1 account with one purchase of the game, a ban will be permanent -- unlike in D2 where getting your cd-keys banned required a lot of banned accounts and malicious activity. If your D2 account was banned, all you had to do was make a new one and start again.

So by simple 101 methods bans will be faster and botting won't be as easy. Not to mention Blizzard can include built-in detectors to the game code (that will detect easy scripts). Elaborate bots won't be as easily caught -- the ones that mimic human activity by increasing delay times and making them slightly random, but such bots won't be distributed for free over the internet like D2 bots were since they will require a lot of hours to be put in programming the bot and keeping it one step ahead of the Warden.

Quote from Don_guillotine

Quote from Dresnia

So anyone believes not everyone is going too multi-box like 10 accounts and bots and earn quite some cash ?
I find it amusing how they state they already proven they are good vs bots on WoW.
Check out google seriously, I've seen 100's of awesome bots undedetected doing the most boring jobs for people :/

Of course there will be bots. But it won't be such a peaceful stroll through the park like botting was in D2. Bots are unavoidable, but if you make the risk vs. reward ratio correct, average casual players will be discouraged from botting and the bots will mostly be run by professional item farmers.

Quote from Don_guillotine

Quote from onlinenow25_1448379

No, this will not eliminate the problem. Gold is a infinite resource Money is not. Gold will inflate and prices for items will rise. Nothing is solved by making gold traded for this e-balance.

You still end up with a game the turns into a pay to win model.

Gold will not be infinite. Gold in the system will follow a simple formula along the lines of:

gold attainable per hour in average x players in the system x time passed since launch - gold taken out of the system (artisans, repairs, etc.).

While the amount of gold will probably increase and gold will suffer from an inflation (it's unavoidable with a small-time fiat currency that in-game gold is in essence). In the perfect world gold will see manageable levels of inflation up to 10% per a reasonable time unit, such as a month.

And since real money is not susceptible to strong inflation (we're talking to around 5% annually, compared to the 100%-200% in-game gold might suffer in some of the best case scenarios) the biggest driving forces in the market will not be inflation, but gold:e-balance going rate and how many items have dropped.

Quote from Johnnyxp64

i am sorry again but if i compare the sc1 had and sc2 is for laughing!
indeed we are not in 2000 and reverse engineering is way better in our days ;-)

The comparison is rather null. Sc1 was not a huge e-sport initially after its launch. There were no such big incentives to create hacks.

Even if reverse engineering is better these days, handling the infrastructure server-side (such that items are never dealt by player-side clients, but are exclusively handled by dedicated servers) will fix almost all of the issues D2 had.

For example, it is impossible to dupe in WoW. Only theoretical way would be to hack the servers, and this would probably cause the servers to be rolled back to the state they were in before the hacking took place.

Quote from Don_guillotine

Quote from N0kI

Quote from NeciFiX

My only concern is that people will probably want to BUY items in gold, but, SELL them in real money. See how that wouldn't work?

...and for that reason Gold AH will have only crap items.
LEGENDARY drops will ONLY be sold/bought in the real money AH.

Like Phrozen already said, the fact that gold is interchangeable into e-balance (or money) will eliminate this.

If you think about this:

Lets say I have the Legendary Axe of Leet. It sells for $10 in the money AH and 10,000 gold pieces in the gold AH. Then if the ratio of gold to money is more than 1,000 gold for $1, then people will sell in the money AH and buy gold with the e-balance. If the ratio of gold to money is less than 1,000 gold for $1, then people will sell in the gold AH and sell gold for $.

This kind of arbitrage will eventually force that all items will be sold in both AHs and the price difference will depend on the current gold to $ exchange rate. Because if there is profit to be had by simply buying from the other AH and selling in the other AH, people will do exactly that. This will essentially create a very functional market.

Even if there were no axes in the other AH, some people would always look to make profit through the arbitrage and buy stuff from the cash AH and sell in the gold AH if the ratio of gold:$ was favorable for that.


The more I think about the economics side of it all, the more sense it makes.

Quote from Dolaiim

Outstanding write-up P, very level-headed, solid presentation of both sides of the argument.

There's one element at play here that I've been tossing around in me gulliver. And it is the effect that no skill points will have on the RMAH. wtf am I talking about? Read on...

I'm gonna spell out what I think is a very plausible medium-term evolution of the game.

Phase 1: The "omg omg omg" phase. Excitement high. Impulsive buying high. Supply low. Races for leetdom drive market into wildly fluctuating highs and lows. Currency and exchange rates will be unpredictable. Farmers and market gamers will exploit volatility, but everyone is happy because of the excitement/impulsivity response.

Phase 2: Steady state phase. Players start to reach level cap. The markets start to flood with un-needed legendary quality items. As players realize how to capitalize on Market forces, arbitrage and exchange rates, gold will flood into the market as well. This will spark a period of fairly noticeable inflation, driven mainly by demand but also by the influx of currency and its ensuing manipulation.

Phase 3: Deflation, Level Cap and Balance. Here's where no skill points comes in. As players hit 60, and power-level alts to 60 (an activity encouraged by the devs), most serious gamers will have level-capped and geared all the characters they're interested in during the steady state phase.

But what now? Since your 1 character type can perpetually swap skills, there will be effectively NO reason to keep leveling alts of the same character type.. Just swap out skills! Thus, demand for high-end gear, normally fed by a constant influx of freshly leveled alts, will necessarily PLUMMET. Hard.

This will kick off a period of FIERCE DEFLATION. Why? Obviously demand will drop like it's hot, but also, gold will start being used for crafting instead of market gamesmanship for items everyone already has, so currency markets will seize up.

The only thing that could keep a fresh influx of characters is the hardcore scene, but it's confirmed that hardcore chars can only trade using the in-game gold AH (which should tell you something).

Once it's obvious that deflation is here to stay, with a little bit of luck, the farmers will go f*** off to game economies with greener pastures, leaving an intact, in-game gold economy for the actual Diablo players.