The actual gameplay of Diablo 3 is phenomenal, some of the best out there, and they should be congratulated for that.
The itemization and auction house are ridiculously bad.
Since so much of the replay of the game is in the item hunt, having terrible, very linear itemization is ridiculously bad. While they wanted players to be able to branch out their 'build' in their item selection, the item balance is so poor and linear that 'branching out' doesn't even become remotely relevant until you're in the 100 million + range, and even then it's limited to a few mods.
The auction house, and particularly the RMAH, exacerbated these problems - they made decent items very accessible, but also made most drops very worthless very quickly (which is terrible in an item hunt game). The RMAH was too direct, and quite a few people lost interest in the game very quickly when they hit a wall, spent money on the RMAH just to advance a little further, then promptly hit another wall.
Throw a big gear nerf into the mix and you have the recipe for the really bad reaction we saw - the underlying game play might be good, but if the item part of the game is a massive frustration instead of lots of fun, no one wants to play.
Most items are bad because there are many more items than characters.
Let's look at a simple example. For simplicity, pretend that you never look at the auction house. You've finally hit level 60, reached Inferno, and found your first level 60+ weapon, which is better than whatever you had before and you equip it.
5 minutes later, you find another level 60+ weapon. What are the odds that this is an upgrade for you? 50/50. Half the time it's better, half the time it will be worse, not accounting for anything else.
5 minutes after that, another weapon! But is this one an upgrade? Well, it would have to be better than either of the previous weapons you have found, which it has only a 1 in 3 chance of being.
The next weapon? 1 in 4.
It keeps going like this, with the odds of any drop being an upgrade for you being proportional to 1/T, where T is the time you've been playing. This is totally without regard to the randomization algorithm or how items are generated or anything of the sorts - once you're no longer improving your drop tables, your upgrade frequency is going to drop as you keep playing, until you essentially stop finding upgrades at all.
Now take the auction house into account. What this does is redistribute items between players. Assume, for example, that there are a million players with a level 60 on the auction house. That would mean that, roughly, only the million best weapons ever found are worth much at all, with the price of weapons right on the edge of that million being exceptionally low since they're so similar to items that just miss the cut. Then add in that this is going to suffer from the same 1/T relationship as the solo play example - we're 10 weeks into the game so far, and after another 10 weeks the number of weapons found will have doubled, which means half the weapons that currently exist will have dropped from 'marginal' to 'crap'.
What does that mean for your own drops? It means the usefulness of your own drops, from the perspective of the auction house, does not depend on how long you have played, but how long *everyone* has played. The more everyone plays, access to high quality gear increases, while an increasing number of items on the edge slip from useful to trash.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the randomization method, or even how item mods are generated; it's just the nature of picking out the best items from a random pool with a constant generator algorithm. There's nothing whatsoever Blizzard can do about this; it's baked into the game.
There are a couple things you can do. The easiest is to take advantage of the fact that pricing items is hard, and buying up high value, under-priced items to re-sell at closer to their real price. You can do this at all sorts of price ranges - I'll find pieces worth 1-2 million when searching for 50k pieces on occasion, and you can make a lot of money quickly if you can identify items offered for 10 million that are really worth 50 million (it's really difficult to distinguish a lot of items in the 25-100 million range, so unless you have a big bankroll and really know a particular market well, be careful there).
The other is an arbitrage loop between the cash and gold auction houses. There are some items that will sell better for dollars, and some items that will sell better for gold. This has tightened up somewhat, but for a while I was able to sell certain types of items for close to $5 per million, while buying other types of items for only $1.50 per million. If you can find something like that you can milk a lot of profit out of it before it dries up.
There are also some tricks you can play with socketed items and gems. The most obvious one is with magic find / gold find helms, where people who don't know better will neglect to socket their help and you can collect a big premium for doing it for them. The same principle applies to other items as well, however, and you can make big chunks of money by buying items without gems, or with the wrong gems in them, and selling them with a better gem set - for example, I've tripled the value of a dex/vit chest by pulling out the amethysts and putting in emeralds.
In any case, you need to be very familiar with the market for the type of item you are buying and selling, as you'll make more money off of the more marginal cases (2x mark-up on resale) than on the home runs (10x mark-up).
Spells that deal a damage-over-time type effect currently have a bug where they are unable to crit. This is a known issue that is on their radar to fix.
Attack speed affects cast speed. It does not have any effect on the damage spells deal beyond that you can cast more of them more quickly. A single Hydra or Blizzard will cast faster with IAS, but will not deal additional damage. This makes IAS very useful for kiting or signature spam, but it's not nearly as important for Hydra / Blizzard build; certainly not as important as the listed DPS boost would imply.
In the absence of any gold sink, the rate of inflation would be incredibly high at the beginning of the game, and gradually taper off asymptotically over the life of the game. This is simply because, at a fixed gold drop rate, there's a much larger relative change in the amount of gold early on, when people do not have a lot of gold yet, than later on, when the economy is flooded. More rigorously, a first order approximation of inflation is dM/M (where M is the amount of gold in the economy), and M is just the integral of dM from the beginning of the game until now. M goes to infinity as the time T goes to infinity, so dM/M goes to zero.
If you have something resembling a percentage tax rate (for example, 20% of gold drops go to repair bills, on average), then the economy behaves exactly the same way, albeit with a slightly lower price level. The rate of inflation is unchanged - if the tax rate is r, then the rate of money growth would be (1-r)*dM; and since the total amount of money is the integral of dM, the total money would be (1-r)*M; and inflation would be (1-r)*dM / (1-r)*M, or once again dM/M.
A fixed rate of expenditure would function the exact same way to a first order approximation. However, a more nuanced view shows that it gives higher inflation. When costs are fixed, the percentage of your income going to the gold sink will drop as you get better at the game and your income increases; so as players advance further, your gold sinks do less, and inflation accelerates. This is what a lot of traditional gold sinks in MMOs (like having to pay for armor and weapon upgrades from vendors) look like - and they end up making the inflation problem worse.
What you actually need to stabilize your economy is a gold sink that takes very little gold early on (because you need to accumulate some amount of money in the economy if it's going to function at all), but increases as people progress in the game, until eventually your gold sink takes 100% of gold drops in the very late game.
Taxes are incapable of doing this in any reasonable fashion. Instead your game needs to provide a service uniquely attractive to veteran players on which they will happily spend all their money. Gambling in D2 actually did a really good job of this pre-LoD; all your gold converts to items, which simultaneously sinks gold and generates more items (which pushes prices down as well) and thus fights inflation on both fronts. Crafting could also do this, in theory, but if gold is the limiting reagent in crafts then crafting materials are worthless.
D3 accomplishes this through the 15% transaction tax on the auction house - by taxing expenditure in the player market, instead of gold drops, they eventually sink 100% of excess gold drops through that tax alone. Essentially, as more gold drops, prices increase - which increase the total gold sunk - until you eventually hit an equilibrium price level where the inflationary pressure from gold drops exactly equals deflationary pressure from auction house taxes.
The other gold sinks honestly do not matter; if all you care about is keeping prices in line in the player market, the auction house is sufficient.
Apologies for this being a bit long winded, but at least it thoroughly covered the basics to the best of my knowledge. If you remember nothing else, remember it's not the quantity of gold sinks you have, but the quality, because a poor gold sink does nothing while a well designed one can curb inflation on its own.
1
The itemization and auction house are ridiculously bad.
Since so much of the replay of the game is in the item hunt, having terrible, very linear itemization is ridiculously bad. While they wanted players to be able to branch out their 'build' in their item selection, the item balance is so poor and linear that 'branching out' doesn't even become remotely relevant until you're in the 100 million + range, and even then it's limited to a few mods.
The auction house, and particularly the RMAH, exacerbated these problems - they made decent items very accessible, but also made most drops very worthless very quickly (which is terrible in an item hunt game). The RMAH was too direct, and quite a few people lost interest in the game very quickly when they hit a wall, spent money on the RMAH just to advance a little further, then promptly hit another wall.
Throw a big gear nerf into the mix and you have the recipe for the really bad reaction we saw - the underlying game play might be good, but if the item part of the game is a massive frustration instead of lots of fun, no one wants to play.
2
Let's look at a simple example. For simplicity, pretend that you never look at the auction house. You've finally hit level 60, reached Inferno, and found your first level 60+ weapon, which is better than whatever you had before and you equip it.
5 minutes later, you find another level 60+ weapon. What are the odds that this is an upgrade for you? 50/50. Half the time it's better, half the time it will be worse, not accounting for anything else.
5 minutes after that, another weapon! But is this one an upgrade? Well, it would have to be better than either of the previous weapons you have found, which it has only a 1 in 3 chance of being.
The next weapon? 1 in 4.
It keeps going like this, with the odds of any drop being an upgrade for you being proportional to 1/T, where T is the time you've been playing. This is totally without regard to the randomization algorithm or how items are generated or anything of the sorts - once you're no longer improving your drop tables, your upgrade frequency is going to drop as you keep playing, until you essentially stop finding upgrades at all.
Now take the auction house into account. What this does is redistribute items between players. Assume, for example, that there are a million players with a level 60 on the auction house. That would mean that, roughly, only the million best weapons ever found are worth much at all, with the price of weapons right on the edge of that million being exceptionally low since they're so similar to items that just miss the cut. Then add in that this is going to suffer from the same 1/T relationship as the solo play example - we're 10 weeks into the game so far, and after another 10 weeks the number of weapons found will have doubled, which means half the weapons that currently exist will have dropped from 'marginal' to 'crap'.
What does that mean for your own drops? It means the usefulness of your own drops, from the perspective of the auction house, does not depend on how long you have played, but how long *everyone* has played. The more everyone plays, access to high quality gear increases, while an increasing number of items on the edge slip from useful to trash.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the randomization method, or even how item mods are generated; it's just the nature of picking out the best items from a random pool with a constant generator algorithm. There's nothing whatsoever Blizzard can do about this; it's baked into the game.
2
The other is an arbitrage loop between the cash and gold auction houses. There are some items that will sell better for dollars, and some items that will sell better for gold. This has tightened up somewhat, but for a while I was able to sell certain types of items for close to $5 per million, while buying other types of items for only $1.50 per million. If you can find something like that you can milk a lot of profit out of it before it dries up.
There are also some tricks you can play with socketed items and gems. The most obvious one is with magic find / gold find helms, where people who don't know better will neglect to socket their help and you can collect a big premium for doing it for them. The same principle applies to other items as well, however, and you can make big chunks of money by buying items without gems, or with the wrong gems in them, and selling them with a better gem set - for example, I've tripled the value of a dex/vit chest by pulling out the amethysts and putting in emeralds.
In any case, you need to be very familiar with the market for the type of item you are buying and selling, as you'll make more money off of the more marginal cases (2x mark-up on resale) than on the home runs (10x mark-up).
1
Attack speed affects cast speed. It does not have any effect on the damage spells deal beyond that you can cast more of them more quickly. A single Hydra or Blizzard will cast faster with IAS, but will not deal additional damage. This makes IAS very useful for kiting or signature spam, but it's not nearly as important for Hydra / Blizzard build; certainly not as important as the listed DPS boost would imply.
1
If you have something resembling a percentage tax rate (for example, 20% of gold drops go to repair bills, on average), then the economy behaves exactly the same way, albeit with a slightly lower price level. The rate of inflation is unchanged - if the tax rate is r, then the rate of money growth would be (1-r)*dM; and since the total amount of money is the integral of dM, the total money would be (1-r)*M; and inflation would be (1-r)*dM / (1-r)*M, or once again dM/M.
A fixed rate of expenditure would function the exact same way to a first order approximation. However, a more nuanced view shows that it gives higher inflation. When costs are fixed, the percentage of your income going to the gold sink will drop as you get better at the game and your income increases; so as players advance further, your gold sinks do less, and inflation accelerates. This is what a lot of traditional gold sinks in MMOs (like having to pay for armor and weapon upgrades from vendors) look like - and they end up making the inflation problem worse.
What you actually need to stabilize your economy is a gold sink that takes very little gold early on (because you need to accumulate some amount of money in the economy if it's going to function at all), but increases as people progress in the game, until eventually your gold sink takes 100% of gold drops in the very late game.
Taxes are incapable of doing this in any reasonable fashion. Instead your game needs to provide a service uniquely attractive to veteran players on which they will happily spend all their money. Gambling in D2 actually did a really good job of this pre-LoD; all your gold converts to items, which simultaneously sinks gold and generates more items (which pushes prices down as well) and thus fights inflation on both fronts. Crafting could also do this, in theory, but if gold is the limiting reagent in crafts then crafting materials are worthless.
D3 accomplishes this through the 15% transaction tax on the auction house - by taxing expenditure in the player market, instead of gold drops, they eventually sink 100% of excess gold drops through that tax alone. Essentially, as more gold drops, prices increase - which increase the total gold sunk - until you eventually hit an equilibrium price level where the inflationary pressure from gold drops exactly equals deflationary pressure from auction house taxes.
The other gold sinks honestly do not matter; if all you care about is keeping prices in line in the player market, the auction house is sufficient.
Apologies for this being a bit long winded, but at least it thoroughly covered the basics to the best of my knowledge. If you remember nothing else, remember it's not the quantity of gold sinks you have, but the quality, because a poor gold sink does nothing while a well designed one can curb inflation on its own.