Sigh... I'm about done with this forum and this is my second post.
I read a post, and move on to the replies, only to find people calling the original author names.
Blizzard makes great games, and for some reason attracts the most immature players I've ever seen.
I totally understand where you are coming from. I came here recently and the status quo (from a couple of notably frequent posters here) is to toss insults with no actual reasoned logic at anyone who disagrees. If you attempt to counter any comment, you receive personal attacks instead of logical debate. Opinions are the defacto "support" for most of the flaming/baiting.
You will be better served to spend 4 hours in the AH and 1 in the game if you really want to see your gear improve.
This is a game where you are supposed to kill stuff and farm to get your loot. Im not wasting my time staring at the AH for a few hours. What the hell fun is that. This is called Diablo 3 not Auction House Online. Not to mention I dont even know what im looking for and without running a bot it would take forever to scan the AH all day long. Yea that sounds like fun.
Notice, I never said that was enjoyable. I never would have bought the game if I thought that was going to be the best way to "get ahead". But the fact remains, it is the best way. If you do not do it this way, then expect to play the game as Blizz intended and each Inferno Act will take months to gear for.
This game is Econ 101 if you want to be ahead of the curve.
There are multiple things like hit detection that distinctly show that there is no real skill. Yes there are some strategies that can help some, but even those are highly dependant on the mobs not having key affixes. As someone mentioned with choke points, those are great...until a molten/vortex/frozen/plague/knockback ruin all your positioning. The only real difficulty in the game is not standing in fire.
There are strats like constantly adjusting on fire chains mobs to not get surrounded, etc. Those are pretty obvious and I'm sure you've picked up on that kind of thing.
It is a true gear check game. In D2, you could complete the game with mediocre gear. From there, you constantly went for the godly gear that you rarely found but you frequently found gear just a little better than what you had making farming easier and easier. To me, that was a MUCH more rewarding system. I prefer ID'ing gear to buying it. In fact, buying gear, even on the GAH just feels like cheating. Unfortunately, that is exactly the way the game was designed. You are expected to buy your gear.
Now, I believe the design intent, which is backed up by a number of interviews and blue posts, was to be more WoW progression oriented and paced. I believe nobody was "supposed" to clear Act 1 Inferno for like 3 months, then 3 months per Act thereafter. This progression curve was destroyed by bots/exploits/bugs(Nether Tentacles-Smoke Screen-Force Armor-etc)/rmah/etc.
Players like Kripp talk a good show of it but he received a LOT of welfare gear from fans etc.
I think that you are spot on in your last comments. Lots of people upgraded gear via AHs with buy low/sell high and not even killing mobs. A lot skipped most mobs and farmed pots/gobs/etc. A lot manually did the things a bot would do. A lot botted. A lot RMAH'd. Basically, it sounds like you are similar to me and will not do what a lot of players have to get to that point. Just look at the outcry when the nerfed drops from pots and the Dank runs?
The lottery like aspect of the gear is a big part of what made D2 so popular. Games by big developers are designed to have psychological rewards systems to keep you coming back to play more. In D2, you could find something just a little better pretty frequently (maybe 6-12 hours of play?). The really godly gear was extremely rare giving you a very long term goals as well. With the way they tried to implement "difficulty" in D3, you can really only use gear with very specific stat distributions. With the layers of rng on how the stats are given to the gear, your individual odds of id'ing something worth-while are the lottery and they are counting on x million players putting in x million hours at x drops per hour to make the AHs the place to go for gear. This isn't even for "godly" gear, this is just for Inferno gear. This is partly to "balance" the economy and partly because of all the bravado talk before release about how "hard" Inferno would be.
I think part of the forum woes everywhere lately is the inability of a lot of people to "agree to disagree" and to make their statements with that mindset.
Your post almost completely disagrees with mine and the way you state it is refreshing (this time, lol). There was no attempt at flaming or baiting. Your statements are opinions and stated so. You are as entitled to all of that as anyone is to their opinions and anyone who tried to "argue" it would be stupid.
I do want to make a point of disagreement, that again is IMO; hell vs inferno.
I feel this game takes almost zero skill. Not standing in fire is hard, amirite? I know 8 year olds who handle that just fine. Therefore, it's hard to make an inferno that requires more "skill". The hit detection that some call a "glitch" and Blizz confirmed is "working as intended" is just one indication that there is not some super special movement/twitch to be good at the game. All they can really do is make it require more gear.
But this is a game entirely focused on gear. It can't be optional if it is the primary source of the "cool" gear. It's poor logic to call it optional.
1) I like playing a game where I grind for gear
2) The best place for the best gear is in location x
/=
A) I don't want to grind for gear in location x
There is a lot of merit to saying that getting through Act 1 was supposed to take 3 months, and each act another 3 months. I actually believe that was the design intent. I think the problem with sticking to that intent, however, is that the curve has already been DESTROYED. And although it might be a small percentage of the game population that's done it, it's enough players to prove the intent did NOT work and cannot be held as a standard anymore. I really don't want to get into HOW it was destroyed because it tends to lead to flaming conversations, just looking at the state of things as they are, regardless how it got there.
Nice reading comprehension there. I distinctly said I played D2 without trading and loved it.
I like the combat systems in this game, which will hopefully be even better after 1.0.4. This isn't all about bashing D3 or Blizz. This is an analytical attempt at why there are so many dissatisfied players and the roll the AHs have in that.
You can ignore the math all you want and throw up straw men left and right. Finding an INCREMENTAL upgrade once every 12 hours of actual GAME PLAY is not extreme.
In the end, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I'm merely stating my observations and opinions and if you don't like it, give me some solid reasoning and logic, not 12 year old internet flaming.
I actually just put a long post in another thread where I detail how there are so many layers of RNG on a drop that it makes your individual chance of usable gear EXTREMELY low.
This is hidden by the fact that you take a low % and multiply it by the number of hours being played by x million players and the drops per hour...suddenly, the AH makes every thing look like it's all ok.
In essence, Blizz already admitted to it and then tried to obscure the comment but they set the overall drop rates to make the economy "balanced" in the AHs. Not claiming that the drops change based on availability of gear or any kind of changing rates. I'm saying the base drop rates they put in at release consider the global scale of the game and what that does to the abundance/lack of gear. Because of scale, individual chances at even decent gear, not even perfect rolls, are terrible. Honestly, I've seen several threads around that indicate what we are seeing as the best gear on the AHs now is not even near perfects. If the best we are seeing is only 75% of perfect roll, consider that. Estimate 2 million (probably low) players putting in 2 hours a night (probably low) during the week and 6 hours a day on weekends (probably low). 2x5 + 6x2 = 22 hours. Say there are 4 iLvl 63s per hour on average. 88. Now times 2 million players = 176 million drops a week and we haven't seen a perfect roll (or almost none). I'm perfectly ok with that. That should be the long term idea. Getting that gear takes FOREVER. But getting USABLE gear should not.
In 300 hours, I have managed to collect about 6 million total with about 7k elite kills. I'm ok with being transparent about that. Those are a LOT lower than some players. But I will not use any form of exploit and I don't "play" the AH. I want to kill monsters, not play Econ 101. Never did Dank runs. That kind of short burst repitition kills my brain cells and isn't fun. I want variety in the content I farm. I want to ID the gear I equip. I want to have a smooth path of progression instead of brick walls that take weeks. That's what the previous Diablo titles let me do with plenty of reward. I played them solo and lan only and it was still enough little wins to keep me going and always wanting to go a little more.
Then you get a lot of self-righteous people who played the AH, or exploited or bought from the RMAH and since they pass the gear checks, they want to tell everyone, "It's fine, stop whining." Of course it is if you have the gear already. They love having near exclusive access to those kinds of drops.
Here's another one of my pet peeves about the AH. Let's say I spend 12 hours on Saturday farming. Given my experiene so far in the game, I'll make a fair share of gold and maybe find 5-6 pieces I can AH for 50k or so. Compare that to someone who chooses to play the AH because they find that fun. Flipping items (and assuming they have a bankroll to start with because they've been doing this all along) they will have a lot better gear than me. They haven't killed one thing. Now, if they want to, they can farm Acts that I can't to further skew the experience.
But a lot of people seem to want to say, "The AH is totally optional".
So is breathing.
The odd part to all this, is that what I would LOVE to see is the AHs so flooded with gear that everything sells for crap and if anyone wanted to, they could finish the game will less than 1 million in gear. The only way that would happen is if drop rates were high enough that I could find an upgrade. Not godly gear, just better than the assorted 58-61 Act 1 gear I have. If I found an incremental upgrade maybe every 6-12 hours, I would never even want to go the AHs. I would be happy farming gear at 13 slots x 12 hours of actually PLAYING the game to get to the next act and so on. That would mean those drop rates x 2 million people and the AH would be ruined as far as balance. And I would not care ONE bit. People who will buy their way to victory are doing it already. Who cares if it's cheaper for them to do so? Make the game rewarding for those who do want to play the game and keep doing it long term. They need that period reward, variety in farming locations and a feeling that the next ID could be the big one to keep them going. They don't need a "balanced" AH.
The gear check is a lot tighter in D3, specially in each of Inferno's acts.
Even if we could get skills to become slightly more powerful past level 60, and got +100 to all stats by gaining a couple more levels, most of us would probably still have to turn to the AH to get better gear. It's not about "outleveling" content.
I was kinda thrown off and pretty pissed off when I allowed this to hinder the enjoyment I got from playing the game and not actually think about what someone else my perceive to be a waste of time or just not worth it at all. I like farming my way even if it's not efficient.
I hate the AH at times when I think about only because I hate the idea of controlling a market. But it seems like a better option than figuring out all the 'best' sites to trade, putting people on REAL ID, etc. You know the process. I don't like RMAH because I hear all the good stuff is on there and not on the gold side. None of this do I have any actually backing to these feelings or claims I tend to put upon myself.
When I just play it in the way I do, and what's fun to me I don't even think about any of this. If you're one that can't, I don't know what to tell you other than it's your fault you feel that way, no one else.
I'm going to call BS here. Game design, which Blizz in the past has proven they understand, has very established concepts. There are psychological reasons for almost everything they do. Smaller indie companies are often less versed at these things and might make a game just to be fun to gamers. As proof, here is an interesting article from a writer turned game designer discussing some of this psychology:
When you are playing games by major developers, there are no two ways about it, you are being manipulated. When done well, it's fun and you don't really notice. Where I'm going with this, is that the game developer has to build in "wins". Something that is the reward, the carrot on the stick, the little motivating force behind wanting to play more. In D2, it was ID'ing drops that were incremental upgrades or even if you got lucky, godly items.
To say, "I've just accepted that there are no rewards and play only to smash monsters" is ok. If that's fun to you, awesome. To say to anyone else, "If you don't like that, you are the problem" is narrow minded and almost insulting.
The motivator in D3 switched from finding gear to buying gear. That is one of the fundamental reasons many are upset with the game. Another is boring itemization. Another is that players feel too weak. The Diablo title has always been about smashing hordes of mobs. Now, we run from them in a war of attrition that many find disappointing because it is so polar opposite to the previous two Diablo titles.
I think a part of it is the inflation has gotten so high and there are getting to be fewer people willing to buy their way to the top. As the more casual and more "wannabe hardcores" leave the game, I think we are seeing fewer people buying gold from 3rd party sites so fewer buyers. Meanwhile, I am seeing mid-level stuff appropriate to doing Act 2 going up and up. Not that I'm sure any of it is selling because I can't find any of it to try, but looking as a buyer, the items I refused to buy for 500k last week are almost all 1 million + now.
Also, the time remaining can be a clue. Nothing is a solid, "this always means it's worth that". But if an item you are comparing to has less than 1 day left and no bids, it's probably overpriced. Outside of the top gear that has to wait for someone with THAT much gold, most well priced stuff sells in the first hour.
1) ID'ing a really cool piece of gear
2) Doing runs - but I didn't just run one thing. I loved that I could go ANYWHERE based on how I felt at the moment
3) Completing the game in a relatively smooth progression and then repeating to get even more powerful. Going from good->God
4) Playing around with different builds, etc
In D3, option 4 is the only one remotely possible and it's only possible pre-Inferno unless you have godly gear.
Option one doesn't happen. The effect that the scale of having 7 million (copies sold in like the first week) or 2 million if you want to be conservative people all going for drops makes this game a lottery IF you try to balance the economy. See, in D2, yes people traded. However, that wasn't a Blizz designed or managed feature. They felt no need to balance or manage that beyond the bots/dupes which was more a comment about hacking/exploiting than economy. In D2, the drops were based around self found or party found items and the trading was a player designed entity. As such, it had a lot of risk. A lot of players, myself included, never traded for anything. I played only solo or lan. The game was still beatable and rewarding that way. D3 is not. Buying gear will never equal the reward of IDing gear for most of us. In D3, they designed and manage the AHs. Therefore, drop rates are set with the idea of balancing them. This destroys the solo reward systems because now we are talking lottery numbers here (e.g. 2 million players to the 1 of me).
It's not just drop rates though. Item level 62+ gear drops enough in my opinion if most of it wasn't vendor trash. There are two factors pushing that.
1) They attempted to make an item game "difficult". There is VERY little skill in this game. Don't stand in fire is about it. I know an 8 year old who manages this consistently just fine. This game, as an ITEM game, difficulty is purely in spec/gear. Therefore, gear acquisition rates dictate completion rates now, where in D2, you could finish with mediocre gear and you farmed gear to make you faster/better at farming for the really cool stuff. The motivation is now different. In D2, you went from weak to getting stronger to becoming godly. In D3, it's reversed. I'm a god in lower levels and get progressively weaker the more I play (obviously I'm referring to relative to mob strength). Also, in D2, I chose how I wanted to gear. I could gear to buff specific skills, specific stats, specific cc, etc. In D3, because of the "difficulty" there is only one way you CAN gear to be viable until you massively overgear. On top of that, there are no interesting affixes anyways.
2) There is rng on top of rng with a little rng mixed in. When an item drops, you have so many hidden rolls. Item level, # of affixes, rarity, which specific affixes, the actual amount of the stat for each affix. That's five layers of rng already. When you put that together with the idea that you need certain things that HAVE to happen for a piece to be equipable:
a) main stat vit
c) main + vit
d) armor/all res
That leaves very little left to be "optional". It also makes getting that combination a total lottery. If you want a decently high roll on ALL of those stats, because each is independant, now you are really talking rng. Then, if you want IAS or crit or life on spirit spent on top of that, you have to be even MORE lucky.
In D2, I didn't find godly items very often at all. But mediocre was ok and it might even be an incremental upgrade from what I had. In D3, there are no incremental upgrades. That is the big failing to me. I don't find stuff that is just +50 dps but itemized ok. Or just +10 main stat and basically the same. This is because of the third itemization problem. The ranges that can roll on items are WAAY to wide. When an iLvl 63 can have between 20-300 of your main stat, that is almost a 300% difference from bad to godly on just one item level. Talk about huge rng. Combined with all of the above, it leads to 99.9% vendor trash and the rest distributed between incremental upgrades and godly.
Option 2 doesn't happen because there is generally only ONE place to viably try to get gear based on what your gear can handle.
Option 3 doesn't happen because the artificial difficulty(gear checks) plus the drop rates of incremental upgrades is so far off (unless you're an AH hero, which is unrewarding to most of us).
0
I totally understand where you are coming from. I came here recently and the status quo (from a couple of notably frequent posters here) is to toss insults with no actual reasoned logic at anyone who disagrees. If you attempt to counter any comment, you receive personal attacks instead of logical debate. Opinions are the defacto "support" for most of the flaming/baiting.
0
Notice, I never said that was enjoyable. I never would have bought the game if I thought that was going to be the best way to "get ahead". But the fact remains, it is the best way. If you do not do it this way, then expect to play the game as Blizz intended and each Inferno Act will take months to gear for.
0
0
There are multiple things like hit detection that distinctly show that there is no real skill. Yes there are some strategies that can help some, but even those are highly dependant on the mobs not having key affixes. As someone mentioned with choke points, those are great...until a molten/vortex/frozen/plague/knockback ruin all your positioning. The only real difficulty in the game is not standing in fire.
There are strats like constantly adjusting on fire chains mobs to not get surrounded, etc. Those are pretty obvious and I'm sure you've picked up on that kind of thing.
It is a true gear check game. In D2, you could complete the game with mediocre gear. From there, you constantly went for the godly gear that you rarely found but you frequently found gear just a little better than what you had making farming easier and easier. To me, that was a MUCH more rewarding system. I prefer ID'ing gear to buying it. In fact, buying gear, even on the GAH just feels like cheating. Unfortunately, that is exactly the way the game was designed. You are expected to buy your gear.
Now, I believe the design intent, which is backed up by a number of interviews and blue posts, was to be more WoW progression oriented and paced. I believe nobody was "supposed" to clear Act 1 Inferno for like 3 months, then 3 months per Act thereafter. This progression curve was destroyed by bots/exploits/bugs(Nether Tentacles-Smoke Screen-Force Armor-etc)/rmah/etc.
Players like Kripp talk a good show of it but he received a LOT of welfare gear from fans etc.
I think that you are spot on in your last comments. Lots of people upgraded gear via AHs with buy low/sell high and not even killing mobs. A lot skipped most mobs and farmed pots/gobs/etc. A lot manually did the things a bot would do. A lot botted. A lot RMAH'd. Basically, it sounds like you are similar to me and will not do what a lot of players have to get to that point. Just look at the outcry when the nerfed drops from pots and the Dank runs?
The lottery like aspect of the gear is a big part of what made D2 so popular. Games by big developers are designed to have psychological rewards systems to keep you coming back to play more. In D2, you could find something just a little better pretty frequently (maybe 6-12 hours of play?). The really godly gear was extremely rare giving you a very long term goals as well. With the way they tried to implement "difficulty" in D3, you can really only use gear with very specific stat distributions. With the layers of rng on how the stats are given to the gear, your individual odds of id'ing something worth-while are the lottery and they are counting on x million players putting in x million hours at x drops per hour to make the AHs the place to go for gear. This isn't even for "godly" gear, this is just for Inferno gear. This is partly to "balance" the economy and partly because of all the bravado talk before release about how "hard" Inferno would be.
0
I think part of the forum woes everywhere lately is the inability of a lot of people to "agree to disagree" and to make their statements with that mindset.
Your post almost completely disagrees with mine and the way you state it is refreshing (this time, lol). There was no attempt at flaming or baiting. Your statements are opinions and stated so. You are as entitled to all of that as anyone is to their opinions and anyone who tried to "argue" it would be stupid.
I do want to make a point of disagreement, that again is IMO; hell vs inferno.
I feel this game takes almost zero skill. Not standing in fire is hard, amirite? I know 8 year olds who handle that just fine. Therefore, it's hard to make an inferno that requires more "skill". The hit detection that some call a "glitch" and Blizz confirmed is "working as intended" is just one indication that there is not some super special movement/twitch to be good at the game. All they can really do is make it require more gear.
But this is a game entirely focused on gear. It can't be optional if it is the primary source of the "cool" gear. It's poor logic to call it optional.
1) I like playing a game where I grind for gear
2) The best place for the best gear is in location x
/=
A) I don't want to grind for gear in location x
There is a lot of merit to saying that getting through Act 1 was supposed to take 3 months, and each act another 3 months. I actually believe that was the design intent. I think the problem with sticking to that intent, however, is that the curve has already been DESTROYED. And although it might be a small percentage of the game population that's done it, it's enough players to prove the intent did NOT work and cannot be held as a standard anymore. I really don't want to get into HOW it was destroyed because it tends to lead to flaming conversations, just looking at the state of things as they are, regardless how it got there.
0
I like the combat systems in this game, which will hopefully be even better after 1.0.4. This isn't all about bashing D3 or Blizz. This is an analytical attempt at why there are so many dissatisfied players and the roll the AHs have in that.
You can ignore the math all you want and throw up straw men left and right. Finding an INCREMENTAL upgrade once every 12 hours of actual GAME PLAY is not extreme.
In the end, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I'm merely stating my observations and opinions and if you don't like it, give me some solid reasoning and logic, not 12 year old internet flaming.
0
This is hidden by the fact that you take a low % and multiply it by the number of hours being played by x million players and the drops per hour...suddenly, the AH makes every thing look like it's all ok.
In essence, Blizz already admitted to it and then tried to obscure the comment but they set the overall drop rates to make the economy "balanced" in the AHs. Not claiming that the drops change based on availability of gear or any kind of changing rates. I'm saying the base drop rates they put in at release consider the global scale of the game and what that does to the abundance/lack of gear. Because of scale, individual chances at even decent gear, not even perfect rolls, are terrible. Honestly, I've seen several threads around that indicate what we are seeing as the best gear on the AHs now is not even near perfects. If the best we are seeing is only 75% of perfect roll, consider that. Estimate 2 million (probably low) players putting in 2 hours a night (probably low) during the week and 6 hours a day on weekends (probably low). 2x5 + 6x2 = 22 hours. Say there are 4 iLvl 63s per hour on average. 88. Now times 2 million players = 176 million drops a week and we haven't seen a perfect roll (or almost none). I'm perfectly ok with that. That should be the long term idea. Getting that gear takes FOREVER. But getting USABLE gear should not.
In 300 hours, I have managed to collect about 6 million total with about 7k elite kills. I'm ok with being transparent about that. Those are a LOT lower than some players. But I will not use any form of exploit and I don't "play" the AH. I want to kill monsters, not play Econ 101. Never did Dank runs. That kind of short burst repitition kills my brain cells and isn't fun. I want variety in the content I farm. I want to ID the gear I equip. I want to have a smooth path of progression instead of brick walls that take weeks. That's what the previous Diablo titles let me do with plenty of reward. I played them solo and lan only and it was still enough little wins to keep me going and always wanting to go a little more.
Then you get a lot of self-righteous people who played the AH, or exploited or bought from the RMAH and since they pass the gear checks, they want to tell everyone, "It's fine, stop whining." Of course it is if you have the gear already. They love having near exclusive access to those kinds of drops.
Here's another one of my pet peeves about the AH. Let's say I spend 12 hours on Saturday farming. Given my experiene so far in the game, I'll make a fair share of gold and maybe find 5-6 pieces I can AH for 50k or so. Compare that to someone who chooses to play the AH because they find that fun. Flipping items (and assuming they have a bankroll to start with because they've been doing this all along) they will have a lot better gear than me. They haven't killed one thing. Now, if they want to, they can farm Acts that I can't to further skew the experience.
But a lot of people seem to want to say, "The AH is totally optional".
So is breathing.
The odd part to all this, is that what I would LOVE to see is the AHs so flooded with gear that everything sells for crap and if anyone wanted to, they could finish the game will less than 1 million in gear. The only way that would happen is if drop rates were high enough that I could find an upgrade. Not godly gear, just better than the assorted 58-61 Act 1 gear I have. If I found an incremental upgrade maybe every 6-12 hours, I would never even want to go the AHs. I would be happy farming gear at 13 slots x 12 hours of actually PLAYING the game to get to the next act and so on. That would mean those drop rates x 2 million people and the AH would be ruined as far as balance. And I would not care ONE bit. People who will buy their way to victory are doing it already. Who cares if it's cheaper for them to do so? Make the game rewarding for those who do want to play the game and keep doing it long term. They need that period reward, variety in farming locations and a feeling that the next ID could be the big one to keep them going. They don't need a "balanced" AH.
2
I'm going to call BS here. Game design, which Blizz in the past has proven they understand, has very established concepts. There are psychological reasons for almost everything they do. Smaller indie companies are often less versed at these things and might make a game just to be fun to gamers. As proof, here is an interesting article from a writer turned game designer discussing some of this psychology:
http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/
When you are playing games by major developers, there are no two ways about it, you are being manipulated. When done well, it's fun and you don't really notice. Where I'm going with this, is that the game developer has to build in "wins". Something that is the reward, the carrot on the stick, the little motivating force behind wanting to play more. In D2, it was ID'ing drops that were incremental upgrades or even if you got lucky, godly items.
To say, "I've just accepted that there are no rewards and play only to smash monsters" is ok. If that's fun to you, awesome. To say to anyone else, "If you don't like that, you are the problem" is narrow minded and almost insulting.
The motivator in D3 switched from finding gear to buying gear. That is one of the fundamental reasons many are upset with the game. Another is boring itemization. Another is that players feel too weak. The Diablo title has always been about smashing hordes of mobs. Now, we run from them in a war of attrition that many find disappointing because it is so polar opposite to the previous two Diablo titles.
0
0
0
In this style of game, the things I enjoyed were:
1) ID'ing a really cool piece of gear
2) Doing runs - but I didn't just run one thing. I loved that I could go ANYWHERE based on how I felt at the moment
3) Completing the game in a relatively smooth progression and then repeating to get even more powerful. Going from good->God
4) Playing around with different builds, etc
In D3, option 4 is the only one remotely possible and it's only possible pre-Inferno unless you have godly gear.
Option one doesn't happen. The effect that the scale of having 7 million (copies sold in like the first week) or 2 million if you want to be conservative people all going for drops makes this game a lottery IF you try to balance the economy. See, in D2, yes people traded. However, that wasn't a Blizz designed or managed feature. They felt no need to balance or manage that beyond the bots/dupes which was more a comment about hacking/exploiting than economy. In D2, the drops were based around self found or party found items and the trading was a player designed entity. As such, it had a lot of risk. A lot of players, myself included, never traded for anything. I played only solo or lan. The game was still beatable and rewarding that way. D3 is not. Buying gear will never equal the reward of IDing gear for most of us. In D3, they designed and manage the AHs. Therefore, drop rates are set with the idea of balancing them. This destroys the solo reward systems because now we are talking lottery numbers here (e.g. 2 million players to the 1 of me).
It's not just drop rates though. Item level 62+ gear drops enough in my opinion if most of it wasn't vendor trash. There are two factors pushing that.
1) They attempted to make an item game "difficult". There is VERY little skill in this game. Don't stand in fire is about it. I know an 8 year old who manages this consistently just fine. This game, as an ITEM game, difficulty is purely in spec/gear. Therefore, gear acquisition rates dictate completion rates now, where in D2, you could finish with mediocre gear and you farmed gear to make you faster/better at farming for the really cool stuff. The motivation is now different. In D2, you went from weak to getting stronger to becoming godly. In D3, it's reversed. I'm a god in lower levels and get progressively weaker the more I play (obviously I'm referring to relative to mob strength). Also, in D2, I chose how I wanted to gear. I could gear to buff specific skills, specific stats, specific cc, etc. In D3, because of the "difficulty" there is only one way you CAN gear to be viable until you massively overgear. On top of that, there are no interesting affixes anyways.
2) There is rng on top of rng with a little rng mixed in. When an item drops, you have so many hidden rolls. Item level, # of affixes, rarity, which specific affixes, the actual amount of the stat for each affix. That's five layers of rng already. When you put that together with the idea that you need certain things that HAVE to happen for a piece to be equipable:
a) main stat
c) main + vit
d) armor/all res
That leaves very little left to be "optional". It also makes getting that combination a total lottery. If you want a decently high roll on ALL of those stats, because each is independant, now you are really talking rng. Then, if you want IAS or crit or life on spirit spent on top of that, you have to be even MORE lucky.
In D2, I didn't find godly items very often at all. But mediocre was ok and it might even be an incremental upgrade from what I had. In D3, there are no incremental upgrades. That is the big failing to me. I don't find stuff that is just +50 dps but itemized ok. Or just +10 main stat and basically the same. This is because of the third itemization problem. The ranges that can roll on items are WAAY to wide. When an iLvl 63 can have between 20-300 of your main stat, that is almost a 300% difference from bad to godly on just one item level. Talk about huge rng. Combined with all of the above, it leads to 99.9% vendor trash and the rest distributed between incremental upgrades and godly.
Option 2 doesn't happen because there is generally only ONE place to viably try to get gear based on what your gear can handle.
Option 3 doesn't happen because the artificial difficulty(gear checks) plus the drop rates of incremental upgrades is so far off (unless you're an AH hero, which is unrewarding to most of us).