The Future of Item Selling
As we all know, the purchasing and selling of digitized goods is a huge problem in Blizzard games, particularly Diablo II and World of Warcraft. With Diablo III on the horizon, I am curious as to how Blizzard may deal with this problem. As there are no plans for having absolutely BoE/BoP items, anything can easily be traded in-game, or sold on a third party website for cash. Some may argue that it's fair because the hardcore players can obtain items by playing, while the casual players, who still want epic gear, can spend a few bucks and be just as good. Others would say that purchasing items isn't fair in the least bit, because they spend countless hours farming for all that epic gear, that others may be able to get by spending 10 minutes and using a credit card. To resolve this issue, Blizzard could go about it a few different ways...
Blizzard-Hosted Store: Instead of having Blizzard attempt to crack down, or ignore item stores, they could simply open up their own "official" store, where everyone could potentially purchase items from. If item selling is going to be going on, Blizzard could use the money from this store to put into the game, to help make the game better for us. So in a sense, you'd be paying extra for some possible cool future things in D3.
User-hosted Stores: Blizzard could allow users to open up their own stores, to gain profit from. Assuming there will be no botters, these users would have to farm gear to sell themselves, so their countless hours of grinding and farming will earn them some cash.
No Stores: You would prefer Blizzard cracked down on all possible item store attempts and forced users to either trade for, or farm items.
Vanity Items only: The purchasing of only items, such as dyes, etc, that make you visually cooler, but do not affect gameplay whatsoever.
In-Game Gear: Players could purchase any item in the game that can also be found via farming, allowing casual players to be just as good as hardcore players.
Top Tier Gear: You would prefer the only way to obtain the top tier gear is to purchase it from the store, not allowing it to drop in-game.
Other: Perhaps you've come to a conclusion we haven't thought of. If so, please explain in the comments below.
All that in mind, we want to know, what is your position on Item Selling in Diablo 3?
In our previous poll, we wanted to know how you decided which class to play. The results showed "playstyle" as the biggest factor, with a majority of the votes. After playstyle, "archetype" and "skills and traits" tied for second place, with just barely a quarter of the votes that playstyle had.
Secondly, Blizzard should make as much an effort as possible in eliminating all 3rd-party sites that attempt to sell items for real money.
It ruines the entire game, and its not just the person buying the item thats effected its the entire economy that suffers,Diablo was never a game that you needed to have the best of the best gear to have fun and the longer it takes to get the best gear the longer you get to enjoy the game.
just my thoughts
cheers
Is the reward of gold or trading for an item of equal or better value not reward enough,
If you find an item thats worth somthing to another player selling it for gold or trading it for an item worth somthing to you should be rewarding enough,If by User-hosted store you mean like a trading post system,then sure but for a player to find an item ans sell it for real money to the highest bidder seems unfair and unwise.
Perhaps random environments(gates) in specific areas that the bots can't handle because they require some extra human interaction(like those letters you have to enter to comment many times on youtube).
Edit: Why is it a multiple choice poll? Most of the options contradict each other so kind of pointless imho.
Sixen, I'm disappointed. This has got to be the most braindead idea/suggestion ever. An official Blizzard item store... really?
Diablo is all about playing the game for what it is, and slowly working your way towards better gear. What would be the point of playing the game at all if Blizzard themselves already had an item store that sold every single item that could be found in the game?
In other words, why would you buy a game in order to spend even more money on made-up pixels just to be good in a made-up world? It's like saying if I hosted a basketball tournament, and I told all of the contestants that they could pay me $50 each to add 7 points to their final score. No one would want to play in my tournament for the mere fact that there is an uneven playing field for those who don't want to pay $50 to "win" at a trivial game. They'll just go find another "free" basketball tournament that is fair for everyone. The point of playing a game is to have fun and relax. If you "cheat" your way to winning (AKA by paying $$$), then it's not fun for anyone, including yourself.
Observe: Congratulations! You won the basketball game! But not because you worked hard at mastering your basketball skills. It's because you paid money to win! Not only do you lose your pride of "winning" because now everyone knows that you paid to win, which involved absolutely no skills at all, but now you're down $50 in the real world. There's absolutely 0 benefit. You won at a made-up game. So what? Again, congratulations!
Same thing for Blizzard games. If Blizzard started opening up official item stores, people will be discouraged to play their games, as no one will care if they are godly in a made-up world with made-up pixels. Anything that involves money for pixels in a "free-to-play" game, is just a stupid implementation. You'll have one population who spends money and has the godliest gear; then you'll have another population who refuses to spend money for pixels and thus are at a clear disadvantage. Eventually everyone will realize how stupid the game is, and they'll all quit the game.
-stores are bad
-ruin balance
-buying power is bypassing the game
-not a fun mechanic
-earn you're items by playing
-etc
edit: changed lpaying to playing...what an embarrassing mistake
This tug-of-war of conflicting ideas I have going on in my head really tears me apart and inevitably turns me off of the game.
I didn't wait years for D3 to come out just to have my fun stripped away just because of stores. No fucking stores, please...
I also don't mind Blizzard item stores - To an extent.
The following is D2 related, but equivalently applies to D3 as well.
If they sold the equivalent of Lower / Mid Lvl D2 sets (Isenheart / Natalya sets, not maxed Tal'Rasha) / Uniques (Sure let them buy a Exceptional Unique's - just not Elite Uniques) / Runes (If people want to pay for a Pul - Let them - But don't let them pay for a Jah / Cham )- Then sure - Let people buy them.
A system where people can pay for mid-level gear I'm fine with. It will let the "Casual" gamers shell out cash if they really want to get strong quickly, but still let the hard-core fans have the uber stuff!