Diablo 3 Beta Announced!

[Daekesh]

Woah.

The gold using ah will be empty lol... no one, or very, very few, will sell XYZ Axe of the ABC for gold instead of actual money.

Why?  There are plenty of people in wow who pay for gold to buy things.  Why not cut out the middle-man?

[Morbid]

Well the biggest fear i have is that the real usefull items will mostly/only be available on the real money AH.
Beside i know how few spare game hours i have nowadays, combine that with that WOW made sure i will never ever farm mindless hours for purple pixels again and you have a real money goldmine for blizz. (But this idea probably came out of Activisions high hat.)

[Monstar]

Not quite sure what my feelings on the real money AH is, certainly didn't expect this from Blizzard, but I should have known better. I fear, like Kawe, that this will have quite a negative effect on the normal AH. Will the ability to make real money from the game have more of a focus than playing the game itself. I guess we will see how it plays out in the beta.

[Yoica]

The biggest questions are;

1. You need to pay a fee to place an auction, how much will this end up being? Auctions that don't sell will actually cost you money, but how much?

2. What is the AH cut for sold items?

3. What is the fee for the 3rd party that actually does the money transfering?

[Gaeios(Graxlos)]

There is another fee for actually cashing out too.

[Yoica]

Isn't that the 3rd point I made?

[Sidestep]

I kinda feel like this has ruined the fun of the game for me on some levels, I'll still play it, and hopefully make a few bucks, but something died inside me.

[Rash]

I was extremely convinced that Blizzard wouldn't allow a game to get ruined by this, so I figured the same system would apply like in WoW. Special silly mounts and pets cost real money, but the actual game remains untouched.

Now that they're turning the Battle.net Cross-realm party thing into a paid service, I'm not so sure about this anymore.

[Sidestep]

You'd think they would be happy with the huge amount they make from subscriptions, let alone random vanity shit.

The day blizzard starts selling epics and the like for money (and i can see it happening), i'm out.

[Yoica]

I kinda feel like this has ruined the fun of the game for me on some levels, I'll still play it, and hopefully make a few bucks, but something died inside me.

I had the same reaction initially, but not anymore. I've never done a lot of item trading D2 or if I did it was with ppl I know. In the worst case I'll never interact with the RL money AH and therefore doesn't affect my game play. In the best case, depending on it works, I make RL money from it.

In the end, it isn't going to influence how I play the game.

[Sintrael]

I think a couple of people commenting on this havent played d2 or at least dont remember the trading system that well.

Back in d2, the best items you could get, namely the 2 rune words that i forget the name of, one would give you the sorcs teleport ability, the other would let you do the babarians buffs on urself. Along with items such as Stone of jordan and The Grandfather amongst others.

The drop rate on the runes required, and the drop rate on the two items i named, as an example, were absolutely and utterly ludicrous, making them near impossible to get.

I saw 1 person with the grandfather in the ENTIRE time i played d2, which was for like 6 years.

What happened as the game grew and the expansion came out is that stones of jordan, a ring that gave you resistances to all schools of magic, became the trading tool of choice, that being said, u cld basically trade 1 stone of jordan for 1 of any item you wanted (barring the grandfather, the rarest item in the game, twas a beastly sword)

Even as this became the standard there was still a massive shortage of these items, there was no way a player could just farm for one.



So, the reason i've written this, is to point out that if blizz intend on having as big a loot table as they did in d2 (the biggest loot table of any rpg ever) then the rarest of items, the ones everyone will want, will not be sold on the AH, ever. If they are it wont be for a long time after the game is released and they'll be ridiculously expensive. I think they're implementing this AH system so that people can pick up and play the game to an adequate level, fairly quickly/make new chars without having to start from scratch again.

In d2 they added special "hell zones" that required you to farm 9 keys, kill 4 uber bosses (they were actually called ubers), when u did all of that u'd get a charm called a torch, best charm in game, but with random numbers for all of its stats (always the same type of stat, but random in its value) going all the way up to perfect torches which were monumentally expensive to just buy.

Killing these uber bosses took stupid gear, me and bison managed to kill _one_ of them after we had made near perfect chars, which took us months.

Again, I really dont think ur gonna find stupidly incredible items on the AH, if they did it would kill the game, and knowing blizz, who dont make decisions lightly, they've almost certainly thought of this.

[delling]

re: paying for stuff -- people will pay, as long as it's worth it (and Blizzard stuff generally is).

I just compare the amount of money I spend on WoW compared to other stuff -- and then think about how many hours of fun I get out of it.

[Sidestep]

Yea i remember how ridiculous the drop rate was, i used to spend weeks doing things like meph runs. Ended up with a breath of the dying (ultimate 2h rune weapon) for my barb, and eventually the teleport armour, made me godlike in pvp.

All the hacking got to me in the end though, hoping it will be better this time, blizzard's security has come a long way since then.

[Palmar]

I'm totally fine with the RL money AH model

[Sintrael]

Ye, you couldnt play on open battle.net _at all_ cos of hacking, meaning u cldnt play ur single player char online, twas no big deal tho cos u cld play ur multiplayer chars on ur own anyway, meant u cldnt power level them on ur own though (aka setting players to 8 in sp, so monsters were really tough and gave more xp)

The only other major hack you might remember was soon after the expansion was released and people figured out how duplicated items (forcing server lag, dropping an item on the ground, leave the server, re-enter the server and u'd have ur item back in ur inventory, but it wld still be lying on the ground as well)

This flooded the market with SOJ's for a while, one of my mates made an entire accound (that means 8 chars all full of SOJ's - a lot of fucking soj's (stones of jordan))

They then fixed it and implemented an anti dupe thing, that would somehow detect dupes and delete them, but it wasnt perfect, it deleted a lot of proper items!

I remember i found a pair of yellow assassin gloves with the perfect +skills that i wanted (was a martial arts sin, not a faggy trap sin)and they got deleted because of the dupe thing like 2 weeks later. Sad panda.

Only other hack was maphacking, which was actually necessary to the game in the end, the one flaw of d2. All it did was let u see the total area of the map for any given area, so you could actually navigate.

I had two accounts (meaning i had to buy the game 3 times in total) banned cos of maphacking, but it was totally retarded trying to play without it.

If anyone remembers doing act 3 with no maphack u'll kno what i'm on about.