3041

Why would listing fees impact prices like that? You still want things to sell if you only get 10 auctions a week. If there were no limit it would be a different story.

3042

With listing fees, there is a monetary cost to listing your goods too high for them to sell. Without listing fees, that cost does not exist. If you only have eight items worth auctioning, it’s probably worth it for you to list your goods higher than you think they’ll sell for, because all you’re losing is the opportunity cost of having the money sooner (which is only important if you need operating income, which you won’t if you can only list 10 items a week), not actually losing out on money.

3043

There is the opportunity cost of forgoing your auction slots. You’re assuming people won’t be slot-limited.

Listing items higher than the market will bear just means that you will hardly sell anything and have a growing backlog of items to list.

3044

But if you’re not maxed out for your slots in any given week, then it’s strictly to your benefit to try to drive the prices up and sell later if you don’t need the operating income… and having a slot limit will mean that nobody needs the operating income.

3045

You can only drive the price up if you have some sort of monopoly or oligopoly power in which case you would drive the price up anyway. When ISN’T it in your interest to drive the price up??? Aiming to sell later is just speculating on future price (and paying with your slots) and isn’t bad for the market.

3046

Spending your time and resources (literally just posting items higher than they’ll sell has an effect on the market, especially if people use market addons or analyzers) isn’t necessarily in your interests if the listing fees / “item didn’t sell” fees are nonzero.

3047

Jay’s Blogis now online detailing the changes to the runestones and skills (I haven’t read it yet though). Enjoy?

3048

I just read the blog and I’ll summarize briefly.

Basically, the skill selection interface is going away and now you select your skills using the skill bar interface (the one that runs along the bottom of the screen), near as I can tell. This does sound like a better fit - it always felt weird to have to first pick a skill to have active and then assign it to a button.

The second skill change is they have defined what catagory (primary, secondary, utility) that a skill falls in and by default that defines where those skills are mapped - primary to left mouse, secondary to right, etc. This is OPTIONAL though - if you feel like you know better or have a build in mind that doesn’t fit this mold, you can chose an Elective Mode which will overwrite the defaults and let you assign whatever you want to whatever. It’ assumed most people will leave it at default until they play for most of the Normal difficulty and at some point want the flexibility Elective Mode will provide as they come up with new builds to try out.

The change to Runestones is there are no more runestones! Instead they are called Skill Runes and they unlock as you level - starting at level 6, so we’ll have some runes to play with in the beta now. There would have been over 3,000 itemized runes and it was becoming a massive headache to manage them in your inventory and trying to juggle runes to equip, runes to store, runes to get rid of, etc.

Now they unlock as you level up and they are not ranked any longer - instead they are just a big, powerful adjustment/mod to a skill as soon as you unlock a rune. You get to pick what rune type to unlock when you hit a level that allows that (such as level 6) and what skill to stick to that rune.

Looks like the maintenance was exctended until about 10pm CST so it’s going to be awhile before I can try this stuff myself, but I definately approve of the new skill interface, and if you get to build your skills by picking runes as you level, I’m DEFINATELY on board for that change, as well.

Also, having to juggle all those runes sounded like a fiasco - we already have gems to have to manage, anyway.

What do you guys think?

3049

I don’t know what briefly means.

3050

It’s a shame that they couldn’t find a middle ground between being able to find runes in the field without it being too messy. I do like the idea of the skill interface change.

3051

Patch is out and downloadable now (a little under 400MB), but I still can’t log into the game.

3052

Interesting - it’s being listed by Windows as “Diablo III Retail” instead of “Beta”.

Also I’m happy to see the patch notes include some much requested features like removing simplified tool tips and some smart tweaks to the skills. We must be getting close to an announcement (probably depending on how smoothly the beta rolls post-patch).

3053

Where is the “difficult to master” part of the equation?

3054

Curious: is it still possible to switch which Rune a skill is attuned to? Like, you decide that the extra damage rune you picked for Fireball 20 levels ago actually sucks and you want the multi-shot rune. . . can you switch without, say, “wasting” another rune unlock for another skill?

3055

It’s supposed to be the late game with the higher difficulty levels - at that point you know how to play, but you have to be fluid about how you build your character to be successfull. That’s the line we’re being told, anyway. No one knows for sure, except Blizzard.

I don’t believe so - I’m speculating, but I believe you select a skill and a rune type and permanently have that effect available to you for that skill. If you want multi-shot, you have to wait until the next time you get a skill rune to pick that up later (unless you can “save” those skill runes to use them later on, then you could spend it right then)? They extended the downtime for another hour so I can’t try it out for a bit, though so I’m just guessing.

3056

From the screenshots and the producer’s blog, it seems pretty clear that specific skills and runes unlock by level. So at level 4 you get the “hammertime” skill, then at 12 you get the “poison hammer” rune, 21 the “holy hammer” rune, 29 the “cursed hammer” rune, and so on. Since runestones aren’t loot, they made them free leveling bonuses. The upshot of that is you get new “stuff” every single level.

3057

I’m pretty sure you get to select a skill rune and a skill - it’s not set in stone.

The screen image I captured above has this caption:
(A mid-20’s demon hunter choosing a skill and its rune variant)

It doesn’t say a mid-20’s demon hunter “unlocking chemical burn variant” or something. I do notice he isn’t allowed to pick Overpenetration until level 27 though, so does that indicate you won’t want to go back to Chemical Burn once you’ve unlocked Overpenetration? Odd.

But I agree it’s cool to get now two or even three things every time you level up.

3058

I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s even less investment in a character now (and it was already feeling that way with the removal of skill trees and unlimited respeccing). I’m sure it’ll be good for a lot of people but I’m just feeling like this game continues to move further and further away from a game I’d like to play.

Hopefully a demo at some point proves me wrong, because me having less and less interest in D3 is depressing, given how much I played D2.

3059

Why do you have less investment with a character? It feels like characters have more options than ever to be custom built just the way you’d like - between selecting your skill load out, what passives you have equipped, what skill runes you use, the gear you find along the way, the gems you socket into said gear, etc. there is a huge amount of variety in how you could build a character.

If you are talking about the lack of a need to play through the game 3 times with a single class to try out multiple builds, well, you’re on your own - I think having to play to level 60 five times (one for each class) is PLENTY for me, thanks.

I did see on diablofans.org that there was some data mining that seemed to prove/indicate that we’d get a trial version much like they did with StarCraft II so you should be able to check it out risk free at some point.

3060

The Skill Rune modifies skill, but each rune provides a very different effect. The Skill Runes that unlock at higher levels aren’t always “more powerful”, but provide different effects; the cooler effects no doubt will mainly be the higher level unlocks. So, depending on how you’re combining your skills, and what type of gear you’re using, you may want to swap between both the skills, and their modifying runes. The entire idea of the “power” of the runes has been eliminated, since players won’t be acquiring items of varying power anymore.

For “character investment”, there will be the achievements and related data that show up on your banner; the history of a character will grow in that regard. With nothing “fixed” per character, there won’t be any reason to level up multiple copies of a specific class, if that’s the sort of investment you’re looking for.