The fear of Blizzard noticing and quickly patching in a new, better item or nerfing the one they own a ton of. Or Blizzard putting something like that in the ToS and banning the accounts of the people trying to corner the market. That would be a fun legal battle. It does make banning more interesting when you can definitively show that it is causing you a financial hardship. I feel like there’s some exciting new legal territory waiting to be explored.
Also I agree that the tears of rage will be delicious when the release of the Sword of Moar Awesomeness kills the value of the Sword of Awesomeness that people paid ridiculous amounts for the week before.
-Not being part of the cash for items thing is not a punishment for Hardcore players. In every game community where that game mode existed whether supported or a personal game rules choice, they want to win or lose trading with other hardcore players, or by finding their own items. They are a very niche community that I am impressed that Blizzard addressed, and I think they did the right thing.
I do agree with the idea of real life cash for items being a bad thing when it comes to certain items. Blizz will screw up, they will release an item, or even a combination of a couple items that when used together are extremely potent. What happens when they discovered a certain combination of items trivialize most encounters? In normal games, they would just announce they had to tweak the items…so sorry, we will reimburse you some gold or dungeon badges.
How do you do that, when it is possible that someone payed real life cash, 50 or 100 dollars for those items, that are made worth 2 cents after the patch. Blizz won’t be saying so sorry, we will reimburse you $200. The other option if they leave such things in the game, and forever after, anyone else will never get them, and always be behind those who were grandfather claused in.
As for the last part of the above post. Blizzard said they do not want to regulate the auction house, not that they wouldn’t if it became so abused that is was only used by gold/item sellers.
Kael
1623
One things for sure, it’s going to be an amazing test case for virtual economies. I wonder if it’s a test case for a larger economy (such as the next mmorpg).
And I wonder about the tax implications. If I am a professional diablo 2 player can I write-off expenses like buying in game loot? How do I report profits? Can I use diablo to launder money or hide assets? (good luck finding my assets in a bankruptcy if I have $20,000 in diablo loot or gold).
Gambling with real money is illegal, is it illegal if I use diablo gold? Can blizzard pay or give their employees bonuses in diablo gold?
Account theft is going to be a major issue. Players hacking accounts, selling and cashing out the balances. Players claiming their accounts were hacked and wanting their items returned.
It will be interesting.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the real money auction house idea gets nixed after Activision’s lawyers really get a chance to think about the implications. Although I’m sure the financial guys will try to fight them.
I hope you are right. It isn’t so much that I am against cash for items. I am fine by playing by my own rules and ignoring the cash auction house.
My problem with it is in D2 I loved the niche items, the Hobnails boots that took a large percentage of damage off of a regualar foe per hit, things like that, that people designed entire wonky builds around.
If Blizzard has to no only balance the game, but the real cash market, they will be extremely timid with itemization. Every fucking item will be a boring percent damage increase, + to fire/cold damage, blah blah, nothing really interesting. Another World of Warcraft, where every item is a mostly uninteresting item that is a damage increase on the curve, with an occasional proc that is also balanced so that is doesn’t happen enough to change the ‘curve’.
Diablo to me is the rare chance of anyone finding a super cool item that can really change the way you play the game. It isn’t a game of predicable boring tiers of boring 4% damage upgrades every few levels. I fear that will be the case, if they fear nerfing items due to the cash shop.
Its late, hope that ramble made sense.
I am going to be really surprised if they don’t have servers set up that are non-auction house, especially for hardcore mode. So all this gnashing of teeth will be pretty silly in hind sight.
Hardcore is already seperated from the real cash AH. There really is no reason for a special server.
Thing is, even if they did make special servers for those that just have to have them because they can’t resist using the real cash AH, it still won’t matter to me. My problem with the cash AH isn’t the concept of buying stuff with cash, it is how timid and boring Blizzard will have to be with itemization and the interesting powers of magic items, in order to make sure they don’t create awesome popular items, that need to be nerfed later.
Nerfing items in an MMO isn’t the same as nerfing an item that someone payed 80 bucks for, that is now only worth 8 cents, because the one attribute that made it special was changed.
The WOW influence is already bad, the cash item shop is just another nail, I can imagine we won’t be seeing the variety of item attributes we saw in D2.
Maybe that just shows how stupid it is to pay $80 for one item in the first place?
You are talking about this shit like it doesn’t already happen. Real money for items is a real thing in D2 and Wow, and has been for quite some time.
Well yeh, I think 80 bucks for an item is stupid. That wasn’t really the point of what I said.
Blizzard will shy away from nifty interesting items in favor of the safe and proven flat percentage upgrades of World of Warcraft. That isn’t Diablo to me, but it is the safest measure they can take, to keep their cash shop safe from undo nerfing.
Once upon a time, I could find a certain gauntlet or staff that totally changed how I played my wizard or amazon. I liked that style of item finding and what it meant. Each kill, each boss was fun, I didn’t just find a bow that did x percent damage more than the last one. I might find a pair of boots that changed how I played my class.
That is what I want in this game, not WoW style flat % upgrades every few levels.
No, I am talking about it like it happens all the time. The difference is when the game owner starts supporting the item sales.
When unbalanced items in a game were sold in ebay for 200 dollars, the games creator wasn’t too worried about backlash when they nerfed that item.
Now take that same scenario, when the game creator supports a cash shop, takes several cuts from the cash sale…then they realize they fucked up on a game item and nerf it from being worth 80 bucks to 80 cents in one patch?
What will happen is timid item creators, playing it safe, boring item procs, boring damage increases in line with its level…boring attributes for items.
Nesrie
1632
Perhaps you are not old enough to remember the original NWN … courtesy of AOL.The point though was MMOs are not the same as MP games, and they’ve always had the server DRM. D3 is not an MMO, at least not by definition that’s been used for awhile anyway.
Mordrak
1633
There’s a qualitative difference. Before, any balance decisions mainly looked at the game, and what kind of game experience they wanted players to have. Now, balance decisions will take into account its effect on sales and prices in the RMT AH in addition to player retention and game design.
Seriously? You meant the SSI game? the MMO? You decided to mention NWN AOL right after you mention singleplayer and multiplayer games as an example of … what exactly? Why even separate it from other MMOs?
Why does blizzard care if an item costs $80 or $.80? They aren’t setting the prices, or even doing the selling for that matter. They are a broker, they get their cut either way.
Mordrak
1636
The cash out fee, is not listed as fixed in the faq. If they take 10%, they’d rather take 10% of $80 than 10% of $0.80. Now it could be fixed, but if it was, you figure they would have taken the care to make that clear like they did with the two other charges (listing and successful auction).
They control pretty much every variable to influence items effects and rarity within the game and thus have great influence over their relative market value.
Nesrie
1637
I believe my original comment was because someone said the MMOs have had always on DRM so what’s the big deal bringing it into the other genres. I think it is a big deal, and the nature of those games compared most the other games is a pretty big difference also. If that is the case, well we should have had always on DRM since the early 90s and not said a peep about it… right?
It’s still way early, so I’d be surprised if there even was a set price yet. But this being the internet, you’d think they’d address that since people are automatically going to assume the worst.
If some item was $80 and is now $.80, there will be some new(or existing) item that will be worth $80 instead. Blizzard still gets their money, assuming they are taking a percentage of each transaction rather than a flat fee.
If anything, I can see the exact opposite of what Kristopher is expecting, not boring safe items, but tons of OP items that are worth a bunch of money.
They care because they are “the man” now. If they nerf an extremely popular but unbalancing item from being worth $80 to .80 cents, they take the flak. If they don’t nerf crazy exploitable items across the board, everyone knows that whoever got the items early rules the game.
IMHO, that mean that they will do less interesting items like we had in D2, and much more boring items that are simply % damage upgrade items each level, with less crazy suffixes and affixes like in D2.
To be clear, I am not against the real cash shop, I am just against it being such an investment of real dollars, that Blizzard will have to be super careful on items, to the extent that their itemization will be extremely boring compared to the innocent age of D2, even with the ebay sales:)
