1821

Hell, I don’t own Starcraft 2 and don’t plan to due to lack of LAN and region locked Battle.net. Starcraft 2 was the line in the dirt for me and presumably a few other people. Diablo 3’s even more ridiculous stance will probably be a line for a fresh batch of people.

1822

After a player asked about the tax and legal implications of the real money auction house, a Blizzard Rep responded with this gem.

Regarding issues like these, it is always best to take such questions to a personal, professional consultant.

Source: Eight post here http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=27822642428&sid=3000

We now need a personal accountant and tax lawyer to play games. :D

1823

My worry is a bit larger than the AH itself, but rather the focus of design towards it. Eliminate any sort of offline mode, because you want everything funneled to the AH. Definitely don’t support mods, because it will take away from the AH’s appeal. Are item drops (drop rates, etc) going to be tailored with the AH in mind? I wouldn’t be surprised if they are, considering that it’s the smart business decision to make. Unfortunately, what makes Blizzard the most profit doesn’t necessarily equate to a better game or gaming experience.

I think a RMT auction house would be a great idea for a F2P game, but this is a premium $60 title. I really don’t want to see this shit popping up in all my games and I worry that it will.

I used to be about the biggest Blizzard fan there was, but I skipped Starcraft 2 and it’s looking like I will skip Diablo 3 as well. That is really unfortunate to me, because damn… I’ve been wanting a sequel to Diablo for a decade now.

Maybe it’s my age or just my personal tastes, but I think it’s getting time for me and the “AAA” games industry to part ways. I’m having an absolute blast with games the past couple years, but it’s all from the indie and smaller dev studios… the ones making games, not product. Oh boy, I think that makes me the gamer equivalent of an art house snob, but oh well.

1824

The chance of finding real treasure, worth real dollars, is going to multiply the Pavlovian draw of the series. The one time you get a 5 dollar item on a run is going to keep you doing that same run all night long.

That’s more of an extrinsic motivator though, leaning on that could spoil the pure fun of the game as you constantly do dollar calculations whenever you get some loot. If you start thinking in terms of dollars per hour or whatever, that could suck the fun right out of it.

1825

I’m sorry, I should have been more specific: less advert botting/ channel spamming (much more specifically: D2 on open Bnet walls of text ect.) Won’t an online-only client coupled with a legitimate outlet for such trading and perhaps more sophisticated Bnet filtering help lessen the assault on my eyeballs while I’m just trying to splatter a few goblins?

I’m crossing my fingers.

1826

I’m not really rabid about the way Blizz is doing the constant-connect requirement, but the more I think it over the more I am thinking of just trying out Torchlight and Torchlight 2.

In the past year I’ve seen WoW become a lot less appealing, and also didn’t quite make it through the single player campaign in SC2 before I got bored. The online component of that gave me heartburn as well when I tried to play it on a plane one time without realizing I had needed to opt out of the server connection WHILE CONNECTED TO THE SERVER. Grr.

I’m not sure what it is, but Blizz seems to me to be doing the Wing Commander slide into reduced fun with their games. All the way through WCIII I loved that game, but that IV was just meh. Lately I’m feeling very meh about Blizzard stuff. That they do things that concern or aggravate me are damaging my nearly twenty-year love affair with their games.

I played D2 for nearly five years, thanks to the mods available out there keeping the game fun and new. Now, a more expensive game wants me to buy it with no possibility for mods. The big sales hook? I can spend yet more money (which they get a cut of) to use their AH to kit out my toon. How long before this turns into a Blizz cash cow and content starts getting tweaked to favor heavier use of the AH? They are seriously using that as a selling point?

Add in that yes, the internet can be unreliable, a single-player game is just what I would want for those times when the online experience is less than optimal. Ever since the S&P downgrade last Friday my internet has been lagging from all the panic-traffic in the DC area. Even from work this page took nearly a minute to load. WoW was useless for raiding or instances for most of the weekend.

It seems to me Blizz could just have an offline-only mode. No AH. Modding doesn’t matter.

This whole thing smells of bad fish to me. Not because I’m some luddite who doesn’t want to move forward. But because I don’t see any way that forcing me online all the time is in any way pushing the needle forward in any way except giving up my own ownership rights to my game.

1827

Sorry, that one was longer than I intended. Short version: I am leery enough of this online-only stuff that I am starting to look at competing products and looking for ways to avoid D3.

1828

Extensive Diablo 3 discussions on the latest RolePlayer’s Realm with Kat, Scooter (in a guest role), the guy who’s a magnificent copy-editor who I think is Justin, and the guy what runs the magazine who has no relationship to 1Up. I didn’t know that it was going to be as different from prior entries as it apparently is.

Also interesting - my takeaway from the fact that the hosting situation for Torchlight II sounds very much like the situation for Diablo 2 (sans Battle.net - in short, because Runic doesn’t have, like, billions of dollars to build server farms, the multiplayer and LAN play are only going to have a rudimentary matchmaking and server searching system) has me now lobbying my friend who runs a game server to run the game on that server if we’re going to do any co-op in it, which I’d certainly like to do, but hell if I’m going to wander blind into the online universe. No n00bs only servers.

1829

Weirdly I am much more interested in Diablo 3 following the various announcements. I don’t care about online-only: my computer is always online, so it makes no difference to me at all. I think the real cash auction house is conceptually very interesting and will no-doubt generate lots of crazy EVE-esque stories of subterfuge. I like the idea of literally being able to “cash out” my gear when I’m done with the game.

1830

How so? There’s none of the persistence of EVE. There’s nothing to fight over.

1831

I was thinking more like market manipulation and so on. People already do hilarious things on the WOW auction houses, and since in Diablo 3 gold will be relatively liquid I’m sure there will be even more of it.

1832

Market manipulation only works when there is a predictable, finite amount of supply. Neither of which will be the case in D3.

1833

Well, fewer people will be able to engage in it, as it will require real money in some form of another. But the market manipulation in EVE isn’t all that interesting without the broader consequences in the world.

When you were talking subterfuge, I was thinking things like maintaining spy networks, raids of corporate funds, information warfare, etc. That’s all driven by persistence.

It’s also going to be more difficult since production inputs amount to just randomness and time.

1834

Two things:
First, even in the Diablo marketplace there is not an infinite supply. The supply of any good is limited by the time it takes to acquire it.
Second, there is no substantive difference between the Diablo marketplace and the WOW auction house, and people have been manipulating the WOW auction house for years.

1835

I haven’t really kept up on Diablo 3’s system, but WoW has crafting professions which not only meet demand, but create demand for various crafting inputs.

Isn’t Diablo 3’s crafting handled by NPCs and players can more easily be self-sufficient? That’s one of the reasons in WoW people were limited to 1 main profession, because if given the option, people more often trade with themselves.

1836

I think you mean limited, rather than finite, and Blizzard will still technically be able to control drop rates if they decide they want to deal with another round of community hollering. If they assign a .1% drop rate to a particular item, the supply should be low enough that if you bother to take the steps necessary to start moving the market around (namely, buying up all the available entries) you can put yourself in a reasonable position.

Of course, that begs the question of why you would bother. In EVE, your corporation is your team. Any guilds in Diablo will be outside of the game of a necessity.

1837

This. I’ll feel less guilty about putting so many hours into the game if I can make some money back.

1838

You would bother because you could potentially make real money off it, and perhaps a lot of it, but that means you’ll have to spend real money to corner those markets but with no other impact on the game which inherently makes it a lot less interesting to me at least.

1839

That raises a question that I’m sure has been raised before, but I didn’t notice it - is this going to run afoul of anti-gambling legislation? The way that Diablo is laid out, farming loot is as much a game of chance as of skill, so it is at least as much gambling as poker. The commodity that you’re wagering in this case is hours of labor instead of cash, but is there any chance they could end up tripping over that? I have to think that the answer is no, since you’d think one of the law talkin’ guys would have told them not to do it if that were the case, but still…

1840

If I remember correctly, in Magic the Gathering: Online you were supposed to report any of your tournament winnings to the IRS since you were winning cards/packs that were purchased with money or tokens.