Mrenda
1941
"I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER."
Or me, during a bout of depression during my university years.
“Why would I want a degree from my university, sure they’re letting me pass.”
Auction house, what? Seriously?
Spot on.
Although, the SC2 community has pleasantly surprised me. SC1 had some great communities, but general battle.net was NOT one of them.
I feel the same way. I play Diablo as either a single player PvE game or as a co-op PvE game–its PvP interests me not at all. As a result, I couldn’t care less whether or not Twinky McDeepPockets spends $100 for the Maul of UberPwnage on the new real-money auction house. Why should I? He’ll never swing it at me, and there’s a remote chance that someday either I’ll sell him something for a ridiculous price or that he’ll join one of my games and use his gear to slaughter something giving me a hard time.
As long as they don’t balance the game to be annoyingly difficult without using the ah. And given that characters that do should have better gear than those who don’t, it’s certainly possible, especially after normal difficulty.
Pogo
1946
I dunno, the PvE AH should be pretty damn accessible. They didn’t make the mistake of requiring the AH for WoW, I don’t think they’ll make a mistake like that for this either. But it was also really easy to use in WoW and someone who had never encountered one before (like myself) picked it up quickly. I don’t imagine it will be much different in Diablo 3. If you get unlucky with drops for your class or something, it might be a fun diversion even for single player peeps to jump into the AH and see what they can grab.
Teiman
1947
If this is a success, I wonder if future games will use something like this. Maybe next Blizzard game will have a Guild Wars model, where you buy the box, then you don’t pay a montly fee,.
If this is a success we’ll probably be seeing Skyrim Dragon Armour, Skyrim Dragon Drinking Bowl, Skyrim Dragon Wing Polish and Skyrim Dragon Manicure Butler, all available from Ye Elde Scroll Bidding Hut.
This is the company that brought us Horse Armor.
I’m pretty sure they were blazing that trail long before Blizzard.
Quite true. I wonder if Diablo 3 will have expansions, in the style of Hellfire or Lord of Destruction, or whether it’ll be incremental DLC.
Teiman
1951
Here
http://news.mmogamesite.com/blizzard-product-slate-leaked.html
I could see three Diablo3 products:
Diablo3, Diablo3X1 Diablo3X2
I suppose Diablo3X1 is a DLC or a expandalone.
Huh. I did not know that. We never played on Battle.net thanks to the lag compared to LAN/DirectIP mode.
So did that mean you had to delete your old ghosts if you wanted more than 8 per account in Diablo II? Or where they automatically deleted anyway when you didn’t play them for a while? (Which you couldn’t anyway, since they were ghosts).
If that’s the case, I hope they have some kind of memorial shrine or something in-game so you can see all your old ghosts. I always tried to name them something unique so that looking at the old ghost would invoke the proper memories.
DeepT
1953
That is a long time between expansions. The last one listed is at the end of 2014. I hope they will be including a graphics update / overhaul with that expansion.
Doesn’t matter - that schedule is both old and out of date at this point, as I’m pretty sure that the first Starcraft expansion has definitely bumped further down the road. It might still make the fiscal year, but it certainly won’t hit in calendar 2011.
If they did have two expansions planned for the game, I think they could get away with the same engine through 2014 with good art direction. At this point, that’s just, like, two years on the same game engine. Three at most. I can think of plenty of three year old games that still look pretty excellent.
WoW didn’t have a financial incentive for Blizzard to encourage people to use the AH. I also couldn’t imagine playing WoW without the auction house - it was extremely useful in filling in gaps in your gear and loading up on crafting materials. I don’t doubt that it was possible to play without using it, but to me it would seem like a gimped and far more grindy experience.
Iirc, playing any character on your account prevented the rest from timing out and getting deleted so the ghosts would stick around as long as you wanted, but they would take up a spot and have to be deleted if you wanted to make a playable character in that spot.
You had to nuke your ghosts. I played HC exclusively on closed b.net - the only ghost I ever kept around was a 97 Assassin (yeah, that’s right. Level 97!)
On the subject of the AH affecting the gameplay, one this people should keep in mind is Blizzard has said that Hardcore characters can not use the RMAH, so I really doubt they would so any seedy drop rate rigging as it would make HC unplayable.
There will still be a gold-only hardcore AH, right? So they can still do seedy drop rate rigging if they want. Or have hardcore drop rates not be tied to softcore.
Can Hardcore characters still do item trading and buy for gold? If so what’s the point of locking them out of the dollar auctions?
To keep people from complaining about losing their money when their character is wiped, I imagine.
