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Extra Credits S.3 Ep.16: The Diablo III marketplace
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I don't think it's unreasonable to say that any computer capable of running Diablo III will also have an internet connection. And really, what would someone be doing with a sweet ass rig that isn't connected to the internet?
Some countries it's probably much easier to buy a decent computer than find a good internet connection.
Anyway...
The thing I found interesting about this episode is when they said something along the lines of, "Normal people making a living by playing the game." It's of course too early to say whether this is true or not but I don't see how it will be possible. There are a few reasons for this.
1. Last I heard Blizzard has a fee for just posting an item. This may not be very large but it could add up if you aren't able to sell enough (see point 2). It's possible that the fee would go up significantly for how long you set the duration of the auction and the price you want to sell the item.
2. When I look at auction houses in other MMO's there's a vast amount of items that don't get sold. The majority of items that are sold are the good stuff that you might only find occasionally.
3. In addition to point #2, now that we are talking about real money I would imagine people would be much less likely to spend much at all on anything that isn't the good stuff.
Now I expect there will be some people that could make a living off of this for a while. However, they will have to be dedicated, clever, and probably lucky enough to find the best spots to grind all day*. In the beginning the market will probably be more open but over time I would be surprised if more than a few percent of the people would be making any significant money.
*I would rather spend half a day with a regular job and the other half enjoying games but that's just me.
Yes, it is pretty unreasonable to say that. Diablo III does not exactly require a top-of-the-line computer, but it does require a constant stable internet connection. Without even going into other countries, there are still places in the US that are stuck with dial-up or those crappy mobile modems that rely on cellphone signals. If high speed is not near universal in the country the game is being developed in, how do you think it is in other countries? And if you do have an internet connection but that connection fails for any amount of time, you are booted out of the game, sent back to town (or nearest checkpoint), and lose any items/progress they gained since whenever the server last decided to autosave (and if you were playing hardcore, you're probably dead and lost your character).
I live in a place that arbitrarily cuts off internet connection when you're outside city limits. And the local ISPs don't check where their ads are being mailed to, because we get ads based on the city address, but don't actually get service. So fuck them, for the record.
But yeah, always-online requirements are a bad thing because most of the country still isn't wired up to support that. And even in a lot of places that are wired up, the service is awful and you can get connection failures and all sorts of things. And so far, none of the ISPs, as far as I know, have stepped up to say, "You know what? We're gonna start making connections at least more stable." They sorta have, but it's in the wrong way - bandwidth caps. I guess if you make people hesitant to use the internet, the overall use drops and things get more stable? But the cost is on the user in a punishing way, it's not an inclusive measure, and that makes it wrong.
So to sum up - as a concept, I don't mind having to always be online, but the condition is that always being online has to be feasible.
Just watched the episode and that was a very good talk. While listening, I decided that the real money auction house is analogous to legalizing pot. You take something that was a criminal action, make it legal and safe to engage in, and we also benefit from it.
The concept of truly free to play games that you don't pay to get access to, and that will run on player-run transactions, was also a nice turn from the typical, "OH GOD THEY'RE GONNA MAKE US PAY FOR EVERYTHIIIIIIIIIIIIING" stuff.
Edit - Oh, though I disagree with the sentiment about losing the fantasy / escapism. That assumes that all video games will cease to have it. It also assumes that everyone who plays the game will only play for the money, which is false. It's wrong to say what other people play video games for.
There will probably be people buying and reselling items on there. People who will anticipate future patches and keep a stock of items they might be able to sell with profit later, that kind of thing. The great thing about a virtual market place is that there are no costs of shipping and keeping stock, making it more like a stock market than an auction house. The moment I could convince a bunch of kids that I am buying all their +n [skill] items for a set price of 1$ per skill level on the item I could make a profit once word comes out that said skill is being buffed next patch.
I wouldn't even have to play the game to do this, completely bypassing all the "is it fun to try and make profit in a game?" questions EC is trying to answer. I would treat the auction house as something completely different from the actual game.
I'm trying to do the same for City of Heroes, a WAY faster paced game with more ambiguous drops (as in one item can serve hundreds of purposes), and the markets are fucking out of CONTROL there. The spikes and demand are random as fuck.
So people trying to make a living on Diablo 3 may not find it so easy. I intend to mess around on it myself (buy low, sell high kids), but I'm not going to plan my life around it. Let alone any sort of real money investment. Not unless I can figure it all out.
Like half of the US. Seriously, I can just imagine how much worse some of those other countries must have it when my broadband only works like 80% of the time and my ISP doesn't seem to feel the need to fix it. This is standard for my area.
WOW Auction House was probably the most protected economy in world history.
This. It's only in the last two years that Steam became something other than a reason NOT to buy a game here in South Africa, simply because of the cost involved in getting a connection fast enough for it. Plus the southern half of the continent is only connected to the rest of the world by two undersea cables. if one of them breaks we're buggered because one of them on their own cannot handle the load. And it can, and has, taken almost a month for them to be fixed.
STEAM
It depends on the size of transactions, to be fair.
It's so young it hasn't even been born yet. It's a fetus.
Africa's internet is quite buggered as the saying may go and while Dubai and much of the UAE sits on a shelf one or two levels less buggery.
I also wanted to share the story of how 5 years ago when I was working there, the internet was shot to hell after someone's anchor cut a central fiber optic cable in the ocean and fucked up the internet for most of Asian. That was a very painful month.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Not to figuratively fictionally victim-blame, but if you honestly consider that a concern, you'd do well to either purchase a Blizzard Authenticator (aren't they like $6 in the US?) or at least get one of the apps that work on practically every phone made in the last 5 years?
Brute forcing one might be possible but it lowers the likelihood pretty heavily (as I understand it). They'd need to have a keylogger on your system and to strike within the ~1 minute window that the code was active for, and if that's the case then you have bigger problems than a compromised D3 account.
Remember, the whole reason Blizzard is doing this is not for the players' benefit, but for their own. The RMAH is going to be the profit generator going forward in all their games if it takes off in Diablo 3, this is just a test to see if consumers are willing to follow through with it to its logical conclusion.
Heisenberg said everything is Uncertain,
Therefore, everything is relatively uncertain.
Given that Blizzard is using a flat rate instead of a scaling/percentage based model, that does mean that lower end sales (those close to the flat rate) will suffer heavy losses, but the more valuable/expensive things will see only a small fraction of their value lost to Blizzard.
Example: as a user of Paypal, it'd cost me 50 cents to withdraw my cash. Now, assuming Blizzard takes an equal or smaller cut then yes, selling something for $1.50 or less and expecting to see essentially anything after trying to put that money in the bank would be silly. However, if you just leave that money with the Blizzard account and either let it accumulate or use it on Blizzard store/services purchases (or other RMAH items) you're just losing whatever Blizzard's cut is.
Conversely, if you sold an Uber Bow Of Wrecking Shit In The Face Real Good for $150, after the same ~$1 in fees you'd walk away with nearly $149.
So yes, on extremely small sales where the amounts coming in are barely higher than the cost of the fees associated, people will risk gaining almost nothing (or even losing perhaps, but that would be dumb of them). On extremely valuable sales, they'll lose a mere fraction of the cost.
And honestly, I expect this is intended and expected behaviour. It will provide an incentive for people to use the gold based AH for 'regular' items; the lower end gear, levelling pieces and general odds and ends found in the game.