Farming items and selling them for blizzbucks. That is blizzbucks from farming.
The RMAH market is fucked by the announcement so cashing out by buying and reselling is a gamble.
People who took and kept blizzbucks assumed some future value in keeping the money in game instead of cashing out immediately. That future value is now gone.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
So they have their ass covered from a legal standpoint with some boilerplate. Good for them.
That doesn't mean that they are immune to criticism or blowback if they don't provide any means to get out of blizzbucks now that one of the major uses of blizzbucks is being shut down. I don't personally have more blizzbucks stored up than I plan to use buying expansions, but I still think it is a shitty move if they refuse to offer any sort of fig leaf to the people who loaded up expecting to use the RMAH.
I mean, they are even offering people refunds within 30 days of this announcement with the latest TOS update, its not like they are unaware that a portion of the playerbase was going to be rather irate about getting rid of the AH.
Yeah, if I'd known about this I'd have used my balance to buy HOTS. But I didn't, because I intended to keep using the RMAH.
And a six month notice that coincides with a major market disruption ain't really worth much.
As I stands I may be able to burn up my balance on expansions, maybe. But I'd much rather have an option to eat the 15% and cash out. And while their TOS may cover them, that doesn't make it less shitty. They've been selling "RMAH gift cards" in stores, for fuck's sake.
It means I can't sue then, but I can still be pissed off and say "fuck Blizzard."
If you had no intention of ever spending your auction house proceeds on anything other than the auction house, then why bother dealing with Blizzbucks at all rather than selling for gold instead?
You could have cashed out for real money at 85% (I think) efficiency when you sold the items and chose not to. You could have cashed out for HotS at 100% efficiency and chose not to. You chose to commit to a spending pattern such that even if the auction house remained open for a decade it you still would have never seen a monetary return on your Blizzbucks, so why are you suddenly expecting to get money for them now? You can still convert them into in-game currency by buying items and reselling them for gold if you want (assuming the gold market doesn't crash from other people doing this).
It IS pretty creepy if Blizzard was explicitly selling RMAH cards; I had never heard of those.
They were, they were sold in the Best Buy I used to work at. But I've always seen those as just a middle man for putting your credit card in at your account page.
They are, but your odds of falling into the "I only need a few dollars now but I'll spend $25 and use them eventually" trap are much higher when you're dealing with prepaid cards. People who did that and have a balance left over are the only ones who can reasonably claim that they're owed money here (they aren't, legally, but it's a considerably worse situation than the alternatives).
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
So they have their ass covered from a legal standpoint with some boilerplate. Good for them.
That doesn't mean that they are immune to criticism or blowback if they don't provide any means to get out of blizzbucks now that one of the major uses of blizzbucks is being shut down. I don't personally have more blizzbucks stored up than I plan to use buying expansions, but I still think it is a shitty move if they refuse to offer any sort of fig leaf to the people who loaded up expecting to use the RMAH.
I mean, they are even offering people refunds within 30 days of this announcement with the latest TOS update, its not like they are unaware that a portion of the playerbase was going to be rather irate about getting rid of the AH.
Yeah, if I'd known about this I'd have used my balance to buy HOTS. But I didn't, because I intended to keep using the RMAH.
And a six month notice that coincides with a major market disruption ain't really worth much.
As I stands I may be able to burn up my balance on expansions, maybe. But I'd much rather have an option to eat the 15% and cash out. And while their TOS may cover them, that doesn't make it less shitty. They've been selling "RMAH gift cards" in stores, for fuck's sake.
It means I can't sue then, but I can still be pissed off and say "fuck Blizzard."
If you had no intention of ever spending your auction house proceeds on anything other than the auction house, then why bother dealing with Blizzbucks at all rather than selling for gold instead?
You could have cashed out for real money at 85% (I think) efficiency when you sold the items and chose not to. You could have cashed out for HotS at 100% efficiency and chose not to. You chose to commit to a spending pattern such that even if the auction house remained open for a decade it you still would have never seen a monetary return on your Blizzbucks, so why are you suddenly expecting to get money for them now? You can still convert them into in-game currency by buying items and reselling them for gold if you want (assuming the gold market doesn't crash from other people doing this).
It IS pretty creepy if Blizzard was explicitly selling RMAH cards; I had never heard of those.
They were, they were sold in the Best Buy I used to work at. But I've always seen those as just a middle man for putting your credit card in at your account page.
They are, but your odds of falling into the "I only need a few dollars now but I'll spend $25 and use them eventually" trap are much higher when you're dealing with prepaid cards. People who did that and have a balance left over are the only ones who can reasonably claim that they're owed money here (they aren't, legally, but it's a considerably worse situation than the alternatives).
True, but even through your account page, you can only add funds in increments. (I think the lowest increment is $10)
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
So they have their ass covered from a legal standpoint with some boilerplate. Good for them.
That doesn't mean that they are immune to criticism or blowback if they don't provide any means to get out of blizzbucks now that one of the major uses of blizzbucks is being shut down. I don't personally have more blizzbucks stored up than I plan to use buying expansions, but I still think it is a shitty move if they refuse to offer any sort of fig leaf to the people who loaded up expecting to use the RMAH.
I mean, they are even offering people refunds within 30 days of this announcement with the latest TOS update, its not like they are unaware that a portion of the playerbase was going to be rather irate about getting rid of the AH.
Yeah, if I'd known about this I'd have used my balance to buy HOTS. But I didn't, because I intended to keep using the RMAH.
And a six month notice that coincides with a major market disruption ain't really worth much.
As I stands I may be able to burn up my balance on expansions, maybe. But I'd much rather have an option to eat the 15% and cash out. And while their TOS may cover them, that doesn't make it less shitty. They've been selling "RMAH gift cards" in stores, for fuck's sake.
It means I can't sue then, but I can still be pissed off and say "fuck Blizzard."
If you had no intention of ever spending your auction house proceeds on anything other than the auction house, then why bother dealing with Blizzbucks at all rather than selling for gold instead?
You could have cashed out for real money at 85% (I think) efficiency when you sold the items and chose not to. You could have cashed out for HotS at 100% efficiency and chose not to. You chose to commit to a spending pattern such that even if the auction house remained open for a decade it you still would have never seen a monetary return on your Blizzbucks, so why are you suddenly expecting to get money for them now? You can still convert them into in-game currency by buying items and reselling them for gold if you want (assuming the gold market doesn't crash from other people doing this).
It IS pretty creepy if Blizzard was explicitly selling RMAH cards; I had never heard of those.
You could get a better return by selling in RMAH than in Gold AH. Also as long as the AH existed there were pretty stable options for still cashing out to Paypal at a later point. Blizzbucks was the most liquid form of D3 currency. That liquidity is being eliminated with the removal of the AH.
Nintendo ID: Incindium
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0
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
one does not find items worth selling for blizzbucks
I guess you could say blizzard made the market less stable, but... really? that's just how these things go, all announcements change the market and have to be made sometime
I would state it is not a good bet to "assume future value" in a fake currency that forewarned you that you shouldn't assume any value in it due to changes that might be made
one does not find items worth selling for blizzbucks
I guess you could say blizzard made the market less stable, but... really? that's just how these things go, all announcements change the market and have to be made sometime
I would state it is not a good bet to "assume future value" in a fake currency that forewarned you that you shouldn't assume any value in it due to changes that might be made
Apparently some people do find items worth selling on the RMAH.
All currency is "fake". The United States could one day state that the dollar is no longer the official currency of the US.
People holding dollars would naturally expect (well, angrily demand) some kind of compensation.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
0
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
that analogy is so poor it's not worth responding to
It's really weird playing on console when most of the thread is on Para lvl xx.
Still, no lag. Mostly good loot.
Though I have a question, if it possible for multiples of the same legendary to drop? I mean, lets say I find an Axe that has +Int on it for some reason, can the same axe drop for me again if I am lucky with +Str? Or are you capped at one named legendary til you sell it or salvage it?
Spent all of yesterday playing co-op with my brother (I switched from Monk to Wizard, he stayed WD. Played from Kulle's resurrection to killing Diablo).
He already had a Monster Hunter and during the course of the game, 2 more dropped.
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
So they have their ass covered from a legal standpoint with some boilerplate. Good for them.
That doesn't mean that they are immune to criticism or blowback if they don't provide any means to get out of blizzbucks now that one of the major uses of blizzbucks is being shut down. I don't personally have more blizzbucks stored up than I plan to use buying expansions, but I still think it is a shitty move if they refuse to offer any sort of fig leaf to the people who loaded up expecting to use the RMAH.
I mean, they are even offering people refunds within 30 days of this announcement with the latest TOS update, its not like they are unaware that a portion of the playerbase was going to be rather irate about getting rid of the AH.
Yeah, if I'd known about this I'd have used my balance to buy HOTS. But I didn't, because I intended to keep using the RMAH.
And a six month notice that coincides with a major market disruption ain't really worth much.
As I stands I may be able to burn up my balance on expansions, maybe. But I'd much rather have an option to eat the 15% and cash out. And while their TOS may cover them, that doesn't make it less shitty. They've been selling "RMAH gift cards" in stores, for fuck's sake.
It means I can't sue then, but I can still be pissed off and say "fuck Blizzard."
If you had no intention of ever spending your auction house proceeds on anything other than the auction house, then why bother dealing with Blizzbucks at all rather than selling for gold instead?
You could have cashed out for real money at 85% (I think) efficiency when you sold the items and chose not to. You could have cashed out for HotS at 100% efficiency and chose not to. You chose to commit to a spending pattern such that even if the auction house remained open for a decade it you still would have never seen a monetary return on your Blizzbucks, so why are you suddenly expecting to get money for them now? You can still convert them into in-game currency by buying items and reselling them for gold if you want (assuming the gold market doesn't crash from other people doing this).
It IS pretty creepy if Blizzard was explicitly selling RMAH cards; I had never heard of those.
Also as long as the AH existed there were pretty stable options for still cashing out to Paypal at a later point. Blizzbucks was the most liquid form of D3 currency. That liquidity is being eliminated with the removal of the AH.
By doing what? Buying items and reselling them? If you thought that auction house values were permanently stable then you're deluding yourself. The expansion was going to horrifically destabilize the market no mater what. Unless you were regularly spending your entire Blizzbucks account down to the last cent, you would have been much better off keeping the bulk of your profits in real money and just keeping a small cushion in-game for flipping more items. And even if you WERE repeatedly dumping your whole wallet into new investments, by making the choice to keep 100% of your "money" in imaginary funbux and let it ride forever, then you were practically guaranteeing that you would start losing it eventually. And here it is. You waited too long to sell and now the market is starting to downturn. If it hadn't happened now, it would have happened later.
There is a point at which it becomes unreasonable to complain that Blizzard is running their video game like a video game and not like the stock market. (Not that the people who run the stock market guarantee you protection against market fluctuations outside your control anyway.)
Wyvern on
Switch: SW-2431-2728-9604 || 3DS: 0817-4948-1650
+2
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
Farming items and selling them for blizzbucks. That is blizzbucks from farming.
The RMAH market is fucked by the announcement so cashing out by buying and reselling is a gamble.
People who took and kept blizzbucks assumed some future value in keeping the money in game instead of cashing out immediately. That future value is now gone.
You can buy gems and then re-sell them to paypal. They sell virtually immediately. I've done a few transactions both yesterday and today.
I actually don't have any blizzbucks. I'm just playing devil's advocate.
We'll see what they decide to do.
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
0
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
yeah gems will hold value for a while, use that to cash out
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
So they have their ass covered from a legal standpoint with some boilerplate. Good for them.
That doesn't mean that they are immune to criticism or blowback if they don't provide any means to get out of blizzbucks now that one of the major uses of blizzbucks is being shut down. I don't personally have more blizzbucks stored up than I plan to use buying expansions, but I still think it is a shitty move if they refuse to offer any sort of fig leaf to the people who loaded up expecting to use the RMAH.
I mean, they are even offering people refunds within 30 days of this announcement with the latest TOS update, its not like they are unaware that a portion of the playerbase was going to be rather irate about getting rid of the AH.
Yeah, if I'd known about this I'd have used my balance to buy HOTS. But I didn't, because I intended to keep using the RMAH.
And a six month notice that coincides with a major market disruption ain't really worth much.
As I stands I may be able to burn up my balance on expansions, maybe. But I'd much rather have an option to eat the 15% and cash out. And while their TOS may cover them, that doesn't make it less shitty. They've been selling "RMAH gift cards" in stores, for fuck's sake.
It means I can't sue then, but I can still be pissed off and say "fuck Blizzard."
If you had no intention of ever spending your auction house proceeds on anything other than the auction house, then why bother dealing with Blizzbucks at all rather than selling for gold instead?
You could have cashed out for real money at 85% (I think) efficiency when you sold the items and chose not to. You could have cashed out for HotS at 100% efficiency and chose not to. You chose to commit to a spending pattern such that even if the auction house remained open for a decade it you still would have never seen a monetary return on your Blizzbucks, so why are you suddenly expecting to get money for them now? You can still convert them into in-game currency by buying items and reselling them for gold if you want (assuming the gold market doesn't crash from other people doing this).
It IS pretty creepy if Blizzard was explicitly selling RMAH cards; I had never heard of those.
Also as long as the AH existed there were pretty stable options for still cashing out to Paypal at a later point. Blizzbucks was the most liquid form of D3 currency. That liquidity is being eliminated with the removal of the AH.
By doing what? Buying items and reselling them? If you thought that auction house values were permanently stable then you're deluding yourself. The expansion was going to horrifically destabilize the market no mater what. Unless you were regularly spending your entire Blizzbucks account down to the last cent, you would have been much better off keeping the bulk of your profits in real money and just keeping a small cushion in-game for flipping more items. And even if you WERE doing that, by making the choice to keep 100% of your "money" in imaginary funbux and let it ride forever, then you were practically guaranteeing that you would start losing it eventually. And here it is. You waited too long to sell and now the market is starting to downturn. If it hadn't happened now, it would have happened later.
There is a point at which it becomes unreasonable to complain that Blizzard is running their video game like a video game and not like the stock market. (Not that the people who run the stock market guarantee you protection against market fluctuations outside your control anyway.)
Holding onto specific items would be analogous to holding stocks or commodities. No ones was holding onto to items expecting the price to go up. That would be silly since Blizzard already set the precedent of obsoleting old forms of items by making superior ones.
Battle.net Balance is currency. If they kept it, it would have simply transferred to the expansion. People would have bought expansion items with the blizzbucks they made playing the original game.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
0
darklite_xI'm not an r-tard...Registered Userregular
You too, for hurting my feelings. You even have me added on your battle.net friends list. We've done ubers together (and apparently the crying emoticon face doesn't work here)
darklite_x on
Steam ID: darklite_x Xbox Gamertag: Darklite 37 PSN:Rage_Kage_37 Battle.Net:darklite#2197
+1
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
Do we know how many more tiers of gems they're adding in the expansion? I'm guessing they'll add enough so that the current amount of gems in the game is insignificant compared to the amount you need for expansion crafting.
If they also increase gold generation and repair costs by a few magnitudes, the expansion economy should be very fresh.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
If you had no intention of ever spending your auction house proceeds on anything other than the auction house, then why bother dealing with Blizzbucks at all rather than selling for gold instead?
Because for a very long time gold inflation was a thing. Sucks to get busy, walk away from the game for a couple months, and come back to find half your value gone.
When I came back after quitting the first time, the couple bucks in BlizzBucks I'd made were a helluvalot more than my gold...the opposite had been true when I left. So yeah, lately I'd taken to keeping my stash in BlizzBucks. If I needed gold to buy a GAH item, I'd buy it.
And I've sold items I found for more in BlizzBucks than Id have gotten in gold. It's weird like that sometimes.
And yeah, you can still cash out, but it's at an additional penalty. Which sucks. Yeah, we're talking a couple/few bucks, but it's the principle.
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
So they have their ass covered from a legal standpoint with some boilerplate. Good for them.
That doesn't mean that they are immune to criticism or blowback if they don't provide any means to get out of blizzbucks now that one of the major uses of blizzbucks is being shut down. I don't personally have more blizzbucks stored up than I plan to use buying expansions, but I still think it is a shitty move if they refuse to offer any sort of fig leaf to the people who loaded up expecting to use the RMAH.
I mean, they are even offering people refunds within 30 days of this announcement with the latest TOS update, its not like they are unaware that a portion of the playerbase was going to be rather irate about getting rid of the AH.
Yeah, if I'd known about this I'd have used my balance to buy HOTS. But I didn't, because I intended to keep using the RMAH.
And a six month notice that coincides with a major market disruption ain't really worth much.
As I stands I may be able to burn up my balance on expansions, maybe. But I'd much rather have an option to eat the 15% and cash out. And while their TOS may cover them, that doesn't make it less shitty. They've been selling "RMAH gift cards" in stores, for fuck's sake.
It means I can't sue then, but I can still be pissed off and say "fuck Blizzard."
If you had no intention of ever spending your auction house proceeds on anything other than the auction house, then why bother dealing with Blizzbucks at all rather than selling for gold instead?
You could have cashed out for real money at 85% (I think) efficiency when you sold the items and chose not to. You could have cashed out for HotS at 100% efficiency and chose not to. You chose to commit to a spending pattern such that even if the auction house remained open for a decade it you still would have never seen a monetary return on your Blizzbucks, so why are you suddenly expecting to get money for them now? You can still convert them into in-game currency by buying items and reselling them for gold if you want (assuming the gold market doesn't crash from other people doing this).
It IS pretty creepy if Blizzard was explicitly selling RMAH cards; I had never heard of those.
Also as long as the AH existed there were pretty stable options for still cashing out to Paypal at a later point. Blizzbucks was the most liquid form of D3 currency. That liquidity is being eliminated with the removal of the AH.
By doing what? Buying items and reselling them? If you thought that auction house values were permanently stable then you're deluding yourself. The expansion was going to horrifically destabilize the market no mater what. Unless you were regularly spending your entire Blizzbucks account down to the last cent, you would have been much better off keeping the bulk of your profits in real money and just keeping a small cushion in-game for flipping more items. And even if you WERE doing that, by making the choice to keep 100% of your "money" in imaginary funbux and let it ride forever, then you were practically guaranteeing that you would start losing it eventually. And here it is. You waited too long to sell and now the market is starting to downturn. If it hadn't happened now, it would have happened later.
There is a point at which it becomes unreasonable to complain that Blizzard is running their video game like a video game and not like the stock market. (Not that the people who run the stock market guarantee you protection against market fluctuations outside your control anyway.)
Holding onto specific items would be analogous to holding stocks or commodities. No ones was holding onto to items expecting the price to go up. That would be silly since Blizzard already set the precedent of obsoleting old forms of items by making superior ones.
Battle.net Balance is currency. If they kept it, it would have simply transferred to the expansion. People would have bought expansion items with the blizzbucks they made playing the original game.
Even if Blizzard left the auction houses up, odds were always extremely high that they were going to try to retool the loot system to make them less necessary, given how many complaints they got. I was figuring that it was likely that this might screw up the real-money buyer/seller ratio to the point that it would become hard to cycle through Blizzard points in the same volume you can now, making it much harder to get rid of them efficiently.
If even a destabilized Diablo 3 economy has enough activity to make that not a problem, then people can just get rid of their Blizzard points now, with the current no-doubt-slightly-destabilized economy, and the whole thing is a complete non-issue and I don't know why we're talking about it.
If you had no intention of ever spending your auction house proceeds on anything other than the auction house, then why bother dealing with Blizzbucks at all rather than selling for gold instead?
Because for a very long time gold inflation was a thing. Sucks to get busy, walk away from the game for a couple months, and come back to find half your value gone.
When I came back after quitting the first time, the couple bucks in BlizzBucks I'd made were a helluvalot more than my gold...the opposite had been true when I left. So yeah, lately I'd taken to keeping my stash in BlizzBucks. If I needed gold to buy a GAH item, I'd buy it.
And I've sold items I found for more in BlizzBucks than Id have gotten in gold. It's weird like that sometimes.
And yeah, you can still cash out, but it's at an additional penalty. Which sucks. Yeah, we're talking a couple/few bucks, but it's the principle.
What additional penalty? You lose 15% of your "money" regardless of whether you cash out (by selling items for PayPal cash instead of Blizzard points) immediately upon selling an item or after selling another item five years later. There was never any conceivable way to convert Blizzard points to cash without paying that 15% no matter what. The only way to not lose 15% is by spending it directly on Blizzard games, which I'm pretty sure you'll still be able to do after the auction houses closed.
Switch: SW-2431-2728-9604 || 3DS: 0817-4948-1650
0
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
the additional penalty is the one dollar you paid to put it into blizzbucks
I don't follow you. You already paid that dollar. Liquidating your Blizzard wallet in five years rather than now was never going to allow you to unspend that dollar. The longer you let your money ride on the auction house flipping more items, the more one dollars you were going to spend in this manner.
This sounds so dumb that I think I may have misunderstood you.
So uh, hey. Anyone experience random crashing/freeze on 360? Had it happen a few times. Had to reboot my console.
Sev: Your gameplay is the most heavily yomi based around. Usually you look for characters that allow you to force guessing situations for big dmg. Even if the guess is mathematically nowhere near in your favor lol. You're happiest when you have either a 50/50, 33/33/33 or even a 75/25 situation to go crazy with. And you will take big risks to force those situations to come up.
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
The AH is not unfair.
It ruins the core concept of Diablo.
Self found gear takes too long for most people (even D2 fans) to even think of getting. The whole point of the game is TO FIND GEAR, not shop the aisles of Diab-Low-Mart for upgrades.
The AH not only ruined the experience of self-found gear, it made the entire concept of crafting weapons and armor absolutely useless. It made the feeling of plowing through packs of bad guys because of that one kickass piece of gear hollow, since you only got the gear by searching a database and not playing your ass off.
It was a shortcut, a handicap to the experience, and it changed nothing. The truly high-end gear still went to third party sites, since the RMAH was capped at $250.
As much as I enjoy the fighting mechanics of the game (oh, and I do), the rest of the Diablo experience in this game is absolutely the worst out of the three entries. The story was bunk, the loot is pathetic, the character leveling system is unsatisfying, and the endgame is non-existent. Three out of four of these things will likely be fixed or mostly fixed with the upcoming updates.
There just isn't room for an AH if the loot drops are good enough to keep your character crushing through the depths.
I'll say it again: Auction House Tycoon is dead. Long live
Diablo.
So, there are widely varying opinions in this thread. And I just feel the need to clarify some things.
Diablo 3 didn't suck because "omg auction house destroyed teh Diablo's"
Diablo 3 sucked from a loot perspective because BLIZZARD IS BAD WITH NUMBERS. LIKE, FUCKING TERRIBLE.
The problem wasn't that you can just dial up the perfect piece of gear on the AH and buy it. The problem was that 99% of the loot you found was complete absolute SHIT. Even LEGENDARIES were 99% shit.
No good. No "Hey this is okay and I can get by with it for awhile" It was shit. Total shit.
Which shows a flaw in the design process/ideology in the first place.
The Auction House wasn't a problem, Ridiculous stat inflation/stat weighting/monster health inflation/blizzard being physically unable to not make anything challenging without throwing lasers on it or increasing monster health x infinity.
Hell World of Warcraft is running into the same problem. Hopefully they just don't think removing the AH fixes everything.
I don't follow you. You already paid that dollar. Liquidating your Blizzard wallet in five years rather than now was never going to allow you to unspend that dollar. The longer you let your money ride on the auction house flipping more items, the more one dollars you were going to spend in this manner.
This sounds so dumb that I think I may have misunderstood you.
I already paid the "blizzard cut" when I sold the items.
To "cash out" I have to buy gems/gold/whatever, and resell it...paying both the 15% PayPal fee and ANOTHER 15% Blizzard cut.
And spending/losing money on blizzard cuts was less offensive to me as part of an ongoing economy than it is as a one-last-fee to cash out. I already put plenty of dollars into Bobby's Lambo Fund.
And yes, I generally intended to either use that RMAH balance to buy Blizzard items, OR to buy in-game items. I may have more than I need for the former, and the latter won't be an option (and I'm not spending money on lvl63 loot 1.0 items).
So...yeah.
Meh. Sure, the game is perhaps better for it (we'll see), but it's at a cost, at least to me. Like, a real dollars and cents cost.
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
The AH is not unfair.
It ruins the core concept of Diablo.
Self found gear takes too long for most people (even D2 fans) to even think of getting. The whole point of the game is TO FIND GEAR, not shop the aisles of Diab-Low-Mart for upgrades.
The AH not only ruined the experience of self-found gear, it made the entire concept of crafting weapons and armor absolutely useless. It made the feeling of plowing through packs of bad guys because of that one kickass piece of gear hollow, since you only got the gear by searching a database and not playing your ass off.
It was a shortcut, a handicap to the experience, and it changed nothing. The truly high-end gear still went to third party sites, since the RMAH was capped at $250.
As much as I enjoy the fighting mechanics of the game (oh, and I do), the rest of the Diablo experience in this game is absolutely the worst out of the three entries. The story was bunk, the loot is pathetic, the character leveling system is unsatisfying, and the endgame is non-existent. Three out of four of these things will likely be fixed or mostly fixed with the upcoming updates.
There just isn't room for an AH if the loot drops are good enough to keep your character crushing through the depths.
I'll say it again: Auction House Tycoon is dead. Long live
Diablo.
So, there are widely varying opinions in this thread. And I just feel the need to clarify some things.
Diablo 3 didn't suck because "omg auction house destroyed teh Diablo's"
Diablo 3 sucked from a loot perspective because BLIZZARD IS BAD WITH NUMBERS. LIKE, FUCKING TERRIBLE.
The problem wasn't that you can just dial up the perfect piece of gear on the AH and buy it. The problem was that 99% of the loot you found was complete absolute SHIT. Even LEGENDARIES were 99% shit.
No good. No "Hey this is okay and I can get by with it for awhile" It was shit. Total shit.
Which shows a flaw in the design process/ideology in the first place.
The Auction House wasn't a problem, Ridiculous stat inflation/stat weighting/monster health inflation/blizzard being physically unable to not make anything challenging without throwing lasers on it or increasing monster health x infinity.
Hell World of Warcraft is running into the same problem. Hopefully they just don't think removing the AH fixes everything.
Hopefully.
It doesn't matter how good you make the loot, the AH will always be a better source of loot then playing the game.
0
NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
So uh, hey. Anyone experience random crashing/freeze on 360? Had it happen a few times. Had to reboot my console.
Nothing yet.
Though I did TP one time in co-op and after we blinked out, nothing happened for like 15 seconds (but pets/creatures still acted normally). Then the loading screen popped.
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
The AH is not unfair.
It ruins the core concept of Diablo.
Self found gear takes too long for most people (even D2 fans) to even think of getting. The whole point of the game is TO FIND GEAR, not shop the aisles of Diab-Low-Mart for upgrades.
The AH not only ruined the experience of self-found gear, it made the entire concept of crafting weapons and armor absolutely useless. It made the feeling of plowing through packs of bad guys because of that one kickass piece of gear hollow, since you only got the gear by searching a database and not playing your ass off.
It was a shortcut, a handicap to the experience, and it changed nothing. The truly high-end gear still went to third party sites, since the RMAH was capped at $250.
As much as I enjoy the fighting mechanics of the game (oh, and I do), the rest of the Diablo experience in this game is absolutely the worst out of the three entries. The story was bunk, the loot is pathetic, the character leveling system is unsatisfying, and the endgame is non-existent. Three out of four of these things will likely be fixed or mostly fixed with the upcoming updates.
There just isn't room for an AH if the loot drops are good enough to keep your character crushing through the depths.
I'll say it again: Auction House Tycoon is dead. Long live
Diablo.
So, there are widely varying opinions in this thread. And I just feel the need to clarify some things.
Diablo 3 didn't suck because "omg auction house destroyed teh Diablo's"
Diablo 3 sucked from a loot perspective because BLIZZARD IS BAD WITH NUMBERS. LIKE, FUCKING TERRIBLE.
The problem wasn't that you can just dial up the perfect piece of gear on the AH and buy it. The problem was that 99% of the loot you found was complete absolute SHIT. Even LEGENDARIES were 99% shit.
No good. No "Hey this is okay and I can get by with it for awhile" It was shit. Total shit.
Which shows a flaw in the design process/ideology in the first place.
The Auction House wasn't a problem, Ridiculous stat inflation/stat weighting/monster health inflation/blizzard being physically unable to not make anything challenging without throwing lasers on it or increasing monster health x infinity.
Hell World of Warcraft is running into the same problem. Hopefully they just don't think removing the AH fixes everything.
Hopefully.
It doesn't matter how good you make the loot, the AH will always be a better source of loot then playing the game.
Of course. And as bad as you make it sound, this isn't the problem.
The problem was it became the ONLY real source of loot. Like, you were REALLY lucky to find a rare sword with your stats that wasn't an affront to God, and man, while leveling, or even playing.
Hell, you were lucky to find ANYTHING, THAT ANYONE could use, while normally playing.
This is a problem when you balance your WHOLE FUCKING GAME around the idea that the Auction House exist, so of course 99% of the stuff you find needs to be literal cow dung. Because duh, just go to the AH and get something better!
And not only that, but to make it difficult to progress without using the Auction House was such piss poor design it was laughable.
Neither of these things is the Auction Houses fault. It's the fault of the developers laughable attempt at trying to " balance" around the AH.
+2
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Maybe I'm just being an ass, but I'm finding it hard to sympathize with people who are losing money because they invested into a microeconomy based in a video game.
Maybe I'm just being an ass, but I'm finding it hard to sympathize with people who are losing money because they invested into a microeconomy based in a video game.
*shrug*. I empathize.
We are deep in the #firstworldproblem jungle no matter what. I mean, we are asking whether somebody is justified in being pissed at a video game publisher. This ain't srsbsns.
0
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
I don't follow you. You already paid that dollar. Liquidating your Blizzard wallet in five years rather than now was never going to allow you to unspend that dollar. The longer you let your money ride on the auction house flipping more items, the more one dollars you were going to spend in this manner.
This sounds so dumb that I think I may have misunderstood you.
the hypothetical was that he would have cashed out instead of ever putting it in blizzbucks
iirc cashing out is only % cuts, whereas putting into blizzbucks is 1$
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
The AH is not unfair.
It ruins the core concept of Diablo.
Self found gear takes too long for most people (even D2 fans) to even think of getting. The whole point of the game is TO FIND GEAR, not shop the aisles of Diab-Low-Mart for upgrades.
The AH not only ruined the experience of self-found gear, it made the entire concept of crafting weapons and armor absolutely useless. It made the feeling of plowing through packs of bad guys because of that one kickass piece of gear hollow, since you only got the gear by searching a database and not playing your ass off.
It was a shortcut, a handicap to the experience, and it changed nothing. The truly high-end gear still went to third party sites, since the RMAH was capped at $250.
As much as I enjoy the fighting mechanics of the game (oh, and I do), the rest of the Diablo experience in this game is absolutely the worst out of the three entries. The story was bunk, the loot is pathetic, the character leveling system is unsatisfying, and the endgame is non-existent. Three out of four of these things will likely be fixed or mostly fixed with the upcoming updates.
There just isn't room for an AH if the loot drops are good enough to keep your character crushing through the depths.
I'll say it again: Auction House Tycoon is dead. Long live
Diablo.
So, there are widely varying opinions in this thread. And I just feel the need to clarify some things.
Diablo 3 didn't suck because "omg auction house destroyed teh Diablo's"
Diablo 3 sucked from a loot perspective because BLIZZARD IS BAD WITH NUMBERS. LIKE, FUCKING TERRIBLE.
The problem wasn't that you can just dial up the perfect piece of gear on the AH and buy it. The problem was that 99% of the loot you found was complete absolute SHIT. Even LEGENDARIES were 99% shit.
No good. No "Hey this is okay and I can get by with it for awhile" It was shit. Total shit.
Which shows a flaw in the design process/ideology in the first place.
The Auction House wasn't a problem, Ridiculous stat inflation/stat weighting/monster health inflation/blizzard being physically unable to not make anything challenging without throwing lasers on it or increasing monster health x infinity.
Hell World of Warcraft is running into the same problem. Hopefully they just don't think removing the AH fixes everything.
Hopefully.
It doesn't matter how good you make the loot, the AH will always be a better source of loot then playing the game.
Of course. And as bad as you make it sound, this isn't the problem.
The problem was it became the ONLY real source of loot. Like, you were REALLY lucky to find a rare sword with your stats that wasn't an affront to God, and man, while leveling, or even playing.
Hell, you were lucky to find ANYTHING, THAT ANYONE could use, while normally playing.
This is a problem when you balance your WHOLE FUCKING GAME around the idea that the Auction House exist, so of course 99% of the stuff you find needs to be literal cow dung. Because duh, just go to the AH and get something better!
And not only that, but to make it difficult to progress without using the Auction House was such piss poor design it was laughable.
Neither of these things is the Auction Houses fault. It's the fault of the developers laughable attempt at trying to " balance" around the AH.
It was never difficult to progress without the AH. It was just more difficult. The AH wasn't the only way, it was simply by far the most optimum.
And this will be true regardless of the quality of the loot because the AH acts to aggregate the loot of every single D3 player and that means it will always be the easiest place to get loot.
Better loot will just squeeze the stat difference between the super expensive BIS stuff and everything else, but that stat difference is utterly arbitrary anyway so it won't change the effect.
I don't follow you. You already paid that dollar. Liquidating your Blizzard wallet in five years rather than now was never going to allow you to unspend that dollar. The longer you let your money ride on the auction house flipping more items, the more one dollars you were going to spend in this manner.
This sounds so dumb that I think I may have misunderstood you.
the hypothetical was that he would have cashed out instead of ever putting it in blizzbucks
iirc cashing out is only % cuts, whereas putting into blizzbucks is 1$
Cashing out was 15% on top of the $1 (for an item) or 15% (for coms). It didn't affect the blizz cut.
But going back to gold and then back to PayPal means another blizz cut, either the $1 or 15% (obviously it'll be the latter, unless you're still crazy enough to try flipping).
On top of the 15% PayPal cut.
mcdermott on
0
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
The AH is not unfair.
It ruins the core concept of Diablo.
Self found gear takes too long for most people (even D2 fans) to even think of getting. The whole point of the game is TO FIND GEAR, not shop the aisles of Diab-Low-Mart for upgrades.
The AH not only ruined the experience of self-found gear, it made the entire concept of crafting weapons and armor absolutely useless. It made the feeling of plowing through packs of bad guys because of that one kickass piece of gear hollow, since you only got the gear by searching a database and not playing your ass off.
It was a shortcut, a handicap to the experience, and it changed nothing. The truly high-end gear still went to third party sites, since the RMAH was capped at $250.
As much as I enjoy the fighting mechanics of the game (oh, and I do), the rest of the Diablo experience in this game is absolutely the worst out of the three entries. The story was bunk, the loot is pathetic, the character leveling system is unsatisfying, and the endgame is non-existent. Three out of four of these things will likely be fixed or mostly fixed with the upcoming updates.
There just isn't room for an AH if the loot drops are good enough to keep your character crushing through the depths.
I'll say it again: Auction House Tycoon is dead. Long live
Diablo.
So, there are widely varying opinions in this thread. And I just feel the need to clarify some things.
Diablo 3 didn't suck because "omg auction house destroyed teh Diablo's"
Diablo 3 sucked from a loot perspective because BLIZZARD IS BAD WITH NUMBERS. LIKE, FUCKING TERRIBLE.
The problem wasn't that you can just dial up the perfect piece of gear on the AH and buy it. The problem was that 99% of the loot you found was complete absolute SHIT. Even LEGENDARIES were 99% shit.
No good. No "Hey this is okay and I can get by with it for awhile" It was shit. Total shit.
Which shows a flaw in the design process/ideology in the first place.
The Auction House wasn't a problem, Ridiculous stat inflation/stat weighting/monster health inflation/blizzard being physically unable to not make anything challenging without throwing lasers on it or increasing monster health x infinity.
Hell World of Warcraft is running into the same problem. Hopefully they just don't think removing the AH fixes everything.
Hopefully.
I think it's fair to say that the reason 99% of the items were shit was because at any given time you had access to a market with tens of millions of items on it at once, so they had to make sure it was a super rare occurrence that you'd ever get anything useful, because if everyone got useful things, the market would be flooded with them.
There's a bigger problem with stats being uninteresting, everything scaling off your weapons, damage types being all the same, black vs. elemental weapons, poor monster balance, yadda yadda yadda, that would support the "blizzard is bad with numbers", but as far as its relationship to the AH, they made all items shit because if you have 30 million items at your fingertips they have to make 99.99% of them a clusterfuck of random stats.
I have a pretty substantial balance of it and honestly I'm not really bothered by the RMAH going poof. I have never and continue to not be the sort of person who would ever invest even a penny into a system to buy loot, so I was never going to spend it on the RMAH. At worst it was an inflation-proof place to store my game wealth, because I only played sporadically over the past year or so.
My pre-launch pipe dream was "boy it would be nice to make enough playing Diablo 3 to be able to get the expansion from them", and I ended up getting enough to buy probably every Diablo expansion they will make, and then whenever Warcraft 4 comes out and its expansion, plus some bucks to throw at Hearthstone-- so, impossible to be mad.
Anyway, there has been some people in this thread and elsewhere who seem very convinced that trading of any kind is going to be shut down with the expansion, and I honestly just don't think it's going to happen. This tweet certainly hints that they're thinking about the void the AH will leave:
The words "trade ecosystem" are telling, I think. I suppose technically they could be thinking "no trade ecosystem", but that's something I will need to hear from the horse's mouth.
Scosglen on
0
Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
edited September 2013
ah, yeah. that could very well refer to what I'm predicting
I feel like all concerns regarding the AH and how it's so unfair should read this, it's never too late.
The AH is not unfair.
It ruins the core concept of Diablo.
Self found gear takes too long for most people (even D2 fans) to even think of getting. The whole point of the game is TO FIND GEAR, not shop the aisles of Diab-Low-Mart for upgrades.
The AH not only ruined the experience of self-found gear, it made the entire concept of crafting weapons and armor absolutely useless. It made the feeling of plowing through packs of bad guys because of that one kickass piece of gear hollow, since you only got the gear by searching a database and not playing your ass off.
It was a shortcut, a handicap to the experience, and it changed nothing. The truly high-end gear still went to third party sites, since the RMAH was capped at $250.
As much as I enjoy the fighting mechanics of the game (oh, and I do), the rest of the Diablo experience in this game is absolutely the worst out of the three entries. The story was bunk, the loot is pathetic, the character leveling system is unsatisfying, and the endgame is non-existent. Three out of four of these things will likely be fixed or mostly fixed with the upcoming updates.
There just isn't room for an AH if the loot drops are good enough to keep your character crushing through the depths.
I'll say it again: Auction House Tycoon is dead. Long live
Diablo.
So, there are widely varying opinions in this thread. And I just feel the need to clarify some things.
Diablo 3 didn't suck because "omg auction house destroyed teh Diablo's"
Diablo 3 sucked from a loot perspective because BLIZZARD IS BAD WITH NUMBERS. LIKE, FUCKING TERRIBLE.
The problem wasn't that you can just dial up the perfect piece of gear on the AH and buy it. The problem was that 99% of the loot you found was complete absolute SHIT. Even LEGENDARIES were 99% shit.
No good. No "Hey this is okay and I can get by with it for awhile" It was shit. Total shit.
Which shows a flaw in the design process/ideology in the first place.
The Auction House wasn't a problem, Ridiculous stat inflation/stat weighting/monster health inflation/blizzard being physically unable to not make anything challenging without throwing lasers on it or increasing monster health x infinity.
Hell World of Warcraft is running into the same problem. Hopefully they just don't think removing the AH fixes everything.
Hopefully.
It doesn't matter how good you make the loot, the AH will always be a better source of loot then playing the game.
Of course. And as bad as you make it sound, this isn't the problem.
The problem was it became the ONLY real source of loot. Like, you were REALLY lucky to find a rare sword with your stats that wasn't an affront to God, and man, while leveling, or even playing.
Hell, you were lucky to find ANYTHING, THAT ANYONE could use, while normally playing.
This is a problem when you balance your WHOLE FUCKING GAME around the idea that the Auction House exist, so of course 99% of the stuff you find needs to be literal cow dung. Because duh, just go to the AH and get something better!
And not only that, but to make it difficult to progress without using the Auction House was such piss poor design it was laughable.
Neither of these things is the Auction Houses fault. It's the fault of the developers laughable attempt at trying to " balance" around the AH.
Uhh...."it's not the auction houses fault" and "the game was balanced around the AH" are not logically reconcilable positions. The game being balanced around the AH is a symptom of the AH existing. The AH was a bad fucking idea, no matter how you slice it.
I feel for the people who were deep in the microeconomy, I really do....but this boil had to be lanced.
Posts
Farming items and selling them for blizzbucks. That is blizzbucks from farming.
The RMAH market is fucked by the announcement so cashing out by buying and reselling is a gamble.
People who took and kept blizzbucks assumed some future value in keeping the money in game instead of cashing out immediately. That future value is now gone.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
They are, but your odds of falling into the "I only need a few dollars now but I'll spend $25 and use them eventually" trap are much higher when you're dealing with prepaid cards. People who did that and have a balance left over are the only ones who can reasonably claim that they're owed money here (they aren't, legally, but it's a considerably worse situation than the alternatives).
True, but even through your account page, you can only add funds in increments. (I think the lowest increment is $10)
You could get a better return by selling in RMAH than in Gold AH. Also as long as the AH existed there were pretty stable options for still cashing out to Paypal at a later point. Blizzbucks was the most liquid form of D3 currency. That liquidity is being eliminated with the removal of the AH.
Nintendo ID: Incindium
PSN: IncindiumX
I guess you could say blizzard made the market less stable, but... really? that's just how these things go, all announcements change the market and have to be made sometime
I would state it is not a good bet to "assume future value" in a fake currency that forewarned you that you shouldn't assume any value in it due to changes that might be made
Apparently some people do find items worth selling on the RMAH.
All currency is "fake". The United States could one day state that the dollar is no longer the official currency of the US.
People holding dollars would naturally expect (well, angrily demand) some kind of compensation.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
agree to disagree I guess
Spent all of yesterday playing co-op with my brother (I switched from Monk to Wizard, he stayed WD. Played from Kulle's resurrection to killing Diablo).
He already had a Monster Hunter and during the course of the game, 2 more dropped.
I also have 2 versions of Leoric's Crown.
By doing what? Buying items and reselling them? If you thought that auction house values were permanently stable then you're deluding yourself. The expansion was going to horrifically destabilize the market no mater what. Unless you were regularly spending your entire Blizzbucks account down to the last cent, you would have been much better off keeping the bulk of your profits in real money and just keeping a small cushion in-game for flipping more items. And even if you WERE repeatedly dumping your whole wallet into new investments, by making the choice to keep 100% of your "money" in imaginary funbux and let it ride forever, then you were practically guaranteeing that you would start losing it eventually. And here it is. You waited too long to sell and now the market is starting to downturn. If it hadn't happened now, it would have happened later.
There is a point at which it becomes unreasonable to complain that Blizzard is running their video game like a video game and not like the stock market. (Not that the people who run the stock market guarantee you protection against market fluctuations outside your control anyway.)
You can buy gems and then re-sell them to paypal. They sell virtually immediately. I've done a few transactions both yesterday and today.
Lose: The opposite of win
Loose: Your mum
We'll see what they decide to do.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I've heard rumblings that gem crafting costs are going to be reduced so I'm not gong to invest in gems, only gonna use them to cash out
Holding onto specific items would be analogous to holding stocks or commodities. No ones was holding onto to items expecting the price to go up. That would be silly since Blizzard already set the precedent of obsoleting old forms of items by making superior ones.
Battle.net Balance is currency. If they kept it, it would have simply transferred to the expansion. People would have bought expansion items with the blizzbucks they made playing the original game.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
You too, for hurting my feelings. You even have me added on your battle.net friends list. We've done ubers together (and apparently the crying emoticon face doesn't work here)
You do take a bit of a hit on fees but it's fairly risk free.
Lose: The opposite of win
Loose: Your mum
If they also increase gold generation and repair costs by a few magnitudes, the expansion economy should be very fresh.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Because for a very long time gold inflation was a thing. Sucks to get busy, walk away from the game for a couple months, and come back to find half your value gone.
When I came back after quitting the first time, the couple bucks in BlizzBucks I'd made were a helluvalot more than my gold...the opposite had been true when I left. So yeah, lately I'd taken to keeping my stash in BlizzBucks. If I needed gold to buy a GAH item, I'd buy it.
And I've sold items I found for more in BlizzBucks than Id have gotten in gold. It's weird like that sometimes.
And yeah, you can still cash out, but it's at an additional penalty. Which sucks. Yeah, we're talking a couple/few bucks, but it's the principle.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Even if Blizzard left the auction houses up, odds were always extremely high that they were going to try to retool the loot system to make them less necessary, given how many complaints they got. I was figuring that it was likely that this might screw up the real-money buyer/seller ratio to the point that it would become hard to cycle through Blizzard points in the same volume you can now, making it much harder to get rid of them efficiently.
If even a destabilized Diablo 3 economy has enough activity to make that not a problem, then people can just get rid of their Blizzard points now, with the current no-doubt-slightly-destabilized economy, and the whole thing is a complete non-issue and I don't know why we're talking about it.
What additional penalty? You lose 15% of your "money" regardless of whether you cash out (by selling items for PayPal cash instead of Blizzard points) immediately upon selling an item or after selling another item five years later. There was never any conceivable way to convert Blizzard points to cash without paying that 15% no matter what. The only way to not lose 15% is by spending it directly on Blizzard games, which I'm pretty sure you'll still be able to do after the auction houses closed.
This sounds so dumb that I think I may have misunderstood you.
So, there are widely varying opinions in this thread. And I just feel the need to clarify some things.
Diablo 3 didn't suck because "omg auction house destroyed teh Diablo's"
Diablo 3 sucked from a loot perspective because BLIZZARD IS BAD WITH NUMBERS. LIKE, FUCKING TERRIBLE.
The problem wasn't that you can just dial up the perfect piece of gear on the AH and buy it. The problem was that 99% of the loot you found was complete absolute SHIT. Even LEGENDARIES were 99% shit.
No good. No "Hey this is okay and I can get by with it for awhile" It was shit. Total shit.
Which shows a flaw in the design process/ideology in the first place.
The Auction House wasn't a problem, Ridiculous stat inflation/stat weighting/monster health inflation/blizzard being physically unable to not make anything challenging without throwing lasers on it or increasing monster health x infinity.
Hell World of Warcraft is running into the same problem. Hopefully they just don't think removing the AH fixes everything.
Hopefully.
I already paid the "blizzard cut" when I sold the items.
To "cash out" I have to buy gems/gold/whatever, and resell it...paying both the 15% PayPal fee and ANOTHER 15% Blizzard cut.
And spending/losing money on blizzard cuts was less offensive to me as part of an ongoing economy than it is as a one-last-fee to cash out. I already put plenty of dollars into Bobby's Lambo Fund.
And yes, I generally intended to either use that RMAH balance to buy Blizzard items, OR to buy in-game items. I may have more than I need for the former, and the latter won't be an option (and I'm not spending money on lvl63 loot 1.0 items).
So...yeah.
Meh. Sure, the game is perhaps better for it (we'll see), but it's at a cost, at least to me. Like, a real dollars and cents cost.
It doesn't matter how good you make the loot, the AH will always be a better source of loot then playing the game.
Nothing yet.
Though I did TP one time in co-op and after we blinked out, nothing happened for like 15 seconds (but pets/creatures still acted normally). Then the loading screen popped.
Scared me for a bit.
Of course. And as bad as you make it sound, this isn't the problem.
The problem was it became the ONLY real source of loot. Like, you were REALLY lucky to find a rare sword with your stats that wasn't an affront to God, and man, while leveling, or even playing.
Hell, you were lucky to find ANYTHING, THAT ANYONE could use, while normally playing.
This is a problem when you balance your WHOLE FUCKING GAME around the idea that the Auction House exist, so of course 99% of the stuff you find needs to be literal cow dung. Because duh, just go to the AH and get something better!
And not only that, but to make it difficult to progress without using the Auction House was such piss poor design it was laughable.
Neither of these things is the Auction Houses fault. It's the fault of the developers laughable attempt at trying to " balance" around the AH.
*shrug*. I empathize.
We are deep in the #firstworldproblem jungle no matter what. I mean, we are asking whether somebody is justified in being pissed at a video game publisher. This ain't srsbsns.
iirc cashing out is only % cuts, whereas putting into blizzbucks is 1$
It was never difficult to progress without the AH. It was just more difficult. The AH wasn't the only way, it was simply by far the most optimum.
And this will be true regardless of the quality of the loot because the AH acts to aggregate the loot of every single D3 player and that means it will always be the easiest place to get loot.
Better loot will just squeeze the stat difference between the super expensive BIS stuff and everything else, but that stat difference is utterly arbitrary anyway so it won't change the effect.
Cashing out was 15% on top of the $1 (for an item) or 15% (for coms). It didn't affect the blizz cut.
But going back to gold and then back to PayPal means another blizz cut, either the $1 or 15% (obviously it'll be the latter, unless you're still crazy enough to try flipping).
On top of the 15% PayPal cut.
I think it's fair to say that the reason 99% of the items were shit was because at any given time you had access to a market with tens of millions of items on it at once, so they had to make sure it was a super rare occurrence that you'd ever get anything useful, because if everyone got useful things, the market would be flooded with them.
There's a bigger problem with stats being uninteresting, everything scaling off your weapons, damage types being all the same, black vs. elemental weapons, poor monster balance, yadda yadda yadda, that would support the "blizzard is bad with numbers", but as far as its relationship to the AH, they made all items shit because if you have 30 million items at your fingertips they have to make 99.99% of them a clusterfuck of random stats.
I have a pretty substantial balance of it and honestly I'm not really bothered by the RMAH going poof. I have never and continue to not be the sort of person who would ever invest even a penny into a system to buy loot, so I was never going to spend it on the RMAH. At worst it was an inflation-proof place to store my game wealth, because I only played sporadically over the past year or so.
My pre-launch pipe dream was "boy it would be nice to make enough playing Diablo 3 to be able to get the expansion from them", and I ended up getting enough to buy probably every Diablo expansion they will make, and then whenever Warcraft 4 comes out and its expansion, plus some bucks to throw at Hearthstone-- so, impossible to be mad.
Anyway, there has been some people in this thread and elsewhere who seem very convinced that trading of any kind is going to be shut down with the expansion, and I honestly just don't think it's going to happen. This tweet certainly hints that they're thinking about the void the AH will leave:
The words "trade ecosystem" are telling, I think. I suppose technically they could be thinking "no trade ecosystem", but that's something I will need to hear from the horse's mouth.
Uhh...."it's not the auction houses fault" and "the game was balanced around the AH" are not logically reconcilable positions. The game being balanced around the AH is a symptom of the AH existing. The AH was a bad fucking idea, no matter how you slice it.
I feel for the people who were deep in the microeconomy, I really do....but this boil had to be lanced.