Kind of an interesting discussion because it mirrors what we're saying here, but just so people know that the way the AH influenced drop rates and the game itself is a very popular opinion. (probably because it's math/common sense)
Kind of an interesting discussion because it mirrors what we're saying here, but just so people know that the way the AH influenced drop rates and the game itself is a very popular opinion. (probably because it's math/common sense)
Just to be clear, I think Diablo will be better with this change.
I have some issues with it (as noted), and I think perhaps it could have been fixed another way, but this is definitely better than the status quo.
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NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
I can't weigh in much on this PC discussion but I like the way things are set up on console gearwise. Drops are pretty decent, there's occasionally an item in the shop that's better then what you have, but mostly Haggard is crafting you what you need.
Now, someone sell me on a hardcore character. Probably going to solo and play on normal, so which one has the best survivability?
The argument goes basically: "Look at how hard it is to find good items normally! The game must have been balanced to assume you use the Auction House!" Except that you're basing the judgement that dropped items suck by comparing them to AH items. The "norm" of gearing up to beat monster power X in Y days of grinding is set by AH gear. No matter what kind of drop system you made, found gear would always be pretty sucky compared to the gear you could get on the market.
Profile -> Signature Settings -> Hide signatures always. Then you don't have to read this worthless text anymore.
I can't weigh in much on this PC discussion but I like the way things are set up on console gearwise. Drops are pretty decent, there's occasionally an item in the shop that's better then what you have, but mostly Haggard is crafting you what you need.
Now, someone sell me on a hardcore character. Probably going to solo and play on normal, so which one has the best survivability?
Witch doctors, I think. They have pets to do tanking and a "get out of death free" passive: Spirit Vessel.
Profile -> Signature Settings -> Hide signatures always. Then you don't have to read this worthless text anymore.
I can't weigh in much on this PC discussion but I like the way things are set up on console gearwise. Drops are pretty decent, there's occasionally an item in the shop that's better then what you have, but mostly Haggard is crafting you what you need.
Are you at 60? I can't imagine seeing gear in the shop better than what I've found/crafted at level 60 on PC.
Couldn't they just restructure the AH into a trading post? You put items up you are willing to trade, someone sees it, they plop the item(s) they are willing to offer for it into another window and you can accept or reject. Have a small text box that would allow some communication as well, if necessary.
I ain't no game designer though.
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NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
I can't weigh in much on this PC discussion but I like the way things are set up on console gearwise. Drops are pretty decent, there's occasionally an item in the shop that's better then what you have, but mostly Haggard is crafting you what you need.
Are you at 60? I can't imagine seeing gear in the shop better than what I've found/crafted at level 60 on PC.
Nope, just finished normal actually. Usually I'm having a bitch of a time finding rings/amulets (these are usually store bought for me).
Most armor/weapons though, yeah, those are found/crafted.
Blizzbux are in no way or shape money in the bank for Blizzard. Cashing out your blizzbux is completely trivial. Get a buddy to post any item you both agreed upon with paypal as the destination for the money, for your desired cashout amount. Buy out the item and have your buddy shoot you the money back through paypal. 15% fee. I did this with a PAer like a year ago. If you convert into gems you'll be getting slapped with an extra 15% commodity fee, plus the potential for drop in gem value between transactions.
I just view my blizzbux balance as a 15% discount on all future blizzard games.
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
Couldn't they just restructure the AH into a trading post? You put items up you are willing to trade, someone sees it, they plop the item(s) they are willing to offer for it into another window and you can accept or reject. Have a small text box that would allow some communication as well, if necessary.
I ain't no game designer though.
You'd just get an item that would function as currency (radiant star emeralds) and that would turn into the same thing as the AH. How many RSEs are you asking for your BIS chantodo's? etc.
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I have found or crafted everything on all of my characters so far.
I seem to have a curse on legendaries: Every hardcore character I have played has been one shot or killed in terrible circumstances after finding one :-(
NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
I've found some decent Legends... Worn/Leoric's Crowns with +Vit, iron heart with high Vit and low durability, Bone Shatterer with +int and Monster Hunter with +dex...
It's like, suddenly turning an awesome weapon into a curio.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Also I am still so mad about how my Witch Doctor died. I would be fine if I died running out of time, that's what the game fucking told me would happen.
But dying to mobs of aggroed enemies I never needed to go near because you don't actually die? That's so fucking bullshit. That dungeon is full of chests anyway even if you don't make it!
So presumably there will be mega-nerds out there with thousands and thousands of bonus primary stat. Seems weird that you still have the option of choosing the other two types even though there's never a reason to do so.
The best part is that it's totally fine if your character becomes stupid broken because it can't spoil the economy!
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.
The AH wasn't the source of the problem, the AH just made the problem worse and impossible to ignore.
The problem is the severe imbalance of supply and demand for equipment, and you'll get into a situation where the vast majority of loot you won't want to wear eventually no matter what starting point you have for the numbers as long as there is a cap on how good the items can get. There's only a fixed and small number of slots to put equipment in, and with an ever growing supply of items from drops without an effective item sink a larger and larger portion of the items will be vendor or salvage trash.
If the endgame isn't focused on getting better and better loot, like is the case in a game like Dark Souls with PvP, this isn't the end of the world. But if all you have is the item hunt like is the case with D3 now then you have a problem.
You can tell she was just itching to prove she has gamer cred throughout this entire conversation. She says it near the end if you don't want to listen to out of touch people talk about things they don't know anything about.
It's probably because I'm an actor, but I immediately translated this as "Whoopi Goldbeg was the voice of Diablo" and was having a very hard time wrapping my head around the randomness of that.
The problem is the severe imbalance of supply and demand for equipment, and you'll get into a situation where the vast majority of loot you won't want to wear eventually no matter what starting point you have for the numbers as long as there is a cap on how good the items can get. There's only a fixed and small number of slots to put equipment in, and with an ever growing supply of items from drops without an effective item sink a larger and larger portion of the items will be vendor or salvage trash.
The bolded was clearly the problem the whole time. It's not the AH, really, it's the fact that there's no mechanism to remove top-tier items, ever. If there was any sort of unavoidable item sink, then BiS items would disappear and thus loot would always matter.
Of course, balancing that against both people not wanting to give up loot and wanting to make sales on the RMAH (for the cut), and you couldn't really make items degrade naturally. And pretty much any other item sink I can think of would work marginally at best.
But any 'C' student in Econ 101 could have told these dumbasses that this would be an issue.
Got Leoric's Signet off of Diablo on my normal console clear. Combined with Infernal Helm, I now get 51% + 88 xp (from the rest of my gear) from each kill.
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.
So your original plan was to spend your Blizzard credit on loot and walk away with no dollars. As a result of the change in policy, you'll be getting your loot for free and you walk away with $X in cash. But you feel that you have lost real money, because...?
When your account hit $40 or whatever you expected your next Blizzard purchase would cost and then continued to put more money in your Blizzard wallet, I figure one of two things must have been true:
1) You were planning on putting the excess back into the auction house to flip more items and increase your eventual payout. If you did this successfully, then your additional profits most likely exceeded the additional fees you paid, and you were correct in assuming that this course of action would maximize your profit. If you didn't manage to do this, then, well, you knew it was a gamble to begin with.
2) You were planning on spending it on items to use in-game, in which case you were 100% committed to either losing that money entirely or being double-charged for it when you eventually took it out down the line. From that 41st dollar onward, nothing you or Blizzard ever could have done would have let you convert that credit into real money without paying both fees on it. You already accepted that sunk cost when you chose not to sell directly to Paypal. So you had nothing to lose here. If cashing out your Blizzard wallet right now nets you $47 in cash, there was no possible way for you to ever turn that amount into more than $47. If anything you were going to spend some of it and end up with less than $47, a loss which you've now been spared from.
Can you see why the "my Blizzard points were real money in my pocket and now I've been robbed of some of it" perspective doesn't make much sense to me?
1) You were planning on putting the excess back into the auction house to flip more items and increase your eventual payout. If you did this successfully, then your additional profits most likely exceeded the additional fees you paid, and you were correct in assuming that this course of action would maximize your profit. If you didn't manage to do this, then, well, you knew it was a gamble to begin with.
I knew it was a gamble. I did not realize Blizzard would change the rules while my money was still on the table.
2) You were planning on spending it on items to use in-game, in which case you were 100% committed to either losing that money entirely or being double-charged for it when you eventually took it out down the line. From that 41st dollar onward, nothing you or Blizzard ever could have done would have let you convert that credit into real money without paying both fees on it. You already accepted that sunk cost when you chose not to sell directly to Paypal. So you had nothing to lose here. If cashing out your Blizzard wallet right now nets you $47 in cash, there was no possible way for you to ever turn that amount into more than $47. If anything you were going to spend some of it and end up with less than $47, a loss which you've now been spared from.
I accepted that sunk cost (or rather, at the time, just cost) given the particular reality of the time. I'd not have made that choice if I thought for a moment that Blizzard would simply pull the plug on the AH entirely. That's the point. I made rational decisions based on the assumption that Blizzard wouldn't excise a major feature of the game.
And if I spent the money on items in-game, I wouldn't be losing that money entirely. I'd be spending it for access to things that have value to me. Now, they've announced that not only will they give those things of value to everybody for free (yay), but that I will no longer be able to use that money to buy any additional things of value to me (current items have no additional value to me). And there was a way for me to "ever" turn that amount into more than $47; I could have sent it to PayPal at the time of sale, which I would have done if I knew Blizzard was willing to axe a major feature of the game.
Can you see why the "my Blizzard points were real money in my pocket and now I've been robbed of some of it" perspective doesn't make much sense to me?
Meanwhile, my hardcore barb continues to make his march towards Hell. Level 43 and counting. Farthest I've gone in hardcore, though it's not like it's hard yet...just the first time I've committed to it (previous characters died around level 30).
Had a couple close calls tonight on Act 3 (Nightmare). I mean, "close call" is relative...my health went to less than half, and I still had Ignore Pain on tap, so it wasn't that close. But still, sketchy.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
The problem is the severe imbalance of supply and demand for equipment, and you'll get into a situation where the vast majority of loot you won't want to wear eventually no matter what starting point you have for the numbers as long as there is a cap on how good the items can get. There's only a fixed and small number of slots to put equipment in, and with an ever growing supply of items from drops without an effective item sink a larger and larger portion of the items will be vendor or salvage trash.
The bolded was clearly the problem the whole time. It's not the AH, really, it's the fact that there's no mechanism to remove top-tier items, ever. If there was any sort of unavoidable item sink, then BiS items would disappear and thus loot would always matter.
Of course, balancing that against both people not wanting to give up loot and wanting to make sales on the RMAH (for the cut), and you couldn't really make items degrade naturally. And pretty much any other item sink I can think of would work marginally at best.
But any 'C' student in Econ 101 could have told these dumbasses that this would be an issue.
That's why hardcore is and will always be the superior Diablo experience. It has persistence that Ladder chars probably won't have, but it has a built in top tier item sink called death.
Level 60 with badass stuff? All it takes is one bad encounter and Bam, dead. All that glorious loot he had, top tier everything, lost to the aether.
Crafting and rerolls look to make this less of an issue as well.
The problem is the severe imbalance of supply and demand for equipment, and you'll get into a situation where the vast majority of loot you won't want to wear eventually no matter what starting point you have for the numbers as long as there is a cap on how good the items can get. There's only a fixed and small number of slots to put equipment in, and with an ever growing supply of items from drops without an effective item sink a larger and larger portion of the items will be vendor or salvage trash.
The bolded was clearly the problem the whole time. It's not the AH, really, it's the fact that there's no mechanism to remove top-tier items, ever. If there was any sort of unavoidable item sink, then BiS items would disappear and thus loot would always matter.
Of course, balancing that against both people not wanting to give up loot and wanting to make sales on the RMAH (for the cut), and you couldn't really make items degrade naturally. And pretty much any other item sink I can think of would work marginally at best.
But any 'C' student in Econ 101 could have told these dumbasses that this would be an issue.
That's why hardcore is and will always be the superior Diablo experience. It has persistence that Ladder chars probably won't have, but it has a built in top tier item sink called death.
Level 60 with badass stuff? All it takes is one bad encounter and Bam, dead. All that glorious loot he had, top tier everything, lost to the aether.
Crafting and rerolls look to make this less of an issue as well.
Yup, exactly. That's why I've started playing hardcore. Honestly, the AH doesn't even seem to be much of a problem there, though I haven't hit 60 yet so I can't be sure. I know that low level items are expensive as fuck half the time.
I think a smaller playerbase helps that too, as well as less incentive for Chinese farmbots (no RMAH).
...
Also, concerning my previous post to Wyvern, I totally get the perspective that "any losses due to this are worth it, for the overall vastly improved game experience." I don't necessarily agree, and I'm going to be unhappy that those who did not lose money on the decision get that same benefit. But I get that. Like, it's a perspective I totally understand. I do not, on the other hand, understand how somebody could just not get why somebody like myself might be pissed about this. It baffles me. More often than not, when somebody is pissed about something, I can totally understand their position, even if I don't agree. So I just don't know where the disconnect is.
Diablo, to me, was basically a slot machine. It was, as he put it, "gambling." And Blizzard changed the rules while my money was on the table. If a casino did that, would I not be pissed? Selling into Blizzbucks was basically like pressing a bet (that's the right term, correct?). Letting it ride. But when I "let it ride," Blizzard didn't just change out dealers on me. They changed the entire game, threw away the cards, brought out a roulette wheel, and placed my money on a sucker bet. At least that's how it feels to me...there's certainly some hyperbole in there.
EDIT: And that their ToS said they had the right to do so won't make me too fucking happy when they decided to. I'm not sure when gamers started buying into that philosophy, really...didn't we used to get pissed when companies put bullshit into their ToS, then went ahead and exercised their options to the detriment of (at least some) players? For things other than, you know, cheating and such?
mcdermott on
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
The problem is the severe imbalance of supply and demand for equipment, and you'll get into a situation where the vast majority of loot you won't want to wear eventually no matter what starting point you have for the numbers as long as there is a cap on how good the items can get. There's only a fixed and small number of slots to put equipment in, and with an ever growing supply of items from drops without an effective item sink a larger and larger portion of the items will be vendor or salvage trash.
The bolded was clearly the problem the whole time. It's not the AH, really, it's the fact that there's no mechanism to remove top-tier items, ever. If there was any sort of unavoidable item sink, then BiS items would disappear and thus loot would always matter.
Of course, balancing that against both people not wanting to give up loot and wanting to make sales on the RMAH (for the cut), and you couldn't really make items degrade naturally. And pretty much any other item sink I can think of would work marginally at best.
But any 'C' student in Econ 101 could have told these dumbasses that this would be an issue.
That's why hardcore is and will always be the superior Diablo experience. It has persistence that Ladder chars probably won't have, but it has a built in top tier item sink called death.
Level 60 with badass stuff? All it takes is one bad encounter and Bam, dead. All that glorious loot he had, top tier everything, lost to the aether.
Crafting and rerolls look to make this less of an issue as well.
Yup, exactly. That's why I've started playing hardcore. Honestly, the AH doesn't even seem to be much of a problem there, though I haven't hit 60 yet so I can't be sure. I know that low level items are expensive as fuck half the time.
I think a smaller playerbase helps that too, as well as less incentive for Chinese farmbots.
Hardcore is just the way to go.
The constant fear of a misstep, a data hiccup, or just a string of bad decisions.
Battles where you look over and see your HP orb is suddenly half empty and this character you've poured a ton of hours into is suddenly on the verge of being a memorial in the archive? Badass. Gets the blood and adrenaline going.
I feel like the AH on HC has some damn fine deals, but its full of people treating it like the SC AH so the item prices in comparison to the SC AH's tend to take on sort of a reverse bell curve.
Hardcore is fucking boring since every mistake lands you back at lvl 1 and the game is really not that exciting till you pick up enough skills to do interesting stuff.
+3
BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
I find the difficulty in D3 to be a little too random to make hardcore seem worth it. Like you'll be able to roll over an area with white mobs and the occasional champion pack, but then you run into a double/triple set of unique monsters that are jailing/vortexing/freezing while arcane orb/reflect damaging you.
Hardcore is fucking boring since every mistake lands you back at lvl 1 and the game is really not that exciting till you pick up enough skills to do interesting stuff.
Yeah, and without double Hellfire Rings and cranked Monster Power (riskier on HC), you can't just power-level back up to sixty in a couple hours, either. I still enjoy it, though. But I'm only on my first "real" character, so....
I find the difficulty in D3 to be a little too random to make hardcore seem worth it. Like you'll be able to roll over an area with white mobs and the occasional champion pack, but then you run into a double/triple set of unique monsters that are jailing/vortexing/freezing while arcane orb/reflect damaging you.
I'm scared to death of Inferno. But that's part of the fun to me. For now...
But for me it was also about trying to build an HC wealth pile, which now with the AH going away may be harder (or pointless), so there's that.
I just wanted to come in to this thread after reading these crazy stories about the AH being removed..
Fucking finally. God damn auction house, I wont miss it, and im looking forward to playing some Diablo instead of that shit. The last few times I played this game, it felt like I was spending as much time there as slaying monsters.
I also can't believe people actually had any sort of bank in blizzbucks instead of cashing out to Paypal. I have never ever sold a single item to blizzbucks simply because it's not real money.
I will definitely eventually spend every Blizzbuck that I have on games I would have bought regardless, so taking the additional paypal hit just seemed unnecessary.
If I don't have to punch in my credit card to buy Reaper of Souls then that's like putting $40 back in my wallet anyway.
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Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
yeah ima buy a bunch of blizzard shit anyway so might as well avoid the tax...
So presumably there will be mega-nerds out there with thousands and thousands of bonus primary stat. Seems weird that you still have the option of choosing the other two types even though there's never a reason to do so.
The best part is that it's totally fine if your character becomes stupid broken because it can't spoil the economy!
Hardcore is fucking boring since every mistake lands you back at lvl 1 and the game is really not that exciting till you pick up enough skills to do interesting stuff.
Spoken like a true hc virgin.
+3
NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
Hardcore is fucking boring since every mistake lands you back at lvl 1 and the game is really not that exciting till you pick up enough skills to do interesting stuff.
Spoken like a true hc virgin.
Gonna have to agree. Made a WD for HC and got to the Executioner (rescue Cain bit). Couple of times were pretty close during that fight, even when slowing him down. Kinda looking forward/scared to face Leoric even though I've already kicked his ass 4 times already.
Also found the black mushroom, which sucks because Stash isn't shared...
So last night, after clearing act 3 on my monk, I decided Azmodan died waaaay to easily so I'm gonna bump it up to Hard. Plus I want the increased drops anyway to start gearing up for Nightmare (salvage materials). I also downgraded some gear slightly to bump up my MF %, and boy did THAT pay off. (I'll need to pull the exact stats off next time). Only time I died was before picking that up was the Named Mallet Demon in the first Hell Rift in Act 4. Dude one shotted me a couple of times so I had to let my minion/spirit do the work.
Then I picked up that beauty which had some bonus health regen. Coupled with my regen aura I could be standing in the middle of Diablo's burn AoE attack,and my life would never drop. After the fight, Big D dropped these bad boys with a nice +Dex and +Str bonus.
I'm kinda tempted to bump it up to Master 1 for Act 1 so far just to remember what pain feels like again...
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I honestly can't understand HC ever being boring, when everything you do has permanent meaningful consequences. In fact, since I started playing Hardcore in Diablo II I have never played a game like this without having hardcore on if I can.
The only time I have had in the 13ish hours I have played Diablo 3 were those where I had to reach level 10 to unlock hardcore mode.
Posts
Kind of an interesting discussion because it mirrors what we're saying here, but just so people know that the way the AH influenced drop rates and the game itself is a very popular opinion. (probably because it's math/common sense)
Just to be clear, I think Diablo will be better with this change.
I have some issues with it (as noted), and I think perhaps it could have been fixed another way, but this is definitely better than the status quo.
Now, someone sell me on a hardcore character. Probably going to solo and play on normal, so which one has the best survivability?
Witch doctors, I think. They have pets to do tanking and a "get out of death free" passive: Spirit Vessel.
Are you at 60? I can't imagine seeing gear in the shop better than what I've found/crafted at level 60 on PC.
I ain't no game designer though.
Nope, just finished normal actually. Usually I'm having a bitch of a time finding rings/amulets (these are usually store bought for me).
Most armor/weapons though, yeah, those are found/crafted.
I just view my blizzbux balance as a 15% discount on all future blizzard games.
You'd just get an item that would function as currency (radiant star emeralds) and that would turn into the same thing as the AH. How many RSEs are you asking for your BIS chantodo's? etc.
It'd be the same thing, just clunkier.
I seem to have a curse on legendaries: Every hardcore character I have played has been one shot or killed in terrible circumstances after finding one :-(
It's like, suddenly turning an awesome weapon into a curio.
But dying to mobs of aggroed enemies I never needed to go near because you don't actually die? That's so fucking bullshit. That dungeon is full of chests anyway even if you don't make it!
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/10014141429#11
So presumably there will be mega-nerds out there with thousands and thousands of bonus primary stat. Seems weird that you still have the option of choosing the other two types even though there's never a reason to do so.
The best part is that it's totally fine if your character becomes stupid broken because it can't spoil the economy!
Whoopi Goldberg plays Diablo!!!
yeah that was something
The AH wasn't the source of the problem, the AH just made the problem worse and impossible to ignore.
The problem is the severe imbalance of supply and demand for equipment, and you'll get into a situation where the vast majority of loot you won't want to wear eventually no matter what starting point you have for the numbers as long as there is a cap on how good the items can get. There's only a fixed and small number of slots to put equipment in, and with an ever growing supply of items from drops without an effective item sink a larger and larger portion of the items will be vendor or salvage trash.
If the endgame isn't focused on getting better and better loot, like is the case in a game like Dark Souls with PvP, this isn't the end of the world. But if all you have is the item hunt like is the case with D3 now then you have a problem.
Goldberg decries Diablo 3 Auction House decision but gives Blizzbucks to needy kids. Says "fuck you" to Bono.
You can tell she was just itching to prove she has gamer cred throughout this entire conversation. She says it near the end if you don't want to listen to out of touch people talk about things they don't know anything about.
I feel like I might as well be listening to Bill O'Reilly talking about the Marvel Universe and its transition to film.
It's probably because I'm an actor, but I immediately translated this as "Whoopi Goldbeg was the voice of Diablo" and was having a very hard time wrapping my head around the randomness of that.
The bolded was clearly the problem the whole time. It's not the AH, really, it's the fact that there's no mechanism to remove top-tier items, ever. If there was any sort of unavoidable item sink, then BiS items would disappear and thus loot would always matter.
Of course, balancing that against both people not wanting to give up loot and wanting to make sales on the RMAH (for the cut), and you couldn't really make items degrade naturally. And pretty much any other item sink I can think of would work marginally at best.
But any 'C' student in Econ 101 could have told these dumbasses that this would be an issue.
So your original plan was to spend your Blizzard credit on loot and walk away with no dollars. As a result of the change in policy, you'll be getting your loot for free and you walk away with $X in cash. But you feel that you have lost real money, because...?
When your account hit $40 or whatever you expected your next Blizzard purchase would cost and then continued to put more money in your Blizzard wallet, I figure one of two things must have been true:
1) You were planning on putting the excess back into the auction house to flip more items and increase your eventual payout. If you did this successfully, then your additional profits most likely exceeded the additional fees you paid, and you were correct in assuming that this course of action would maximize your profit. If you didn't manage to do this, then, well, you knew it was a gamble to begin with.
2) You were planning on spending it on items to use in-game, in which case you were 100% committed to either losing that money entirely or being double-charged for it when you eventually took it out down the line. From that 41st dollar onward, nothing you or Blizzard ever could have done would have let you convert that credit into real money without paying both fees on it. You already accepted that sunk cost when you chose not to sell directly to Paypal. So you had nothing to lose here. If cashing out your Blizzard wallet right now nets you $47 in cash, there was no possible way for you to ever turn that amount into more than $47. If anything you were going to spend some of it and end up with less than $47, a loss which you've now been spared from.
Can you see why the "my Blizzard points were real money in my pocket and now I've been robbed of some of it" perspective doesn't make much sense to me?
I knew it was a gamble. I did not realize Blizzard would change the rules while my money was still on the table.
I accepted that sunk cost (or rather, at the time, just cost) given the particular reality of the time. I'd not have made that choice if I thought for a moment that Blizzard would simply pull the plug on the AH entirely. That's the point. I made rational decisions based on the assumption that Blizzard wouldn't excise a major feature of the game.
And if I spent the money on items in-game, I wouldn't be losing that money entirely. I'd be spending it for access to things that have value to me. Now, they've announced that not only will they give those things of value to everybody for free (yay), but that I will no longer be able to use that money to buy any additional things of value to me (current items have no additional value to me). And there was a way for me to "ever" turn that amount into more than $47; I could have sent it to PayPal at the time of sale, which I would have done if I knew Blizzard was willing to axe a major feature of the game.
Nope. But I don't give a shit.
Had a couple close calls tonight on Act 3 (Nightmare). I mean, "close call" is relative...my health went to less than half, and I still had Ignore Pain on tap, so it wasn't that close. But still, sketchy.
That's why hardcore is and will always be the superior Diablo experience. It has persistence that Ladder chars probably won't have, but it has a built in top tier item sink called death.
Level 60 with badass stuff? All it takes is one bad encounter and Bam, dead. All that glorious loot he had, top tier everything, lost to the aether.
Crafting and rerolls look to make this less of an issue as well.
Yup, exactly. That's why I've started playing hardcore. Honestly, the AH doesn't even seem to be much of a problem there, though I haven't hit 60 yet so I can't be sure. I know that low level items are expensive as fuck half the time.
I think a smaller playerbase helps that too, as well as less incentive for Chinese farmbots (no RMAH).
...
Also, concerning my previous post to Wyvern, I totally get the perspective that "any losses due to this are worth it, for the overall vastly improved game experience." I don't necessarily agree, and I'm going to be unhappy that those who did not lose money on the decision get that same benefit. But I get that. Like, it's a perspective I totally understand. I do not, on the other hand, understand how somebody could just not get why somebody like myself might be pissed about this. It baffles me. More often than not, when somebody is pissed about something, I can totally understand their position, even if I don't agree. So I just don't know where the disconnect is.
Diablo, to me, was basically a slot machine. It was, as he put it, "gambling." And Blizzard changed the rules while my money was on the table. If a casino did that, would I not be pissed? Selling into Blizzbucks was basically like pressing a bet (that's the right term, correct?). Letting it ride. But when I "let it ride," Blizzard didn't just change out dealers on me. They changed the entire game, threw away the cards, brought out a roulette wheel, and placed my money on a sucker bet. At least that's how it feels to me...there's certainly some hyperbole in there.
EDIT: And that their ToS said they had the right to do so won't make me too fucking happy when they decided to. I'm not sure when gamers started buying into that philosophy, really...didn't we used to get pissed when companies put bullshit into their ToS, then went ahead and exercised their options to the detriment of (at least some) players? For things other than, you know, cheating and such?
Hardcore is just the way to go.
The constant fear of a misstep, a data hiccup, or just a string of bad decisions.
Battles where you look over and see your HP orb is suddenly half empty and this character you've poured a ton of hours into is suddenly on the verge of being a memorial in the archive? Badass. Gets the blood and adrenaline going.
I feel like the AH on HC has some damn fine deals, but its full of people treating it like the SC AH so the item prices in comparison to the SC AH's tend to take on sort of a reverse bell curve.
Yeah, and without double Hellfire Rings and cranked Monster Power (riskier on HC), you can't just power-level back up to sixty in a couple hours, either. I still enjoy it, though. But I'm only on my first "real" character, so....
I'm scared to death of Inferno. But that's part of the fun to me. For now...
But for me it was also about trying to build an HC wealth pile, which now with the AH going away may be harder (or pointless), so there's that.
Fucking finally. God damn auction house, I wont miss it, and im looking forward to playing some Diablo instead of that shit. The last few times I played this game, it felt like I was spending as much time there as slaying monsters.
I also can't believe people actually had any sort of bank in blizzbucks instead of cashing out to Paypal. I have never ever sold a single item to blizzbucks simply because it's not real money.
If I don't have to punch in my credit card to buy Reaper of Souls then that's like putting $40 back in my wallet anyway.
Yeah, but who cares about nonladder?
Spoken like a true hc virgin.
Gonna have to agree. Made a WD for HC and got to the Executioner (rescue Cain bit). Couple of times were pretty close during that fight, even when slowing him down. Kinda looking forward/scared to face Leoric even though I've already kicked his ass 4 times already.
Also found the black mushroom, which sucks because Stash isn't shared...
So last night, after clearing act 3 on my monk, I decided Azmodan died waaaay to easily so I'm gonna bump it up to Hard. Plus I want the increased drops anyway to start gearing up for Nightmare (salvage materials). I also downgraded some gear slightly to bump up my MF %, and boy did THAT pay off. (I'll need to pull the exact stats off next time). Only time I died was before picking that up was the Named Mallet Demon in the first Hell Rift in Act 4. Dude one shotted me a couple of times so I had to let my minion/spirit do the work.
Then I picked up that beauty which had some bonus health regen. Coupled with my regen aura I could be standing in the middle of Diablo's burn AoE attack,and my life would never drop. After the fight, Big D dropped these bad boys with a nice +Dex and +Str bonus.
I'm kinda tempted to bump it up to Master 1 for Act 1 so far just to remember what pain feels like again...
The only time I have had in the 13ish hours I have played Diablo 3 were those where I had to reach level 10 to unlock hardcore mode.