Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details(ausgamers.com) |
Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details(ausgamers.com) |
That is guaranteed to draw heavy adversarial attention from both the bad guys and the good guys.
Business-wise, even Blizzard is going to eventually bow to reality and realize that INSERT ... INTO ITEMS; is the most profitable line of code any game company can ever write. They've experimented a few times in WoW with making folks pay for e.g. cosmetic mount improvements. Eventually they're going to realize that their core audience pays hundreds but values their gamerhood at (conservatively) thousands, and start monetizing that gap. After doing so, they'll be able to treat the base product as "Free 2 Play", assuming they think America has enough bandwidth to play their games without needing the assist from a truck of DVDs shipped to every Best Buy and Walmart.
I respect that you may no like this. I dislike gravity. Some days we do not get what we want.
More so than any other game, I've found arbitrage to be most difficult on WoW.
There's also the question of accounts nailed for abuse. What happens to the distributed items and trades? The company will be far less likely to forgive innocent parties connected to the original abuse account since there is real money on the line.
Have you heard of rampant money laundering in eBay?
The only fraud they would have to deal with is the same fraud they have to deal with when they sell stuff in their online store.
A former employer once commissioned a flash game with a western setting which included a virtual casino with several games of chance. He had to shelve the idea of offering people to cash out and the game was delayed for a long time (if I remember correctly, it was turned into a game where you could buy stuff for your character, but there was no longer a way to transfer your winnings into real money accounts)
Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game.
Ah... Fond memories of duping items in the original Diablo game -- Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, Godly Plate of the Whale, King's Sword of Haste...
=]
Does WoW have duping problems? I was under the impression that it was the particular way D2 handled items[1] that allowed duping, not a necessary part of any game.
[1] Probably at the time, the trade-off for being secure would have been unacceptable performance and/or database bloat.
With Diablo III being a one-time purchase, item duping would devalue items on the player side and may or may not result in increased commission revenue for Blizzard (depending on how many players will actually purchase the item on the auction house).
Not really. I can recall just one time where someone found an exploit to do so, probably 3+ years ago, which was handled quickly.
Talk about game designers selling out badly ...
That changed during the middle of the Burning Crusade expansion, where Blizzard basically decided that the gold sellers won, and that they were just going to flood the market with currency. They added daily quests, which were quests that gave reputation and gold every day to top-level characters, as well as more sinks, like a character title that cost 1000 gold.
At this point, gold is basically a joke, because it's extremely easy to get with a minimal time investment. Half an hour of play can get the player anywhere between 100 and 400 gold. It appears that most of the gold sellers have moved to selling epic tradable gear and items over gold at this point.
Players sell accounts, power leveling services, items, gold, etc. There are always people who are willing to pay real cash for virtual things. Without fundamentally changing the game, you can't get rid of people meeting on 3rd party (or in-game channels) to trade cash for in-game goods/services.
As a player, it's acceptable for Blizzard to aggregate the market in-house and take their cut of inevitable monetary transactions. If they change the game to encourage spending real money to get ahead (like battlefield heroes?), then I would stop playing. If they are responsible about it (only acting as a clearinghouse, but not affecting balance mechanics), it isn't a problem for me.
In fact, they might just do it by accident.
SOJs, "stone of Jordan" was a unique ring in diablo2.
Gold in diablo2 became worthless, even though they tried to soak it up with improving vendor items, and even implementing gambling.
Eventually SOJs became the currency for trading. You'd see postings like "2 socket archon 4 2 SOJ".
What was so interesting is that SOJ's are very similar to gold in the real world. They were easy to trade, easy to store (only taking up 1 square), very rare (or supposed to be), and had great intrinsic value because the sorcerer class was always running out of mana and they gave a 25% increase to mana.
Using SOJs as currency just developed naturally, probably just like gold did in the real world.
What's stopping this from becoming a full-time occupation for someone?
The botting was completely out of control.
I chatted with another player who used bots to farm for rare items and he claimed to have 24+ instances of the game running 24/7 split across several machines. He would check once a day to see if any of his bots managed to get a really, really rare item.
Kinda crazy... =]
1) Money. D3 is free to play so monetizing non-subscription aspects makes sense.
2) People will buy in game items for real money so bringing that out of the dark underground makes sense.
However it still seems contrary to the gameplay, and would make finding some very rare item less special (unless you were going to sell it that is.)
On the bright side, hardcore mode will not have this, so I think overall it is acceptable.
- You must be always online, no offline mode at all. /// - Mods are expressly forbidden, no mods at all.
An entire economy has developed around buying virtual items, and Blizzard is only the latest ones to try to cash in on it. EVE Online does this with the PLEX licenses, which are 1 month subscriptions that players can buy with real money, then sell them in-game to other players. Everquest 2 had(or has?) servers that allowed the player to do the exact same thing, by auctioning off in-game items and characters for real money.
Blizzard's is doing the exact same thing that SOE and CCP did. They're making sure that they are going to get a cut of the money that will be flowing through the game.
http://beefjack.com/news/eve-online-revolts-could-cost-ccp-1...
$1mm is a big deal for a small, niche company like CCP.
I think that Blizzard monetizing item auctions is acceptable if it's simply done through in-game interface instead of eBay (or shady websites). Of all companies, Blizzard is not a stupid company, so I assume they won't blatantly sell out (and ruin) their gameplay mechanics to monetize D3 via auctions.
The extreme rarity of items was once a nice idea as it allowed to add meaningful trade to the game . But every modern mmorpg has a central market so basically real player-to-player trade got taken out of the game already anyway. All that's left of it now are completely meaningless inflated prices and the real currency is no longer items but player time. Which I find sad as wasting as much player time as possible is a really poor design target.
I don't say it won't work out for them, but personally I hope they fail with it. Because if it succeeds, then it's obvious that they will next try to figure out how to further improve that income. I would prefer game designers to spend their time thinking about how to improve the game-play instead.
I would argue CCP's issues are more with their marketing and customer-facing people than anything else. Valve did that with TF2 hats(some cost $20 or more to buy), and didn't have nearly the same level of fallout with it. Blizzard's done the same thing with purchasable vanity pets and in-game mounts, and hasn't had really any backlash from it.
CCP was charging US$70 for a virtual pair of jeans, then made forum posts trying to convince people since people spend that much on actual clothing, they could charge the same thing for the virtual item. The userbase, predictably, wasn't happy with this idiotic argument, and the fact that a LOT of development time went to these features versus things that actually impacted the player's experience.
Oh, and another thing I just thought of as I was writing this. During that time that you're searching for the "Priceless Crossbow of Ill-repute", you're going to find other, extremely rare artifacts which you can then ... sell yourself, or trade! So instead of having to search through all possible procedurally generated items for the "Flaming Katar of Fiery Doom", you can quest on your own and find items and then sell one or many of your artifacts that another player wants, and ... get the item you want.
How does this system fail again?
Look at Eve Online as another example. Would you make the following declaration? "Eve Online has a problem because the Titan Class vessels are hard to get. You have to spend years training for the skills necessary to pilot those things; and, at the same time, you have to go out and mine all the resources and find all the blueprints yourself, to build them. What should happen instead is that, with a reasonable amount of time, you should be able to find a Titan Vessel yourself."
Also "A particular build"? ... this is Diablo. The weapons are procedurally generated. Frankly, a feature, to me. I love procedural generation in games where that results in millions upon millions of potential combinations. Go play WoW if you want a particular, precise build.
As long as you can beat the game with normal sword on the ground, you don't need to buy $$$ items. While $$$ sword will make your life easier, you don't need it to quest with friends or beat the game.
And it's also about fairness. Once you introduce money it means players no longer have equal chances. With that happening outside the system you could at least complain - making the system itself unfair - I just call this broken.