Diablo III - Real Life MoneyFollow

The idea is an interesting one, but I'm concerned the impact would be negative. I dream of the ability to use AH skills to buy and sell virtual items to make real cash. However, its implications could be far reaching. This morning, I got the pattern for the Extreme-Impact Hole Puncher, a gun I'm going to craft and give a few away to guildies. If instead I could sell it for real money on the AH, I'm afraid my generosity would be short lived. The fun may be lost when the game becomes a job.

^This in a nutshell. Do i want to use this upgrade or sell it? Greed, cornering AH markets, and the like are already casting an ugly shadow.

I haven't even played D2 (yeah i know >.<), but the economic format change for D3 makes me real leery. I'm not sure if the fact a person can make money while playing the game, and the stress most of us would have trying to do so, really helps the enjoyment of the game "as it's meant to be played".

And it will make loot-stealing more of a deal as well, compared to WoW where someone will ninja a blue/boe epic (or whatever) to sell for a few hundred/thousand gold is nothing compared to when they can make $50 from it.

"Yeah, I really need that, it is a huge upgrade [insert 'hunter weapon here']" and then sells it.

Infact, I just made a picture to represent this:

http://i.imgur.com/CTUqy.jpg


Granted I don't know how group-loot works in diablo, is it whoever clicks on the loot first or does it bring up a /roll window?



Edited, Aug 1st 2011 6:06pm by Anobix

Edited, Aug 1st 2011 6:07pm by Anobix

Yeah, I'm in agreement with the above stuff.

This smells like a 'great business solution.' Someone in marketing had a light bulb go off, and it stinks of some kind of synergy. It turns a problem (with all the costs that would go into fighting against it) into a money-generating solution. It makes business sense on paper, but it'll be interesting to see what happens to the effects on gameplay once they try and implement it.

Really I'm thinking the in-game currency will be a bad investment, and you'll want to convert to cash ASAP (I'm thinking expansion/patch based inflation here really). Hyper-inflation makes a good gameplay model, as it keeps you grinding away at the content, but I'm not too sure what happens to both when you can convert easily to a more reliable currency. Add in that Blizzard will, in a sense, be able to 'print' currency whenever they feel like it. Gold in WoW isn't worth anywhere near what it once was worth (if I go by the numbers the gold sellers spam in /2), and it's not like other 'fake currencies' like airline miles are a good investment either really. Hmmm...

I dunno, I'm not an economist and don't really understand this stuff. Maybe it'll all work out well, it just makes me nervous reading about it.

Edited, Aug 1st 2011 3:21pm by someproteinguy

I was looking forward to playing it. Not anymore. To me it's not much of a GAME anymore the moment real money is involved. I find it hard enough to accept the Blizzard Store or other sources of loot like the trading cards in WoW.

Seriously, how much of a game is it, when rich folks just go an buy whatever they want, while others have to grind endlessly to get anywhere?

I have too much of that already in the real world.

Buying items for cash is already in Diablo II. The difference now is that the transactions are in game, so Blizz will be able to monitor them for fraud. At best, you could argue that the real money AH makes the process more accessible.

I don't think its a big deal, and it certainly won't stop me from playing Diablo 3.

Forced online is realistically no different than if they released it through Steam, no? As I understand it, you can only play steam games if logged in. I've never tried to do so offline, though, so IDK.

Do I like required online? Hell no. Do I think they have a valid reason for doing it? Yes. Realistically, if pirating wasn't such a massive problem, they wouldn't need to bother. As gamers, we should all probably do what we can to get used to such systems, because they aren't going away.

I do wish they'd work in an alternate system as well though. Like let me text them for an authentication code "unique" to my game that I can input to play offline. Figure SOMETHING out that doesn't require internet access, because if my internet drops out, I'm still going to want to play.

Who the hell is "we?"

It's someone randomly cutting and pasting in order to spam the link in their sig.

An interesting little article about this.

tl;dr:



I find that a little insulting.

Edited, Aug 3rd 2011 12:25am by IDrownFish

That's where Players X came in, well until they borked it in 1.10+, never heard if that was properly fixed or not.

It was a hidden command that you'd type in, that made monsters stronger as if that number of players joined. Example, typing "players 3" and hitting the enter key would make the game act like 3 players were in the game, even if you were playing solo.

And yes, in Normal Mode, solo was fairly easy, but on Nightmare+, in Singleplayer the game quickly started becoming nearly impossible due to the fact that offline, you had no means of acquiring any decent equipment, other than hours upon hours of atrocious grind that makes older EQ-style MMORPGs seem like easymode handouts.