somewhat sad and hilarious!

[Crni Vuk]

I guess there are quite a few people here that played Diablo 3, or at least enough that played one of the Diablo games.

Now, Diablo 3 has as "new" feature the auction house in the game where people can buy and sell items for gold or even real money, and it is as well possible to buy and sell "gold" that you collect in the game for real money.

There has been a lot of speculation before the game was released and it was always seen as rather questionable for a game like Diablo which actually used a trading or bartering system before. So for a game like Diablo this was pretty new.

So much to the history.

Diablo 3 got recently on the US servers the patch 1.08 (for those that stoped to play D3).

What happened? A few changes here and there. But, not just changes. A rather serious issue or "bug" as well. Gold has become one of the most important "items" in the game, as it is one of the currencies in the game next to money. As said, you can buy and sell gold with real money.

Now listen to this:

Diablo 3 Gold Dupe Bug

Along with the amusing bugs, the Patch 1.0.8 brought along a serious one; a way for players to dupe gold by posting and then canceling items in the Auction House. The Auction House has now been taken down and there is much player speculation about roll backs or other radical steps to fix the economic destruction.

Blizzard hasn’t yet commented other than with their default security message, but hopefully we’ll get more news on this shortly.

source: http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/diablo-3-gold-dupe-bug

Over streams people showed how they either willingly or accidently started to dupe "gold". In other words, duplicating for those that dont know it. While people usually find in a few hours of playing the game (more or less) 1-2 million gold, some made literally now in MINUTES trillions of gold.

Somewhat hilarious. Well If you ever thought it could not get worse. Something like that happens.

 

[woo1108]

Now, Diablo 3 has as "new" feature the auction house in the game where people can buy and sell items for gold or even real money, and it is as well possible to buy and sell "gold" that you collect in the game for real money.

There's already website where people trade game money with real money exist in Korea. Nothing special I guess?

 

[Crni Vuk]

are we in Korea yet? For a game like Diablo this IS a new feature. We are not talking about "illegal" trading here or where people buy stuff from china farmers, which is also not that welcome.

Certain MMOs have auction houses, like World of Warcraft. But, those games usually don't contain any form of "real money" and they have strong limitations, like caps, items that cant be bought or sold on the auction etc. For example in World of Warcraft certain items are either bound to your account or you cant sell them once you equip them (Bound on Account and Bound on Equip, Soulbound and what ever else, I am not playing WoW).

Diablo 3 is a game where you can do everything with the AH. What ever you find in the game can be sold or bought either for real money or Gold. The only "caps" or "limits" you have in the game are that nothing can be sold for more then 250$ or 2billion gold. Now recently there has been the issue that people constantly sell items that are now A LOT more worth then 2 billion gold like on third party websites, because Gold has took a massive inflation. To say this, there are two auction houses in Diablo 3, one where you sell items for money and the other one for real money. The only real connection is that you can buy/sell gold for real money. People also started to for example buy gems for real money, which can be get for a few cents, and sell them for "gold" in the gold auction house as this is a lot cheaper to buy gold for real money then to buy it directly from Blizzard.

So to say this ... the "economy" of Diablo 3 has been in a pretty silly state for a long time. And now it somehow crashed completely. I like Diablo 3. Somewhat. As I still play it sometimes. But I cant say that I donut find the situation right now, at least on the US servers, as Europe does not have the patch yet, hilarious.

I never was a friend of this whole AH thing. Particularly that it is now about real money. If people decide to buy stuff with real money, so be it. But it opens a whole new opportunity and scenario in where I have the feeling that "games" are losing what makes them actually ... games, and more like a "job". Do we really want to play games where we have to worry about wealth and money in such ways? don't we have already enough from that in our "real life"? I always loved Diablo. As game. But I can say that Diablo 3, is really a move in the wrong direction.

Maybe, but thats just a hope, Blizzard will finally wake up. And take this as a warning, what feature like the auction house can do to a once great franchise.

- I am not totally against "transactions" with real money in games. I had the one or other game where I even spend money in microtransactions 2 or 3 times. But those have been always very very small sums of money, just a couple of times a few dollars/euroes here and there. Nothing to serious. The problem starts when some people start to see those kind of things like a second job. Or if people start to "regularly" buy things for very high amounts of money. It is twisting the purpose of gaming in to something it never was meant to be. A form of business that is in no relation to the goods you get. Now I know, the "value" of things depends on the person. You could as well argue, that 8 or 12 dollars for a 2 hour movie is "a lot". But still. Enough people spend 100 of $ if not even more on games. And Diablo 3 has for sure pushed all of this to a whole new level, because now players sold to other players rather regularly even items for very high sums. And the best about it? Blizzard gets always a good chunck of those transactions. Be it when people "sell" the stuff, or when they get their money out of Diablo 3 via pay pall. So they earn literaly money, for doing nothing.

 

[woo1108]

I already heard lots of folks trade GM with RM in korea but I'm surprise that thing is only occurs in korea(plus maybe china?).
In korea, lots of MMO charactors are just doning simple job to earn game money and eventually they gather huge amount of money and sell that game money. So they earn real money by earing game money. funny thing is there's bunch of peope who buy them. I'm really doubt why they pay money to play and use money to buy game money or charactors to play instead of earn by themselves?

 

[Ilosar]

The AH was obviously stupid from the start. It was created as a revenue enhancement, but it ended up alienating a lot of the playerbase, especially since they based drops around the AH (so itesm have less chances to drop, else the AH would be positively flooded by them, not that it currently isin't).

Hell, I don't even think the RMAH is the problem, if those overly rich idiots want to pay dollars for pixels, more power to them. But the gold AH has made the economy as retarded as D2's, and that's even before those duping shenanigans. It's very possible to fully deck your character in decent gear based solely off the AH, since everything but Best In Slot items are dirt cheap. Eh, it's what I did with my barbarian. I have maybe 2 pieces of equipment I picked up that I use, the rest was bought because it's much faster and easier than farming enemies who utterly trounce you if you don't have good enough gear. You know there's a problem when browsing spreadsheets is more rewarding than playing the actual game.

It's sad, because apart from the AH and the derpy story I liked Diablo 3, probably more than D2 (yes, yes, heresy, I know). If they announced that they removed the AH and rebalanced the drops I'd probably get back to playing it. Wishful thinking, however, and no I'm not gonna buy it on PS3 just to get the ''proper'' version of the game.

 

[clercqer]

In fact, Blizzard developers have stated they think the AH is more of a burden to the game than a gift.