Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details | Hacker News Reader

Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

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58 pointspinguar53 comments

I don't know how they're going to manage this with the money-laundering/fraud angle. This makes Epic Boots of the Whale into a transfer medium for money between virtually anonymous endpoints, including internationally. (Long story short: You can run an auction which is honest or you can run an auction which is anonymous, but you cannot do both at the same time. Virtually any information flow from the system to any participant in the auction compromises the anonymity, since the attacker has perfect knowledge of the state of the system from both ends of the trade.)

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'm more worried about how it'll effect the game from a personal/player angle than a laundering/fraud issue. Gold farmers are a problem in any MMOG, but this will likely exacerbate the issue.

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.

The nice thing about virtual goods is they can make both the seller and the buyer whole at the same time if they wish by simply duplicating the item/good. The scarcity is artificial.

My concern is the other way. Duplication or balance bugs can make it very easy to suddenly produce an influx of goods and devalue (in real currency) other player holdings.

First off they make far more money than any of the free2play games even with a far smaller playerbase so I don't think they have much to learn from the F2P comunity. They already make money from people changing names and servers and non combat pets not just mounts. There are even benifits introducing another player to the game so it's got a fairly strong viral component. Also, as a wow player I would mention that you don't need a physical copy to play wow the DVD's are just there for marketing / gift giving.

I disagree, Blizzard has done a good job with managing their in game economies and they wouldn't be so stupid as to screw it up by competing against their own players for control of assets, they stand to make way more money by just skimming off the top.

Blizzard is very good at what they do, but not perfect. The entire space is converging on Free2Play and games with 1 pct of WoW's budget print money hats. When Blizzard makes a tiny cosmetic sale of items, the Internet goes awash with geek rage and the shareholders at Vivendi get 20 million richer. Geeks rage hard at 5% fees for transactions but happily pay ten bucks a button press for a SQL statement with 98 pct margins.

I respect that you may no like this. I dislike gravity. Some days we do not get what we want.

I don't know what experience you have with online game economies, but saying they've done a good job "managing" their economies is misleading. World of Warcraft has had a good go, not because of any economic management, but because of innovative economic planning... to an extent. The economy in WoW is very artificial, and they've eliminated the majority of their economic issues by releasing new armor sets, and using the bind-on-pickup system.

More so than any other game, I've found arbitrage to be most difficult on WoW.

The points won't be anonymous. You need to supply bank information. Sure, someone could fake that, but there are plenty of routes to go if you are going to fake information. It isn't like this route gives you one of those debit Visa cards or mails an address cash.

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.

It will be interesting to see how they get around (anti-)gambling laws, at least here in Germany. The moment you offer real money for winning in luck-based games (as opposed to skill-based ones) like Diablo3, you may run afoul of the state monopoly for lottery and related games.

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)

This will be interesting.

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...

>Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game.

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.

There have been some duping bugs in WoW, but I think they're gone now.

>Does WoW have duping problems?

Not really. I can recall just one time where someone found an exploit to do so, probably 3+ years ago, which was handled quickly.

There is nothing specific about how Diablo 2 did items that enabled duping. Nearly every MMORPG has had bugs that allow duping. You are working with distributed systems with tens if not hundreds of ways of interacting with your inventory and have to make sure they all work properly even when an attacker can crash your servers at any time during the processing. This all has to be done while at the same time allowing massive amounts of transactions to occur simulatenously. It is not an easy thing to deal with.

It might not be such an issue either, because with a subscription-based game like WoW, item rarity has more value to Blizzard because the longer it takes to get an item the more subscription revenue they get.

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).

Duped Stones of Jordan were so prevalent in D2 that they introduced a mob (Diablo Clone) that spawned only when those duped SoJs were sold to merchants. I look forward to D3's dupe economy :)

Step 1: Make getting good items so frustratingly repetitive that players start paying other people for getting those. Step 2: Instead of trying to fix that part of the game decide to monetize on this?

Talk about game designers selling out badly ...

Gold farmers: If you can't beat 'em... tax 'em, apparently.

As a Diablo 2 player, Step 1 is the nature of the game. Unique Items are extremely rare, so that when you got one, it was a super big deal. You never know what items will drop when you kill the next monster, but odds are extremely low it will be something good.

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.

This is not just about easier/harder to get items but also a lot about the value of item vs. the value of player skill. As soon as you no longer get better by playing more skilled but only by playing longer you will get such gold mining markets as many people value their time and don't want to spend it completely meaningless. Set a sane upper limit how long it takes to reach items and from there on only skill decides and you can basically remove the incentive to buy items for money.

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.

Is it strange that I like the extreme rarity of certain items? You don't ~need~ any particular item to beat the game, or be amazing. When weapons and buffs are procedurally generated, it realy doesn't matter. But, if you desperately want the "Flawless Arcane Hammer of The Middle-Aged Gods", then you can sell your current items.

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?

It seems you have not yet reached the point where you got so frustrated that you decided to buy items instead anyway. The kind of players that buy items are often building up certain configurations and there is no way in the game to do that without spending days doing repetive runs just to find out in the end if that configuration of items will work or not. Money really only comes into play at a certain point and I think a game designer should realize something in the game mechanics is broken when people start paying money to _not_ play certain parts of a game.

And, when they're on their quest, they'll also find rare items they can sell or trade to get the thing they want. So we have trading. An economy! Now they're participating in another part of the game that didn't exist before. Perhaps they'll enjoy it.

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.

These are details. (Yeah the weapons in Diablo 2 are procedurally generated,but only within certain limits so you can look up on D2 sites exactly within which ranges each unique item can be. So nearly all character guides start with build recommendations). It doesn't matter much if you just play for winning the game, but once people start playing for highscores or pvp they usually don't just play with the random stuff they get. I can't say anything about Eve Online as I've never played that game - if people buy those "Titan Vessel" with real money then yes, I would say the game mechanics are broken. Trading does also not really make a difference anymore - calculate the average amount you'll get for your stuff each hour (there's probably calculators out there just for that...) and you still have an unholy amount of hours just collecting and trading stuff which obviously people hated enough to create an industry living from doing that for them.

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.

Blizzard has said that PvP in Diablo 3 is explicitly a lark. It will be given no priority for balance. The game is the PvE experience.

Agreed

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.

It doesn't matter what Blizzard does to make it easier to get, really. If there is even a perception of rarity, someone will try to sell it for real money.

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.

Eve is hemorrhaging accounts and the player outrage from the aftermath of their attempts to directly monetize the playerbase beyond PLEX accounts make them a VERY bad example to follow.

http://beefjack.com/news/eve-online-revolts-could-cost-ccp-1...

$1mm is a big deal for a small, niche company like CCP.

>Eve is hemorrhaging accounts and the player outrage from the aftermath of their attempts to directly monetize the playerbase beyond PLEX accounts make them a VERY bad example to follow.

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.

It was a misunderstanding of their market entirely. The Eve player-base is incredibly pissy.

Hasn't blizzard been previously quite aggressive about how game breaking player driven cash economies are - i.e. gold selling and the such? But now they think it's a fine idea as long as they're getting a real world cash fee? Seems to suggest they never saw it as game breaking as much as revenue stealing.

Do you think that cash transactions are unavoidable?

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.

Or they never balanced a previous game around that, and they have now. It's possible that gold selling in some games could break the game, because that game wasn't designed with gold selling in mind. If you start with the premise that players will use real world money to buy in game items, you can balance around that.

There's a perfectly reasonable middle ground where they know from experience that a secondary market in virtual items is inevitable, and they think they'll have more of an ability to control how that effects their gameplay if they're the ones who run it.

At one point, they were pretty protective about WoW's economy. In vanilla, there were a lot of gold sinks, like skill/spell training costs, riding skills, etc. Those are sill present, but don't impact the game nearly as much. They're mostly vanity things like gigantic bags and non-combat pets. In-game currency was relatively rare, with most endgame bosses giving less than 1 gold per person.

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.

Blizzard, strangely enough, is probably in the perfect position to start a successful virtual currency.

In fact, they might just do it by accident.

SOJs?

SOJs was a really interesting phenomenon and probably taught me more about economics more than anything else.

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.

I wonder if there's going to be a cap on how much you can trade/earn.

What's stopping this from becoming a full-time occupation for someone?

I've always wondered what the ballpark was for people employed full-time playing Diablo 2. Thousands?

If you actually play the game? Probably nothing. You need armies of bots to make anything with how badly item stores and duping dilute the economy. The economy has been a joke for years now; I'd actually be surprised if bots weren't the majority of "players" by now.

Yeah, maybe I should have clarified that when I said "always" I meant "circa 2003" :P

I dusted off my old copy of Diablo 2 last summer and played for a little while. The entire multi-player experience was dominated by bots spamming ads or bots that instantly pick up any rare items that dropped.

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... =]

You should ask him to do an AMA, if you can get a hold of him. I wonder how profitable this was - especially compared to, say, mining bitcoins.

For me the huge news here is that they're making Diablo 3. I'm so out of the loop when it comes to games.

There's a whole community over on reddit worth looking over. Lots of Diablo 3 information.

http://www.reddit.com/r/diablo

From one view I understand at least some of the reasons they are doing this.

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.

I fear this might make the argument for taxing virtual goods stronger. There have been some real money systems (livegamer) out there but never on such a large expected release title.

I'll be paying close attention to if this trend catches on. Blizzard is often a trailblazer in features it introduces (example: Exclamation Mark = New Quest, Question Mark = Completed Quest; Talent Trees).

Here is what I wish Blizzard would do with WoW. Instead of paying $15 a month for game playing time, they should sell you game items that represent a week of play time, so let's say $15 buys you a stack of 4 in game chips. The player can then activate those chips to extend their play time or they can trade them with other players or sell them on the auction house for in game gold. On the other end, blizzard can enable a program to buy back chips at say 70% of the original value. This gives people a legitimate avenue to "buy" items if they want, while also controlling the gold/item farming community.

There are 2 absolutely bad side effects to this:

- You must be always online, no offline mode at all. /// - Mods are expressly forbidden, no mods at all.

What a joke. No wonder this game is taking so long to release. Creating a global marketplace like this is a serious development effort. This isn't a game anymore.

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