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 ...
Talk about game designers selling out badly ...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.