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Comment by newman314 | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard sure could use someone like him right about now.

Diablo 3 has crazy gold hyperinflation due to bots and the real money auction is causing further havoc. It is pretty obvious that this was not well thought out prior to release.

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I disagree. I think it was well thought out, I just think it's hard to know what will happen until afterward. As for some of the values of items in Diablo III currently... I think there will be a settling period before prices reflect their true value. Supply will increase until some equilibrium is reached. When we hit some equilibrium we'll know if Blizz needs to tweak things. The gold AH, for instance, has had the overall item price tank pretty quickly over the last few weeks reaching what is now much more sane numbers IMO.

I don't think they took into account the bot farming which causes a huge disparity between normal users farming and them getting 6mil gold/hr.

There is also evidence of duping on the Asia servers already requiring a rollback so. So people are actively trying to exploit the system and there are not enough checks in place.

Blizzard is well familiar with bots and virtual economies, they do still run multi-million subscriber behemoth World Of Warcraft after all.

Just to clarify the item dupe was caught quickly and no rollback was needed, they were able to track the item that was the basis for the dupe and all the clones and remove them.

What's the equivalent of this in the real world? Forgeries? Fraud? Owning something without a license? Or is it not comparible?

Isn't valve's store idea a pretty trivial way to anchor the price of items though? It seems blizzard chose the path of ambiguity, rather than using a proven off the shelf method for controlling price.

I can't dig up a source, but Blizzard representatives have confirmed in the past that they hired economists to work on Diablo III -- this isn't something unique to Valve.

Thats a job I would love to have. Datamining and seeing the patterns, figuring out the tweaks, and seeing it affect the economy as it propogates out.

That would be one fun thing to test - and better yet, contrast with real world examples.

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