Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014

arstechnica.com

185 pointsfreeman478142 comments

So, I have a bit of a personal episode here I'd like to share.

I played a lot of Diablo 2, more than I care to admit, and so the launch of Diablo 3 was a really big deal to me. I pre-ordered it on day 1, I pre-installed the game weeks before launch and I read every piece of information about the game. When the game came out, I initially loved it; just an absolute pleasure to play. It was great, until I found the auction house.

Within a few days, I had enough gear to handle most everything in the game and after a week or two I had a max-leveled character of each class. What was left to do? I hit the level cap, and even though they eventually came out with a second cap, the idea of grinding made no sense when the auction house existed. The most practical thing to do was trade and that got so boring so quick :/.

The design choices that Blizzard made as a direct result of the auction house are both terrifying and a fantastic lesson for anyone in the startup world.

As a direct result of making money off of the activities of people in the game, Blizzard made the following game inhibiting decisions:

* Penalizing players for dying for longer and longer periods of time

* Limiting in-game communication systems severely

* Penalizing players for playing in groups

I could go on, but the bottom line was this: Activision put profit over gameplay and burned one of the best franchises in the history of gaming for little profit. The game was absolutely atrocious as a direct result of the goddamn auction house. It took my favorite game and turned it into a stock simulator.

What made Diablo great was the camaraderie, the lack of a driving arching focus on optimization/monetization, and an amazing community of folks. Diablo 3 tried to turn all of that into money and it sucked.

Thank god and good riddance to that rubbish auction house.

I agree with you 100% and I'm coming from a similar situation. The question is, are you going to play again once it's removed? I almost definitely won't give it another shot.

Still play D2 on occasion though.

I'm sort of done of D2, but I've found Torchlight 2 to be an excellent replacement for Diablo. No auction house, and it fixes the most annoying parts (IMHO) of D3 and D2: weak, boring bosses and weak skills, respectively.

I played a ton of D2, but I always was disappointed that, with the exception of gimmick builds which could barely make it to Nightmare, you were limited to one or two viable builds for each character. Put more than one point into Firebolt? Too bad for you.

As for D3, I almost finished my first playthrough without drinking a single health potion. Not exactly the nail-biting, walking the razor's edge gameplay I had come to expect from Diablo.

I haven't played D1/2/3 but I've played torchlight 1-2. I don't like TL2. For some reason when I play TL2 I'm very aware that the next thing I'll be doing is the thing I'm already doing. Playing the game feels pointless. Yes, I'll have better gear but the bad guys will be stronger so "so what?"

The skills I'd get for leveling up seemed pointless too. I can pick between an attack that explodes this way or that explodes that way. Maybe it'll explode and freeze the enemies for 1 second. Meh.

Maybe this is me just getting old. But I didn't feel this way about TL1.

Yeah, I avoided that feeling at first, but I think its a bit of the art style being a little too cartoonish. I know its stupid, but when I see hack and slash + cartoons I just start thinking of browser games.

In torchlight I think they needed to work a wee bit harder on differentiation of the characters and places you visit. I couldn't name one character from torchlight 2. (And I am on act 2.5)

Your second paragraph is very relevant to my feelings. "Same actions, new background" is pretty much how I felt when playing. I think I may have gotten to act 2.5, too.

I finished the game.. I wont spoil the end, but it felt very anti-climatic.

More a "Oh, I am fighting the end boss? I didnt realize..." rather than a "Oh cool! I'm about to fight the end boss! Better get ready!"

If you liked D2 You should try Path of Exile. It retains a lot of the great things from D2 while bringing some unique twists of its own, like "currency items" rather then a gold based economy and gigantic passive skill trees.

For me it wasn't the auction house that made me loathe to replay the game, it was the lack of character customization. Item choice is purely about HPS and damage reduction, with all other attributes more or less useless, and the ability to customize your skill loadout at will made it so you never invested in a consistent character. Why would you ever roll another character of a class if it's just going to be the exact same thing in the end?

No I may be unusual in this, I played a lot of D2, but never at a very high level. I would come back to it every few months or after a year of not playing it and roll a new character with some different skill tree choices and have a somewhat different experience each time. I never made it to nightmare, never had a level 99 character, but I found the game a lot of fun. D3 is just too much about the end-game for me, there's no journey.

I had a bunch of toons at level 97; the last 3 levels have the same experience requirement as the first 96, so it's a lot of work to get to 99.

The problems with D3 are manifold, but they all, at least to my mind, come back to wanting to monetize gameplay elements when they should've monetized cosmetics. It's like Blizzard/Activision took a big hit of the EA koolaid and forgot how to make good games. It didn't help that they fired all of Blizzard North back in the day...

If you ever meet a Blizzard North developer, ask them about what it was like. It's an incredible, really just incredible, story of how NOT to treat developers.

The lesson, applicable to games, startups, governance, and indeed systems engineering in general, is that systems react. You can not look at an existing system, then say "Ah, this system is doing X, so I shall do Y which will cause the result Z, and nothing else." In this case, you can't look at the D2 community, and say, "Ah ha, I shall inject this system for extracting money, and therefore it shall be exactly like the original situation except I shall be making money." The system reacts.

This is truly one of the gaping holes in human cognition, this idea that a single participant in a larger system can make a change and then model the results of that change without accounting for the reactions of all the other actors. Especially when the participant in question is by far the largest participant.

I actually disagree that the root problem is that they put "profit over gameplay". The root problem is that they made changes designed to create profit, but failed to correctly understand how the rest of the system would react. There probably is a way to "monetize" the Diablo community more successfully, but whatever that way is it's going to be something more subtle than the Auction House was.

I'd suggest looking at how Valve has monetized the hell out of Team Fortress 2 if you're trying to find a positive example. It's mind boggling what they've pulled off there, and observe that, like I said, it's a great deal more subtle than "let's just put up some payment gates!!1!". MMORPGs also provide a variety of interesting compare & contrasts, especially with the recent successes of the free-to-play models to compare to the WoW subscription/expansion model.

I'd argue the difference is how the complex ecosystems handled parasites.

On the one hand, Blizzard enabled balance-breaking monetization, and TF2 enabled costume-breaking monetization. Blizzard could've made just as much (or a lot more really) money just by enabling cosmetic rewards instead of gameplay rewards.

I feel like I quote this once a week [0] but Cory Doctorow makes a ton of great points on this and related subjects in the linked essay.

[0]http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt

It's worth nothing that Blizzard did exactly that in World of Warcraft.

One has to wonder about the plans for Hearthstone (another F2P game from Blizzard). The recent discontinuation of WoW TCG seems to make it apparent that they may be pushing Hearthstone as a replacement.

Cards Against Humanity is a really popular table-top card game, and Blizzard would be smart to be taking a hard look at emulating it. Attempting to "monetize" Hearthstone could be dangerous.

> F2P

Don't you have to buy card packs with RL money for Hearthstone to be able to play at all?

One way which would work is if you get your initial X cards free and then you have to pay for booster packs. And if you then have no way of trading cards it would work as a F2P game.

You CAN buy card packs with real money. But you can also spend 100 in-game gold (which you earn from playing the game) for a card pack. (the gold cost per pack might be off, since I'm only recalling it from having watched people play it) You also get free cards for each class when the class you're playing as "levels up" from playing matches. And you can disenchant extra cards to get dust which can be used to straight up make any card in the game.

They also monetize the game by offering an "arena" mode where you pick from 3 random heroes, then 30 sets of 3 random cards to make a deck. Lose three times and that deck is gone forever. (you only play against other people who have done the same) You can pay 100 gold to get into that mode, or a couple dollars.

So they're being pretty smart about monetizing the game.

From what I understand, the discontinuation of WoW TCG has more to do with the relationship between Cryptozoic and Blizzard. Blizzard and Cryptozoic are competing in the same space with Hex and Hearthstone, which makes for a complicated relationship.

This is so spot on. Someone asked me when we would run out of oil, my answer, "Never". "Never?!" they spat out, but look at how quickly we use it, look at how finite a resource it is, Etc. And I replied, as it gets rare, the price will go up, as the price goes up other things will be substituted, as they are substituted the demand will go down. Demand goes down and the time to exhaustion stretches out. Long tail curve, we never hit zero. It just gets so expensive that nobody uses it any more.

Systems do react, and that reaction is why you can never predict system behavior with extrapolation.

Neil Stephenson posits a more rational economic system for WoW (and presumably Diablo 3) in the novel Reamde. What is perhaps most interesting is how he deconstructs the flow of 'value' in the economy, trickling in from gold creation and trickling out with taxes and purchases. To bad Blizzard didn't read that first.

That said the notion of a 'no levels' RPG where everything is trained/earned is more like Everquest (nobody wants to go back to skinning 6,000 rabbits, trust me) but it is the place where the next big breakthrough will be made. And it will make the people who discover the recipe very wealthy indeed.

eve style?

Clearly very much inspired by Eve Online but still in the Fantasy/Roleplaying vein. One of the interesting things was a physical model of the world with actual geology such that ore and such took a lot to mine. Of course SWToR was kind of down that path and it failed miserably so it may not be possible.

I agree with you, but the energy example is flawed in that it assumes we will find alternatives that aren't very expensive. We won't run out of oil, but we may very likely run out of cheap energy.

The statement "cheap energy" is really hard to quantify (like 'largest integer') you can say "Gee Coal is really Cheap and there is tons and tons of it!" Except that coal smoke is killing people, contaminating large swaths of land etc. But at $100 a barrel you can gasify coal and make clean gas power plants cost effectively, but what is the $100 really mean? Its local currency (US Dollars) in a world economy. At a high enough price you can build nuclear plants and fast breeder reactors that eat all their own fuel. And use that energy to make long chain hydrocarbons (aka oil) out of CO2 and electrolisys of water [1]. Politically nonviable but that too is a system, what do people vote for energy and synthesize oil for plastics or a degenerating quality of life? There is some thoughts that you can run F-T reactors using concentrated solar in the desert.

But to you point of 'running out of cheap energy' what does that mean if the economy has adjusted to the cost of that energy? Look at electric cars as a prime example, sure they are expensive today but what happens 10 years from now when they are everywhere? Now $200/barrel oil, converted into electricity at a fossil fuel plant is give you the same miles per $ as burning it as gasoline used to do in your internal combustion engine.

Constant adaptation by the system to the constraints applied to it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch

Over the last 60 years global energy consumption has grown exponentially. There is a strong case to be made that rising living standards globally and global economic growth are dependent on this level of energy growth.

Nothing you said can come close to meeting anything close to this level of growth and I see no reason to believe our system is prepared for anything less than such growth without great pain.

I've read if wind, solar, and/or nuclear were subsidized even a fraction as much as oil is, they would be equally cheap. Is that way off the mark?

>The lesson, applicable to games, startups, governance, and indeed systems engineering in general, is that systems react.

A great humorous look at how systems react is: http://www.amazon.com/The-Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide/dp/0...

I found it very insightful, and very relevant to software engineering, too.

> This is truly one of the gaping holes in human cognition, this idea that a single participant in a larger system can make a change and then model the results of that change without accounting for the reactions of all the other actors

The parent's sentiment may be a tired old theme in the context of a game company that produces a long-awaited sequel to a much-beloved classic, meddles too much with the winning formula, and ends up killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, but I feel that this idea needs more airtime in politics.

The best, surest way to get a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works and make a series of many incremental changes.

This should be a fundamental axiom in politics -- that anything you do, from creating a top-secret surveillance agency, to sweeping healthcare reform, to the war on drugs, to the legalization of gay marriage, is not guaranteed to have the effect its creators intended, at the magnitude they intended, without any other potentially larger effects, some of which may range from undesirable to catastrophic.

Therefore, when possible small and simple changes should be made, and we should think twice before proposing complex changes, and ponder three times again before implementing them. It's the only possible way to avoid getting buried under a relentless onslaught of unexpected consequences.

Not enough people are even talking about this idea. AFAICT it's neither conservative nor liberal nor libertarian; it's literally conservative in the sense of "we don't understand the problem space very well outside the status quo, so let's take care not to get too far away from the familiar in case we fall into a hole we can't climb back out of." Imagine a decades-old project which gets dozens to hundreds of commits a year, but whose authors always reject any commits smaller than 1000 lines of code. What's surprising isn't that it contains bugs, what's surprising is that the end result does anything resembling what it's supposed to.

> The best, surest way to get a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works and make a series of many incremental changes.

Shades of Gall's Law from Systemantics:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. – John Gall (1975, p.71)

This problem is often seen in politics.

> There probably is a way to "monetize" the Diablo community more successfully

I think this is a solved problem: Player contributed Hats.

Alas, if only you had read as far as the next sentence....

I did. Was just pointing it out as "THE" solution (rather than "A" solution), for all things. In an attempt to be slightly absurd, and slightly humorous.

Seems I failed at that.

I unsubscribed myself from all Blizzard game After the D3 fiasco. Blizzard is no longer the same company it once was. There are so many issues but I think it ultimately boil down to treating their customers as drug addicts rather than intelligent human beings. The worst offenders being dumb down game mechanics to cater to the lowest common denominator, WoW daily quests, always online DRM and of course the D3 AH.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

D2 was just complex enough to be extremely interesting. The incredible diversity in skills, items and stats allowed an immense variety of viable builds, leaving players to hunt for specific legendary items which totally changed the gameplay experience (teleporting barbarians, whirlwhind assassins, etc etc).

D3 is the complete antithesis to this design philosophy. Everything was made so simple that there is zero depth. Gameplay is not altered by any acquired items. Your character's strength increases linearly as a value of a few stats. Boring, repetitive, and linear.

The failure of D3 was that it failed to capitalize on what D2 got right, and also failed to invent anything to replace that massive loss.

Tying ability damage to weapon DPS was the worst mistake they made, in my opinion. Not only did it make zero sense but also made all character classes feel the same in terms of itemization.

It also did a pretty good job crippling the Barbarian at higher levels.

You do realize, and I don't know if this is still true, but at one time the barbarians were, by far, the dominant class in D3? They do ungodly amounts of damage and they're super Tanky. There's an 8 second Azmodan kill on Inferno by a Barb.

Just saying, the barbs were actually imbalanced horribly.

Didn't help that every level 60 demon hunter is literally identical except gear. I can take your guy and put on my gear and continue where I left off.

Please don't associate the diversity of builds with the difficulty in changing builds. You have plenty of choices for spec in D3.

Yes, you have maxed DPS + maxed DR and a skill loadout you change on the fly as well as.... wait what were the other builds again?

This whole "casual gamer" centered design is what became the plague of modern gaming.

But I remember the pre-expansion Diablo 1, and it was _sucky_ to be gentle. All the good stuff including runes, higher level uniques (remember there wasn't any uniques in nightmare & hell), runewords, hammerdins (argh!) came much-much later. So I am saving myself for the expansion, I am done with this one.

You mean the pre-expansion Diablo 2, I agree. I'll give it another shot when the expansion is released. I played D2 for 10+ years... waited for this piece of crap to be released.

I think now, there's hope.

I agree with this. I also believe removing the AH doesn't solve the problems with D3. It's D3's item/stat/skill systems that lead to the issues with the AH. Everyone was desiring the same items (using their class's 1 OP build).

In lieu of no Auction House the game will definitely need named-games or some sort of trading post where people bid on items with their own items. I hope they understand that Diablo was always about trading too, not BoA like WoW. We will see I guess! Good luck Blizz :)

> Limiting in-game communication systems severely

I haven't played either game. Was this just done because they didn't have enough time to make it better?

> Penalizing players for playing in groups

How did they accomplish this? How was it better in D2?

Playing in groups initially increased the difficulty to the point of near impossibility in the end-game, with little to no extra reward.

I played Diablo 1 and 2 for many years, and pre-ordered Diablo 3 like you. I ended up playing for a few weeks and haven't touched it since for the following reasons:

The auction systems - didn't like them for the exact reason the linked article states. There was no "fun" in trying to get gear in the actual game anymore. I used to enjoy "Magic Finding" to gear new characters.

Only 4 people per game (versus 8 in Diablo 2) - At launch, myself and the 5-6 people I played D2 with all wanted to play together and simply couldn't. I suspect this to be related to the fact they planned to release it on consoles from the start. Unrelated to this complaint, but I also found the interface to be suspiciously optimized for console controls instead of keyboard and mouse.

"Matchmaking" - Part of the fun of D1 and D2 (in my opinion) was joining player created games (with names specified by the players). PvP games, trade games, chat games, hide and seek, specific quests, magic finding, levelling, boss runs etc. In Diablo 3 this was taken away. You were just thrown into a game with people on the same quest as you. To me this destroyed a significant part of the community that kept people playing D2 as long as they did. In the time I played after launch it was difficult to get in a game with anyone willing to communicate, or who actually spoke the same language.

Fewer skills/choices in placing attributes - Self-explanatory. D3 dumbed down the process of "building" your character to the point where no matter what you do you'll have a viable build. No more creating a character around a specific skill or item you like just to see if you could optimize it despite the disadvantage of it not being a mainstream build.

No PvP at launch - Again, self-explanatory. No idea if this was patched in at some point.

I agree with your experience, but I disagree with your conclusions re: cause and effect. Specifically:

* Penalizing players for dying for longer and longer periods of time

* Penalizing players for playing in groups

I suspect these were simply misguided design decisions aimed at making the game "challenging". Difficulty was entirely out of whack at launch across the entire game (yes, partly because the developers vastly underestimated the effect of the AH), and I suspect this was simply part of it.

* Limiting in-game communication systems severely

I have no way to prove it, but I'm almost certain this was a result of some bizarre political battle inside Blizzard. Battle.net 2.0 came out with Starcraft 2 with the same boneheaded decisions - no chat rooms, the RealID fiasco, etc. - and Diablo 3 simply inherited that mess. There HAVE to be people inside Blizzard who understand why players might find chat rooms valuable, but for some reason they never made themselves heard. I don't think this has much to do with the AH.

There have been public complaints from Blizzard employees about Battle.net. Community managers and developers both have stated that improvements to Battle.net are far harder to push through than changes to the games proper. Why exactly this is, I'm not sure. My guess would be that it's either seriously understaffed or drowning in bureaucracy.

I can see it being more difficult to modify, since it powers all Blizzard games. That also raises another option - it's a technical mess that no one wants to touch...

>> it powers all Blizzard games

I could see that forcing a proper test cycle to take longer than implementing a change.

I'd bet it's drowning in bureaucracy for a reason — Battle.net is a common component in virtually everything the company creates, so any change to it will impact a lot of people's work in unforeseen ways.

Well, still (or perhaps even more so) - if they considered something like chat rooms to be as essential as many users feel, it would have been easier to implement earlier rather than later, when there are more products to support.

Then again, something like chat rooms could be implemented per game, minimizing impact on the entire battle.net system.

It just wasn't seen as a priority, or there wasn't the political will to push it through, or there's something else we don't know.

I remember the endless complaints about how hard Diablo 3 was at launch. I therefore find it hard to believe you were able to accumulate enough ingame gold to buy gear 'within a few days' that allowed you to handle 'most everything', except by buying gold. In games like Diablo, buying ingame items or currency is roughly analogous to shooting yourself in the foot with a cannon, because you effectively remove the end-game for yourself.

I wish people like you would stop judging the game by its version 1.0.0, rather than the 1.0.8 we're at now. People are no longer penalized longer and longer for dying and playing in groups is now actively rewarded.

I would quite seriously invite you to give the game a second try. Diablo 3 is by no means a perfect game (for example, public game discovery is still abysmal, and ingame communication is practically non-existent), but it has improved a lot since it came out, in many small but significant ways. I fully expect that the expansion will further improve the game, as indeed it did for Diablo 2.

So...

In 2 days, I was in Inferno. That was not the intention of the game designers. I never bought ingame currency, but I know the laws of supply and demand and dealt with the game accordingly. If you're telling me that I should've just pretended the AH didn't exist, I would say that you're telling me not to play D3.

I wish people like you would stop telling me how to feel. I don't think you have some superposition that lets you judge me and I wish you'd separate me from my opinions. I am a person, I have opinions, but when you say "people like me" you lump me into a general audience and I don't think that's ok. I don't speak for anyone other than myself.

I would quite seriously invite you to consider that I invested a lot of time into D3 and played through a number of updates. I know exactly what I wanted out of a D3 experience and I can tell you in excruciating detail how it failed; this isn't the time or place for that.

The fact is, it took almost a decade for the game to come out, why the fuck did it have to ship as an unplayable pile of crap?

Sorry, I'm not trying to be offensive, but you're asking for patience when, as a consumer, I've been basically told that my investment in the game isn't enough for Blizzard: they need to make money off of my invested hours as well. I'm happy that Blizzard is improving the game but I'm not willing to give them any more of my time after what I view as a waste of my time.

It's true Diablo games improve over time, but wow was D3 a steaming pile of garbage when it launched. I mean if they had just implemented D2 with new graphics and content, it would've been glorious.

Anyways, I'm sorry to rant, but the crux of my point is that you can't attack me personally for my opinions and expect to have a good discussion. I concede the point that Blizzard might be getting better, but it also doesn't matter, for me.

Diablo 3 wasn't hard at launch. It was so trivially easy that the first run through the game was considered the 'tutorial level' - the entire game was considered tutorial.

I played at a friend's place and was utterly bored by how easy that first run-through was. I don't understand complaints of difficulty, though admittedly I abandoned the entire mindspace of D3 just because it was so mindbogglingly easy. Why would I play the entire game on 'super-easy' just to play it again on 'normal'?

have you actually played Inferno difficulty pre-1.03?! it was just downright frustrating because everything after Act 2 one-shots your character!

No, because to get to that level of difficulty, you have to run through the game on 'stupid dumb easy' first.

I don't really understand complaints of difficulty when you've already experienced the game several times, and then when you pick the 'really, this is crazily hard' setting, it's too hard.

Yeah, the first three difficulties were really easy. Inferno was like a wall that you run into the first time you try it. I remember kicking Diablo's ass in Hell difficulty and then replaying Act 1 but in Inferno. Came across the first zombie in New Tristram and promptly died in two hits.

Does that make the game "good"? That they created an impossible gear wall in Inferno Act 2 that only certain classes could get past? The game creators admitted to never even playing the game on inferno difficulty pre launch. It's just more of the same.

Well, this game is super dumb and easy... let just crank the last 3 acts by 2000% to make up for it.

I haven't played since 1.02 (?), in which I was mopping the floor with standard mobs in Inferno Act 1, but couldn't kill any special mobs at all (in my memory they all seemed to have molten, arcane, fire-chains and vortex modifiers)

yup, that was the main point of frustration with Inferno.

white mobs were easy to deal with but Elite packs had disgusting affixes.

And then after grinding Act 1 (remember Butcher runs? lol) for about a month, you finally gear up enough to be able to easily kill Act 1 Elite packs.

Then you get to Act 2 and find yourself getting one-shotted by those stupid wasps (and we're not talking about Elite variety, these were just the regular wasps).

> I wish people like you would stop judging the game by its version 1.0.0, rather than the 1.0.8 we're at now.

Are we giving up on the idea that a product that people pay for should be good when it's released?

Why shouldn't we judge it buy the game we bought. This game took 10 years to make. It's not like they didn't have enough time to get it right.

I played for a bit, not as much as you. Couldn't they have made items "bind on equip" and/or "bind on pickup" similar to WoW instead of dropping the AH all together? Seems like dropping the AH will just create 3rd party marketplaces and trading instead.

A problem with that solution is that the loot system was so garbage that you could likely go through multiple playthroughs without finding a single decent item for your character. At least when I played, most uniques were completely inferior to highly rolled magic items from the end game.

It was basically at the point where your only real choice end game was to grind gold to buy items, it wasn't even worth it to try to search for items.

I had the idea of limited-transfer items. For example, an item can be bound to three characters; once the third character picks it up, it's non-transferable. This would let me give my friend the bow I don't need, or even sell something once, but items wouldn't be infinitely fungible any more.

"bind on equip" and "bind on pickup" are terrible ideas for games like Diablo. Trading with friends, strangers or your own characters is part of the fun.

I had the same experience. I played the beta like 2000 times before the released gamme. The game until patch 1.03 was totally hard to play and it was rewarding to play bacause you could die. But after this patch they've made all the "so hard difficulty" inferno totally easy. Then, they added a 5th level of difficulty and just because they've broke the initial one and so on. Now ppl farm MP 10 with ease.

This news proves many things. One of them is a different game direction. Yes… no more Jay Wilson scourge.

The idea of grinding doesn't make sense period.

It does if the rewards aren't monetizable because of their ability to break the game. People grind for hats in TF2 all day, and by getting a hat you don't break the game. The problem is when you reward people with things that break the game.

Don't break the game for profit; simple, no?

"...just an absolute pleasure to play."

So you're saying that you actually haven't played past Act 2 in Inferno difficulty pre-1.03 patch

How do you know that Blizzard's reasons for making the "game inhibiting decisions" you list are a result of their desire to monetize with the RMAH?

People occasionally wonder why I'm so into indie games these days, even the ugly ones and the pretentiously arty ones and the three-minute-long ones.

It seems to me that that indies are passionate about making games. They don't always have the skill or resources to reach their potential, but you can feel that passion even in something banged together for a 24-hour jam. It's refreshing.

The big studios, or at least the people who call the shots at the big studios, are passionate about making money, and they're not a bit shy about throwing out great gameplay for more money. Every "monetization" decision beyond "here's our game, it costs $umpty" is an exercise in making your game worse on purpose and then charging to bring it back up to baseline. Occasionally, these decisions are made with enough care and subtlety that the overall experience remains almost as good as it could've been...but not usually.

I don't understand how so many of these top-tier organizations miss the simple axiom of truth; build a great product.

I like the way Tei from Rock Paper Shotgun forums put it:

"Diablo 3 is not PvP or PvE, it's PvAH."

I also loved Diablo 1 and 2, but did not like the gameplay of Diablo 3 at all as it felt too simplistic. The thing I was worried about, however, was seeing the auction house being successful and this kind of nonsense becoming mainstream. It is bad enough we have day 1 DLC, special preorder offers which give overpowered items, and special currencies which buy the best items. But being able to simply throw money at a game to be good at it? What is the point in playing the game? Players should have to play the game and be good at it to earn/unlock items and achievements and this experiment shows that players don't want to be able to rush themselves through it because it is the experience that counts, not the end goal.

The prevailing opinion is that the AH killed the fun of hunting for rare drops, and it should be abandoned.

Over time, I've found games that involve grinding for rare drops resembling more and more the psychology of slot machines.[1]

It's hard for me to be sympathetic to people who claim the fun thing is now too easy, because it doesn't involve as much mind-numbing work. If your game only works with a slot machine mechanic, maybe it has other design issues?

Also relevant: [2].

[1] http://99percentinvisible.prx.org/2013/04/29/78-no-armed-ban...

[2] http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/31 (There may be one that's more on point...)

The Skinner Box is a well-known and understood psychological data point. The problem is that if you undercut the joy of pressing the reward button, all the reinforcement conditioning goes into teaching your audience that your game is Not Fun, rather than teaching them that "just one more run" will grant them the thing they want.

The problem with the AH and its accompanying miniscule drop rates is that it quantified things too solidly. You can't do "just one more run" with the hope of getting your item. You know that your chances of getting your item on your own are virtually nil, and you can calculate that you need to do 634 more runs to earn the currency needed to buy the item you're looking for.

People get addicted to gambling because of the endorphin rush you get when you win big. Blizzard killed the "win big" and reduced it to going to a 9-5 job to earn a paycheck to eventually buy that big screen TV you want.

Wow, this is a surprising reversal of trends as far as user generated content and micro-transaction based economies go, but the auction house really did change the core mechanics of Diablo 3.

As a player I really did kind of like the auction system during the initial grind from level 1 to 60, but when there was no more level progression and the only progression was item progression, it just stopped being fun because the only purpose of playing was to kill things for the best drops that you could sell on the auction house. There was no longer a use for almost everything that dropped.

The auction house mechanic might work on a MMO style game, but Diablo 3 isn't a MMO and the auction house broke the one mechanic that made the game a lot of fun - random loot drops.

It's treasure hunting basically. Auction house turns treasure hunting into a job, and thus it's less fun after a while.

This is a good lesson for game designers. The treasure hunting random loot mechanic works only if it can't be short circuited. The moment you can "buy" treasure, it's no longer treasure, it's a commodity and collecting commodities is a job, not a game.

Treasure hunting is a game.

> the only purpose of playing was to kill things for the best drops

which is not different from what people were doing on Diablo II for ages.

You truncated what he said. He qualified it with "that you could sell on the auction house", which is exceptionally important.

Grinding bosses for drops to build the character that you want offers great direct feedback - you kill the boss 84 times, and he finally drops the thing you've been looking for. The reward is tangible and exciting. Compare to the AH structure, where it's basically "well, I'll grind for things that might sell, and then hope they sell well enough that I can save up for that thing I need which I know will never actually drop for me". The direct feedback and chance for excitement is practically gone, because the things that you are actually excited for come from the auction house rather than the gameplay.

>you kill the boss 84 times, and he finally drops the thing you've been looking for. The reward is tangible and exciting.

It feels exciting. Grinding the same boss 84 times. Where do I sign up?

That's loot grinders. If you don't like grinding for loot, then the genre probably isn't for you.

Except that at least Diablo 1+2 were for everyone. I remember playing those for the story and the gameplay. The loot and levelling were a means to an end for me - finishing the game.

The whole repeating the game again on harder difficulties, requiring better loot and grinding was very much an added bonus.

Diablo 3 decided to throw those who were there for the gameplay and story out the window, and was purely targeted at the grind. I finished the game in 2 days and still had half my characters skills left to unlock. What kind of RPG is that?

The Action RPG genre used to be about more than JUST loot grinding. It used to be about so much more, that welcomed players who were looking for all sorts from the game. Some people liked fast twitchy action mechanics, some liked the RPG story elements, some liked endlessly tweaking character builds and some liked loot grinding. But Diablo 3 is almost entirely focused on the last, with little room for the rest.

Well, it's also worth noting that the presence of the auction house necessitated that drop rates for good stuff be depressed, as well, since the increased ease of trade means that the effective supply is higher. The effect of this, of course, is that the average player never sees the really good gear in the course of play - if you want good gear, you have to go buy it. Not only is the treasure hunting mechanic short-circuited, it's actually retarded by the presence of the AH -- most folks I know (myself included) quit playing D3 when they figured this out.

The other factor exacerbating this was the gear design in D3 - they drastically boiled down the potential combinations of gear by reducing the number of potential stats on items and baking everything relevant to the character's viability into the gear (rather than using a character progression path independent of gearing), so that while in other loot grinders a piece of loot may be useful but not perfect, in D3, there's basically "has everything I need" and "not useful at all". When you combine this binary gear usefulness with deflated drop rates, you end up with a situation in which most players feel that actually trying to play the game as a treasure hunt is an exercise in futility.

But the thing is there is still a trading economy in the game. It will still exist, it's now just unofficial. In diablo 2 you traded items by joining chat rooms and spamming your wares or joining message boards. You then traded by arranging a game together and trading in person.

They are just removing the convenience now.

Actually no; when they made the auction house they reduced the quality of items that dropped. This is evident in the console versions, which have vastly different "loot tables" and no auction house. So they didn't just make it convenient for players, they tailored the items that drop around the fact that anyone could sell and buy items.

For the small group of players that always did trading that's probably a good thing, but for the vast majority that want the game to be Diablo and not the auction house it was a pretty bad change to the core game.

As a new player, I really liked the AH: Every single thing that dropped for me was either completely useless, or orders of magnitude worse than what people were throwing away on the AH for a pittance. (Sub-optimal stats went for cheap.) So, I could basically always find something that would be a significant upgrade every few levels.

If I had actually been seeing drops that were any good (due to a non-depressed drop rate), I'd have not felt the need for it ... but using the AH basically quadrupled my character's effectiveness. Using it was definitely part of "playing the game".

It made leveling great: You can freely vendor/DE almost everything you pick up if you want, and use the cash to buy things on the AH. Profit! At the end game, though, I can absolutely understand why that would kill the fun.

> The auction house mechanic might work on a MMO style game, but Diablo 3 isn't a MMO

What's the meaningful difference? I mean, what specifically makes auction house work in an MMO, but not a game like Diablo?

I thought auction house as a feature either works, if done right, or it doesn't. I thought auction house as an idea is great, and now this... I haven't played Diablo 3 yet; I played a little World of Warcraft back in the day and I liked the way I can sell unneeded gear and buy exactly what's right for me instead (buth some pretty cool items are Soulbound and cannot be sold!). I thought an auction house in a game like original online Magic the Gathering is pretty fabulous: auctions there are full of player-run trade bots which are tolerated by administration, and all this in a game that didn't start out with game currency to begin with (they appropriated tournament tickets as a de facto game currency). I can't play the game itself, unfortunately: interface is just too clunky for me.

D3 is all about the (tradeable) loot. The AH works in WoW because everything sellable was also consumable, and the most desirable items couldn't be sold. To get the best stuff in WoW, you play the game. To get the best stuff in D3, you pull out your wallet.

Imagine how WoW would have been if good items only dropped from dungeon bosses once per 1200 runs, but were sellable on the AH. Once you've been through the dungeon once to experience it, why would you ever go back, rather than just purchasing some gold?

While I broadly speaking applaud this move, I do feel a little bit like the guys from blizzard need to eat just a little bit of humble pie.

'this is really exciting for us'?

really?

how about, 'we're really sorry we took a franchise you loved and set fire to it, and are now really concerned about the viability of the expansion we're making'

Too late; I'll play torchlight thanks.

You have a nice diablo romp over there. You've lost my support; I no longer have confidence the team on diablo 3 can deliver a game I actually want to play.

Thanks for putting it way better then I could have. Substituting Torchlight for PoE

The AH wasn't really the problem for D3. The problem was the basic stat balance issues created huge lottery items.

At launch for a Monk basically there were a handful of god stats (attack speed, life on hit, dex, all resist, your specific resist, magic find), a handful of ok stats and a large number of garbage stats. Now even a good stat can be worthless because of the large value ranges.

Back of the envelop numbers: say god stats are a 10, ok stats are 4 and dump stats are 2's. Now the MEDIAN item is (roughly) 1% of one with an avg amount of ideal stats (ideal stats with all high end values might be 30 times better).

And this is different to D2? D2 was even worse, with the amount of time you needed to spend to get that perfect item.

To me the itemization was far and away better in D2. A decade of MMO popularity may have changed player expectations as well. And yes, circling back to the linked article, the AH exposes the poor itemization in a way that D2 didn't have so even if D3 itemization is the same as D2 it needed to be better.

Official annoucement here : http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/ but i felt ars added some useful context and commentary.

Finally. This was the absolute worst aspect of DIII. It completely ruined the gearing up aspect of the game. Loot drops were tuned down because of it, so how did everyone get gear? They bought it. Lame.

The new direction of this game looks really good. These kind of changes make me want to play the xpac. I had previously sworn off the game entirely.

ditto. I even asked for (and received) a refund as I was quite irate that the game mechanics had obviously been tuned with something other than fun as the top priority. This makes me think of giving it another go. I was hoping stuff like this would start happening after they broke away from their parent.

Great move. I remember the first time I stopped by the auction house and bought some powerful gems for my level 20 character. I'd been collecting crappy gems planning to upgrade them, but then for a pittance of gold I had suddenly (almost accidentally) twinked my character with gems with huge stat bonuses and no level requirements. I tried to swear off the auction house after that, but the psychological damage was done, and I never played Diablo 3 after the first time I beat normal difficulty. (To be fair, I might just have been in a different stage of my life than when I was a Diablo 2 addict in high school.)

I'm sure this will become a seminal case study for online game design in the future.

Fuck Blizzard. I will never forgive them for the cashgrab they called D3 I don't care how they change it.

How is this attitude rational?

I can't understand how people react like this. Is it left over anger from when the situation was in the undesirable configuration? Can they not see how their opinions have had an influence in something they're passionate about?

I can't see how someone who wanted this to happen would consider Blizzard to be still in the wrong.

Because they already made all of their money from it in the first place. Now they are pretending they give a shit in order to try to get more money from people.

They showed their true colors when they destroyed my favorite franchise of all time. I will never give them another cent.

What makes you say that greed is their "true colors" when this could be their true colors, finally shining through when the changes they were forced to make for D3 didn't pan out like the money-grubbing overlords wanted?

I just don't see how you can claim one completely fabricated story is true but the other isn't.

Why should it be rational? Who cares if you understand it or not? Frankly, no one has to.

Fact is people do end up feeling that way, and it costs sales. Worse still, it costs loyalty. So know it exists, the accept it as a reality to deal with.

Lastly, ever had a boy/girl friend who cheated? Were you still interested after the other person was dropped? Did all return to normal? Is that rational?

Some people are still human, with human emotions, and no, they are not rational.

Because I'm not talking about any of the things you're talking about, I'm talking specifically about why a person thinks that.

You say it doesn't matter and "who cares", but I asked the question, so obviously I care.

I was among the many D2 fans that felt let down by Diablo 3. I never went so far as to grab a pitchfork like some other people, but the auction house really sucked the fun out of the game.

Honestly, I'm very proud of Blizzard for making this decision. I never expected them to do something this drastic, but ultimately, it is what is best for the game.

"March 2014" WHAT! They should have done that immediately!

Without a loot reset, it would likely leave much of the playerbase feeling like they've been hung out to dry. Coupling it to the expansion is the right move here.

This is the right thing to do, from my perspective. The AHs killed the fun of finding items for me, because there was always something way better you could buy for just a tiny amount of money. This could restore the game to the feeling it is meant to have.

Best news ever. I wrote extensively on the spanish forums about how bad the game was with the RMAH and the AH itself. They claimed many things like "good economy" and nice balance between real money and virtual, but it was all a lie. In fact, the same became dull really fast.

This is a wonderful news for the Diablo fans, who really love to trade char by char, using items. Diablo is that, an itemfinder game, trade items for items, not for realmoney. But well, you can sell them outside the game anyways, people did it even with the current AH.

I was able to get through the game relatively quickly with items purchased on the auction house. Afterwards my friends and I were glad we were done with the addiction of 'chasing' the next level/item.

If they could make a larger more satisfying endgame, possibly large PvP areas where guilds can fight for territory, claim land, place houses/structures, I'd be happy to grind.

But endlessly chasing a carot on a stick? I'm glad the auction house 'ruined' the 'game' for me..

Too little too late. The only thing that can redeem D3 in my eyes is the removal of always online requirement. With AH gone there is absolutely no excuse for it to be present.

This sounds like a great idea and should make the game a lot more rewarding. For one, it will make crafting useful instead of a waste of money.

It doesn't matter at this point. They've milked it. Gold per dollar has dropped so far it's hard to sell anything except the very best. By the time march rolls around they'll have squeezed everything they could from it. At launch people where busying 'average' items for ~$100+. Now, unless it's best in slot it won't sell

A good decision terribly too late. The cash cow is dead and they're not going to bring it back and unsoil the franchise.

Reduce search by stats flexibility of the AH. Allow only one item per account. Make custom games with custom names available and browsable. Make chat channels relevant by placing everyone in one and having it take a lot of the screen estate.

You can still have the AH for one-off items, but reduce the volume by a large margin.

>Reduce search by stats flexibility of the AH.

Why would you intentionally cripple your UI unless you just wanted to frustrate your users?

All this will do is make users use external auction houses. As long as they keep in-game trading of rare and legendary items, people will just take it to eBay or some other site, and then arrange the swap in-game.

It makes it less instant gratification, but won't stop the buying of items.

Which is fine, IMO. Removing the AH as a crux of gameplay design is the important thing here. Trade isn't inherently bad, but building the entire game around trade (and more specifically, trying to build the game around incentivizing people to trade through your system for real currency of which you get a cut) is a really crappy thing to do to a loot grinder.

Do you have any sources which confirm that Blizzard built the game around AH monetization? I see this claim made frequently, but I've never actually seen anything that wasn't pure speculation.

They've never explicitly said "Yeah, we built to game to try to juice as much out of you through the RMAH" if that's what you're asking. It's pretty clear if you actually played the game, though. The game was tuned, both in terms of difficulty and drops, with the expectation that the player would be using the AH[1], and Blizzard built the RMAH in order to attempt to capitalize upon the sales that previously happened through D2JSP or whatnot.

It's exceptionally clear that Blizzard's idea was to control scarcity of desirable items so that people were incentivized to buy and sell these most desirable items for real money, giving Blizzard their 15% cut on every sale. We have a scenario in which the same entity that brokers sales (for a fee!) is the same entity that (arbitrarily) controls the production of items sold -- it doesn't take an MBA to connect the dots there.

No, I can't prove any of this. I would be exceptionally surprised if anyone could. But companies of Blizzard's scale don't do things like a real-money marketplace (from which they take broker's fees) just because "the community demands it" - that absolutely was the monetization strategy for the game. People don't pay a subscription fee, or purchase microtransaction items in the traditional sense. How else are you going to monetize it?

(They had a similar monetization strategy for Starcraft 2, IIRC. Something about a marketplace for community-created content that, again, they would take a cut of. Let the players do the work, take a cut of it. I don't play SC2, so I'm not sure how this shook out.)

[1] http://i48.tinypic.com/2cwsg3q.png (sorry, original thread is now gone)

Blizzard monetized the game by selling it for $60 a copy.

That image you linked shows that the drop rates for items take into account the existence of the auction house. That sounds like a purely game balance decision. I.e., it would still be true even if only the gold auction house existed.

I never got all the outrage over the existence of the auction houses. In Diablo 2 you'd grind for hours looking for good drops and then have to spam chat rooms and trade with people. In Diablo 3 you'd do the same grinding but just for gold, and then you buy what you need on the auction house with that gold. What's the difference? (Other than in Diablo 3, once you're done grinding its much easier to get what you want.)

I don't think they really feel the need to completely stop the buying of good items. They just want to decrease their availability so that most players can experience the fun of finding items themselves.

I don't know why you're being down voted as that's the direct response to come out of the hardcore player-base.

Spamming will grow and third-party sites will flourish.

This is a good and smart move, but it's only one step towards fixing the nature of the game.

I'm curious as someone who has never played the game: What else do they need to fix? I've only heard complaints about the auction house

The game is always-online, even for single player or local LAN. Which means you can get lag-killed in single player, or the server is full (which happened at launch) so you can't play your single player game. The game also kicks you out if you lose your connection while you're playing.

Also, the gear progression is very linear. On every gear slot you are looking for the same affixes.

Affixes?

postfix, prefix. Gear gets a randomly generated name based on what special properties it has. So the red club of the owl is a club that has added fire damage(has red prefix) and a health bonus(has owl suffix)(or something I only play diablo causally so I don't know the affixes off hand.)

One of my favourite complains is rooted in the lightning and colour palette choices of D3 when comparing to D2.

http://www.diablowiki.net/Art_controversy

Wow, hats off to Blizzard for recognizing that the auction house was undermining the overall experience. Obviously this doesn't stop people from trading in-person, but Diablo 2 had it right and I'm pleased to see they went back to that route.

A reasonable direction go to would be:

1. reduce the range of gear power, make the average gear drop 80-90% of the maximum roll for the piece.

2. make the best pieces account bound and available in the ladder season.

This would encourage replayability of the game and remove the need to spam AH.

they already sucked the money out of it (what little there was). And hoping making this change will get users back. Too late, Blizzard.

I see what they say are the reasons for closing it down.. But here is what I am hearing between the lines:

"So guys, we are closing down the auction house! We are not really breaking even anymore between the cost of running the auction house (servers, maintenance, etc) and the profits we get from sold items so we are closing it down and hiding it behind a smokescreen of 'we are totally doing it for the player, lol'. Oh yeah, its still always online so lulz I guess. Please buy our expansion!"

Seems like there will be a huge divide between pre-auction house characters and post.

Is there any sort of PvP in the game?

Why? With the implementation of "loot 2.0" you will catch up to "paid for" characters by, you know, actually finding good gear that you can use. This change (as well as others they have planned) works because they are overhauling the loot system.

Are you really going to just jump on the "loot 2.0" bandwagon assuming they will right all previous wrongs. I can almost guarantee this expansion will be just another money grab.

I'm not assuming anything; I'm just going by what the new lead has been saying. Like everyone else, I'll wait and see. However, it really does seen like they're (finally) listening.

so many kids will become unemployed in China... those poor poor item farmers... won't someone think of the children!

Maybe we'll finally move back to SoJ currency, like it's supposed to be.

It's truly the gold standard, if alchemy worked.

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