Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details (opens in new tab)

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.

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'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 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.

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 :)

>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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

SOJs?

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

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

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

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.