[coffeeaddicted]

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 ...

[cube13]

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.

[alnayyir]

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.

[cube13]

>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.

[alnayyir]

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

[rexf]

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.

[coffeeaddicted]

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.

[sukuriant]

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?

[coffeeaddicted]

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.

[sukuriant]

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.

[coffeeaddicted]

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.

[rexf]

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.

[ja2ke]

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