[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.

[rictic]

Blizzard has said that PvP in Diablo 3 is explicitly a lark. It will be given no priority for balance. The game is the PvE experience.