Diablo 3 - Reaper of Souls

So guess it's time to get the rest of the classes to 60, spend about 50m gold to get budget mp4-7 sets and then shelve the game until RoS and loot 2.0

I hope they bring back a lobby type system like they had in D2 with the expansion but I highly doubt it.

If they really want to win people over just add offline mode and allow modding.

Wow this is unexpected.

You can't not be impressed by this announcement, even if you don't give a shit about d3 (me). They voluntarily decided to remove a feature which made them absurd amounts of money, and would continue doing so as long as the game was running. It must have been one hell of a developer/corporate meeting. Did a Dev catch a high up blizzard exec blowing a kid or something and blackmailed him? This is unheard of

The AH was a problem, definitely. Let's not kid ourselves and pretend the AH only became a problem because of shit itemization. It became MORE of a problem because of shit itemization, but even the Diablo team have stated that the reason certain items never got the "oomph" they needed was because of the AH. That, coupled with the fact that grinding and running bosses over and over again like you used to in D2 were still not as efficient as just farming the gold and buying the item. And we're not even talking, "Path of Least Resistance" shit, we're talking "Holy fuck I have been at this for a week and I haven't seen a single legendary that is at all worthwhile and holy shit, look at that thing on the AH, you have got to be kidding me."

The AH needed to go, and it was plain to see. It's depressing that this is actually a morale boost; like I WANT to play now because it's no longer looming over my head, curving the design paths of the team etc.

My only sadness is that they aren't removing it now. =(

I am also looking forward to the potential that if a legendary quiver drops it might not have bonuses for witch doctors on it.

The AH is stupid, it completely annihilates the economy, period. Nobody wants that. Well, nobody should want that. Except people are lazy and want to face roll everything with 1 click of the "Buy it now" button.

Those people shouldn't be playing Diablo in the first place heh

Just to give some kind of idea how Loot 2.0 may work based off the console version (I know they have said it will be similar, but different):

I got it on PS3 a few days ago and am level 45 in Act 3 on NM. In the time I've played (on varying difficulty levels, depends on if i'm solo/group/etc) I have come across probably 20 legendaries. As a Barbarian, all but 1 had Strength on it (the other had STR, but it also had more INT, so not acompletewaste. Plus, it really is from all tiers. I haven't seen anything like a level 20 Echoing Fury or anything like that, but I've gotten a level 40 something version of an item that D3's site says is meant for Level 9. I've gotten the same legendary mighty belt 3 times, just at different levels, and with better stats each time. It's not to the point of where its trivializing the game because if it gets too easy, you can just hop out and make the difficulty harder.

By contrast, on PC I had been farming various acts on anywhere from MP4-7 on a Paragon 40-something Barbarian previous to getting the console version, and running around with a full 5 stacks of Valor and clearing the prime farm spots, I had found probably 10-15 Legendaries in the past few weeks, and all of them were complete shit.

Mist_sl said:

I really doubt the margins on the RMAH made them absurd amounts of anything. Many people have done very realistic mathematical approximations and there's no way it was particularly profitable for Blizzard after the initial buy in.

They did a cost/benefit analysis and came to the conclusion that more people might actually buy the expac if they advertised this as a major feature. Blizzard is always going to make the largest share of their money on box sales.

I still think this is bad. This is like the United States saying "Well, the Fed/SEC suck at their jobs, so we're just going to go back to the barter system." This also hands the economy over to criminals and scammers. The economy doesn't just go away because they choose to close down the legitimate markets.

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Yea I definitely agree with you here. It's funny reading some posts around the net praising Blizzard for throwing away their revenue to make the game better when I'm sure the numbers were crunched and they realized that they would make more money if they removed the auction house as a feature. It's definitely all about box sales, I think the rmah makes them very little money especially with the population being what it is.

The funny part is I thought the auction house was actually a decent addition, it was just that the rest of the game had way too many problems. Blizzard really messed up with this one and it doesn't appear they've gotten a grasp on things 2 years after its launch.

I'd actually like if they removed rmah and gah, adding a trade ah or a barter exchange (eg you list an item and what you want to trade it for with a list of affixes and range of values for them, someone wants to do the trade they put the item up as well and when you check it you can accept or not and if you do the trade is done then)

I never bothered trading previously and have only used the AH to buy gold to then buy items for mp sets since I don't play often enough to see usable drops but I do understand some people like trading so I think having a workable, safe trading system in place to allow trade matches while you're offline and without having to go to a third-party site would be the best all-round solution to the issue for those that want to trade without impacting on those that don't and not needed drops to be balanced around being able to get them anywhere but for yourself

Well, they are also concerned that they tanked the value of an extremely valuable franchise in the eyes of many PC gamers and there are still enough of us to matter for the sales of D4 or WoD or whatever they do next with it. This way they get the cream of the RMAH cash and can still turn things around with the expansion perhaps.

After all, they have done this before (well, not the RMAH stuff...) by rescuing a product line through an expansion. Without Brood War, Starcraft would have been a blip on the radar.

I am really having a hard time how anyone thought the AH (in any form) was good. It tanked the idea of how you played Diablo; the team themselves said certain things were not implemented/changed because of the AH. D3 was less what Diablo was because of the AH. How was that in any way, a good thing, and how is it, in any way, a bad thing that they are throwing in the towel?

And yea, I imagine they aren't losing much revenue, considering how people just are done with D3 because of the AH. It's empirical but I'm seeing a lot of people willing to give D3 a try with the AH gone, so I imagine this is a good move all around.

Goodbye AH = goodbye hunting AH for -level requirements items / twinking...?

The blizzard diablo forums are fucking hilarious right now. I can't tell if it's full of super massive trolls or if there's people that seriously like the auction house?

There's a guy who actually made a post that the fun of diablo 3 is knowing that at any point an item could drop that you could sell for $250. He was promptly flamed into oblivion for 10+ pages.

Shit you got better odds of winning the powerball lottery than getting an item that sells for 250 bucks in D3 anyways.

Seananigans_sl said:

Anyone who thinks a singular nation-wide (basically any scale large enough to be called an auction house) linked AH of any sort isn't cancer to agame like thisknows nothing about game design or the underlying reasons/motivations for people to play certain types of games.

And that's fine. Not everyone needs to know the deeper intricacies of game design.

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Or they don't understand basic human psychology/nature... In other words idiots.