Blizzard looking at ways to make item-finding in Diablo III more interesting than the Auction House
By Tim Colwill on January 24, 2013 at 8:03 pm
One of the thrills of Diablo and every game to have spawned from or been inspired by its loins has been the delight of finding new items on the fresh corpses of monsters, comparing stats with them, and then smacking more monsters with the new weapon until the whole process repeats.
Responding to an enormous Battle.net thread titled “How It Went Terribly Wrong, Because They Listened To Us”, Blizzard’s Community Manager Grimiku said that “We know that (for many players) it’s much more rewarding to gear up from items that you find while playing normally than it is to necessarily go through Auction House, and we’re working to make improvements in that area.”
“There are a lot of ways we could attempt to reach that goal, and choosing the best one(s) to go with is not always a fast process. I want to encourage you all to continue to post your thoughts on the subject and I promise we will keep reading and relaying them.”
Many long-term Diablo players disliked the idea of an Auction House, but just as many have used and enjoyed it. How do you feel — does it detract from the main gameplay too much?
Source: Battle.net via PC Gamer
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You crazy people. You so crazy.
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I’m firmly convinced the Auction House killed Diablo3 for us – a bunch of gamers who’d enjoyed D2 and was looking forward to D3, and we ended up all quitting after 2 months.
In the old days, you would find awesome items you couldn’t use and give them to your friends. Now everyone just liquidates whatever they find and buys their own upgrades. It’s become a solo grind game. Sometimes efficiency is the enemy of fun.
They designed the game from the start around AH, it’s literally impossible to fix now.
Jay Wilson destroyed Diablo.
all the AH does is replace the trade channel, trade games, ebay and third party sites.
keep in mind they didn’t have the AH whilst testing balance.
also, after a few patches, it got to a point where you didn’t need to use the AH. recently there was a guy that completed inferno with every class without using the AH. with the recent emphasis on crafting and bind-to-account items, it’s going to be even more true.
if you quit after 2 months, I’m not sure your opinion is valid on the current game.
I dis agree I don’t know if it’s AH related or not but drop rates on set items in particular are vastly lower than they were in diablo 2, I’m lucky to see 1 set item a day diablo 2 i would have seen atlest 1 per run it may not have been for the set i was looking for but i found one non the less.
also the age old argument of “it destroys the community”
Meh, people are still playing this…
Got bored of the grind after getting to Inferno. The repetition is too heavy vs the phat loot which seems to drop for everyone but you.
Much better games to spend my time on ;)
I havent played it months but it absolutely blew my mind that they made items NOT Bind-on-equip, the sheer stupidity of that left me staggered.
You have to be an absolute moron to think that an auction house can NOT ruin the game when there are 10 million people playing the game and absolutely nothing removing items from the economy.
They obviously understood it in WoW, so it’s just sheer incompetence that they didn’t let those lessons carry over the D3.
All you need is decent listing fees (which you dont get back) and items becoming BOE once they touch the auction house in any way. I couldn’t understand why I would want to play the game when I could buy a weapon for one mob worth of coin that is better than anything I ever found.
Getting stuck and having to play the exact same content over and over and over and over again to get better equipment to be able to have a chance to surive the next section of the game ala D2 is preferable?
Don’t know about the normal AH, but the hardcore AH frequently didn’t actually have ‘perfect’ items in it, so I was always on the lookout for equal (for if i died) or better equipment anyway. It pretty much just removed the aforementioned pain from sheer cliffs in the game.
Diablo 3: Reach difficulty (stat) wall, visit AH and incrementally increase the numbers on items. Hope to have enough gold to upgrade by the time you hit the next wall, because there is no chance you’ll find loot that will complement your build and provide the necessary numbers to progress.
This was my and everyone I know’s experience with Diablo 3 before we never touched it again months ago.
There is something extremely wrong with Diablo 3, it’s the auction house. The game is designed around it, so it makes it no fun to ignore it, no fun to give in to it.
It’s nice to see they’ve recognised the issue, but it feels a little late after nearly 1 year since the release. I’m glad I did my first playthrough without the AH but when my character started dying repeatedly on the harder difficulties it was harder to resist the AH, especially when it is built into the game, safe and easy to use.
All items sold via AH attract a -10% stat/dmg value per sale. Items traded char to char do not. The stacking of the -10% will get rid of all the crap on the AH. May also be worth thinking of having bind on equip items.
** Edit**
Wow, just spent an hour reading that forum link, didnt realise the problem is that bad now, though I have not played DIII since launch since i capped out and got fed up of AH scrolling
AH is great for the casual players (ala me)… instead of hoping for a good drop or having to hack, we can just buy ourselves what we want/need for a reasonable price.
I do admit that one does have to play the AH… that is do the odd bit of flipping, or grind for gear and sell it on AH to make more than selling to a vendor; and that’s all time consuming. I can’t remember a week in the past 4 month where I wasn’t on the AH listing items. Grinding for gold is too slow.
For high end players, the Gold/$ requirement for the godly gear is atrocious (I’m starting to notice these prices now that I’ve got a lvl60 char). You can finish inferno by not using the AH but you may not be able to create certain builds by just relying on drops.
Personally, I liked Torchlight’s drop rate more but that game also required me to play as all 3 classes and pass items between them to make it work. (I didn’t mind playing as all 3 classes of course)
“We know that (for many players) it’s much more rewarding to gear up from items that you find while playing normally than it is to necessarily go through Auction House”
Really ? I thought that was always the goal, and where the fun was at. It’s like Blizz are too afraid to let the single player actually play the game, never saw much point in interesting stuff dropping in the last 2% of the story.
Torchlight 2 drops keep the interest alive by making it ……FUN!!!….