Blizzard vs. Real Money Trading (RMT)

[Kevin]

I can't help but think that even with RMT (maybe because of it?), Diablo III will be in a better economic situation than Diablo II where gold was more or less worthless and currency was based on either massively duped items or imaginary currency on a 3rd-party website.

Perhaps. Thing is, if Diablo II had an in-game auction house, then gold could theoretically mean something. Sure, it may get to the point where 10 million gold buys a hamburger, but essentially gold would be an arbitration enabler. That Stone of Jordan would trade for a million gold or something, and that million gold would in turn buy something else.

Not having participated in any of this Diablo II activity, though, I admit I'm ignorant of potential issues with that.

Basically, without an in-game Auction House, all such activity had to shift elsewhere - and real money wound up being exchanged. Blizzard has an active policy with WoW to include an in-game Auction House, followed by random enforcement discouraging the active trading of real money for gold and items. They chose not to do this with Diablo III.

The common statement about all of this is that it opens Blizzard up to legal issues. If you have an item that sells for $40 regularly - say, something truly rare and powerful - and Blizzard nerfs that item, they just cost you $40. Every single activity in the game will have an economic impact, and that really kills the "fun" for me, even if such "fun" was just an illusion to begin with. I could certainly sell my World of Warcraft account for decent cash, but I don't think about it that way. Having an in-game Auction House where things sell for real money draws me out of that immersion and reminds me that I'm playing a game that generates X amount of money per hour, even if such money is insignificant compared to my employment. It's not "wow, look at that killer rare item, it'll really boost my character and/or alt," but "wow, look at that killer rare item, I can make $10 off that." Erm...yeah.

To each their own, though. I don't begrudge people for still being excited about D3. Combined with the Activision "merge" with Blizzard leading directly to money-grabbing changes to WoW, I'm just really "meh" about D3 right now, and there are going to be many good alternatives to the game.

I haven't followed D3 development closely and my thoughts are still a little muddled on this.

I didn't get involved with the D2 economy much and a lot of that had to do with the fact that D2 was fundamentally a single player game that you could play with other people. If you were using "gimp" gear it didn't have a ton of effect on what you could do. The entire game on all difficulties could be completed solo with every class. I never joined a guild in D2 for similar reasons, it didn't really add much to the game, unlike WoW which as you may recall was something I brought up in the old discussions about forum layout back when WoW was in beta. Most D2 multiplayer was just a bunch of people playing solo in the same game, but wanting more people in game to up the drop levels, unless the game was arranged ahead of time and you were playing with folks you knew.

It's my understanding that D3 will again fundamentally be a single player game that you can play with other people. They have said that while they will have more PvP elements added that they aren't planning to balance for them at all (though I admit this is months old info that could have changed). The game is designed as PvE and while it sounds like co-op will be a bit more rewarding, that it still isn't required.

I think as you mentioned just having an Auction House in game will be a bigger stabilizing factor on the economy. Though again, the economy in D3 is not as important as the economy in WoW anyway. The importance of items to character development may or may not be more important than in WoW, but the impact of that on what is possible in the game will always be less. If you couldn't kill Diablo, if you needed better gear to do so, there would be places you could farm to get it. Or since the game generally got easier with more people you could get a friend to help you. D3 may not be designed that way, but I suspect that it is.

I also think you are right that there will be some people out there that will get pissed about a patch or something else destroying real world money for them. I can see litigation over it. I can see your and others' concerns about how it will impact your mentality on the game, but for me that isn't an issue. I'm more concerned about the general direction. As mentioned Blizzard in general has been going down a path that doesn't excite me.

Maybe my information is just out of date. But Torchlight II with built in mod support, peer-to-peer multiplay, and other features actually is looking more like the spiritual successor to Diablo II to me. Though battle.net was one of the reasons for D2's success and I'm not sure Torchlight is going to have anything like that. As you also mention there will be other alternatives.

I didn't buy Starcraft 2, I did manage to borrow a copy and played through the single player missions, and while they did a good job to keep it feel like Starcraft something was just not there, it felt incomplete because there was only the one campaign, and it wasn't done that much better than what War3 had for all of it's campaigns. It felt like milking it for more money was the only reason to not have more single player content and I had no desire to actually pay for it.

They'll make their money on D3, I might still get it, but it is by no means the only game in town anymore.