The Auction House III: Evil is Back

[Bolty]

[It's possible] that Diablo III is actually a gigantic gambling mechanism, Activision/Blizzard is the "house," and the game is an overlay for what basically amounts to pulling a slot machine. That Blizzard's sole reason to create Diablo III is to implement (and make money from) this RMT auction house. Your goal as a player is to be talked into using this auction house, and eventually get addicted to it, in a game that's all about the items you wear and a system that prevents you from getting all the best items without purchasing them from the AH.

Time will prove or disprove [this] theory; there's no way to tell this for sure one way or the other until the game's been out for a while and we can see what direction it takes.

--Bolty, September 13 2011

It looks to me like Daeity was right. And I've only been level 60 for 2 days.

Diablo III is a fun game. The variety of skills, the fast-paced frenetic gameplay, the multiplayer, the joy of advancing your character through Normal, Nightmare, and Hell difficulties. And then you hit level 60, and can delve into the incredibly challenging Inferno difficulty you've heard so much about. The gear you've acquired in the previous difficulties is really just a "starter set;" the game resets with Inferno difficulty, and you have to farm this mode a ton just to make slight advancements. You need to take the mindset going in that you're starting over from scratch; the REAL game begins with Inferno difficulty and the gear you gain there. Ask anyone who has been there a while.

Unfortunately, it doesn't take long to realize something: Diablo III's end-game isn't Inferno difficulty.

It's the Auction House. And that's exactly the way Blizzard wants it. Inferno difficulty is not there to challenge you as a player; it's there to push you into using the Auction House, and by extension, the Real Money Auction House - where Blizzard makes their money.

This really doesn't become apparent to you until you hit Inferno difficulty. The reason is simple: if the game's too hard on previous difficulties, you can simply level up to become stronger, and the difficulty curve is lenient enough so that you can do amazing things with sub-par gear. Step into Inferno mode and watch yourself get 1-shot by white mob abilities, and you realize that skill alone isn't going to help you. You need gear. The obvious thought to that is "well, I can farm the gear!" This is why the Nephalem Valor buff exists, right? You get a sweet stacking (up to 5) magic find buff after each champion or rare pack you defeat once you reach level 60. This gives you lots of rare drops to pick up and fawn over.

Once you start doing the math, though, you start realizing that there are literally hundreds of millions of combinations of stats that can appear on these items. Even then, you can get an awesome item that's totally useless to your character. You can play for six hours and not find a single upgrade - although you may perhaps find a semi-decent item for another class.

To the Auction House! Sell that item, and get the cash to buy something useful to you. So, wait a minute. What just happened? You played the game for six hours so that you could generate some gold. You can then use that gold to find something useful to you. Once you have a decent amount of base gold, you can start trading more intensely to gain upgrades.

Hey look, that sword is undervalued. I bet I can buy that up and re-list it for a lot more. That'll give me the gold to get that set item I've been looking at. Hmm, now I'm low on gold. Let me play a bit to farm up some more gear to sell.

(fast-forward 3 months)

Ah, time to "play" Diablo III. Let me log in and monitor my sales. Hey look, someone finally posted a helm that's an upgrade for me. I'll snag that. Hmm, those 5 items there can probably be re-listed for profit. I'll hang out on the AH for another hour or two; this is primetime, so some new items might be coming in at any moment. Okay! That was a great evening, I snagged 2 upgrades and made another 5 million gold!

Diablo III has now become the Auction House. Don't think this won't happen to addicted players. It won't be about playing the game anymore, it'll be about playing the Auction House. It's the inevitable end-game result of Blizzard's game design.

Diablo III is built on gear (after level 60), but it is not an achievement-based gear system. In World of Warcraft, you get gear as a reward for achievement. In Diablo III, you get gear via gold (or real-life money once that's available). You make gold initially by playing the game to farm up items - most items you find will be for selling on the AH, not for using on your character - and eventually you just stop playing the game altogether because you're far more likely to get upgrades from the Auction House. As your gear in Diablo III improves, the odds of actually getting a drop that's an upgrade from playing the game itself go down and down and down. It'll be far more effective to login each game session and camp the Auction House, playing the buy/sell game to ensure you have the liquidity to purchase things you want.

You may be sitting here thinking "nah, I won't do that, I'll play the game and earn my rewards without using the Auction House." If you are, I'd venture you haven't been playing Inferno difficulty for long. It's just not viable to take this approach for a sustained period without burning out, and you'll realize this at some point - whether it's in Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, or if you're a masochist - Act 4. Even if you play for hundreds of hours to get gear and never use the Auction House to clear Inferno difficulty, you will STILL be able to substantially upgrade your character by using the Auction House. It's why so many players are getting to level 60, playing for a bit, and then quitting or re-rolling. No amount of skill will get you past the gear requirements imposed by Inferno difficulty, and the gear drops are more of a mechanism to generate wealth for purchasing upgrades useful to you. At some point, you will realize that playing the actual game isn't nearly as "useful" to your character as playing the Auction House, so if you're not into that sort of thing, you wind up quitting or re-rolling.

Some common arguments heard are:

1) "Well, this is just because Inferno difficulty is too hard. Blizzard will nerf it." I don't see this changing anything. The end game, the true way to advance your character past any artificial point, is to play the Auction House. You may feel that there's no reason to do so once you've defeated the hardest difficulty in the game, but many people won't. People want to progress their characters; it's part of why we play RPGs. You're not playing Diablo III for the PLOT, are you? You saw it all in Normal difficulty! Diablo II never had a Inferno difficulty, and was thus much easier than Diablo III in end-game, but people still played for ages to try to get better items. If Diablo II had an Auction House, its end-game would have wound up the same as Diablo III's.

2) "You're just saying this because you want to rush through Inferno difficulty. Take it slow and enjoy it!" Even though this is usually only said by those who haven't gotten to Inferno difficulty yet, I think it still misses the overall point. It doesn't matter where the game itself stops. The rarity of actual, good, useful end-game drops is so insanely high (think high-end runewords of Diablo II) that you will not see them after thousands of hours of play. You will see them in the Auction House, though, because millions of players are playing millions of games every day and generating items. It's one big slot machine, and even if you don't pull the winning lever, someone out there did. People play Diablo III for character advancement, and in the end, no matter where that end is, the only realistic way to advance your character will be the Auction House. You may have the patience required to farm for an incredibly long time in Inferno difficulty, but in the end - even if you beat all of Inferno this way - you're still going to need to go to the Auction House if you want to progress further.

If you're the type of player who believes that skill should be rewarded with gear, you're going to get frustrated at some point. Where that point is will depend on the player, but you'll get there. And if you don't get pulled into the Auction House metagame - how long until people are writing programs that overlay onto Diablo III's Auction House, I wonder - you're probably going to go look somewhere else. Torchlight II, anyone?

Now, keep in mind that despite the tone of this post, I'm still playing Diablo III. I'd like to "beat" the game in the sense of clearing Inferno difficulty, and try out the other classes. But I don't want to get sucked into the Auction House end-game, so there's only so-much shelf-life this game has for me. Back to World of Warcrack when MoP's released!