Uber upgrade?

[FenrisWulf]

@gekko:
Point taken about the particular sites that are advertised in channel, and also the eBay sellers who have a severe overabundance of items to sell: it can usually be taken on faith that these items were not acquired legitimately, and so you purchase them at the price of your moral high ground. Indeed, to deny that you likely are purchasing botted items, and to deny that you are thus supporting the activities of botters, is ridiculous. Agreed. I was simply curious about how you felt about the concept of item sale in general, and whether it is acceptable in the abstract.

My actual opinion, devil's advocacy aside, is that the sale of items for Real Life™ currency should probably not be part of the game. Blizzard should have included rules to this effect in the ToS, asked eBay to desist from presenting D2 item/character sales (much as Sony did with Everquest), and worked to shut down (using the terms of the ToS) item warehouse websites. Why? Because there is far less impetus to bot, dupe, or otherwise hack (in a way detrimental to the realm as a whole) if the only rewards are ingame. In part, this is because there are limits to the wealth you would want to acquire within D2; you're done once you have the items you need for your characters, or once you've found all of the Unique items, or similar. Also, supply and demand works effectively in a closed environment: there would be no way for an illegitimate form of acquiring items to actually be feasible in accruing a solid sense of wealth, because the value of each item in D2 (in general) relates inversely to its rarity, ie, if you stockpile items in a way that breaks their natural rarities, then they become less valuable in the process. There could still be duping and botting to a point that every item is moderately easily to acquire, but why would it ever go beyond that? The dupers and botters would get nothing out of it, aside from more worthless ingame items. Hacked items? I suspect that they would rarely be traded, and thus produced only in small quantities, because there would be nothing within the game worth enough to warrant trading.

Real Life™ money throws everything off, because the limit for "too much money" is far, far higher than the limit for "too many items". Stockpiling (ie, botting, duping) makes sense, as does mass-producing hacked items, because you will have many different prospective buyers offering $$$, which you can never have enough of, instead of items, which you no longer need. This leads to, instead of a slight distortion of the economy, a complete destruction of it, as evinced after most of the serious duping exploits. For instance, Stones of Jordan became worthless in the context of the game, but could still fetch a few dollars, so the duping of them continued. It's a vicious cycle made more so, once you affix an endless sink of earning more money.

So, even though buying legitimate items via cash may not be in direct support of botters and their associates, I still don't think that it should be allowed, because it opens the floodgates for the kind of exploitation that essentially destroyed the economy of Diablo 2.

IMO. :)

(further support: the Real Life™ prize for the second Ladder season has increased the amount of botting and hacking on the realms, though this time we're trading experience for money, instead of items)

EDIT: Added a few extra details.