It seems to me that the intention is to lead people by the nose towards more complex game play: starting afresh, playing no-twink, knowing when to run, no dupes being available at least initially. At the same time the new system will preserve an area for those people who can't bear to compete on an even footing, along with players who simply like their characters, enjoy doing what they've always done and want to keep on with the same old gameplay albeit in a more challenging environment
To talk about the economy crashing on a ladder reset is nonsense. The non-Ladder economy is pretty much fixed now as vast reserves of currency already exist. It will continue in the same way it does now (SoJs, Windforces and so on). Ladder items appearing in the economy will not affect it because there will be too few items of value - there are few items designated Ladder only and surely there are a fair number of dupers with dozens of accounts full of Windforce mules
So what if Frostreaver fetches 4 Windforces? That's just petty cash to people who exploited the ability to dupe as much as they wanted
The Ladder system is an attempt to address the problem that the non-Ladder realms will never be cleaned up.
The Ladder economy will be very interesting
Without doubt it will be completely legit to start with as people frantically try to piece together low level sets.
As people find stuff they will hit E-Bay. I reckon a Sigons Helm could go for $20+ on the first day. People like to buy success and, as Occhi says, the heirs of Barnum like to take their money. If you're determined to be top buying a complete Sigon's with cash on E-Bay on day 1 makes some sense. What these people are buying is daft, acquiring items rather than playing skill and short-changing themselves of the chance to learn through playing (of course, that's a discussion we had another time and our views in no way alter the fact of the $$$ for items economy)
The really frantic trading will come when the uber items appear and no one has anything in game to offer. No amount of Venomgrips and Infernostrides can possibly acquire a Gaze, unless the owner of the Gaze has no idea what he or she holds
So if my Necromancer turns up a Buriza and wants to get rid of it what do I do? Well, sitting on it would be disastrous - it's value is sky-high but plummeting by the hour. Trading it should be possible, if I send several people off to find a Leoric's or a Homunculous then with luck someone might turn something up after much work on their part and very little on mine
(Giving it away is also an option, but that's not really relevant to this topic)
Converting it into Lums or Shaels might be an option but I'm not sure. I'd be hesitant to trade something which is highly sought after for runes that might be rather easy to obtain if Countess running turns out to be as absurdly profitable as it seems or if someone comes up with a fast way to get mules to Hell Hellforge
I suspect that the main currency rune is more likely to be at least Ist rather than anything lower. It's got to be rarer than runes that drop from Nightmare Hellforge otherwise it's just not valuable enough
Remember it should be valuable enough that 40 of them will trade for pretty much anything. 40 Lums won't buy you a Windforce in the Ladder
OK, once the basic economy is established there then will come fluctuations as people successfully find ways to cheat
At first the cheating will be almost invisible. Dedicated, almost professional hackers seeking to make a killing on E-Bay. It is completely counter to thie interests to let anyone else know they have cracked the game. They want to make money, their interests lie in being the only person who can dupe, in not having it known that duping is possible and particularly in not having Blizzard fix their exploit and/or re-set the Ladder
I don't know how long that phase will last. I imagine quite some time. When Diablo2 started I played for months without ever being aware that duping was possible. About 6 months
When LoD started again I didn't hear a whisper of people duping for about 6 weeks, then there were a couple of months where the trade rooms became suspiciously high-end oriented and then it was everywhere and completely blatant
(I'll quite happily accept that I may have been rather naive and sheltered :rolleyes: )
Now the beauty of the Ladder re-sets is that it actually gives incentive to the cheaters to keep their cheats private so long as E-Bay continues to permit sales. This is something that only occurred to me in writing this post, E-Bay sales help Blizzard keep the realms "cheat low" by encouraging cheats to keep their cheats private. I still can't stand the practice though
OK, I've gone on long enough, time to draw some conclusions and to briefly address some points I haven't as yet
1) 3 months feels like a reasonable period to expect a "cheat low", ie almost cheat free realm which is the best that BNet can reasonably aspire to
2) we will simply have to wait and see how Blizzard deals with its vague undertaking to reset the Ladder. They are a company of many outstanding qualities but a history of what are on the face of it, some inexplicably daft decisions. It slightly encourages me that Blizzard North has a new management team. New teams are usually more cautious about doing something inexplicably daft than established teams
3) The principal change to crafting is that the rares affix pool is better. However except for instances where crafting mods can stack with rare mods (enhanced damage on weapons and leech on rings) generally a rare (6 random affixes) will beat a craft (4 random affixes and 3-4 rather weak pre-sets). Some prefixes are priceless such as Knockback on gloves but the pre-sets are usually weak
Crafting ingredients will have virtually no impact on the economy. Most of the runes can be found in Act 1 Normal from the Countess and the rest drop like leaves in autumn throughout the game. Perfect gems are not an effective use of gem stock. 9 regular rubies represents one craft OR 3 attempts at a socketed blue weapon, ideally a 6 socket Cruel of Quickness or Evisceration so crafting a weapon is by comparison simply not economic
(Edit: technical analysis of cubing Cruels suggests 6 socket Cruels of Quickness will not be possible:
http://www.theamazonbasin.com/d2/forums/in...0&#entry302146)
4) Will the Ladder resets, a formula of choosing between uberness and gameplay work? Well clearly not for everyone, there will be some people who work long and hard in the first ladder season who won't want to start over but will be rather bitter about being lumped in with the legions of Windforce wielding dupazons. But it certainly is a better formula than we have now which is that we all have to play in the shadow of cheats who have much better items unless we play in private games. I certainly will be starting over each new Ladder but to be honest I've always tended to start over once a character has completed the game anyway (ie killed Hell Baal). Anyone who has a tendency to play characters up to level 75 to 80 and then move on to something else has already been voluntarily doing what the Ladder resets will enforce. I think there are quite a lot of such players around
5) It seems like a pretty good system. I am very much looking forward to it
To talk about the economy crashing on a ladder reset is nonsense. The non-Ladder economy is pretty much fixed now as vast reserves of currency already exist. It will continue in the same way it does now (SoJs, Windforces and so on). Ladder items appearing in the economy will not affect it because there will be too few items of value - there are few items designated Ladder only and surely there are a fair number of dupers with dozens of accounts full of Windforce mules
So what if Frostreaver fetches 4 Windforces? That's just petty cash to people who exploited the ability to dupe as much as they wanted
The Ladder system is an attempt to address the problem that the non-Ladder realms will never be cleaned up.
The Ladder economy will be very interesting
Without doubt it will be completely legit to start with as people frantically try to piece together low level sets.
As people find stuff they will hit E-Bay. I reckon a Sigons Helm could go for $20+ on the first day. People like to buy success and, as Occhi says, the heirs of Barnum like to take their money. If you're determined to be top buying a complete Sigon's with cash on E-Bay on day 1 makes some sense. What these people are buying is daft, acquiring items rather than playing skill and short-changing themselves of the chance to learn through playing (of course, that's a discussion we had another time and our views in no way alter the fact of the $$$ for items economy)
The really frantic trading will come when the uber items appear and no one has anything in game to offer. No amount of Venomgrips and Infernostrides can possibly acquire a Gaze, unless the owner of the Gaze has no idea what he or she holds
So if my Necromancer turns up a Buriza and wants to get rid of it what do I do? Well, sitting on it would be disastrous - it's value is sky-high but plummeting by the hour. Trading it should be possible, if I send several people off to find a Leoric's or a Homunculous then with luck someone might turn something up after much work on their part and very little on mine
(Giving it away is also an option, but that's not really relevant to this topic)
Converting it into Lums or Shaels might be an option but I'm not sure. I'd be hesitant to trade something which is highly sought after for runes that might be rather easy to obtain if Countess running turns out to be as absurdly profitable as it seems or if someone comes up with a fast way to get mules to Hell Hellforge
I suspect that the main currency rune is more likely to be at least Ist rather than anything lower. It's got to be rarer than runes that drop from Nightmare Hellforge otherwise it's just not valuable enough
Remember it should be valuable enough that 40 of them will trade for pretty much anything. 40 Lums won't buy you a Windforce in the Ladder
OK, once the basic economy is established there then will come fluctuations as people successfully find ways to cheat
At first the cheating will be almost invisible. Dedicated, almost professional hackers seeking to make a killing on E-Bay. It is completely counter to thie interests to let anyone else know they have cracked the game. They want to make money, their interests lie in being the only person who can dupe, in not having it known that duping is possible and particularly in not having Blizzard fix their exploit and/or re-set the Ladder
I don't know how long that phase will last. I imagine quite some time. When Diablo2 started I played for months without ever being aware that duping was possible. About 6 months
When LoD started again I didn't hear a whisper of people duping for about 6 weeks, then there were a couple of months where the trade rooms became suspiciously high-end oriented and then it was everywhere and completely blatant
(I'll quite happily accept that I may have been rather naive and sheltered :rolleyes: )
Now the beauty of the Ladder re-sets is that it actually gives incentive to the cheaters to keep their cheats private so long as E-Bay continues to permit sales. This is something that only occurred to me in writing this post, E-Bay sales help Blizzard keep the realms "cheat low" by encouraging cheats to keep their cheats private. I still can't stand the practice though
OK, I've gone on long enough, time to draw some conclusions and to briefly address some points I haven't as yet
1) 3 months feels like a reasonable period to expect a "cheat low", ie almost cheat free realm which is the best that BNet can reasonably aspire to
2) we will simply have to wait and see how Blizzard deals with its vague undertaking to reset the Ladder. They are a company of many outstanding qualities but a history of what are on the face of it, some inexplicably daft decisions. It slightly encourages me that Blizzard North has a new management team. New teams are usually more cautious about doing something inexplicably daft than established teams
3) The principal change to crafting is that the rares affix pool is better. However except for instances where crafting mods can stack with rare mods (enhanced damage on weapons and leech on rings) generally a rare (6 random affixes) will beat a craft (4 random affixes and 3-4 rather weak pre-sets). Some prefixes are priceless such as Knockback on gloves but the pre-sets are usually weak
Crafting ingredients will have virtually no impact on the economy. Most of the runes can be found in Act 1 Normal from the Countess and the rest drop like leaves in autumn throughout the game. Perfect gems are not an effective use of gem stock. 9 regular rubies represents one craft OR 3 attempts at a socketed blue weapon, ideally a 6 socket Cruel of Quickness or Evisceration so crafting a weapon is by comparison simply not economic
(Edit: technical analysis of cubing Cruels suggests 6 socket Cruels of Quickness will not be possible:
http://www.theamazonbasin.com/d2/forums/in...0&#entry302146)
4) Will the Ladder resets, a formula of choosing between uberness and gameplay work? Well clearly not for everyone, there will be some people who work long and hard in the first ladder season who won't want to start over but will be rather bitter about being lumped in with the legions of Windforce wielding dupazons. But it certainly is a better formula than we have now which is that we all have to play in the shadow of cheats who have much better items unless we play in private games. I certainly will be starting over each new Ladder but to be honest I've always tended to start over once a character has completed the game anyway (ie killed Hell Baal). Anyone who has a tendency to play characters up to level 75 to 80 and then move on to something else has already been voluntarily doing what the Ladder resets will enforce. I think there are quite a lot of such players around
5) It seems like a pretty good system. I am very much looking forward to it