Diablo 3 is fundamentally broken

[FoxBat]

As far as the RMAH and greed:

What bothers me more is not the question of whether the RMAH is "greedy" or not, but how much of an influence people seem to think it has over game design.

Inferno was set up to require a lot of farming to progress in. It's like they started with the idea of the D2 uber bosses, which were one of the few things you would actually want that good gear for to beat, and extended it out to an entire difficulty. They looked at the people that loved running for loot, and they looked at how may people complained the game was too easy, and this type of endgame was the result.

Try and imagine what a no-farming-required alternative would be like. Would you rather all of Inferno be equivalent to Act 1? Would it be just another difficulty like hell that you blow through and are done? Considering the limited incentive to reroll characters, what kind of longevity are you expecting for the game?

I'll admit this also makes a convenient setup that mirrors F2P games, where you can either grind to win or pay real money to win. But the effect of this is at present limited. There is gear that makes A3/A4 Inferno manageable but it does not make it cakewalk. That gear doesn't just automatically make the hardest elites curl up and die, I think that's a sign that Jay and crew actually wanted to make a challenging endgame, even if they clearly didn't put the requisite time in to balance it properly. They just set that challenge in the context of D2's loot farming tradition, which some people may hate, but it is not like $$$ is the only motivating factor.

The other problem is when people overthink just *how* much game design could possibly be affected by RMAH. Nerfing gold drops or upping repair costs isn't going to do squat for the RMAH when so much gold value is connected to items players need to progress. Whether you get 1 million or 1 billion gold for your dollar doesn't matter to Blizzard, only how many dollars you are paying, and that doesn't change if the same rarity of items are going for 1 million or 1 billion gold.

The main thing that *does* matter for Blizzard is that people keep playing Inferno and keep trading gear on the AH. Sheer volume is where Blizzard can make profits, not high prices that only a few will bother paying. If Inferno is too easy/quick to farm through then people quit fast, if it's too hard then they quit in frustration. Apparently Blizzard believes they erred too much on the latter half and are chipping away at Inferno difficulty in the next patch. If this is pure "greed" then bring on the greed because it's promoting the *longevity* of the game for the majority, which I thought we all agreed was a good thing.