Diablo III Auction Houses Close March 18, 2014

[Chesspiece_face]

I'm personally very excited over the news of the AH removal. Assuming they have an alternative trade system in mind, so we're not forced to trade as we are in Path of Exile.

I have mixed feelings on whether removing the AH will end up having the effect that people think it will. Mostly because having played PoE I can see the absolute cluster@#$% of what trading and the economy is in that game.

The AH in D3 was always the easy target to direct ones flame fueled rage at but all it was, in reality, was a magnifier for issues that were at the core of the game.

An even larger issue for D3 at release (and one we touched on in those old DitD Podcasts) was the absolute focus on Rare items as the loot progression. Because the value of any item was strictly tied to the numeric values instead of any item (even original Legendaries) having inherent value it meant that 90% of the stuff you found (even Legendaries!) were garbage just because you weren't lucky enough to roll viable numbers on it.

Then we turn to the push for gold to have real value and for it to support the economy and we have a system that is bound for gigantic inflation. You can see the same thing in PoE now even though they don't have a "cash" economy. Supply and Demand means nothing for these economies because you are trading a usable item for an abstract currency. For sellers in these economies the psychological cost of trading an item for below what they "expect" it to be worth is too strong for them to ever trade "down" to what it really may be worth. This literally leads to a point where it is psychologically less costly to just sell it to a vendor or trash it than to sell/trade it to a player for a lower cost than the originally posted price. Sure this happened to some extent in D2, but more often than not people were willing to trade up/down because "you have something I need for my character to work, I have something you need for your character to work" Deal! I've watched so many storefronts in PoE where they get offers marginally beneath what they are asking and they never take the offer only to have the item sit there unsold for weeks onto months.

I still feel the same about the AH now as I did when the game first came out. If I don't want it to effect my game, I don't use it. I'm not a conspiracy theorist that thinks that Blizzard stunted the item drops to push the AH. I just think they had a broken system to begin with. I'm happy to see the direction they are taking the game, but I will have to see a LOT more before I get a true feeling whether Loot 2.0 will have the effect that they want. I'm still worried that item value will be based more on the random roll than any item having intrinsic value.