The New Jokonomy

[Occhidiangela]

Referencing the Diablo II LoD 1.10 Ladder Realms "Economy."

If level 99 characters will be rare, or at least less common than at present, then what of the "economy" that gets endless critique and comment on the Realms?

And, more to the point, what about Crafts? I like crafts.

1. Assumption: counterfeiting will be better handled. The dupe/hack density will be considerably less than at present, hence the "uber item" density will also be lesser.
(Yes, I have had three cups of coffee today, why do you ask? :D )

Prediction: Fewer "uber" items offered for trade, and hence a much higher trade value for many of them. Some won't be available for love nor money as folks scramble up the ladder with their precious uber items.

2. Assumption: Crafting affixes will be useful.

Prediction: Level 99 Characters will become, either for a given character or for clans and guilds, Crafting, Shopping, Gambling mules, when they are not "ladder running."

Since not everyone cares about being on top of the ladder, or for Guilds and clans who work as teams (see old RussBarb) a level 99 Crafting mule could be quite the enabler to the one or two ladder characters being raced to the top of the "XP over time" hill.

Caveat: With a finite ladder season, will anyone with the patience to level to 99 ever stop running the ladder? Maybe not.

3. Gems and Runes will be firmly established as the currency on the Ladder Only Realms.

Why? Rarity of the Gold and Set Items.

4. Full sets will be extremely rare.

Why? Some of the Piñatas will not burst as before.

5. Ebay prices will go up, as will other paypal sites where items are sold.

Why? When someone actually finds a Windforce with his Druid, he will likely sell it to a Windforce Hungry Zon rather than spend the time to level up a zon to 70+. Cash or trade.

6. The SoJ will no longer be currency: until the duping starts again, but when it does, runes that will allow the upgrades to Exceptional and Elite Uniques will be what is duped, as will the proper perfect gems. :)

7. Sigons Set will still be available, but will cost more than a few chips for each item. :)

8. Good and excellent Rares will become trade and sale items again.

9. Charsi will be cursed for being the lousy, spaztic, incompetent malus weilding twit that she was back in pre LoD days. Poor dear . . .

Someone, somewhere, will make a buck here and there, because:

PT Barnum was right. :)

[BEEFMOTRTON]

Crafting should come back in a big way with the improvements made to rares. Only crafted weapons will be able to surpass 450% enhanced damage (with a max of 510% unless there's something I don't know). Sure it'll take an obscene number of attempts to get something good from it but they could very well be the new "uber" items.


Though I do have a nitpick with your post, you say level 99 as if we're going to be seeing any anytime soon. Earning only 1/1000th of the normal experience at level 98 is gonna make it pretty damn hard.

[Occhidiangela]

Caveat: With a finite ladder season, will anyone with the patience to level to 99 ever stop running the ladder? Maybe not.  
If level 99 characters will be rare, or at least less common than at present,

Where did I say they would be common?

Perhaps you are correct, and 99 won't be very common, or even anything over 88 for that matter. One can only hope. :)

The ladder may indeed return to the days of GerBarb and RussBarb. Maybe a level 90 is a more likely Craft mule. Or a level 80.

Once to 99, though, what would one do with the character? :)

[Guest]

Im not talking about the first month of ladder, but after that. And Im not comparing it to D2 now but rather D@ right after 1.9 was released before hacks went wild.

I think you will see more legit sets than you ever saw in 1.09

I "godly" items will be far more attainable than before.

I think runes will be currency like you say.

[ImpressiveOne]

I don't think gems will become currency, runes maybe. Gems are too easy to come by. As far as eBay prices go they might go up for a bit but most of the money grubbers have moved onto other games. see galaxies.

[CorwinBrute]

1. Actually, I expect a lot of duping, but the "low-profile" variety (ie Ebay powersellers, not the random Battle.net jackass). Currently already massive bug lists for the beta show that the patch needs a lot more coding attention, so I expect security to be problematic as before. On the other hand, I believe that dupers will refrain from hacking items, which will probably be detected more easily. I think runes will be duped a lot, coupled with cubing which will generate new IDs for all runes.

Regarding people not trading some stuff, this will be true to some extent, but then again, people might want to part from their newly found uber items for extremely rare runes that will allow them to finish some of the most impressive runewords.

2. I don't see that much improved demand for crafting... After all, except for nearly impossible to wear stuff (level 85%+ Blood rings, +2 skill amulets), crafting generally yields better results at Clvl 52 (against level 90 monsters, so perhaps Clvl 56 or 60 in 1.10). There are no new recipes, so except for weapons which will be viable, the same stuff will be crafted (rings, amulets, caster belts, Hitpower Gloves, Blood Gloves). On the other hand, expect to see more Blood rings and amulets, as it's now possible to cube Sol and Amn runes using lower grade runes.

3. Definitely agreed for runes, especially since runes will now have a fixed scale of value (ie 2 Cham = 1 Zod, unless in 1.09 were the values were basically the same for the top runes (Jah, Ber, Cham, Zod)). Gems will be the currency for low-end stuff. I think popular runes will be the ones for the upgrade item recipes.

4. Perhaps the top sets will not be readily available, but I'm not sure. It seems (from reports from people playing in Hell) that elite items drop much, much more often. In 1.09 the problem wasn't MF, but getting the damn TCs to drop. So after the first month, I think some good supply of high-end gold/green items will be available.

5. Ebay prices will definitely skyrocket, thus driving the demand for duping methods. See 1.

6. As a currency, the SoJ is already nearly dead in 1.09. We may have to wait for the "World Event" to unfold before making guesses on the SoJ value.

7. An easy guess, since chips are dead in 1.10. :P I believe that low-level, high quality stuff (Sigon's, Death Set...) will carry a very nice price tag in HC, and much less in SC after a few weeks.

8. I agree, there will be a nice market for good rares, fueled by runes as currency.

9. Eh. Old blacksmiths never die, but they don't fade away nicely either.

[Ignatz]

I mean, c'mon, HOW many times were they supposed to reset the ladder and didn't? How many runewords did they say they'd add (and how often), but didn't?

I think your assumptions and predictions are good ones, but that yet hinge on Blizzard's willingness to actually create a ladder reset schedule.

I'll bet my pocketbook there will be fewer than five ladder resets. Ever. Which would eventually turn the economy into something awfully similar to what we see today. The b.net community can't be trusted, as a whole, not to dig themselves into the ground. Well, if the ladder isn't reset at least every quarter, someone will start passing out spades.

God help us if I'm right. <_<

[channel1]

Occhidiangela: 3. Gems and Runes will be firmly established as the currency on the Ladder Only Realms.

Why? Rarity of the Gold and Set Items.

I don't think Unique and Set items will be uncommon at all.
From the bit of playing I've done in 1.10, I was floored by how much Green & Gold drops in NM and Hell. It looks like most of the Unique monsters have been set to have a very high likelihood to drop Unique or Set the first time you kill them, similar to the act bosses. I ran in to 4 Unique bosses in the Blood Moor in Hell, and only covered a third of the Blood Moor. I'm not sure if the "Merc-gets-killing-hit" trick works on these bosses, but it certainly does with Mephisto.

The funny thing is, what I had the hardest time finding was a plain, non-magic Elite armor. Everything that the vendors offer to my high level characters is magic, so is no use for Rune Words. I finally found an Embossed Plate (Exceptional Gothic Plate), in the time that I gained 6 levels with my character (Level 54 to 60). I saved the item and copied it a few times (not an option in Realm), and did the socketing recipe on 5 of them. (Results: two 4-socket, one each of 3, 2 and 1 socket).

I guess one thing that will happen is "Non-MF" runs, to get Elite versions of items for Runewords. :S

I have found that a character levels very fast to the 60s, fast enough that someone could create characters just to get the "First Kill" drops on the Hell Unique monsters if the Merc Kill trick doesn't work, or gets "fixed". Once someone has managed to put together a serious MF set to twink those characters with, Unique and Set items will be common.

I don't think it's a bad thing, it's a lot more fun PLAYING a character through than it is to do continuous Mephisto runs. It seems to be a lot better for the casual player, but how it will work out on the Realms remains to be seen.

I do agree that the Runes will be the new economy, but they won't scale up based on their relative value in the Upgrade recipe line. Since you can't DOWNGRADE a Rune, Zod has a very limited value. Ral, Tal, Amn and Thul, although low level Runes, will be in demand for the socketing recipes. Since the number of sockets can be anything up to the item's maximum, it can take a lot of tries to get an item with the number of sockets you want.

One thing that I haven't seen is anything with the "+X% Experience gained" attribute. That should help the folks who want to race to Level 99, if they can collect enough of them. I'll be surprised if someone doesn't hit 99 on the Realm Ladder within the first month. :) The Arreat Summit states that [i]" The maximum experience gain is limited to 1 character level" for A5Q5 (Ancient's Quest). If the actual reward IS 1 CLevel, then the power levelers will only need to get to level 96 IF they can complete Baal without completing that quest. That should be do-able, since you don't get credit it you are less than 20/40/60 when you kill the Ancients. Just go through them at CLevel 19/39/59. :)

I agree that there will be folks selling items to suckers, one thing I bet that they will be trying to sell will be the "First-Kill" characters I mentioned. Run a new character through the game, collecting all of the good stuff. Once the character has gotten all of the "First-Kill" Unique boss drops, they will sell them as High-Level characters. Minus what they found, of course. :)

[--Pete]

Hi,

Though I do have to agree with you on Buzzard's ability to deliver on their promises (I'm still steamed about Guild Halls and, to a lesser extent, the Arena).

The important thing about a ladder season is that it needs to be short enough that neither the top levels nor the top gear become too common. I have no idea how long that is, and I suspect Buzzard doesn't either. But one real easy criterion is to simply restart the ladder when there's a dozen or so level 99s. Of course, with the XP penalties, that might take forever. So, maybe the amount of uber gear out there should be tracked too.

However, something I haven't seen discussed does bother me. How many people will be willing to start new characters each time the ladder is reset? Unlike SC/BW where there is no persistence other than the ladder ranking, in D2 a new ladder means all the goodies and the character and the hours to get all that all go down the toilet when a new season starts. If the ladder characters get thrown into the common pool when the season ends, and if the common pool does not have access to the 1.10 features, then those ex-ladder characters will become trash with no future. I'm wondering just how many of the players who live for gear and the uber characters that gear gives them will be willing to have it all pissed away every three months or so.

Looks to me they've made the game worse for those that don't give a crap about gear and they've screwed those that do by making it all go away (in effect) every three months or so. If I thought Buzzard had the cleverness to actually plan it out, I'd say they were releasing 1.10 to kill the game, much like they did with 1.08 in D1. But then I remember the maxim: "Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity."

--Pete

[Guest]

I agree with you that it may annoy many people.

If they dump the ladder back into the common pool, many people who are not power lvlers will be upset.

Many people are excited about the new gear and hopefull that the hacks are gone. Other than that they just want to play like they did before.

[channel1]

...making it all go away (in effect) every three months or so

I expect that the first 1.10 Ladder will last as long as it takes for hacks to screw up public games & trading, plus the amount of time for Blizzard to do a half-assed job of patching the leaks.

I do think that the "retired" Ladder characters should go to their own Realm, NOT the pre-1.10 Realm. Of course, if all of the pre-1.10 characters are left to die off by account inactivity, it won't make any difference.

It's too bad that they won't make the non-ladder Realm have all of the features of the Ladder (cube recipes, etc.), that would make it less likely for the lamers to bother even creating characters on a Realm that will start out cheat-free. I suspect that the main reason that they have excluded those recipes is because they couldn't work around compatbility problems with old items.

-rcv-

[--Pete]

Hi,

I do think that the "retired" Ladder characters should go to their own Realm, NOT the pre-1.10 Realm.

From the AS http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/basics/ch...ctertypes.shtml under "Ladder":

these ladder characters will exist in a new separate economy from the other Battle.net Diablo II characters. After the ladder season is over, all ladder characters become normal characters.

Of course, if all of the pre-1.10 characters are left to die off by account inactivity, it won't make any difference.

Oh, yes it will make a difference. Again from the AS http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/ for June 16, 2003

We’ll be adding many new Horadric Cube recipes to Diablo II with the upcoming 1.10 patch. Many of the recipes allow you to upgrade Runes. For instance, Jah Rune + Jah Rune + Jah Rune + Flawless Ruby results in a Cham Rune. This formula only works for Ladder Characters and Open Characters.

In other words, some of the 1.10 stuff will only work for Ladder characters. When the ladder season is over, those Ladder characters will become Normal realm characters. The new cube capabilities will no longer work for them. The new items may or may not drop for them. I don't know what Buzzard intends to do with the 1.10 items these ex-Ladder characters will take into Normal, but anything they could do seems wrong. Wrong to delete them. Wrong to nerf them. Wrong to let some players have uber items denied to other players on the realm. Wrong to further screw the D2 Normal economy by introducing a slug of items that were not previously available. And, as far as I can tell, Buzzard doesn't have a clue, either, about what they'll do. Probably didn't even occur to them.

So, either you play on realms and you're screwed because you're excluded from a lot of the new stuff, or you play on ladder and you're screwed because your character is doomed to death at the end of the ladder season. And, of course, Buzzard doesn't have a clue how long the ladder season is going to last.

Two years of straining and Buzzard is giving birth to this monstrosity? My respect for their thought process is already below sea level and sinking fast.

--Pete

[GenericKen]

Wrong. After the first ladder season, those ladder items will come over to the normal realm when those characters with their ladder items are converted.

And the economy will EXPLODE, fall over on its side, burn down, sink into a swamp, then burn down again.

[--Pete]

Hi,

First, I'll risk assuming you meant to reply to me since that is where you posted.

Now, just what that I said is "Wrong"?

Wrong. After the first ladder season, those ladder items will come over to the normal realm when those characters with their ladder items are converted.

And you know this how? Direct line to god? Contemplating your navel? Or are you just full of crap you pass off as fact?

As to the economy, you just echoed what I said would happen *if* the items were just imported.

--Pete

[Wapptor]

And the economy will EXPLODE, fall over on its side, burn down, sink into a swamp, then burn down again.

(heh) :lol:

[Archon_Wing]

Which I always wonder why everyone complains about an in-game economy, considering the economy is mainly run by the 1337 d00ds-_-

[Brista]

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

[--Pete]

Hi,

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

Yes. And when the ladder reset comes, the first group will be forced to join the second group or start over. Since most of the first group will have become the first group because they were trying to avoid the second, starting over becomes the most likely option. While I, like you, start many characters and drop them after a while, I don't relish the thought that I will be forced to restart my characters at a time not of my choosing! I do not play 24/7 or even as much as an hour or two a day. It usually takes me a day per waypoint, roughly. Say a month and a half to two months to run a character through. Which means, if the ladder season is three months, then I have no desire to start a character after the first month since that character might become useless before *I* am through with it.

I agree with you, trashing characters and starting over is fun. But I feel that we, not Buzzard, should determine when one of our characters is "finished".

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

Hold on. First, "there will be too few items of value". Do you mean that there will be too few types or too few copies of those types? If you mean too few types, remember that the economy now is based on a half dozen or less items. If a new half dozen *better* items come from the ladder, the original items of value will become worthless (since the economy is pretty much binary: an item is either worth a lot or it is worth next to nothing). If you mean that too few copies (or perhaps "instances" would be better -- let's be naive and assume Buzzard manages to prevent ladder duping), that might be possible, depending on how many people play the ladder, how much they play, and how hard it will be to find/make the new uber items. If there aren't very many instances of uber items in circulation when they get dumped into the normal realm, then you might be right and they will not become the *basis* of the economy. They will still disrupt the economy because the buyers are typically looking for the best items available *now*, not a few months ago.

So, I think you are underestimating the effect of ladder items flooding the normal economy. Of course, that presumes they will, indeed, be permitted to enter normal. If not, then the people who have those items on their ladder characters will get a double screwing.

The Ladder system is an attempt to address the problem that the non-Ladder realms will never be cleaned up.

Well, duh. Yes, and it is a neat way for Buzzard to try to keep a clean environment. Every time a new exploit is developed that turns the Ladder into a cesspool and Buzzard can't (or won't) figure a way to clean it up, all they have to do is declare a new season. Presto, a fresh blank page. So, it is a great solution from that perspective. I just don't see it as a great solution from the perspective of the honest players who are told that, just because some sewage has gotten into their pool they are going to be flushed away to the sewage treatment plant (normal realms) with the crap.

As to the rest, you have some sound arguments. But time will tell. A lot depends on a few factors, such as how much warning Buzzard will give before resetting the ladder, what they will do with the "ladder only" items of the "demoted" characters, how well they avoid (and fix) exploits on the ladder. Predictions are difficult. You seem to think they'll pull it off. I remember the duping and MS bug in D1 (which modders fixed but Buzzard didn't) and have not much faith.

--Pete

[Occhidiangela]

what they will do with the "ladder only" items of the "demoted" characters, how well they avoid (and fix) exploits on the ladder.

Prediction only, with reasoning.

The ladder only items will stay alive once a ladder season is over, and when the new season opens, a few other new items will be presented, or hyped, or some new cube recipes, or what have you. As the old ladder items will have "X" identification, their detection as dupes, should the duping occur (should I say when? :o ) and there will be no real harm in adding them to the "general population" pool of items. They will have served their purpose.

I'd guess that seasons will be 4-5 months, maybe, to allow for a lot of stuff to be found. I'd also guess that Blizzard support for ladder seasons will end within two years as WoW picks up steam. Then, slowly but surely, D II LoD will be eased out to pasture.

[TriggerHappy]

If normal realms are already a complete mess, why should those trying to get away from there care for what happens to that so called "economy"?

After all, if one never plans to be anywhere but the ladder realms, the normal realms can burn. Who is stil under the illusion that the normal realms can be "saved"?

I can see a problem when one wants to keep playing a character one's attached to, after a ladder reset. Here the legit player would have to deal with the mess that are normal realms. Tough luck here. Otherwise, a ladder player should only care about the "economy" of the next ladder cycle, if one cares about D2 economies at all, that is. Personally i don't, seing as i never trade, and usually solo or play in a small party with trusted people.