Comments on: You Can Sell Your Diablo 3 Loot For Actual Money

By: Pattom

Pattom — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 23:12:05 +0000

Really disappointed by your preview. This is the kind of thing I’d love to avoid buying out of principle (less so for the auction house itself the lack of mods or offline play), but Diablo has always been most appealing to me of Blizzard’s traditional fare, and the Witch Doctor in particular sounds like it’s a whole game of Bioshock’s Insect Swarm. :S

By: Jason L

Jason L — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 03:41:41 +0000

Nah, I failed to consider what that’d look like in text. I didn’t mean to make your casual verbal tangent look like some weighty editorial line in the sand. I was just trying to express equally casually that though I’ll be exiled from the mainstream when the big boys finish their switch from content to compulsion, I will not be suffering.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:56:14 +0000

Yeah, I guess I should have said you’ll have very few new mainstream games to buy.

That was the first half of a point I didn’t get a chance to make fully, which was that the fight is going to change from “bonus content vs no bonus content” to “bonus content that doesn’t piss people off vs bonus content that does”. Wanna do a piece at some point on what constitutes what, for me – it’s a tough thing to generalise about, but it’s going to become hugely important.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:48:19 +0000

I finally got around to transcribing this because of this news and the PCGPC article is old.

I think, if you have a policy of…you will not ever play a game where it’s possible for somebody to pay money or do something out of the game to get an advantage, to get something extra in the game, extra content, then you’ll have very little to play in about five years’ time…

I disagree. There are more glorious, uplifting indie projects than I can track, let alone buy, let alone play, and if even those fall then like everyone I have a tottering 30-year Stack of Shame. I may have very little to buy, which is a very different proposition. Catch you on the flip side, Actard.

By: Diffractionman

Diffractionman — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 15:49:49 +0000

Good news for Torchlight 2 then?

I don’t think the whole idea is evil, especailly once i realised it wasn’t blizzard doing the selling. If it works well for TF2, why not diablo? Well I just think it may cheapen the whole experience. I don’t see a way that this can work and not affect the fun of playing the game. Even just knowing as you loot an item that you could sell it would probably ruin the feel of exploring a dungeon. I want to be immersed in a world where there are monsters and me clicking them till they die, not reminded of money and the real world.

The always online thing also irks me, for multiplayer it would make sense, but for singleplayer? Let me cast fireballs at zombies without jumping through your login hoops.

By: Mickiscoole

Mickiscoole — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:11:10 +0000

What irks me about this is the idea that the only reason ActiBlizz are against gold farmers in WoW is because they weren’t getting their cut.

By: Lack_26

Lack_26 — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:36:53 +0000

Money!? Actual money! Why back in my day we traded toffees for handgrenades and the sky was made of gold. [etc.]

This does actually sounds like a much better system, if TF2 had tried this then I’m sure a lot more people would play, just for the hope of a few squid. But I rather like the way that the people who make the models make quite a bit of money for it, to change the system would affect their cut.

I wonder how much it would change prices (especially with the limited item-types), would it devalue items to the extent that the regular player stops needing to really play just to unlock stuff. (Not that that is necessarily a bad thing. I’m sure that given enough time and data, and a pet economist I might actually be able to give an approximation of the result).