Black Raven Dragoons

[MaxRile]

Thought this years games would put your wallet in a bind.. Think again Blizzard is introducing an ingame Auction House for Diablo3 with real world money at stack. As well as ingame gold and Online Store credit.

I myself think the idea is awesome with some terrible side effects:
good sides
1 money for power, power for money
2 farming will be uncontrollable
3 market flux
better sides
1 playing with friends = better loot = overage = money = ?world domination?
2 free weekly postings in the AH
3 Ingame, online awesomeness

[Zancarius]

Hmm, seems like Blizzard liked the micro-transaction stuff from WoW a little too much.

[MaxRile]

think of it this way.

someone has an item you want and youve been farming for it for weeks with no luck you give up and you have this large amount of gold or 15bucks to spare from the AH stuffs youve just dumped onto it, now you just pay for it on the AH.

it kicks a good chunk of the middle man out and is safer.

[Grimblast]

I've never been fond of using real world money to buy in game items. I prefer using in game funds to buy items. But I suppose a sucker is born every minute and will sink their actual money into non tangible items.

[Zancarius]

Blizzard learned from name changes, account transfers, etc., that they can make a load more money off of microtransactions (although their idea of microtransactiosn are kind of expensive) than just accounts alone.

For people with more money than time, I suppose it might be worth it. Although, I'd much rather just play the game than pay for some random item. It really does seem like it's a way to sucker people into paying more. But hey--whatever floats your boat.

[MaxRile]

Its not about Blizzard taking in more money, it just bringing a system that was in play already and giving it an actual place and a safe way to do it in. People are always going to want to pay for more in there games and this is a way of doing that sure Blizzard skims off the top for maintenance and other things but so what. The vast majority of money changing hands is player to player, and from my understanding you dont have to spend money to make money its not just centered around real world money you can use in game gold or just barter...

[Zancarius]

Blizzard charges a fee to list items in the auction house (although Pardo stated that players would be able to create a certain number of free listings per week), and takes a percentage of the finalized transaction.

Sounds to me like it is everything to do about making more money. Why else would they imply there's a cap on the number of "free listings?"

[MaxRile]

With actual money involved would it not be prudent to limit the number of free interactions a person can get then to not, think about it the markets going to be flooded one way or the other, its a limit on the flood would reduce the the inflation on over all prices. Then to have everyone and there mother post everything from crap to gold, when you pay for more then you can get its a sure thing that your ether dumb or smart about what your doing and not just posting crap.

[Zancarius]

The transaction cap is what I gathered from the quoted text. Whether they actually implement it is something that remains to be seen since I highly doubt Diablo 3 is going to be viable this year.

I suspect part of it is because Diablo 3 will be a very different game from WoW; unless they turn it into an MMO, it's doubtful many people are going to bother with a pay for auction house. The idea may sound alluring, but what Blizzard's margins are may dictate how popular it becomes. I don't think they'll be much--probably a few cents here and there--but there's a lot of tight fisted SOBs out there who aren't fond of having something free and unlimited (think WoW's AH) replaced with something free and limited or unlimited and pay-for. Further, such payments might server to increase the quality of items posted to the AH, but the other side of the coin is thus: How willing are players to spend money on something that is generally free in other popular games? There's a chance it will impact the market size, and certainly not in a good way.

I don't think real world currency will have as much of an impact on inflation as you may think. If anything, I'd be inclined to believe it might be more so, because now players would be able to charge real money for intangible goods and gamers are notoriously bad at economics. This also explains why Tirian was able to milk idiot WoW players for a ridiculous amount of gold, because his background allowed him to manipulate markets and very few were any the wiser.

I'll see how this goes. I'm rethinking my excitement over Diablo 3, because if Vivendi--err, Activi... err, Blizzard--is going to turn it into another money leach game, I think I'll just stick with indie titles.