
Why Diablo's Auction House Went Straight to Hell (2013) - ducaale
https://www.wired.com/2013/09/diablo-auction-house/
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peter_d_sherman
Excerpt:

 _" But Diablo doesn't have more dungeons, more bosses, etc. Players just play
the same procession of levels on harder and harder difficulty levels, picking
up better and better loot. In other words, the loot isn't just a helping hand
towards their ultimate goal – better loot is the ultimate goal. And with the
auction house, players found that the best way to obtain it was to just buy
it.

And the next thing you know, they're not playing the game anymore. Why would
they, when the reward structure that would otherwise motivate them to play was
no longer there? Without the promise of better stuff, Diablo was all stick and
no carrot."_

This problem is already solved in World Of Warcraft - basically players can't
buy specific items -- until they're of a certain level... But the items
attained at a new level are only good/worthwhile to have - for a few levels
after that one. That is, after a few levels of advancement, the advantage
gained by possessing an item attained at a lower level diminishes (relative to
other new/more powerful items attainable at those newer, higher levels), such
that after a few levels, the item diminishes in its utility, and eventually it
must, of necessity, be discarded as a piece of junk!

(Side note: Compare this to how upwardly economically mobile people will
discard items that they once purchased that once served them well, because as
they attain higher incomes, newer/better/more expensive replacement items can
now be purchased by them! When that happens, the old, yet once-useful items,
are "crap", by comparison, so they get discarded as trash...)

The problem is already solved -- in World Of Warcraft.

~~~
Konnstann
Diablo 3 took a few hours to get to max level on the first character, an hour
max on the second, even less if you had friends. Items are already level-gated
in the game anyway, so you'd need to come up with a convoluted gear-score
system to judge power-level of gear.

D3's auction house made the game suck because the combination of game
difficulty at Inferno and the way the loot dropped meant that the fastest way
to gear up was to do chest runs where you ignored all the enemies. The extreme
imbalance on the AH also meant that top end gear was stupid expensive and
everything else was dirt cheap, limiting mobility for those who chose to "play
the AH".

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boazISgay
Degrade attributes of the object when the object is sold. If you want an
unmolested version with 10-15% more power, earn it yourself instead of buying
it.

