

Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details - pinguar
http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3093728

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patio11
I don't know how they're going to manage this with the money-laundering/fraud
angle. This makes Epic Boots of the Whale into a transfer medium for money
between virtually anonymous endpoints, including internationally. (Long story
short: You can run an auction which is honest or you can run an auction which
is anonymous, but you cannot do both at the same time. Virtually any
information flow from the system to any participant in the auction compromises
the anonymity, since the attacker has _perfect knowledge of the state of the
system from both ends of the trade._ )

That is guaranteed to draw heavy adversarial attention from both the bad guys
and the good guys.

Business-wise, even Blizzard is going to eventually bow to reality and realize
that INSERT ... INTO ITEMS; is the most profitable line of code any game
company can ever write. They've experimented a few times in WoW with making
folks pay for e.g. cosmetic mount improvements. Eventually they're going to
realize that their core audience pays hundreds but values their gamerhood at
(conservatively) thousands, and start monetizing that gap. After doing so,
they'll be able to treat the base product as "Free 2 Play", assuming they
think America has enough bandwidth to play their games without needing the
assist from a truck of DVDs shipped to every Best Buy and Walmart.

~~~
seanalltogether
I disagree, Blizzard has done a good job with managing their in game economies
and they wouldn't be so stupid as to screw it up by competing against their
own players for control of assets, they stand to make way more money by just
skimming off the top.

~~~
patio11
Blizzard is very good at what they do, but not perfect. The entire space is
converging on Free2Play and games with 1 pct of WoW's budget print money hats.
When Blizzard makes a tiny cosmetic sale of items, the Internet goes awash
with geek rage and the shareholders at Vivendi get 20 million richer. Geeks
rage hard at 5% fees for transactions but happily pay ten bucks a button press
for a SQL statement with 98 pct margins.

I respect that you may no like this. I dislike gravity. Some days we do not
get what we want.

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chokma
It will be interesting to see how they get around (anti-)gambling laws, at
least here in Germany. The moment you offer real money for winning in luck-
based games (as opposed to skill-based ones) like Diablo3, you may run afoul
of the state monopoly for lottery and related games.

A former employer once commissioned a flash game with a western setting which
included a virtual casino with several games of chance. He had to shelve the
idea of offering people to cash out and the game was delayed for a long time
(if I remember correctly, it was turned into a game where you could buy stuff
for your character, but there was no longer a way to transfer your winnings
into real money accounts)

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guildchatter
This will be interesting.

Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game.

Ah... Fond memories of duping items in the original Diablo game -- Obsidian
Ring of the Zodiac, Godly Plate of the Whale, King's Sword of Haste...

=]

~~~
starwed
> _Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-
> game._

Does WoW have duping problems? I was under the impression that it was the
particular way D2 handled items[1] that allowed duping, not a necessary part
of any game.

[1] Probably at the time, the trade-off for being secure would have been
unacceptable performance and/or database bloat.

~~~
mukyu
There is nothing specific about how Diablo 2 did items that enabled duping.
Nearly every MMORPG has had bugs that allow duping. You are working with
distributed systems with tens if not hundreds of ways of interacting with your
inventory and have to make sure they all work properly even when an attacker
can crash your servers at any time during the processing. This all has to be
done while at the same time allowing massive amounts of transactions to occur
simulatenously. It is not an easy thing to deal with.

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coffeeaddicted
Step 1: Make getting good items so frustratingly repetitive that players start
paying other people for getting those. Step 2: Instead of trying to fix that
part of the game decide to monetize on this?

Talk about game designers selling out badly ...

~~~
cube13
It doesn't matter what Blizzard does to make it easier to get, really. If
there is even a perception of rarity, someone will try to sell it for real
money.

An entire economy has developed around buying virtual items, and Blizzard is
only the latest ones to try to cash in on it. EVE Online does this with the
PLEX licenses, which are 1 month subscriptions that players can buy with real
money, then sell them in-game to other players. Everquest 2 had(or has?)
servers that allowed the player to do the exact same thing, by auctioning off
in-game items and characters for real money.

Blizzard's is doing the exact same thing that SOE and CCP did. They're making
sure that they are going to get a cut of the money that will be flowing
through the game.

~~~
alnayyir
Eve is hemorrhaging accounts and the player outrage from the aftermath of
their attempts to directly monetize the playerbase beyond PLEX accounts make
them a VERY bad example to follow.

[http://beefjack.com/news/eve-online-revolts-could-cost-
ccp-1...](http://beefjack.com/news/eve-online-revolts-could-cost-ccp-1m-in-
lost-revenue/)

$1mm is a big deal for a small, niche company like CCP.

~~~
cube13
>Eve is hemorrhaging accounts and the player outrage from the aftermath of
their attempts to directly monetize the playerbase beyond PLEX accounts make
them a VERY bad example to follow.

I would argue CCP's issues are more with their marketing and customer-facing
people than anything else. Valve did that with TF2 hats(some cost $20 or more
to buy), and didn't have nearly the same level of fallout with it. Blizzard's
done the same thing with purchasable vanity pets and in-game mounts, and
hasn't had really any backlash from it.

CCP was charging US$70 for a virtual pair of jeans, then made forum posts
trying to convince people since people spend that much on actual clothing,
they could charge the same thing for the virtual item. The userbase,
predictably, wasn't happy with this idiotic argument, and the fact that a LOT
of development time went to these features versus things that actually
impacted the player's experience.

~~~
alnayyir
It was a misunderstanding of their market entirely. The Eve player-base is
incredibly pissy.

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trotsky
Hasn't blizzard been previously quite aggressive about how game breaking
player driven cash economies are - i.e. gold selling and the such? But now
they think it's a fine idea as long as they're getting a real world cash fee?
Seems to suggest they never saw it as game breaking as much as revenue
stealing.

~~~
cube13
At one point, they were pretty protective about WoW's economy. In vanilla,
there were a lot of gold sinks, like skill/spell training costs, riding
skills, etc. Those are sill present, but don't impact the game nearly as much.
They're mostly vanity things like gigantic bags and non-combat pets. In-game
currency was relatively rare, with most endgame bosses giving less than 1 gold
per person.

That changed during the middle of the Burning Crusade expansion, where
Blizzard basically decided that the gold sellers won, and that they were just
going to flood the market with currency. They added daily quests, which were
quests that gave reputation and gold every day to top-level characters, as
well as more sinks, like a character title that cost 1000 gold.

At this point, gold is basically a joke, because it's extremely easy to get
with a minimal time investment. Half an hour of play can get the player
anywhere between 100 and 400 gold. It appears that most of the gold sellers
have moved to selling epic tradable gear and items over gold at this point.

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pushingbits
Blizzard, strangely enough, is probably in the perfect position to start a
successful virtual currency.

In fact, they might just do it by accident.

~~~
beaumartinez
SOJs?

~~~
KevinMS
SOJs was a really interesting phenomenon and probably taught me more about
economics more than anything else.

SOJs, "stone of Jordan" was a unique ring in diablo2.

Gold in diablo2 became worthless, even though they tried to soak it up with
improving vendor items, and even implementing gambling.

Eventually SOJs became the currency for trading. You'd see postings like "2
socket archon 4 2 SOJ".

What was so interesting is that SOJ's are very similar to gold in the real
world. They were easy to trade, easy to store (only taking up 1 square), very
rare (or supposed to be), and had great intrinsic value because the sorcerer
class was always running out of mana and they gave a 25% increase to mana.

Using SOJs as currency just developed naturally, probably just like gold did
in the real world.

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MrJagil
I wonder if there's going to be a cap on how much you can trade/earn.

What's stopping this from becoming a full-time occupation for someone?

~~~
Cushman
I've always wondered what the ballpark was for people employed full-time
playing Diablo 2. Thousands?

~~~
guildchatter
I dusted off my old copy of Diablo 2 last summer and played for a little
while. The entire multi-player experience was dominated by bots spamming ads
or bots that instantly pick up any rare items that dropped.

The botting was completely out of control.

I chatted with another player who used bots to farm for rare items and he
claimed to have 24+ instances of the game running 24/7 split across several
machines. He would check once a day to see if any of his bots managed to get a
really, really rare item.

Kinda crazy... =]

~~~
pavel_lishin
You should ask him to do an AMA, if you can get a hold of him. I wonder how
profitable this was - especially compared to, say, mining bitcoins.

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Tomek_
For me the huge news here is that they're making Diablo 3. I'm so out of the
loop when it comes to games.

~~~
ghotli
There's a whole community over on reddit worth looking over. Lots of Diablo 3
information.

<http://www.reddit.com/r/diablo>

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kbatten
From one view I understand at least some of the reasons they are doing this.

1) Money. D3 is free to play so monetizing non-subscription aspects makes
sense.

2) People _will_ buy in game items for real money so bringing that out of the
dark underground makes sense.

However it still seems contrary to the gameplay, and would make finding some
very rare item less special (unless you were going to sell it that is.)

On the bright side, hardcore mode will not have this, so I think overall it is
acceptable.

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cyanbane
I fear this might make the argument for taxing virtual goods stronger. There
have been some real money systems (livegamer) out there but never on such a
large expected release title.

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joez
I'll be paying close attention to if this trend catches on. Blizzard is often
a trailblazer in features it introduces (example: Exclamation Mark = New
Quest, Question Mark = Completed Quest; Talent Trees).

~~~
seanalltogether
Here is what I wish Blizzard would do with WoW. Instead of paying $15 a month
for game playing time, they should sell you game items that represent a week
of play time, so let's say $15 buys you a stack of 4 in game chips. The player
can then activate those chips to extend their play time or they can trade them
with other players or sell them on the auction house for in game gold. On the
other end, blizzard can enable a program to buy back chips at say 70% of the
original value. This gives people a legitimate avenue to "buy" items if they
want, while also controlling the gold/item farming community.

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Arxiss
There are 2 absolutely bad side effects to this:

\- You must be always online, no offline mode at all. /// \- Mods are
expressly forbidden, no mods at all.

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neuroelectronic
What a joke. No wonder this game is taking so long to release. Creating a
global marketplace like this is a serious development effort. This isn't a
game anymore.

