
Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014 - freeman478
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/09/diablo-3-to-permanently-remove-its-auction-houses-in-march-2014/
======
josh2600
So, I have a bit of a personal episode here I'd like to share.

I played a lot of Diablo 2, more than I care to admit, and so the launch of
Diablo 3 was a really big deal to me. I pre-ordered it on day 1, I pre-
installed the game weeks before launch and I read every piece of information
about the game. When the game came out, I initially loved it; just an absolute
pleasure to play. It was great, until I found the auction house.

Within a few days, I had enough gear to handle most everything in the game and
after a week or two I had a max-leveled character of each class. What was left
to do? I hit the level cap, and even though they eventually came out with a
second cap, the idea of grinding made no sense when the auction house existed.
The most practical thing to do was trade and that got so boring so quick :/.

The design choices that Blizzard made as a direct result of the auction house
are both terrifying and a fantastic lesson for anyone in the startup world.

As a direct result of making money off of the activities of people in the
game, Blizzard made the following game inhibiting decisions:

* Penalizing players for dying for longer and longer periods of time

* Limiting in-game communication systems severely

* Penalizing players for playing in groups

I could go on, but the bottom line was this: Activision put profit over
gameplay and burned one of the best franchises in the history of gaming for
little profit. The game was absolutely atrocious as a direct result of the
goddamn auction house. It took my favorite game and turned it into a stock
simulator.

What made Diablo great was the camaraderie, the lack of a driving arching
focus on optimization/monetization, and an amazing community of folks. Diablo
3 tried to turn all of that into money and it sucked.

Thank god and good riddance to that rubbish auction house.

~~~
jerf
The lesson, applicable to games, startups, governance, and indeed systems
engineering in general, is that systems _react_. You can not look at an
existing system, then say "Ah, this system is doing X, so I shall do Y which
will cause the result Z, _and nothing else_." In this case, you can't look at
the D2 community, and say, "Ah ha, I shall inject this system for extracting
money, and therefore it shall be exactly like the original situation except I
shall be making money." The system reacts.

This is truly one of the gaping holes in human cognition, this idea that a
single participant in a larger system can make a change and then model the
results of that change without accounting for the reactions of all the other
actors. Especially when the participant in question is by far the largest
participant.

I actually disagree that the root problem is that they put "profit over
gameplay". The root problem is that they made changes designed to create
profit, but failed to correctly understand how the rest of the system would
react. There probably _is_ a way to "monetize" the Diablo community more
successfully, but whatever that way is it's going to be something more subtle
than the Auction House was.

I'd suggest looking at how Valve has monetized the _hell_ out of Team Fortress
2 if you're trying to find a positive example. It's mind boggling what they've
pulled off there, and observe that, like I said, it's a great deal more subtle
than "let's just put up some payment gates!!1!". MMORPGs also provide a
variety of interesting compare & contrasts, especially with the recent
successes of the free-to-play models to compare to the WoW
subscription/expansion model.

~~~
ChuckMcM
This is so spot on. Someone asked me when we would run out of oil, my answer,
"Never". "Never?!" they spat out, but look at how quickly we use it, look at
how finite a resource it is, Etc. And I replied, as it gets rare, the price
will go up, as the price goes up other things will be substituted, as they are
substituted the demand will go down. Demand goes down and the time to
exhaustion stretches out. Long tail curve, we never hit zero. It just gets so
expensive that nobody uses it any more.

Systems do react, and that reaction is why you can never predict system
behavior with extrapolation.

Neil Stephenson posits a more rational economic system for WoW (and presumably
Diablo 3) in the novel Reamde. What is perhaps most interesting is how he
deconstructs the flow of 'value' in the economy, trickling in from gold
creation and trickling out with taxes and purchases. To bad Blizzard didn't
read that first.

That said the notion of a 'no levels' RPG where everything is trained/earned
is more like Everquest (nobody wants to go back to skinning 6,000 rabbits,
trust me) but it is the place where the next big breakthrough will be made.
And it will make the people who discover the recipe very wealthy indeed.

~~~
jshen
I agree with you, but the energy example is flawed in that it assumes we will
find alternatives that aren't very expensive. We won't run out of oil, but we
may very likely run out of cheap energy.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The statement "cheap energy" is really hard to quantify (like 'largest
integer') you can say "Gee Coal is really Cheap and there is tons and tons of
it!" Except that coal smoke is killing people, contaminating large swaths of
land etc. But at $100 a barrel you can gasify coal and make clean gas power
plants cost effectively, but what is the $100 really mean? Its local currency
(US Dollars) in a world economy. At a high enough price you can build nuclear
plants and fast breeder reactors that eat all their own fuel. And use that
energy to make long chain hydrocarbons (aka oil) out of CO2 and electrolisys
of water [1]. Politically nonviable but that too is a system, what do people
vote for energy and synthesize oil for plastics or a degenerating quality of
life? There is some thoughts that you can run F-T reactors using concentrated
solar in the desert.

But to you point of 'running out of cheap energy' what does that mean if the
economy has adjusted to the cost of that energy? Look at electric cars as a
prime example, sure they are expensive today but what happens 10 years from
now when they are everywhere? Now $200/barrel oil, converted into electricity
at a fossil fuel plant is give you the same miles per $ as burning it as
gasoline used to do in your internal combustion engine.

Constant adaptation by the system to the constraints applied to it.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-
Tropsch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch)

~~~
jshen
Over the last 60 years global energy consumption has grown exponentially.
There is a strong case to be made that rising living standards globally and
global economic growth are dependent on this level of energy growth.

Nothing you said can come close to meeting anything close to this level of
growth and I see no reason to believe our system is prepared for anything less
than such growth without great pain.

------
brownbat
The prevailing opinion is that the AH killed the fun of hunting for rare
drops, and it should be abandoned.

Over time, I've found games that involve grinding for rare drops resembling
more and more the psychology of slot machines.[1]

It's hard for me to be sympathetic to people who claim the fun thing is now
too easy, because it doesn't involve as much mind-numbing work. If your game
only works with a slot machine mechanic, maybe it has other design issues?

Also relevant: [2].

[1] [http://99percentinvisible.prx.org/2013/04/29/78-no-armed-
ban...](http://99percentinvisible.prx.org/2013/04/29/78-no-armed-
bandit/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=78-no-armed-bandit)

[2] [http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/31](http://penny-
arcade.com/comic/2007/12/31) (There may be one that's more on point...)

~~~
cheald
The Skinner Box is a well-known and understood psychological data point. The
problem is that if you undercut the joy of pressing the reward button, all the
reinforcement conditioning goes into teaching your audience that your game is
Not Fun, rather than teaching them that "just one more run" will grant them
the thing they want.

The problem with the AH and its accompanying miniscule drop rates is that it
quantified things too solidly. You can't do "just one more run" with the hope
of getting your item. You know that your chances of getting your item on your
own are virtually nil, and you can calculate that you need to do 634 more runs
to earn the currency needed to buy the item you're looking for.

People get addicted to gambling because of the endorphin rush you get when you
win big. Blizzard killed the "win big" and reduced it to going to a 9-5 job to
earn a paycheck to eventually buy that big screen TV you want.

------
programminggeek
Wow, this is a surprising reversal of trends as far as user generated content
and micro-transaction based economies go, but the auction house really did
change the core mechanics of Diablo 3.

As a player I really did kind of like the auction system during the initial
grind from level 1 to 60, but when there was no more level progression and the
only progression was item progression, it just stopped being fun because the
only purpose of playing was to kill things for the best drops that you could
sell on the auction house. There was no longer a use for almost everything
that dropped.

The auction house mechanic might work on a MMO style game, but Diablo 3 isn't
a MMO and the auction house broke the one mechanic that made the game a lot of
fun - random loot drops.

It's treasure hunting basically. Auction house turns treasure hunting into a
job, and thus it's less fun after a while.

This is a good lesson for game designers. The treasure hunting random loot
mechanic works only if it can't be short circuited. The moment you can "buy"
treasure, it's no longer treasure, it's a commodity and collecting commodities
is a job, not a game.

Treasure hunting is a game.

~~~
listic
> The auction house mechanic might work on a MMO style game, but Diablo 3
> isn't a MMO

What's the meaningful difference? I mean, what specifically makes auction
house work in an MMO, but not a game like Diablo?

I thought auction house as a feature either works, if done right, or it
doesn't. I thought auction house as an idea is great, and now this... I
haven't played Diablo 3 yet; I played a little World of Warcraft back in the
day and I liked the way I can sell unneeded gear and buy exactly what's right
for me instead (buth some pretty cool items are Soulbound and cannot be
sold!). I thought an auction house in a game like original online Magic the
Gathering is pretty fabulous: auctions there are full of player-run trade bots
which are tolerated by administration, and all this in a game that didn't
start out with game currency to begin with (they appropriated tournament
tickets as a de facto game currency). I can't play the game itself,
unfortunately: interface is just too clunky for me.

~~~
cheald
D3 is _all about_ the (tradeable) loot. The AH works in WoW because everything
sellable was also consumable, and the most desirable items couldn't be sold.
To get the best stuff in WoW, you play the game. To get the best stuff in D3,
you pull out your wallet.

Imagine how WoW would have been if good items only dropped from dungeon bosses
once per 1200 runs, but were sellable on the AH. Once you've been through the
dungeon once to experience it, why would you ever go back, rather than just
purchasing some gold?

------
shadowmint
While I broadly speaking applaud this move, I do feel a little bit like the
guys from blizzard need to eat just a little bit of humble pie.

'this is really exciting for us'?

really?

how about, 'we're really sorry we took a franchise you loved and set fire to
it, and are now really concerned about the viability of the expansion we're
making'

Too late; I'll play torchlight thanks.

You have a nice diablo romp over there. You've lost my support; I no longer
have confidence the team on diablo 3 can deliver a game I actually want to
play.

~~~
thefreeman
Thanks for putting it way better then I could have. Substituting Torchlight
for PoE

------
Steko
The AH wasn't really the problem for D3. The problem was the basic stat
balance issues created huge lottery items.

At launch for a Monk basically there were a handful of god stats (attack
speed, life on hit, dex, all resist, your specific resist, magic find), a
handful of ok stats and a large number of garbage stats. Now even a good stat
can be worthless because of the large value ranges.

Back of the envelop numbers: say god stats are a 10, ok stats are 4 and dump
stats are 2's. Now the MEDIAN item is (roughly) 1% of one with an avg amount
of ideal stats (ideal stats with all high end values might be 30 times
better).

~~~
mehwoot
And this is different to D2? D2 was even worse, with the amount of time you
needed to spend to get that perfect item.

~~~
Steko
To me the itemization was far and away better in D2. A decade of MMO
popularity may have changed player expectations as well. And yes, circling
back to the linked article, the AH exposes the poor itemization in a way that
D2 didn't have so even if D3 itemization is the same as D2 it needed to be
better.

------
freeman478
Official annoucement here :
[http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/](http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/)
but i felt ars added some useful context and commentary.

------
EpicEng
Finally. This was the absolute worst aspect of DIII. It completely ruined the
gearing up aspect of the game. Loot drops were tuned down because of it, so
how did everyone get gear? They bought it. Lame.

The new direction of this game looks really good. These kind of changes make
me want to play the xpac. I had previously sworn off the game entirely.

~~~
craigyk
ditto. I even asked for (and received) a refund as I was quite irate that the
game mechanics had obviously been tuned with something other than fun as the
top priority. This makes me think of giving it another go. I was hoping stuff
like this would start happening after they broke away from their parent.

------
thisisnotatest
Great move. I remember the first time I stopped by the auction house and
bought some powerful gems for my level 20 character. I'd been collecting
crappy gems planning to upgrade them, but then for a pittance of gold I had
suddenly (almost accidentally) twinked my character with gems with huge stat
bonuses and no level requirements. I tried to swear off the auction house
after that, but the psychological damage was done, and I never played Diablo 3
after the first time I beat normal difficulty. (To be fair, I might just have
been in a different stage of my life than when I was a Diablo 2 addict in high
school.)

I'm sure this will become a seminal case study for online game design in the
future.

------
thefreeman
Fuck Blizzard. I will never forgive them for the cashgrab they called D3 I
don't care how they change it.

~~~
diminoten
How is this attitude rational?

I can't understand how people react like this. Is it left over anger from when
the situation was in the undesirable configuration? Can they not see how their
opinions have had an influence in something they're passionate about?

I can't see how someone who wanted this to happen would consider Blizzard to
be still in the wrong.

~~~
alan_cx
Why should it be rational? Who cares if you understand it or not? Frankly, no
one has to.

Fact is people do end up feeling that way, and it costs sales. Worse still, it
costs loyalty. So know it exists, the accept it as a reality to deal with.

Lastly, ever had a boy/girl friend who cheated? Were you still interested
after the other person was dropped? Did all return to normal? Is that
rational?

Some people are still human, with human emotions, and no, they are not
rational.

~~~
diminoten
Because I'm not talking about any of the things you're talking about, I'm
talking specifically about why a person thinks that.

You say it doesn't matter and "who cares", but I asked the question, so
obviously I care.

------
rholdy
I was among the many D2 fans that felt let down by Diablo 3. I never went so
far as to grab a pitchfork like some other people, but the auction house
really sucked the fun out of the game.

Honestly, I'm very proud of Blizzard for making this decision. I never
expected them to do something this drastic, but ultimately, it is what is best
for the game.

------
xer0x
"March 2014" WHAT! They should have done that immediately!

~~~
cheald
Without a loot reset, it would likely leave much of the playerbase feeling
like they've been hung out to dry. Coupling it to the expansion is the right
move here.

------
jamesaguilar
This is the right thing to do, from my perspective. The AHs killed the fun of
finding items for me, because there was always something way better you could
buy for just a tiny amount of money. This could restore the game to the
feeling it is meant to have.

------
meerita
Best news ever. I wrote extensively on the spanish forums about how bad the
game was with the RMAH and the AH itself. They claimed many things like "good
economy" and nice balance between real money and virtual, but it was all a
lie. In fact, the same became dull really fast.

This is a wonderful news for the Diablo fans, who really love to trade char by
char, using items. Diablo is that, an itemfinder game, trade items for items,
not for realmoney. But well, you can sell them outside the game anyways,
people did it even with the current AH.

------
mentos
I was able to get through the game relatively quickly with items purchased on
the auction house. Afterwards my friends and I were glad we were done with the
addiction of 'chasing' the next level/item.

If they could make a larger more satisfying endgame, possibly large PvP areas
where guilds can fight for territory, claim land, place houses/structures, I'd
be happy to grind.

But endlessly chasing a carot on a stick? I'm glad the auction house 'ruined'
the 'game' for me..

------
venomsnake
Too little too late. The only thing that can redeem D3 in my eyes is the
removal of always online requirement. With AH gone there is absolutely no
excuse for it to be present.

------
aaronbee
This sounds like a great idea and should make the game a lot more rewarding.
For one, it will make crafting useful instead of a waste of money.

------
faet
It doesn't matter at this point. They've milked it. Gold per dollar has
dropped so far it's hard to sell anything except the very best. By the time
march rolls around they'll have squeezed everything they could from it. At
launch people where busying 'average' items for ~$100+. Now, unless it's best
in slot it won't sell

------
gboudrias
A good decision terribly too late. The cash cow is dead and they're not going
to bring it back and unsoil the franchise.

------
diziet
Reduce search by stats flexibility of the AH. Allow only one item per account.
Make custom games with custom names available and browsable. Make chat
channels relevant by placing everyone in one and having it take a lot of the
screen estate.

You can still have the AH for one-off items, but reduce the volume by a large
margin.

~~~
yannyu
>Reduce search by stats flexibility of the AH.

Why would you intentionally cripple your UI unless you just wanted to
frustrate your users?

------
cromwellian
All this will do is make users use external auction houses. As long as they
keep in-game trading of rare and legendary items, people will just take it to
eBay or some other site, and then arrange the swap in-game.

It makes it less instant gratification, but won't stop the buying of items.

~~~
cheald
Which is fine, IMO. Removing the AH as a crux of _gameplay design_ is the
important thing here. Trade isn't inherently bad, but building the entire game
around trade (and more specifically, trying to build the game around
incentivizing people to trade through your system for real currency of which
you get a cut) is a really crappy thing to do to a loot grinder.

~~~
lackbeard
Do you have any sources which confirm that Blizzard built the game around AH
monetization? I see this claim made frequently, but I've never actually seen
anything that wasn't pure speculation.

~~~
cheald
They've never explicitly said "Yeah, we built to game to try to juice as much
out of you through the RMAH" if that's what you're asking. It's pretty clear
if you actually played the game, though. The game was tuned, both in terms of
difficulty and drops, with the expectation that the player would be using the
AH[1], and Blizzard built the RMAH in order to attempt to capitalize upon the
sales that previously happened through D2JSP or whatnot.

It's exceptionally clear that Blizzard's idea was to control scarcity of
desirable items so that people were incentivized to buy and sell these most
desirable items for real money, giving Blizzard their 15% cut on every sale.
We have a scenario in which the same entity that brokers sales (for a fee!) is
the same entity that (arbitrarily) controls the production of items sold -- it
doesn't take an MBA to connect the dots there.

No, I can't prove any of this. I would be exceptionally surprised if anyone
could. But companies of Blizzard's scale don't do things like a real-money
marketplace (from which they take broker's fees) just because "the community
demands it" \- that absolutely was the monetization strategy for the game.
People don't pay a subscription fee, or purchase microtransaction items in the
traditional sense. How else are you going to monetize it?

(They had a similar monetization strategy for Starcraft 2, IIRC. Something
about a marketplace for community-created content that, again, they would take
a cut of. Let the players do the work, take a cut of it. I don't play SC2, so
I'm not sure how this shook out.)

[1] [http://i48.tinypic.com/2cwsg3q.png](http://i48.tinypic.com/2cwsg3q.png)
(sorry, original thread is now gone)

~~~
lackbeard
Blizzard monetized the game by selling it for $60 a copy.

That image you linked shows that the drop rates for items take into account
the existence of the auction house. That sounds like a purely game balance
decision. I.e., it would still be true even if only the gold auction house
existed.

I never got all the outrage over the existence of the auction houses. In
Diablo 2 you'd grind for hours looking for good drops and then have to spam
chat rooms and trade with people. In Diablo 3 you'd do the same grinding but
just for gold, and then you buy what you need on the auction house with that
gold. What's the difference? (Other than in Diablo 3, once you're done
grinding its much easier to get what you want.)

------
debacle
This is a good and smart move, but it's only one step towards fixing the
nature of the game.

~~~
tieTYT
I'm curious as someone who has never played the game: What else do they need
to fix? I've only heard complaints about the auction house

~~~
rholdy
Also, the gear progression is very linear. On every gear slot you are looking
for the same affixes.

~~~
oconnor0
Affixes?

~~~
stonemetal
postfix, prefix. Gear gets a randomly generated name based on what special
properties it has. So the red club of the owl is a club that has added fire
damage(has red prefix) and a health bonus(has owl suffix)(or something I only
play diablo causally so I don't know the affixes off hand.)

------
jakebellacera
Wow, hats off to Blizzard for recognizing that the auction house was
undermining the overall experience. Obviously this doesn't stop people from
trading in-person, but Diablo 2 had it right and I'm pleased to see they went
back to that route.

------
mmxiii
A reasonable direction go to would be:

1\. reduce the range of gear power, make the average gear drop 80-90% of the
maximum roll for the piece.

2\. make the best pieces account bound and available in the ladder season.

This would encourage replayability of the game and remove the need to spam AH.

------
devanti
they already sucked the money out of it (what little there was). And hoping
making this change will get users back. Too late, Blizzard.

------
talmir
I see what they say are the reasons for closing it down.. But here is what I
am hearing between the lines:

"So guys, we are closing down the auction house! We are not really breaking
even anymore between the cost of running the auction house (servers,
maintenance, etc) and the profits we get from sold items so we are closing it
down and hiding it behind a smokescreen of 'we are totally doing it for the
player, lol'. Oh yeah, its still always online so lulz I guess. Please buy our
expansion!"

------
ars
Seems like there will be a huge divide between pre-auction house characters
and post.

Is there any sort of PvP in the game?

~~~
EpicEng
Why? With the implementation of "loot 2.0" you will catch up to "paid for"
characters by, you know, actually finding good gear that you can use. This
change (as well as others they have planned) works because they are
overhauling the loot system.

~~~
thefreeman
Are you really going to just jump on the "loot 2.0" bandwagon assuming they
will right all previous wrongs. I can almost guarantee this expansion will be
just another money grab.

~~~
EpicEng
I'm not assuming anything; I'm just going by what the new lead has been
saying. Like everyone else, I'll wait and see. However, it really does seen
like they're (finally) listening.

------
borgchick
so many kids will become unemployed in China... those poor poor item
farmers... won't someone think of the children!

------
mumbi
Maybe we'll finally move back to SoJ currency, like it's supposed to be.

~~~
Sheepshow
It's truly the gold standard, if alchemy worked.

