No. People can still trade for money. Not sure what you are missing here.
Most people don’t understand, including Blizzard, that the real problem isn’t buying and selling gear outside of the game.
The real problem is bots.
Most people who buy their gear in Diablo II are genuinely garbage players and cannot play the game at a high level endgame capacity. They can buy all the best gear they want, but they still suck at the game and can’t progress without buying gear off the botters and then following the bots in game to level up.
Well there’s probably a good reason I said “mitigate” and not “negate entirely”.
True. But it can be used in certain circumstances to serve as a proxy to illegal activities.
Then there’s the taxing issue. There are limits of how much money can be funneled through your system before IRS starts poke your shoulder and kind ask you to file a report.
Again, I point out that I’m no lawyer but I believe Blizzard could end up being held accountable of a lot of grey market money running through D4. The tightened taxing laws in the US ended being the main reason why the AH was closed after all.
edit:
Regardless of what is illegal or not, the use of real money needs to be completely eliminated. Not mitigated, it has to be completely eliminated. Not only it is a very shady practise in itself, it ruins the joy for everyone else who wants enoy the game legit. This is especially important when there’s even tiny amount of competetive aspects in the game.
1 Like
Blizzard isn’t on the hook for that as they had nothing to do with it. They also wont have a tax issue for money that they aren’t making.
This just goes back to what I said to Beefhammer about how you guys admit that the bad things still happen even without RMT but hand wave that away because it’s on a smaller scale.
but then tell me that mitigating the bad things with RMT isn’t good enough and it needs to be 100%.
So let’s remove everything that leads to botting too, which can also be a shady practice.
That would be great, I’d support that. I just want everyone to be on equal ground. No shortcuts of any kind, no matter what means one could use. No shortcuts.
If that means a complete elimination of trading, then so be it. I’d rather avoid it but sometimes sacrifices are necessary.
1 Like
This would also result in a terrible game because it would mean the time between making a new character and being max level and fully kitted out in perfect gear needs to be VERY small.
Otherwise, guess what people are gonna do if there’s a grind of any sort?
As soon as you involve more than 1 person, somebody is going to try to find a way to get an advantage by any means.
Only if the game is as badly designed as D3. The gear should supplement the build, not define it.
Because forcing trade doesn’t mean forcing spending $$.
… No you wouldn’t. Cyonan is being sarcastic (at least, I’m pretty sure he is). You CAN’T remove everything that leads to botting.
I’m not talking about just gear.
If anything in the game requires a half way decent time commitment, you’ll get botting.
Yeah, this is sort of my point.
If you removed everything that led to botting, you’d basically just remove the game from existence =P
https://i.imgur.com/igPb7zG.png
Let’s see, either you farm one item for 3 weeks non-stop or just go to work as a part-timer for 1 or 2 days to get everything.
Also, clearly, you never play a mobile game. You can play the mobile game with predatory monetization without spending a single cent. It just takes you a long time to get an upgrade, probably like 3 weeks or more.
If you are the type that can farm D2 for Zod Runes for 6 months, it will be an easy mode for you in mobile game with predatory monetization. 
Actually, they would have gotten into trouble with the Department of the Treasury, as the RMAHs were being used to facilitate money laundering. That’s why, when FinCEN got involved, Blizzard shut the AHs down rather than face the possibility of lawsuits. FinCEN gave them a deadline before enforcement would happen. They removed the AHs a week before the deadline and gave us Smart Loot v2.
Potentially. But that is quite different since Blizzard was outright facilitating the RMT.
Not the case when people are just doing transactions outside the game.
Clash of Clans. Also played PoE and Trove, the latter of which isn’t mobile but is full of monetization anyway.
Oh ok.
Full of Predatory Monetization?
Very much so. Low weekly limits you can only bypass through $$. A monthly fee that does things like increase your crafting speed and jumps (important stat) and potion uses. A dragon collection (dragons permanently increase your base statistics) where crafting them from scratch is insanely difficult for most of them, unless you buy the mats or the monthly free dragon item. And a bunch of other things, some of which I’ve forgotten by now.
I swear every time I hear somebody talk about the RMAH being shut down I hear a new version of events.
In either case, I was talking about the third party item sellers in Diablo 2 and not the RMAH.
Blizzard isn’t gonna get in trouble for transactions that don’t happen on their platform.
1 Like
You can fight shallowness with other stuff than PK. Like exciting Seasons. Ideally you want to replace shallowness with entertainment like Music, imho.
So in the end, do you spend money on those predatory monetization games?
Well, take a look at the results of…
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=blizzard+fincen+auction+house
…you’ll find plenty of contemporaneous articles / videos all referencing the introduction of the new FinCEN rules.