They can’t trade it directly, it can only occur via the Auction House.
Person A asks Person B to pay them $50 via PayPal.
Person B pays Person A $50
Person A arranges a time when they’re both online, lists the item (at a very low gold price) on the Auction House, tells Person B it’s been listed, Person B snipes it off the Auction House
Alternatively, Person A laughs at Person B and runs off with the money to repeat the process, knowing that Person B can’t report this because Person B would be admitting to breaking the Terms of Service by reporting it.
It’s *very simple. If items can be traded in-game, they’ll be traded for real life money outside of the game.
well jokes on you because perfect rares with most likely be the most valuable items as they can be used to craft legendaries with essences everyone will have stored in their stash anyways :v
If Blizz allow gold selling then they will likely reduce the amount we can list on the AH (top tier items etc) to argue “it’s not p2w” but it will be “pay to get ahead” and crafting mats for the best items might still be sold.
Basically if Blizz doesn’t want D4 to be p2w at all and change peoples mind after D:I, they cannot sell gold for real money.
It would actually be really cool to have a pleasant AH experience allowing you to swap items for value that you don’t need and get the things you do.
That would make up for not being able to trade.
But likely this will be ruined by Blizzards greediness by them selling gold like in wow…
To create some resemblance of trading, the value of selling items to vendors could fluctuate with how popular the items were in the playerbase.
The more people who equipped rares and legendaries with specific combinations of normal affixes and legendary affixes, or specific uniques, the higher sell value. That value might be gold, crafting materials etc. of course.
No player trading, but still something that could 1) feel a bit like a dynamic economy, and 2) give value to the best items you find (which is a common argument among pro-trade people).
You still dont get the “social aspect” of trading of course, but honestly, as I see it, the social aspect of playing together to find items together (which are shareable within the group) should be a much stronger social experience anyway.
because of AH item snipers, and if bliszard simply removes the name of the person listing the item, it would be almost impossible to sell items for real money and deliver the item through the AH safely.
so it’s a good option to pursue for keeping bads like D2jps out of D4.
I’ve already thought of a way to exploit it and trade money between players.
Player A buys $50 of gold. Player B asks them to list a worthless item on the AH for the amount of gold they bought. Player B then purchases the worthless item for a high gold price. Maybe anonymous listings would stop this happening? At least other clever players would also list worthless items for tons of gold to try and get a nice reward from a gold farmer making a mistake. But still the time stamp when it gets listed and could give it away. Maybe would have to hide the timing of the listing and even have things appear a day late.
It is easy to avoid sniping.
RMT buyer pays RMT seller X dollars.
RMT Buyer places worthless item A on the AH for 1 trillion gold. Nobody would want to snipe it.
RMT Seller buys it. Now RMT Buyer got 1 trillion gold.
RMT Seller puts up the actual item they wanted to trade, for 1 trillion gold. Still no snipers because 1 trillion gold is a lot (in this little scenario anyway).
RMT Buyer pays the 1 trillion borrowed gold, and gets their item.
RMT buyer might just take the 1 trillion gold, but eh, the seller already got some money out of it, even if that happens.
Even easier if you can trade for specific item requests.
being a professional and a programmer myself, i would restrict the values at which a certain item could be sold. You could even do this through an algorithm.
certain item’s last 100 sales average X gold, highest value of next sale no grater than 200%.
any specific items that suffer inflation to be flagged and investigated if legit or not, and if not you just ban the guy who was inflating the item likely to himself.
put a little work into it, D4 is your baby, your lifeblood.
EDIT: Also, i’d put a little random delay of 30~180 seconds (maybe more?) for the item to show in the listings after posting. bye bye birdie no synchronous trading
I’d be ok with this if players were able to have influence by increasing or decreasing their listing price slightly. That way if an item was deemed more or less expensive by the player base it would eventually be able to reach its true value.
The biggest shame would be if the AH comes out with zero checks and balances or innovative design mechanisms to either remove or alleviate p2w black market exploitation.
How do you price those first 100 items?
Remember, we are talking millions and billions of different items.
Outside of Uniques most items will rarely be replicates.
That would be a ton of work.
I’d much rather Blizzard spent that time investigating botters instead.
They shouldnt put a little work into it.
Even if you magically avoid RMT (which you wont), trading itself is the problem. It simply should not be allowed.
They could create an algorithm that prices things based on the stats they give.
With player influence things could reach the price the player base believe things are worth.
They could have an algorithm for this too and have human check it if items get flagged. The games economy is worth this amount of effort imo.
Because this is precisely how botters convert their time into money. Putting time into this would be actually stopping botters from being able to execute their trade.
D3 has plenty of botters without trading. Botters will always be there. They should just be hunted down.
Gameplay first imo. Having trading, having a player economy, is bad for the gameplay.
As I see it, it would be a bunch of work just so they could deliver a worse game.
How would the algorithm know the value of the stats.
I get that if an item has +10 str instead of +9 str, then the item is likely worth more, but even then it gets difficult. Prices grow exponentially the closer you get to perfect stats. But perfectly maxed stats dont matter if those stats are not wanted.
An algorithm would have a hard time getting things right, and every time it failed to get things right, you might have created a flaw that people could take advantage of.
I think there is some value in Blizzard trying to determine the value of items though. Just use it for in-game vendors rather than trading. Then it wont matter as much that the prices are wrong from time to time.
and also you could be very lenient with the values, just have a hard cap that blocks abnormality and that will make gold sellers have to sell in very small amounts and then it becomes far too much trouble than it’s worth and they dont bother.
Players changing the value by being able to list slightly higher or lower than the automated price. Eventually prices would reflect the true value players deem these things to be worth. It would take some time but it would get there.
I think you’re thinking it would be able to make huge mistakes. I doubt it, numbers don’t lie. If it’s got more stats on it it’s likely worth more. Human error might make mistakes like this but computers if set up well will be ok dealing with numbers. And any overlooked bugs with mistaken items pricing would likely be fixed fairly quickly.
Fighting botters shouldn’t take time away from also creating a good economy on the AH for a multi billion dollar company.
The argument a company like Blizz don’t have time to deal with issues that aren’t hard, industry wide difficult coding issues, I don’t buy. They have the money and the resources and could hire teams to deal with both these issues as they are separate to the normal coding issues of game mechanics etc.
Still billions of unique items. Many of them would rarely, if ever, be on the AH, limiting the data for that trend. If an item was last seen a month ago, who knows how wild the gold inflation has become since then.
Are there a single game company who has ever done anything remotely like what is being proposed here?
So you now want to not only determine a gold market value of an item, but also whether 2 different items, or maybe 10 for 1 item etc. constitutes an “appropriate” trade?
Anyway, beyond the; is this even possible, the most important aspect imo still is; even if they could do it, they shouldn’t. It would hurt the gameplay.
