Wyatt Cheng on Diablo 3 Auction House in early day

General Discussion
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I often hear the phrase “Diablo 3 was tuned around the auction house”. This is false. Many players certainly had experiences that “Diablo 3’s tuning forced me to use the auction house” but that’s different than design intent.

Diablo 3’s tuning (Inferno and such) was not intended to drive people to the Auction House, it was intended to require farming. We used Diablo 2 as a reference. In Diablo 2 you cannot play straight through Normal, Nightmare and Hell. During internal testing the AH did not exist.

In Diablo 2 your progress starts to slow and some amount of farming becomes required. You replay zones, farm bosses, and get better gear so you can get farther through the Acts of Hell.

Testing Diablo 3 prior to launch was much more akin to playing SSF. Internal testing didn’t have an AH, and we didn’t have thousands of players interacting. I spent endless hours playing internal builds farming bosses through Hell and Inferno prior to D3 launch.

First important design lesson is obvious in hindsight – we should have had more public testing. We had public testing available up until Skeleton King which was nowhere near enough.

Public testing needed to include more of the content (90%+), needs to go for longer (on the order of months), and we needed to build more time on the development schedule for “soup tasting”.

When building out a schedule for games at this scale, one needs more buffer time for “major design pivots based on lessons learned”. This buffer time should be on the order of 2-3 MONTHS, not days or weeks.

It is extremely hard to be this disciplined in game development. When leadership gets together to review the schedule and there’s 2-3 months of “iterating on the game based on feedback from the previous beta” it is very tempting to try and reduce this.

Not sure if people outside the industry could ever truly appreciate how difficult it is, but those who have lived through a game lifecycle can imagine how hard it would be to defend even a 6 week gap in the schedule where there are no concrete tasks.

The second important design lesson is that your game, the features, and the tuning are not perceived through design intent, but through the lens of the features provided to the player.

It’s all fine and well that I say we didn’t tune D3 around the AH, but by providing one, players are going to use the tools that we provided (as they should!). Players generally follow the path of least resistance and in D3 that was the AH, your design tuning intent be damned.

At the time we naively thought “We’ll tune the content hard and people who choose to play SSF will find the game challenging and those who want to engage with the AH can do so”.

Regardless, it still irks me when I hear “D3 was tuned around the AH” or “D3 made you use the AH”. I get why people say that, but a more technically correct phrasing would be “D3’s tuning drove players to the AH” or “The accessibility of the AH bypassed the normal reward loop”

I guess that explains why Diablo Immortal Alpha/Beta offers almost all Diablo Immortal contents and why does the public testing takes so long to wrap up. :point_down:

First important design lesson is obvious in hindsight – we should have had more public testing. We had public testing available up until Skeleton King which was nowhere near enough.

Public testing needed to include more of the content (90%+), needs to go for longer (on the order of months), and we needed to build more time on the development schedule for “soup tasting”.

When building out a schedule for games at this scale, one needs more buffer time for “major design pivots based on lessons learned”. This buffer time should be on the order of 2-3 MONTHS, not days or weeks.

:point_up:

So for those who are following D2R beta, care to tell me how long was the Beta duration again? :thinking:

Asking this because of the recent D2R server issues that they are facing and I am surprised that they didn’t notice or experience that during the beta testing unless the time to test is relatively short.

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He is the reason D3 had a huge turn around for the better IMO with RoS, and he is the reason DI will be good.

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Don’t open another D2R thread please… You know they come here in droves already and you invite them.

Regardless, it still irks me when I hear “D3 was tuned around the AH” or “D3 made you use the AH”. I get why people say that, but a more technically correct phrasing would be “D3’s tuning drove players to the AH” or “The accessibility of the AH bypassed the normal reward loop”

If it wasn’t for AH my character was stuck at Act1 inferno back at v1.0.2. Because drop rates were terrible and Hell difficulty never had anything useful dropping for me. Only way out for my character was dying over and over at Act2, just to farm anything reliable.
Farm Hell Act3-4 you get lvl50 useless junk and only funnel you to do that because without farming Inferno, you can’t clear its content. Farm Act1 inferno and you get lvl52 magical mighty belts with demon hunter skill bonuses. Step into Act2 and you get lvl54 rare items with no offense stats and Invulnerable Minion - Horde rare Elites that slaughter an entire squad of 4 players.

Fun times. Even though, I get what he was trying to do way late, there were tons of mistakes on the design of classic D3 beyond the Auction House.
Player had no idea about available affix pools, because there’s nothing that would show you them like Mystic in-game. When you burden entire power on the items then make them all random, there will be always unlucky players which a haphazardly designed crafting system can’t fix.

Even seeing the available affix pools would help player on deciding to optimize their items properly. You can’t see that without using Auction House yourself for instance. No wonder Auction House won over effort.
On another account, proc coefficients of skills was important information for player to strategize their crowd control and recovery. Yet, sandbox like design make you lost your way; hence why Jay Wilson felt the urge to talk about how to properly cobble a skill build together in Diablo 3. People were THAT clueless about how to create a proper build and left in the dark.

At both initial release and expansion pack, Wyatt was there. Only director changed and it was only about Jay Wilson, PC version director of Diablo 3 leaving his chair to his friend Josh Mosqueira, director of the Diablo 3 console version. If it wasn’t for the Jay, I kind of doubt Wyatt would “double” anything to begin with.

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I call it BS that the drop rates weren’t tuned for AH. Why else would they be so horrid for more than 99.999% of players?

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To this day I am still pondering where the good AH items came from if they are so darn hard to come by? Bots, devs ? Why would the regular players sell good items in AH, I wld think they wld rather keep it. sus

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Mostly crafting because loot give you lvl52-lvl60 average and nothing good ever for maximum level. Crafting always result in a lvl60 item if you get the recipe or trained the Artisan. That was the trick. Issue was collecting enough material for mass crafting when you need to sell stuff to maintain your gold. However, being nothing exactly different than looting, 5-6 random affixes by crafted items don’t seem much enticing.
Jay and Wyatt’s design was really complicated and original on its own, on top of hiding crucial information from players that’s why people struggled.

Also yeah, bots were affecting the market as well but not as people make it out to be. Most of them were too busy conquering Asian servers. There were hardly any bots in EU and US regions, at least not as much as EAs regions. Bots and people who played the game day and night were big influences to have enough material for mass crafting stuff.

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Wyatt sounds like a good dude but I call BS. The whole point of AH wasn’t to bypass the reward loop, it was there to make Blizzard money.

If the drop rates are not tuned accordingly and players dont need to spend hours in the AH sniping gear, Blizzard wouldnt make any money off it, rendering it pointless.

D3 was hard at launch and it was great, but the very existence of AH killed it.

If the only way to progress was to farm and farm and farm, that’d be fine even with crap drops. But when the shiny gear is sitting in the AH right at your finger tips? Even cheap crappy gear was usually an upgrade over what you found by actually playing.

So Wyatt, you tuned drop rates to make AH financially viable for Blizzard and you made AH farming thousand times more efficient than playing.

You are a smart dude and you know all this. But i also understand it wasn’t your call.

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I don’t believe him when he says drop rates weren’t kept abysmal to drive people to the auction house.

But I also do credit him for vastly improving and turning this game around for the better.

Having a game where the economy is first and the game is a distant second sucks. It’s the biggest reason why D2 is a bad game.

It’s not fun and I will never buy another game where the economy treated with any importance at all.

And the sad part is, I think a lot of that stuff is coming back for D4, except they’ll do a better job at leveraging it so they can get their cut. Or just make it outright pay to win smartphone garbage. Time will tell, I guess.

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He has been in Diablo team for the longest and I think Diablo Immortal is the first game where he is actually in charge of everything if I not mistaken. It would be interesting to see how far he can go compare to previous Diablo team directors.

So far, Diablo Immortal gameplay and concepts look solid from Alpha/Beta feedback.

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Honestly, I can’t say that his statement regarding Diablo 3 not being based and/or tuned around the AH is believable, especially when he compares it to grinding in Diablo 2. In Diablo 2, if you were having a hard time in an area/difficulty, it was more than possible to go to an earlier area and grind there instead, while this was also possible in D3 vanilla, that’s where the similarity ends.

In Diablo 2, even if you spent hours or even days farming a particular area, and you didn’t find a single major item upgrade, you still gain power in the form of leveling, which meant you can either learn new skills or improve skills already learned. So you were still gaining power that would help you handle the new area/difficulty.

In Diablo 3 vanilla however, if you spent hours or even days farming a particular area, and you didn’t find a single major item upgrade, you gain nothing (as paragon didn’t exist in early D3). Instead you can only keep farming until you decide to drop the ssf mindset and use the auction house and/or trade.

So yeah, unless a person was astronomically lucky, there was almost no way to progress through Early Diablo 3 without either trading or using the Auction House. I mean that’s a bit of a reason as to why they added the legendary pity timer later on and had campaign mode drop a guaranteed legendary.

Now as for Diablo Immortal. I won’t be playing it (I’ll still look into it for lore purposes ofc), but I hope it does good for the folks who are looking forward to it.

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I remember watching a twitch streamer craft 1000 Hellfire rings, at the end he got pissed off and left the stream without saying anything.

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So Blizz is both the developer and publisher huh. Not the last time I checked, it is VV is the developer so they are the ones that were developing the remaster. Also it is a remaster not an entirely never before released game. It is based on code that is rock solid that didn’t need a lot of testing.

Or and you think that with a longer test that server issues would’ve been present, i highly doubt it.

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So how long was the beta testing took? No idea?

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I think he went way too far, between those 1000 hellfire rings something must have been useful. Still only a 1000 attempt wouldn’t even scratch the surface of the tries you need to land on an absolutely perfect roll. There are google docs and excel sheets that calculate the possibility of such thing and 1000 attempts while good for finding a decent item, it won’t hand you the perfect roll.

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Wyatt wasn’t in charge. VD3 was all Jay Wilson’s baby. Just listen to Wyatt’s design philosophies, they don’t line up with what vD3 was. He had more influence after Jay was removed. That’s when the changes for the better happened.

As for using the AH, you chose to use it I stead of farming. I cleared all of Inferno with my wife and we never touched either AH.

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As in my reply above it’s clear he had no game design influence in vD3.

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I know. This is why it will be interesting to see his real vision for the Diablo game for the first time without influenced by others.

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Well I already like some of the things I see in D:I and I will not even play it on my phone.
Wyatt is one of my favorite developers. Some of the streamers who know him really like him.

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The server issues are coincidental with peak Asian time (read: South Korea). And since the servers, at least the authentication servers needed to reach the character select screens, are globally connected now, everything takes an electron bath at the same time.

Given the nature of the rollbacks and how players can trade items with each other in that game, the prevailing theory right now is a mass duping attempt at roughly the same time every day. That this only happens when it’s peak time in the Asia region is what is lending credence to this theory.

Wyatt Cheng’s dedication to this franchise is uncanny. He really does care about it. A lot. He’s right in that the game may not have been designed around the AH, but the confluence of having to farm acts higher than you could progress to in order to get the gear to progress to those higher acts in Inferno (i.e. chicken and the egg scenario) essentially forced most players to the AH due to lack of drops in Act 1 or 2and drop rates about ten times worse than the worst possible drop rates in Diablo 2 and you had a recipe for players feeling like the AH was what drops were tuned around.

Basically the tools available + terribad drop rates (I didn’t get my first legendary for four months and my first set item only came a month after that) meant good luck trying to find anything yourself. I think we kind of went a bit too far in the opposite direction for RoS, but given how layered the RNG is in this game, it was probably the only viable route.

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As always, very interesting insight and analysis from Wyatt.

Remember when Jay said “Then we doubled it” ? It was about Inferno difficulty after internal testing.

I don’t have a hard time believing Wyatt when he says he was playing SSF Inferno since players didn’t need as much near-perfect drops then. Of course there’s no way to know for certain if that’s true or not, people will decide what they want to believe.

He had. He is the one that built the combat system and made the change from potion to health globes, among many other things. He probably was the most influencial developper besides Jay himself. His role carried on through RoS but didn’t start there.
Of course, the AH was not his call.

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