Wyatt Cheng on Diablo 3 Auction House in early day

General Discussion
42

I think for being candid, as a current employee, this might the best interview q&a I ever read. Most blizz replies are pure corporate crap, as one would expect in a tightly controlled environment.

Let’s break it down a bit… say I believe him that d3 drops weren’t tuned for AH. If that’s the case, then what gives to such horrendous drops and such hard game? Simple: If we take him at his word, then he never expected players to play in hardest modes in act 3/4 for at least 6 month into the game. Due to crappy drops and long term farming, which is what D2 was based of, most players were forced to become centurion warriors.

Why did AH exist or why was it created/included? That’s a hard answer as we may only find out once he leaves Blizz. My guess, it was due to accounting or financial folks demanding a path to monetize it long term, which was become fashionable in the USA, with Asian market proving successful.

Did it work? NOPE. Don’t get me wrong. I really liked AH, but i disgress.

So, what happened later. Once they closed AH, it became clear that they had to dramatically change how game worked… from immediately making gold worthless (abundant) to dramatically increase drops, so that now any player with even 50 hrs of game play can get 99% of the items. Maybe not the best mods, but good enough to clear gr100.

We still have massive problems with D3.

Paragon levels only regard those who have a lot of dedication and can play in teams.
No real crafting available, where one can create seriously powerful endgame items (short for few recipe’s).

Can D3 be saved? Prob not… Ethereal was a nice change… kinda how kanai cube was… it gave about 10-15 p level upgrade for ‘free’

I am glad I read his comments that. I do believe him as he said, but i do believe that outside forces influenced a lot of things, because executive’s bonus’s are based on performance and meeting deadlines, vs taking extra 6-12 month to have open beta and potentially dramatically change the game.

43

Not to mention the massive server instability, crashes, and broken (IE, play solo only or get nothing) loot system.

Sad, on multiple levels.

44

This is such an obvious crock. If they did any balancing for Diablo 3 at all, they did, it was done with the RMAH as part of design. They may have done it badly. They may have imagined it differently. They did build it with the RMAH as designed and everything they did from then on just exacerbated the grind and increased usage of the auction house until the day it was removed. Pleading gross incompetence isn’t a valid excuse and doesn’t mitigate the responsibility for failure.

45

The drop rates were tuned in order to extend the play time needed to beat D3 in its entirety, not necessarily to draw people to the AH. The AH just happened to expedite the process of beating D3.

Honestly, with the way that Inferno difficulty was hyped, I’m not sure how people were expecting anything less than a nigh-insurmountable obstacle, and it’s ridiculous to me that people would complain that Inferno was well, nigh-insurmountable. I mean, who would have thought? It’s not like there was exclusive content in either Nightmare or Hell difficulties (piss-easy by the way, and in no way deserving of those monikers), and Inferno was no different. It was literally the same thing we played 3 times previously but tuned to the Nth degree. Yet people apparently just couldn’t sleep at night until Inferno was cleared. For what, achievements and a checkmark on the armory, and say you were over and done with D3? Give me a break.

Then again, maybe some people were keen on being able to farm Inferno Act 4 in preparation for when PvP finally released, and they didn’t want to have to spend money (or else live inside D3) in order to stay on the curve. Yeah, in that case I can see the urgency of having full access to Inferno. What a wash.

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46

Guess players made it quite clear that a in game trading solution was unacceptable. By this I mean the auction house in D3.

In my opinion, that was a fix for using 3rd party sites. Too bad the implementation was “a bit” lacking. Could have been a 3rd party site fix for D2R…

Scarcity of in game drops was and is a balance choice. Not some bug or some technical issue or bug. Regardless whether and how much we agree with their balance choices.

Scarcity or not, players want to trade. In an easy way. So, I guess using a 3rd party site is the only option.

Besides, not playing for a while would delete all of your characters and mules anyways. Now, those are persistent.

So, yes, I do mean the game has worked as intended for the past two decades. Regardless of whether we liked it.

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Loot system works as intended and fine for the past two decades. To make things clear, I’d prefer personal loot instead of the group loot.

The crashes are D2R and suck.

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There is working as intended, when they didn’t have the ability to do personal loot, and actually working. there’s a difference.

Should we still treat diseases by bleeding people, or should we try modern technology? I hope the analogy makes it clear how ridiculous the argument "because that's how we always do it." is.
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Eh, I am calling BS on all this from Wyatt. D3V was definitely tuned around the RMAH. Pre-Inferno nerf, you had to farm Inferno A1 to get gear to be able to farm Inferno A1 and so on, which means the only 2 ways to legitimately farm Inferno A1 was to either get lucky breaking jars and barrels all day long, or buy gear from the RMAH from those that did get lucky breaking jars and barrels all day long. They made it near impossibly hard because they knew the money they were going to make was in the RMAH. If you don’t push a lot of players through it, you won’t be making money.

As for him saying they used D2 as a reference, I call bull on this also. In D2 you could get through Baal on hell without a significant amount of farming. It was also possible to do with far from BIS gear pieces at all. Once you got through hell, you started farming better gear to make farming easier, or farming gear for alts, or farming for PVP.

The design for D3V RMAH was nothing like this. They took much more of a freemium P2W approach. Have it so a few lucky lottery winners can beat the game, so it looks beatable, then push as many of the players as you can towards the P2W option.

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People who actually played the game like me. I never purchased stuff, but I sure did sell a lot of things for gold and then sole the gold for a pretty penny. The RMAH paid for my band to go on a few tours, and some other nice things. I hear people say that they couldn’t find anything, but I don’t think they tried hard enough. Perhaps you wanted things to rain from the sky like they do now?

Edit for clarification. The Best items that were in the AH were not in the RMAH, because that had a $cap (I think it was $250). The real best items were in the GAH, because you could sell gold in smaller chunks and make a lot more $ than a single item could sell for.

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Right, so they cried until the dev’s removed ALL of the trading options from the entire game and then made the game rain legendries like everyone won the lottery for merely logging in. :upside_down_face:

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Yeee! I like AH so much! Thanks Y.C.

p.s. haters gonna hate )

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Lol, nice way of putting it, but yes.

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I’m sure they could have, from a technological point of view.

They very much clearly stated that they wanted to stay extremely close to the original one. So, yes, still working properly and as intended.
That you don’t agree, is another discission entirely.

That some or perhaps even many players would welcome personal loot may be the case. I am one of them. Implementing ploot, changes the game quite a bit. Which in this case would be fine by me. Even very welcome.

55

Make all items account-bound was a good solution.
Increasing droprates a lot was the problem.

You could also kill Diablo on Inferno without a significant amount of farming in D3. More than in D2, sure, but AH was not required for it.
Still, people want to do more than barely managing to kill Diablo, and the AH facilitated that, and was designed to.

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56

Yup. Don’t recall doing much more if anymore farming on Inferno D3 than I did for Hell in D2. But being an MMO and RPG vet, farming or grinding is expected to finish games/bosses.

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My entire statement was referring to Inferno pre-nerf. Very few people were getting past A2 at that point much less killing Diablo without the RMAH. The original game design pushed you to use the RMAH.

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58

This indeed the way I remember it. You couldn’t even get past act 2 without exploiting Force Armor (as a sorceress; until they “fixed” it) or rolling a demon Hunter.

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59

Yeah, same.

Agreed. Only saying AH was not required. People still wanted those items of course, and it made things a lot easier. Trading is always easy mode.

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It’s been a long while, but from what I remember drops from Inferno Act I and II were itemlevel 61, and drops from Inferno Acts III and IV were itemlevel 63. It’s why you had to get lucky with drops in Act III, or use the AH to buy items of that level. As a melee hero, that pretty much made it the equivalent of repeatedly rolling a dice to see if you successfully dodged attacks and the first dice roll that failed, you’d be dead and running back.

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61

That’s exactly why I always say that a person had to be astronomically lucky to progress through Diablo 3 vanilla (pre-inferno nerf) without using the AH and/or trading. Monk for example, was pretty painful to play at that time, especially when trying to get items with resistances in order to maximize the One with Everything Passive.