So for as long as I can remember people have spoken of this “Economy” which is being attacked by various practices. Now, I do know what an economy is, as Economics is defined as the study of how to best manage finite resources amongst a group, shorthand. Now in games with what I would call “meaningful” economic principles this means that things are not priced arbitrarily and that there is a meaningfully finite supply of things that is driven by effectively extreme rarity.
So games where an item has a 1/10,000 chance to drop from a single enemy which is also very hard to beat, or a very arduous cycle of construction for an item that is not easily repeated, while also having a very real constriction on the global currency drop rate making it difficult to acquire wealth are games with “meaningful economies”.
Diablo 4 specifically has none of this. There are no items that are particularly difficult to acquire on one’s own, no enemies which gatekeep these items with any effectiveness, no arduous cycle of construction tied locally to any given item (clarification: Resplendent Sparks have multiple avenues of acquisition and can be acquired through deconstruction making them malleable) and the global currency is extremely easy to acquire to the point where prices are inflated to make that currency frivolous in scale.
The reason I bring this up is because the argument for duping in this particular game is less an economic one and more a matter of fairness and morality. This does not diminish the crime of duping. It is wrong to cheat at games. However the solution to the problem changes with the lens of the problem; preventing duping in this game actually puts it on the track for a meaningful economy which makes cheating more profitable rather than less and forces players who do not want to cheat to lean into the market system more because the odds of acquisition and ease of flow of economic value decrease as the market desaturates.
So I pose that there’s no economic argument to stop duping, perhaps a moral one, but the economy of Diablo 4 is extremely weak and fluid which ironically makes it very hard to disrupt because even if one player injected 1 quintillion gold into the system randomly gold itself is so frivolous that it requires no central circulation so it would inflate away instantly and giving everyone a duplicate of the Shroud of False Death would have the same exact impact where it’s malleability completely undermines it’s inherent value and renders it the same as giving everyone Andariel’s Visage.
TL;DR: There is no economy to protect in D4 and that’s a good thing.
I would argue that 3GA (or in the case of Uniques, 4GA) items are of high enough rarity that an economy centred around them makes sense.
Otherwise, I agree. What makes the idea of an economy more absurd (and I apologize if this was already mentioned) is that there is no official competitive aspect to this game or real need for group-based progression (Dark Citadel doesn’t really count here is it’s not required).
With that in mind, even if Diablo 4 had an economy, there is no need to actually participate in it. Making the idea of an economy even more unnecessary.
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This post is making a positive case for duping in the economy. Not only is that a foolish thing but its dangerous and wrong.
Duping is always bad 100% of the time.
The more duping is allowed to exist and the more it happens the more faith in the game is lost. Cheating ruins games. You dont have to trade to have duping ruin your experience but if you do trade it will ruin your experience there as well. Have your experience ruined enough and you move on. Enough ppl move on and we dont have a game anymore.
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It’s something they hallucinate some games have, even though any hame they think jad one is rife with duping and RMT, but they pretend D4 is unique in that regard.
Ask PoE 2 how their economy is now that the Chinese bot farms are in full swing.
If i don’t trade, how does someone else’s duping ruin my experience?
I just stated how. Look up above.
Imagine if they just did absolutely nothing on duping. In fact lets say they just gave players the tools to dupe and encouraged it. We are taking this to the extreme to show you the point of view. What would happen? The game would so utterly trivialized that it would eventually become abandoned. All the ladder spots would be taken by cheaters. Everyone left would be better than you. Nobody would play it. Your guild would fall apart. All your friends would leave. It would shut down. This is already happening its just happening at a slower pace because they are trying to fight duping if largely unsuccessful.
Duping ruins games. Cheating ruins games. Dont think that duping doesnt affect you because you dont trade. It does and you should aim for a fair game for everyone.
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Economy in all diablo games where open trade exists is the same as all other games:
- Dupes
- RMT
- Flippers
There is nothing new in this or any game. However, with everything being common unless your looking for a 4ga unique or 3ga legendary you may try and trade for it.
If your a casual trader you wont keep up with those playing trade simulator.
The economy is someone else’s duped items and your credit card.
edit: damn I just lost 50,000 social credit score for this
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Ultimately if you are enjoying the game, not engaging in trading, have no intention to, it doesn’t ruin your experience at all. Now it can ruin the experience of some gamers out there, but it would be hard to pinpoint the exact amount of people this would affect at any given time. Not that it shouldn’t be fixed mind you, but realistically speaking you can’t even say the majority of players would be affected by this, at the same time you can’t say the minority will be either without hard evidence.
I’d venture a guess it wouldn’t be the deciding factor why most people leave the game though. It doesn’t help the game, but I’d put money down it’s not the sole reason people actually leave and never play the game again. I’d chalk that up to far worse reasons, this just happens to be the icing on the cake.
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I don’t agree with duping or cheating and those things should be handled. Nothing you said impacts my experience though. If someone else is “better” than me, it doesn’t matter because i’m not playing with them. If someone else is cheating to get more items/runes/gems/gold whatever, it doesn’t change anything for me because they don’t exist to me.
Now… if blizzard changes the game or tunes difficulty, or what have you, around the power level of people who cheat/dupe/etc, that might ruin my experience… but it won’t be because of cheating/duping… it would be Blizzard’s business decisions.
They could shut down the servers tomorrow and i wouldn’t care. I’d just play something else and delete the blizzard app from my phone.
Just like last season when people were crying about how they couldn’t play other classes because spiritborn was too powerful. I played other classes and had a great time.
Or this season and people crying about the same thing because necro is too powerful. I finished the season journey on my stormhorn sorc and i’m having a good time. Next will probably be my staff of the crone druid. I don’t have any reason to play the broken-bazillion-damage builds because i don’t need them to complete any of the season requirements.
You (HEX) still dont get it and dint read anything I wrote…awell.
If that’s what you think, then you shouldn’t talk to me… it’s clearly a waste of both our time.
I don’t really understand the plot or point you’re trying to argue here.
To summarise it for you… This is a social game, there is an economy because people trade and exchange items/gold-currency/services 24/7. This is a fact, these transactions happen non-stop and have large active communities build around it. Just because you don’t partake in this, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
If you isolate yourself from everyone and anything then sure I guess a dupe won’t affect you, but then why even bother joining a social forum to argue silly things? Duping/cheating is bad, that’s just the reality.
People like to build and chase the power fantasy, slowly progression their Character making it stronger and stronger and finding those gg items is a goal. And when people find something special or obtain resources they can opt to trade this for something else. You have this constant excitement of possible drops and value.
But when there is mass duping, everything becomes worthless. Anything you grind for is worthless and every 4ga bis item becomes rapidly available. And this where people get tempted. Why spend days farming gold when you can grab 99b for a dollar. Last Season you could literally buy a whole SB 4ga gg god gear for basically nothing. People will inevitably take the bait when tempted this much. And when they finally do they realise the fun is gone, nothing left to chase. Now there are plenty of people who definitely avoid this, but then they get demoralized seeing everyone running around with the same god gear. This is just human nature. Maybe you’re immune to it all, but saying duping doesn’t really affect much is outrageous.
When there is no cheating or duping people actually have to put in work and the whole eco system or season tends to be more enjoyable and thrive longer.
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Duping affect the experience of a game like D4 when its main theme is about loot, not the combat. I played many games which has mod and save game editor. Those tools that trivialize loot does not affect experience, as main theme of those game is about combat.
So, this is not true.
Let’s just be clear right now that there are duplication glitches in even our beloved Diablo 2 which have not been solved.
The problem with this explanation is not that it is impossible to occur but that it has to be in the right environment to occur. Take a game like Eve Online and this would absolutely crush the game to dust and make it completely pointless to play because that game has a very real, very meaningful economy that even goes so far as to have genuine analysts playing the game and constant real-time markets in game.
The number of people who are going to quit a game like Diablo where gear goes stale every 90 days no matter how you get it because of duplication glitches is nigh zero. A good proof of this is this season where players found Lost Altars in caves and literally bussed people into those caves via the forums to get people their last powers. That’s cheating! It did not matter. In fact it had a positive communal effect despite it being cheating.
There’s also this piece:
All the ladder spots would be taken by cheaters.
The ladder spots will always be taken by the best funded groups no matter how they get their gear and it’s an oligarchic problem. What’s strange about this kind of thing is that while it seems like it would reduce fairness it actually increases it alongside increasing build diversity and courage because (much like in the game now) the cost to respec, the cost to regear, and the cost to experiment would go to zero. But returning to the oligarchic problem the players who are at the top will always be the ones who are in the groups who do the farming in every game.
In games where there are zero cheats possible due to hypervigilance over certain systems for instance there’s “top guilds” and those guilds pretty much never get dethroned but also never take on “less than great” players so nothing new changes and the meta becomes the stale reality.
TL;DR 2nd part: If everyone had greater access to everything the game would actually flourish.
I stopped reading here. funny stuff you think sharing altars is cheating.
Duping is bad for the game and economy. Im done trying to convince you.
Well, let’s define cheating:
“act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, especially in a game or examination.”
Is it not an unfair advantage to, should you have friends or access to connections, not have to look for the altars versus other players who had to do the work themselves? Is that not a circumvention of the intention of the developers?
I kind of figured that’d be your response though because I kind of figured that you were using the moral version of “cheating” rather than the literal version of “cheating” which means that you just don’t like duping. You don’t have to. But your whole spiel about the world ending because duping exists is just wrong.