In last Campfire Сhat, the devs were clear they have no plans to add an Auction House to the game. It’s safe to say its too controversial and they still have a bad taste in their mouth from the negative impact it had on D3.
With that said, I think there is a potential middle ground the devs should consider for a future Season. In PoE, the new Settlers of Kalguur league introduced a Currency Exchange Market to quickly swap currency with other players. I think a feature like this would work well in D4…
Currency Exchange
Located in Kyovashad
Available for Seasonal/Eternal Realms
Use Gold to list currency/mats as follows:
Currency (e.g. Obols)
Herbs (e.g. Angelbreath)
Ore (e.g. Scattered Prism)
Consumable Items (e.g. Elixir)
Upgrade Materials (e.g. Neathiron)
Salvaged Materials (e.g. Resplendent Spark)
Boss Summoning Materials (e.g. Exquisite Blood)
Max number of exchanges you can list depends on Renowned Level with Fractured Peaks:
If they add a currency exchange, it shouldn’t be with other players or require levelling up a reputation.
You shouldn’t ever be able to exchange sparks for currency because the other side of that is effectively pay2win. RMT to get gold then exchange it for sparks and buy mythic items. BIG NO to that.
What “should” be possible is:
Convert gems to other types of gems
Convert lower level materials to higher level materials
Convert potions to herbs
Convert boss materials to different boss materials
Everything else is both not needed, and massively problematic.
Player trading should be limited to items only, not gold.
This won’t necessarily fix RMT, people will just pay real money for an item, but it will likely drastically cut down on it, whilst allowing people to give eachother items they don’t need.
To get rid of RMT they’d have to ban all forms of trading with players. This could be done by introducing an ingame NPC that you sell stuff to, and buy stuff from. But what’s available is based on what others sell to it. The prices would need to be calcuated by Blizz based on stats/rarity etc… and you wouldn’t need someone to buy your item to get paid for it, but perhaps if someone does you get a little extra next time you visit the npc or something.
Would a currency exchange make the game better? For me absolutely and many others. So would a full fledged AH.
Refusing to add anything in the game because “wuh wuh mah RMT”. It’s the same logic as why even make a game in the first place because there will be RMT, bots, exploiters, scammers etc. Maybe we shouldnt build roades because it will help criminals move around faster.
If adding something in the game leads to more rmt going on, but it will also increase the enjoyment of the game by everyone else then that is a good trade in my books.
You shouldn’t punish the majority of players because of exploiters, scammers, etc. This feature would benefit the vast majority of players, thus should be implemented.
Nah, gold just needs to be untradable and costs balanced around the game modes. Right now IH gives 100 million per T8. They need to put better measures in place to combat RMT.
Cost should not be arbitrarily set, but rather set by the economy. The cost of a spark would be set to an astronomical value by players. The economy is self-correcting.
You should put controls in place to protect all players. There would be more damage done from RMT and legit players would get punished in a punitive way by not putting controls and letting the RMT control an exchange service.
If banning players was so effective we wouldnt have half the problems with the “economy” that exists today.
The only way to do it is remove the ability to RMT. If they were able to combat it we would have seen better controls in D2, D2R, D3 (when ah was up) and current D4.
Its not only diablo but Im using it as the primary example.