Yes it matters. Having to go to a 3rd party site with all the extra hassle and risk it entails means that most people are not participating in that part of the economy. It’s possible that mechanism becomes the best way to compete if you want to compete, but it doesn’t impact the experience of anyone who doesn’t want the hassle and doesn’t want to compete.
This is also basically true of the high-friction in-game version I suggested. It might still be more efficient to farm up gold and go buy items from the trading post, but at least it costs you some in-game time to hunt up the item you want by browsing different instances. This cost means that people can more easily ignore it and feel good about their play. Maybe they go there now and then when they find a great item or when they really need something to compete their build, but they don’t just find every possible upgrade sitting there waiting for them the first time they open the interface.
Of course, professional traders still might make this too easy, so the current system is maybe the best bet. Just allow people to join or block a trade channel and figure it out themselves from there. If they want to use 3rd party sites, fine. Blizz could easily crack down on 3rd party RMT by just having some staff members seek out these sites, identify seller accounts, and ban them. Broadly speaking, I think they use this as a revenue source because it’s less disruptive than the RMAH was: they tax the professional RMT users by periodically forcing them to buy a new copy.
This they should absolutely fix in-game.
Efficient trading completely overwhelms drop rates. It is impossible to balance with gold sinks and drop rates alone, unless the drop rates are explicitly tied to not trading.
Such a ridiculous argument against an in-game trading solution. Forcing people to trade outside of game decreases the overall time a person spends in the game and obviously incentivizes RMT transactions when you see advertisements on trading websites to other websites selling Gold for $$$ or boss mats for $$$.
Anyone who competes at a serious level with the current game design is going to trade outside of game anyways. Why force them to trade outside of the game?
There a methods that blizz can implement that can easily prevent RMT transactions within the game and ensure a smooth gaming experience and maintain market values.
By eliminating gold transfers directly between players it will force players to gold farm themselves by finding it or selling items or complete rewards. This aspect can be carefully controlled by developers which directly control the market.
The market will obviously balance its self out as a free markets always do. The best gear in the market will always demand a higher price. Getting rid of gold RMT’s will obviously change the market in a significant way.
At the end of the day no one is forcing you to trade.
Unrestricted trading about as bad as no trading. Rarely would i suggest taking anything from d3 but trading should of been.
No reason to group in D4 and trading would be at least 1 incentive. So now every single legit player is going to have to ignore that there are noobs running around in better gear. Because ANY trading in a game like d2 is cheating.
D2jsp is the way to go imo. But only using it to trade ethically. Never using more FG then you gained in a season.
Blizzard should really make their own version of this because it’s lossless trading. Trading item for item, one party is losing some degree of value in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Because making an in-game AH would ruin the game for everyone else.
RMT isn’t my concern.
Yes. It will force everyone to farm gold. Farming gold or trading for it will be the primary way to get new gear.
They only control the ratio of gold to items. There is nothing they can do about the fact that there will be far better items on the AH than you can find for yourself. It’s just math.
Let’s say that I’m searching for an upgrade that’s a 1/1000 drop. So I need to fill my 33-item inventory about 30 times to find it, on average. The developers can set the typical
amount of gold I would get per inventory. If they set it to 1M, then I will get 30M gold while farming this item. If they set it to 100k, I will get 3M.
If I get some other item instead, I will try to sell it. But it is not worth as much to me as the item I want. So if the item I want is worth farming 30+ inventories for, I’m going to charge way less for the items I don’t want, because their value to me is 0. Maybe there’s a min value I’d assign that makes it worth the hassle.
So when I go on the AH, my 30-run item is selling for 10 or 15 runs worth of gold. Or less. Because someone found it but didn’t need it and they had no reason to hold out for more value.
By adding a convenient AH, you are giving me two options: completely abstain from trade and never open the AH or use the AH and therefore the game is only about farming gold.
Having a trade-only currency could help keep the gameplay about finding items instead of about finding gold. It’s also enough of a friction that you can mostly ignore the AH until you find an item that’s clearly super valuable but that you won’t use that season. The devs could also just disallow gold trading and still have a currency for trading (especially if it was an AH-only currency) that can be split between HC and SC, season and eternal.
Again, no one is being forced to trade using in game auction house…
You complain about ruining the game for everyone else yet but not concerned about RMT which dilutes the value of items in game by incentivizing low labor cost countries to farm items and gold to sell for $$$ USD.
I fail to see your point… There would be some kind of currency used for trading regardless… D2 it was HR’s. Even now using third party website the majority of all trades are items for gold, vice versa.
Isn’t this the point of trading? Find items to trade for currency to get better items for your char? Instead of spending 400 hours finding one item I can find multiple decent items to save up to get that big ticket item.
Blizzard seriously needs to think less diablo 3 and more diablo 2… There is a reason why Diablo 2 is still going strong even after 20+ years…
I’m conflicted as to why blizzard is okay with forcing players to use third party services such as discord, diablo.trade, jsp or other third party sites to group or orchestrate trades. This entire experience takes the players OUT of the game.
Except that the best way to farm currency is to just farm it directly. The only way to have system you describe is if the trading currency was exclusive to the AH and you could only get it by selling items (though there would have to be some mechanism to get it to people in first place, like an endowment or default income).
Even then you are saying that my goal in the game is not to find an item that is great for me, but to find a set of items that are decent for other people (and know what they are worth) then sell them to buy the items I want. No thanks. I’d rather have a loot filter, as inelegant as it is.
D2 does not have an in-game AH. This is actually one of the reasons its trading works. PoE has an inconvenient mess of currencies that each have inherent power, and even then trade leagues are a very different beast it that game.
Because they tried moving that experience into the game and it ruined D3
You find gold and sell junk items for gold, this obviously does not change. Blizzard also can easily provide perks to increase gold find during events or seasons.
You are correct however there is an easy way to orchestrate trades in D2 which is to create a game. i.e; “ber 4 jah” and people can see it easily and click to join if interested. This mechanism does not exist in D4 other then trade chat and trade chat has its own architectural design shortcomings.
AH did not ruin D3, the RMT auction house did. Blizzard obviously learned their lesson that and quickly shut it down after realizing they have to report tax information for people profiting off their game. This opened up avenues for potential money laundering thus required KYC and state MTL’s. Had it just remained in game gold only it would have been fine. Blizzard decided to lock down trading and basically throw every item at you in the game in the first 24 hours of game play. I personally can recall being one week into a new season a significant portion of the player base had moved onto other games.
Unlimited trading with a free market is GOOD for the longevity of the game, there is nothing that can convince me otherwise. I do however support a non trade gamemode, but just like PoE it will be heavily underplayed compared to trade. Unless they go more in the LE style of having certain bonuses if you are self found.
Yes, some small % will RMT themselves extra gold to buy stuff, just like in PoE for example. But i would never ever remove trading in PoE just because it exists and luckily the PoE devs understand that as well.
If i need item X but i find item Y instead that are worth exactly the same amount of gold, i am EQUALLY as happy about that drop as i would have been just finding X. Having open trade opens up the game as well, it makes you care about more items instead of just the ones you need. Gives it a stronger loot hunt overall.
Finding many small things and sell them and save up to buy that one big item you want feels just as good when you reach that goal.
But in D4 none of it really matter, there is nothing really rare or hard to get items anyway, you wont need to trade. Only exception might be some GG triple greater affix uniques or legendary. But if youre lucky enough to find one of those, you could sell it buy yourself a full set of gear if you wanted and that feels good too.
The only downside of open trade is RMT but it is such a small % of people doing it and it has never bothered me in the slightest in other games such as PoE.
No, you’re wrong. The gold AH was far worse for the game, as I have tried to explain and as plenty of devs have explained over the years. Frictionless global trade based on a farmable currency ruins the item hunt because it is far easier to get currency and buy someone’s cast off items than it is to get good items for yourself.
Things that can mitigate it:
Bind on equip or the equivalent (like D4 now has with bind on craft) can reduce the global supply of items
giving the trade currency a high inherent value, like HRs or SOJs or divines
making the trade currency unfarmable
limiting trade to only people who are online and in the same instance
RMT is a completely separate issue that only affects the super high end competitive crowd (and the people who choose to use RMT).
To be clear: I agree with this. I just think it needs to have friction to it so that “trade for the item I want” isn’t 100 times faster than “find the item I want as a drop.”
I usually pay 2x the normal asking price and sell items for half price so I don’t have to deal with kids. Only exception is god tier items which I sell based on bids.
