This is simply BS. Real money auction house? No, 100% agree. However, trading already exist. Making it easier is far better for the player and game experience. And you cannot balance the game economy around trading being a major pain in the a**, that most players will avoid it.
Add a few gold sinks, and the system would be fully functional.
And here i thought Goblins and Trolls loved gold above all else.
Hmmm who made the choice to buff the drops? Was it the same people that came up with the idea in their head that drops needed to be rare because of the AH? Sounds like the decision makers could have made a different choice. They didn’t attempt an AH while also having more of a loot 2.0 mindset. What you say has been proven hasn’t been proven at all.
No thanks.
I would rather the game play didn’t revolve around the auction house. The devs will then make everything rarer and harder to find, and it will be assumed that the ah is the primary method of gear acquisition. They did this with D3 and there are numerous interviews with devs saying how big of a mistake the entire thing was.
No, their choice to balance the gear drops in that manner is what causes the pain not having the AH itself.
It’s a gear grinding game, not a gold grinding game. It needs to stay that way.
introducing an AH would put the focus on gold, which would just lead to an RMT hellscape.
I think you misunderstand me about trade inviting exploiting, etc. which to be fair, I could’ve typed out more but I was trying to be less than 5 paragraphs for a change. So much for brevity.
Games (of all types) have similar psychological triggers as real life. There will always be cheating and exploiting, look at Monopoly even. 
Those are generally crimes of opportunity with the feel of “what can I get away with” and results in minor issues. Once you put financial incentives, both real and virtual, you invite a different type of exploiting and generally bad behavior. We see it already with 3rd party RMT, hacks, duping, etc.
Games that have trade systems just get cheated more and that has a generally bad influence on the entire audience. Bad actors become more vicious in their attempts to exploit systems.
LE’s influx of dupes, inventory exploits, gold sellers on such a small audience compared to a game like Tetris is a stark comparison. It’s even more of a contrast when a comparable title like D4 has less of a problem than LE when it has a much larger audience. That’s a direct result of trading being less viable.
Yeah, LE isn’t exactly social heaven regardless of factions. I don’t think any game is very social these days, even when their core premise is built around massive player numbers (MMOs).
As for numbers related to the faction split, it’s not publicly available info so we can only extrapolate from what people are saying about their experiences. Obviously that’s not a guaranteed method of finding results but it’s no different than what people do about D4 issues.
The LE forums and Reddit seem to have a significant number of posts (when observing only faction posts) where they describe the trade faction as “dead” or “going to be dead by June”. Another Reddit post seemed to indicate that the marketplace is controlled by a handful of sellers, I can’t verify their data but they suggested 5 accounts control 50% of postings. Other posts indicated they needed to fix factions and asked why bother joining the trade faction.
This kind of sentiment makes me lean toward the trade population being fairly small compared to the larger population. I’m sure there are people who will take the non-trade faction because of drop increases BUT… that doesn’t account for being able to swap factions freely. You’d think there would be people swapping regularly to trade for a non-trade faction drop but that doesn’t appear to happen. Plus, if trading was something so desirable that it absolutely must be in all games then… why aren’t more people doing it in LE anyway?
The desire to trade does not overcome the desire for loot. Thus: trading is only useful to the majority when it’s an easy avenue to gearing. Add even minor barriers to trading and it’s abandoned.
Doesn’t that indicate trade isn’t a necessity? If it was so desirable there wouldn’t be a barrier that would stop it.
The issue with AH is real money trading. Its quite popular the item that sold from AH with 250 euro and on an external site with 14k euro … Blizzard suffered a lot with real money AH because people were spending more time in the AH than playing the game. It was practically a way to earn your monthly income. As long as they implement an AH with game currency and not real money I would be fine with it
I want them to implement a normal AH with game currency not money.
Real money transactions on items are anyway happening even in the current stage of the game.
A lot of what you’re saying hasn’t been my experience. Maybe I just haven’t played enough, but one of my characters is basically “Aspirational BiS” or close enough to it.
I don’t buy %’s thrown out about market share. I can tell you there is a huge variance in price postings, and there are plenty of times I see what was the going rate for a rarer item drop due to multiple people posting outside the normal range. I can think of several uniques that are always used in a build you can get for 0 gold, with 3 LP on them (Grimoire of Necrotic Elixirs). Seems counter intuitive to said individuals to post for 0 gold if they all run the market.
I’ve easily made a few billion, maybe more, and most of what I sell is gone in minutes to a handful of hours. I ‘ve barely had the game a month, am I part of the handful that controls the market? I mean the items bind to the buyer, and there are always several people in the area (I don’t know the cap).
I’ve got characters in both factions, and both of them maxed. If you’re looking to see more T6-7 exalted items drop, yeah CoF does that. But if you’re after specific affixes and specific uniques with 2+ LP, MG all the way. Like I said-I’ve got several “Aspirational” or close to it BiS pieces on my MG character. My CoF has mainly T6 on the Legendaries, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten more than a 1 LP on a desired unique. Usually the bounties are the same less desired uniques over and over in my experience. If you play a class that needs a T7 +4 to x skill affix and are playing CoF, good luck.
I too have read where people disagree, but my experience has been if you want to get enough of the right uniques to try and make the best legendaries with the correct affixes, MG makes it much easier.
Edit 2-You also can’t switch for trading purposes like that. If you’re playing CoF, none of your uniques can be traded (it says it on the item). Any exalted item gotten through a CoF perk also can’t be traded (if it has the purple icon), you can’t even equip those pieces if you are in MG. Just like you can’t equip an item bought on the AH on a CoF character.
That all said-I don’t know if any of that really means trading is needed per say in Diablo, it’s not nearly as systems heavy of a game. There’s not nearly the depth of itemization in D4 that LE has (I haven’t played PTR so maybe it is about to be different). I never had much of a problem finding all my items with the right affixes, especially once they changed 925’s to always drop in NM90’s.
D3 is indeed considered a complete failure. Initially, players’ nostalgia for the glorious days of D2, without the reset mechanism, was one reason they were willing to try D4. However, the result was disappointing, much like D3’s 2.0 version.
Moreover, the failure of D3 lies not in the auction house itself, but in the fact that after its introduction, dropped items no longer felt valuable regardless of how you played (they couldn’t meet the demands of the next stage). There were too many difficulty levels, with mechanisms like monster’s time-limited frenzy, forcing players to resort to the auction house. While the concept of the auction house was good, the problem arose from the developers’ lack of corresponding and friendly mechanisms to refine it, instead adding many malicious and unfriendly measures.
It was also due to the disgust and anti-money laundering measures associated with these complementary measures that the auction house had to be closed. As the economy collapsed, only then did they adopt a passive approach, bringing out the ridiculous design of reset to wrap up, creating the illusion that the game was very successful!
Complete failure but no other Diablo clone has ever had as many players as D3. Further, they went from 12 million in sales to 75 million in sales AFTER RoS came out. That means more people bought and played D3 long after any D2 confusion was wiped away.
Your opinion is yours but it’s not based in reality.
Correct, but you can still switch from one faction to another freely. And as far as I’m aware you don’t lose your standing when you switch. Point being, if trading was so awesome then more people would switch.
Ultimately you’re right though. We won’t actually know until some actual numbers are released so my commentary is nothing more than educated guesses.
Ahhhh. I meant to say no for real money and yes for gold. That was a typo 
I don’t disagree there no way to really know. Again I’m newer to the game, but I have played a ton of it since getting it. Personally I doubt those that say MG isn’t popular, lately I’ve read more complaints about CoF than it. Only time will tell though. And no, you just lose your favor with that faction, rep stays intact. I maxxed both on dfferent characters to see which one better suited my playstyle (which other people probably should do).
I think there is a large group that actively want to and participate in trading, and in LE’s case it is nice to do something with items I don’t need. Gold also actually has a purpose in LE for non MG characters (Arbor vault). I can’t say I see as much of a point for it in this game, gearing is exceptionally easy, but it doesn’t change making the items bind to you after buying them fixes most RMT concerns.
It doesn’t fix the RMT concerns. People will need massive amounts of gold. People will RMT to get it. Which means the market and game will be flooded by sweatshop workers and bots. I would rather not have to compete with people who are literally making their living farming in the game i’m trying to play.
This is an open world, and i’m not sharing it with RMT’ers.
The max sell value is 1.5 billion. Period. The only items that may go for that are high LP super rare items. You can get things like a 1 LP omnis for a few million. You can get a regular one for 10-50k. You need to sell items to max your rep with the faction, there are tons upon tons of items you can get for free.
Like I imagine on reddit, sounds like several haven’t actually messed with the trading system. If you think 1 million is a lot of gold in the game, you’re not doing 200 or so corruption lol.
I don’t care. I play solo hardcore… hahahaha
RMT will exist in all games no matter what as long as any type of trading is possible. Even now, with almost no trading system in D4, we have RMT on external sites. The only reason while there is no flood of bots and things like that is that D4 is seasonal and that makes RMT for items not worth much. The people who manage such RMT sites are aware of the fact that nobody will pay a great amount of money for an items that they will use in the best case for 3 months.
I would be happy to have a proper trading system in game cause it just makes sense.
We will see what happens in S4 with expanded trading. If it turns into a duping, exploited, dumpster fire will we stop with all this talk of an AH?
Money laundering via video game item trading already exists. Under the table bonus systems too.
“AH would just make trading more accessible” is 100% correct and is actually the crux of why the AH would make the game worse. For any system that makes getting powerful gear easier, Blizzard re-tunes gameplay to accommodate that system — the more that system is used, the more drastic Blizzard’s re-balancing.
Trading is in the game now but is not used anywhere near as much as an AH would be. Right now, the effect of not choosing to trade is minimal. But with an AH (it doesn’t matter if it’s real money or in-game gold), the D4 game experience would dramatically change — especially and more negatively for players who don’t want to participate in the AH mechanics.