Latest example of how Chinese Gold Farmers are destroying D3
Latest example of how Chinese Gold Farmers are destroying D3
So first we get patch 1.03 which practially ruines the game for legit players and now if you buy a digital copy of the game, you can't get access to the entire game for 3 days ?!?!
A quirky addition to Diablo 3's patch 1.0.3 is the purchase of a digital copy of the game will restrict players to the Starter Edition for "the first 72 hours (sometimes less)." This means legitimate customers can only play Act 1 up to the Skeleton King, are capped at level 13 and can only interact with other Starter Edition players.
We could easily speculate why Blizzard would put such precautions in place, but it doesn't ease our concerns about hostile actions against legitimate customers. Oh, also, given the wording on the post, this is a feature, not a bug.
Take this to mean if you're looking to impulsively marathon Diablo 3 over some upcoming free time, you'll need to pick up the game from retail or overnight a boxed copy.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/21/psa-buy-diablo-3-online-wait-up-to-thr...
Whoever is making these decisions over at Blizzard needs to loose their jobs. Instead of punishing legit gamers who love the franchise how about you put more effort into detecting and banning bots instead ?!
Holy shit what happened to Blizzard over the 10 years since I used to love and honor them as producing the best games in the industry in the D2/SC era.
what does this have to do with Chinese Gold Farmers?
They steal keys and use digital copies of the game to get multiple accounts farming gold. Locking them out of the full game disrupts their process.
so now the problem is fixed, yes?
Fixed, no, none of these measures 'fix' the problems. The fix would be for them to improve "Warden" to actually catch and disable the farmers. But then they just steal more keys, get more copies and start again. As long as there's money to be made in it, the cycle will continue.
RMAH is probably the worst thing they could have come up with.
I agree, but not so much in the sense that this thread originated. It's bad for Diablo, not only because it uses real money but because an auction house is bad for Diablo.
One of the questions always surrounding the series, and in particular surrounding this game is what makes Diablo different than an MMO? Games are designed as much around financial structures as they are gameplay elements. In an MMO, with a consistent revenue structure the gameplay elements tend toward a max power level most of the time because a defining element of most subscription based MMOs involve regular content updates. In that sense players need an auction house to help sustain the level that the content requires because those games are content centric.
Diablo is not a series that is content centric. It is loot centric. You're not playing to see the next piece of content or to be prepared for the next piece of content but rather playing simply to acquire more loot. With an auction house that incentive is almost completely gone because finding loot is no longer the reward but rather a means to acquiring loot. It's much the difference betweent he satisfaction of building something yourself vs buying it.
Blizzard's stance was one that the auction house system, both for in game currency and real currency, simply streamlined an existing market. In terms of in game currency, there really wasn't any in D2 because gold was relatively worthless. It was a barter economy in that respect which didn't have the same effect as a currency economy in terms of loot devaluation.
That's D3's problem in a nutshell. Loot devaluation both in the form described above and the disatisfactory nature of the loot that does exist. In a sense, it is almost like they didn't understand the nature of their own product, though I highly doubt that to be the case. They tried to make a better gameplay experience by adding more quests and dialogs but in the process lost the simple gameplay that made those games work.
You hit the nail on the head. When the entire point of a game is to farm for loot, having an auction house only makes farming for that loot more and more pointless as time goes one. Soon prices will fall and items will be worth nothing. It turned me off almost as much as the latest patch did. I'm glad I've moved on.
Ya.... i have mixed feelings about it. If they had have capped the price of things at $5 I probalby would have spent 20 or 30 dollars there to get some top teir gear, but letting people list stuff for $250 is insane. There's a post in the D3 forums from a guy who spend over $1000 on items in the RMAH, wtf seriously... People are stupid with their money and activision is greedy and the RMAH has become a place where the two can meet and encourage either other's bad behaviour.
Sure, except those people have always found ways of spending real money on gear. Even in D2. Or they used duping to get enough SoJ's to trade.
But people have been using grey-market means to get gear for years; all the RMAH does is give people a more secure method of doing so, while taking a fee to offset the cost of ensuring that the process stays secure. Well, as secure as it can be given that there's probably a team of hackers somewhere trying to find a way to steal either money or info.
As always, the problem isn't that there are "Chinese farmers", the problem is that there are people willing to spend real money to get digital shit. Look at the number of people from 2o2p that bought gold in WoW. That gold rarely came from bots farming gold, but the easier and far more profitable method of stealing account info and ravaging someone's account.
Sellers aren't the problem, buyers are.
Blizzard is just giving customers what they want, in a package that Blizzard can somewhat control.
The same thing that happens to every entity like that; they get bigger and bigger and their priorities change. I'm sure we can all name multiple bands whom we loved their first albums and hated everything after that.
What is interesting to me isn't so much Blizzard's decisions but rather the community backlash those decisions have taken. It's a very different world in the time since D2 was released and they're getting a very different reaction.
^ werd
As for the gold auction house - I'm guilty of using it, as is everyone who plays. I rolled a barb the other night and he's to level 24 in 5 hours. Have only died maybe 3 times and those were flukes. This is because every ten levels I can go on the AH and lowball a buyout amount for higher gear than I could get to drop myself, and run with that for ten more levels. Then rinse, repeat. Getting OP gear for 2K out of my decent bank from my other character is just chump change.
Blizz = get as much $$ as possible.
All the server shit from the beginning was terrible. They lost people there and they really haven't gotten people back and they continue to loose people. I don't know what happened to them but Diablo really died with D3 :(
I heard that Blizzard North dissolved and the team that put this out was truly at a loss as to what they were to do at the onset? They chage direction a time or two before this occurred.