Asian farmers are the ones that keep the World of Warcraft Auction House at a decent level. Joke aside, when it comes to money, aren't you hating Activision enough to know that they will rule this with an Iron Fist and most likely have the biggest amount of security to avoid the reason you mention people wouldn't use the RMAH?Originally Posted by R-F
What's wrong with that anyway? I got my gold for the item...
Also you don't know what restrictions they plan to have to prevent things like hacked/stolen items from being sold (i.e. a grace period before you can sell an item on the cash AH).
You sound really bitter and jaded, I'm not really sure why either. It's like you are directing all the anger you should have for game companies that actually do rip people off at one that doesn't because you are afraid they might in the future...
Why? Unless it's an extraordinarily good deal then it's pointless exchanging gold -> item -> money when you can just sell the gold on the RMT auction house directly.
Yes, people will buy up under-priced goods to try and play the system but that would be a problem regardless (as gold-selling would be happening anyway).
Only a nightmare if the developer is stupid enough to put PvP in as an afterthought (see: World of Warcraft). A game that is balanced for PvP first can always be balanced for PvE without breaking PvP balance because you can do the PvE balancing by adjusting the environment.
Wow. They outright allow you to sell gold? Absolutely nuts.
The ability to finish stuff is the most important in a game dev.
Maybe - I just think they've thought this through. They have more experience with gold farmers than anyone. It might not work, I think there are too many variables to predict. But they're not going to make the obvious mistakes.
The whole thing is setup to have a safe, in game method of doing what people did in Diablo 2 (and most MMOs) anyway.
Yeah. I think it's better for the players to have a safe and well regulated market to do what they were going to do anyway. At this point you're either going to do something like this or you're going to bind-on-equip for all good items, and I don't think that's what we want to see for a Diablo game.
Anyway, when two players engage in a transaction, where the seller gets at least the minimum asked for price, and the buyer pays no more than they wanted to, what's the problem? Who loses? It's not unreasonable for the facilitator of the transaction and the infrastructure owner (Blizzard) to take an open, transparent cut. I have problems with necessitating a constant online connection, but I have no issues with the existence or the nature of the marketplace.
Is anyone else really curious to see how the whole thing works out? It'll be a fascinating demonstration in economic fundamentals, seeing how everything prices out, and how Blizzard choose to deal with demand issues or interesting market activity.
My prediction is, given the size of the market, supply will be generous. Thus, only the greatest and rarest items will end up on the real money side of the auction house, which will nevertheless do fine business. Most non-hardcore players will find plenty of good deals on perfectly decent stuff on the fake money side. The thing that would throw this off is inadequate inflation controls, so I'm looking forward to seeing how they manage that.
I'm hoping that open real money trading will end up highlighting the fundamental emptiness and unsatisfying nature of grind-based mechanics to more and more players. Also hoping that the incentives RMT gives the developers will lead to said developers fucking up their games, so we get less stupid grinding in the future. (Next in line, a live talking pony that poops marshmallows, because obviously anything is possible with my godly luck.)
It's not grinding if doing it is fun regardless of reward.
Not quite. For instance, way back when I played Team Fortress 2, I was having fun, but there was definitely a grind involved in getting access to weapons which hurt the overall experience. In other words, I had less fun than I would have had without the grind.
When the entire game falls flat on its face when you strip out the "reward", it's not just a game with a grind in it but a grind-based game.
When I play Diablo 2, if I had a button that would get me all of the items and experience that the play session I intended would provide, I wouldn't press it. So it doesn't count as grinding. I assume that Diablo 3 is likely to be the same.
Thinking of a play session in terms of providing a certain amount of items and experience kind of points towards the game possibly being...
If the game did not have items and experience to begin with, would there be a point to playing it? If yes, how long would it stay attractive compared to the version that has stuff to accumulate?
To clarify how I'm using the terms, I tend to call an element of a game a grind if it is repetitive, its results accumulate by time, and I would rather not do it. (Typically it is also quite unchallenging.) This is necessarily a subjective determination as it depends both on "fun" and to a point, "challenge". My calling a game grind-based is broader and somewhat less subjective; those games are highly dependent on accumulating something over time with repetitive activity over different play sessions, and fall apart or become a shadow of their former selves if you take that away. In other words those games primarily satisfy the player's collecting instincts (not to mention OCD tendencies). I'm not saying they are outright bad, but what enjoyment there is available from them feels hollow to me so I avoid them. What I have a real problem with is the recent fashion of grinds being tacked on non-grind-based games which I might actually want to play.
OK, then I don't think what you called a grind-based game is a bad thing. Indeed, Diablo 2 would not be much fun for very long if it had no experience or items. And you definitely accumulate these through a repetitive activity. But this repetitive activity involves using the items and experience, and working out which items are working best and how your skills are best used, and is in itself quite entertaining as long as skills/items are changing from time to time. So I don't think it's an empty experience at all. And if I had a big "give me xp" button next to me I don't think I would press it (maybe to get to lvl 20 or so, but that's only because low-level character play similarly and I've played a lot).
I don't see a game or a game element where you repeat tasks to get a reward to be grindy unless, given the choice between repeating the tasks and getting the reward and just getting the reward, I would choose the reward. I wouldn't do that in Diablo. In some online games I've briefly played then I would. I consider whether the game would become boring without the reward to be an irrelevant question; this just suggests that the game would get stale if nothing changed. I'd say this is true of a lot of games. The difference, I suppose, is between "I am playing the game, which is fun, and aiming for a reward which will make the game continue to be fun rather than stale" and "I am playing the game and aiming for a reward which will make the game start being fun".
So you're saying that Diablo, a game based on killing monsters and collecting loot, would be half the game if there was no loot to collect? Wow, who would have thought...
A lot of people like this kind of gameplay, just because you don't doesn't mean it's stupid or bad design.
And here I was being unusually careful about distinguishing between my neutral definition and my subjective views to pre-empt exactly that kind of reply. Where did I say a grind-based game is fundamentally "bad" design?
um... this?
Don't try to backpedal out of it. You didn't say the words "bad", this is true, but read your damn post.
Yes, I understand there is some interesting valuation play there, but figuring out the game system takes a minuscule amount of the time most players of these games play them. It's also not often in the game that you get to make interesting decisions about skills and items which actually change the way you play the character, and all the upgrades in between those critical upgrades are sort of window dressing; the game progression would be largely the same logically if you just got the in-between upgrade effects packaged with the critical ones, and the monsters before the next critical upgrade were balanced slightly weaker to match. Unless the level design is unique and worth seeing all the way, the game could be straightforwardly compressed to bring the critical decisions closer to one another. So since the in-between stuff spreads interesting decisions further apart, either it is a design fault or the players are in large part playing for the sake of their gotta-catch-em-all instincts being tickled.
There's a third option common for grind-based games which hits me every time I make the mistake of getting into one of them. "I was playing, and it seemed to make sense to always go for the next step in the succession of 'rewards' which was dangled in front of my nose, and the whole thing just seems pointless in hindsight."I don't see a game or a game element where you repeat tasks to get a reward to be grindy unless, given the choice between repeating the tasks and getting the reward and just getting the reward, I would choose the reward. I wouldn't do that in Diablo. In some online games I've briefly played then I would. I consider whether the game would become boring without the reward to be an irrelevant question; this just suggests that the game would get stale if nothing changed. I'd say this is true of a lot of games. The difference, I suppose, is between "I am playing the game, which is fun, and aiming for a reward which will make the game continue to be fun rather than stale" and "I am playing the game and aiming for a reward which will make the game start being fun".
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