Diablonomics: How Diablo 3's Auction House Makes It Feel Pointless
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Enjoying Diablo 3 too much to bother with the Auction House yet? Heard some of the stories about the things you can find on the Auction House? Wondering whether or not you should check it out? DON’T DO IT. Please. Stay away from it until you finish reading this. You can choose to use it, but you may well be better off without. It may not seem that way right now, but it’s true: the Auction House in Diablo 3 changes the game tremendously. In fact, it changes almost everything about how the entire incentive structure in the game works. It changes how you think about items, how you think about your character, and even how you think about the game itself. More than that, it can make all those changes even if you never use it. All it takes is a glance, and your attitude towards the game will likely change forever. There’s no going back—and to explain why, I’m going to have to tell you a little bit about the economics of Diablo 3. “Economics”? Yes. Economics. Diablo 3 has an economy. Most games do, when you come down to it. Economics, in many respects, is about the tradeoffs involved in managing scarce resources. Ask any Starcraft player: they’ll tell you that a big part of the game is paying attention to a variety of scarce resources: Time, minerals, gas, units, production facilities, unit resources, mining and gas patches, along with any number of other considerations. You’re constantly trading one resource for another: trading time for more minerals, trading attention for more gas, abandoning existing units for the opportunity to make new ones. It’s not as complex as a real-world economy, but there’s a reason Starcraft forums always talk about the importance of “managing your economy”. A successful Starcraft player is one that can quickly made these decisions. But it isn’t just Starcraft. ALL games are about scarce resources. Ammo, lives, weaponry, time, experience: there’s always tradeoffs. Anything you can think of that isn’t plentiful is going to be affected by economic considerations. That doesn’t mean it’s the only thing going on–I’m the last person to engage in economic determinism–but it’s important enough to always keep in mind.  Sweet, sweet lucre. Diablo 3, though, is a whole different story. It isn’t just an economy. No, it’s a CASH economy. In previous RPGs, you’d generally trade time and a little luck for your gear and capabilities. In a game like World of Warcraft, for example, there were stark limits on what you could buy; most high-level gear needed to be earned through gameplay. Not in Diablo 3. Everything can be legitimately bought and sold in Diablo 3, whether on the Auction House or just between players. Absolutely everything. Gear? Just buy it with gold. Enhancements (gems, in this case?) Gold. Weapons? Gold. It doesn’t matter whether it’s early-game magic gear or end-game legendary weapons dripping with power, all of it can be yours if you have enough gold. And, sure, there’s also the real-money auction house, but that’s only one small part of it. Gold and real money are interconvertible currencies as well; gold in Diablo 3 is a currency as much as any other, albeit one that’s backed by a game-maker instead of a state. That changes things a lot. It makes the game’s economics ultimately much like the real world’s economics, where the value of things are usually reducible to cash. Your time, your luck, your skill in acquiring gear—it really just determines your gold-earning power. No, there’s only one stat in Diablo 3 that matters, and it’s not strength, or vitality, or any of the others. It’s “Gold Find”. All other stats are “Gold Find” wearing a variety of silly masks. They might be more effective. But they’re the same thing. It’s just gold. Is the cash economy a problem, though? Yes, for two main reasons, stemming from two different economic traditions. From Marxian political economy, we’ve ended up in a situation where players are “alienated from their labour”. And from more mainstream neoclassical economics, we’ve got players learning that the value of their gear isn’t what they think it is; it’s what the market says it is. Those aren’t the same thing, and the realization is showing players how little their effort is really worth. Look a little closer, and you’ll see why these things are contributing to the sense of ennui and dissatisfaction that is plaguing the game, and have been plaguing it since the game was launched. It’s why people are complaining that they just don’t find it “fun” like they did Diablo 2—and it might just be why the reviews seem not to capture these issues. (The Real Money Auction House if anything just makes these issues worse, but I’m looking mostly at the gold one this time.) Marx and the Alienated Labourer "Workers of the world: stay a while, and listen." Marx’s “Marxian” economics (or “political economy” depending on who you ask) is hellishly complex and difficult. It doesn’t really have that much to do with what we think of as “economics”, and doesn’t have much to do with what we think of when we think of “communists”, either. Most of what Marx wrote wasn’t really about communism or socialism or any of that, anyway. His game was about criticizing the problems that he saw in capitalism. Some things were probably accurate, some likely weren’t, and a LOT of it is opaque. It’s still handy to know when you’re poking at some of the issues with a market, though–and Diablo 3 is as much a market as it is a game. One of the handiest ideas in the Marxian tradition is about “alienation of labour”. What’s that? In short, it’s the idea that there’s no true connection between what you do and the product that comes out the other end. Marx (and others) saw what was going on with the factories of the industrial revolution and realized that people weren’t necessarily going to have the pride of creation that they used to, because they don’t really make things. They might contribute a nut here, or a bolt there, or maybe they sanded down some pointy bit, but they’ll never see the finished product, and they don’t necessarily feel like they made anything. It’s even worse with modern office-type jobs: even if you’re contributing something important, you aren’t doing the same thing as a skilled craftsman was doing back before the industrial revolution. Sure, you get paid for your time. Sure, you can use that money to buy other things. But it all boils down to cash; there’s no direct connection between the things that you did and the things that you get. It’s indirect and, in many minds, unsatisfactory. That’s why you get so many middle-aged men puttering around in a shop in their garage, and why knitting has become this massive, ubiquitous international subculture. They want that direct connection between labour and product. (Seriously. Never, ever mess with knitters. They are legion and they are ARMED.) You can still get that feeling in video games, though. RPGs, especially, give you the sense that you’ve earned something, that you’ve made something. Sure, the labor and work involved is a bit obtuse and arcane, with you clubbing some poor orc to death a bunch of times in order to get a neat sword—but there’s still that connection there between the thing that you did and the thing that you get. When you’ve got some guy strutting around Orgrimmar with his new dragon mount and glowy sword, you know he’s saying “look at what I did! Look at what I earned!” That direct connection’s the key.  "Sweet gear. How much did it cost you?" Diablo 3 severs that connection. Since everything boils down to gold, you quickly become aware that the direct connection is only an illusion. Sure, you could just use the stuff that you’ve found, and people do. But you’re going to know that the stuff you’re using is substandard; and, eventually, you’re going to be forced to hit the Auction House or the forums just to be able to keep up with the punishing difficulty of high-level play. The gold is ALWAYS there, hidden under the surface. That knowledge is ALWAYS going to be standing between you and that sense of accomplishment. Seeing someone else in awesome gear is ALWAYS going to be devalued in your eyes, because you know that they could have just bought it. Even looking at the auction house is ALWAYS going to make it absolutely impossible to ignore the big golden elephant in the room. You’ll never forget what your gear really is, or what it’s really worth. If you don’t buy the gear, you’ll feel like a sucker. If you do buy the gear (and sell the stuff you get), you’ll be alienated from what you made, just as Marx said. It’s all indirect. It’s all just cash. It’s all unsatisfying. Everything Has Its PriceIt gets worse. The Marxians may have come up with alienation, but regular “neoclassical” econ has something to say too. Neoclassical econ is partially about sorting out the pricing of stuff; whereas the Marxians drew a distinction between something’s “use value” and “exchange value”, more mainstream econ says that it’s quite a bit simpler: things cost whatever people are willing to pay for them. A lot of microeconomics focuses on what conditions are necessary for a market to “clear”: that is, when sellers manage to find buyers for all their goods.  Demand curves shifting up: NOT what's happening in Diablo. There’s a lot to it. The math can be nightmarish. But here’s a microeconomic lesson that people are learning on the Auction House right now: their stuff really is worth what people pay for it. Full stop. No more. No less. If you can find someone who’s willing to buy a bushel of corn for five bucks, then guess what? It’s worth five bucks. If you can’t? Then it wasn’t worth five bucks. It was worth less than that. Maybe it was worth three bucks. Maybe two. But, ultimately, the seller doesn’t decide what it’s worth. The buyer and sellers do it together. Of course, sellers and buyers have to get together first. Buyers have to see all their different options in order to make a maximally informed decision. And if you’re bartering, then it can be really difficult for buyers to sort out what something’s really worth. Is a bushel of wheat worth two piglets? Is it worth [x] dozens of eggs? Hard to say. Add a currency that’s convertible into everything though, and it ends up mostly working out. A bushel of wheat costs a certain amount of cash, and a piglet costs a certain amount of cash, and you can compare the value just by comparing the cost. Marxian alienation or no, it does make things simpler. Let’s bring this back to gaming. In previous small-scale RPGs, you were mostly bartering, and you didn’t know what all the options were or what people were REALLY willing to trade for the items. Sure, you could usually sell your gear to some NPC vendor, but so what? The gold could only buy a certain subset of items. The REAL stuff, the stuff you actually wanted, was bartered: you bartered your time spent monster-bashing for the gear that came with it, or you bartered gear with your friends and guildmates. And those values were mostly whatever you wanted them to be. Even MMOs work that way: the stuff you really want can’t be bought with anything but time and effort. Free-to-play games change that up a bit with their cash shop, and there’s usually some kind of black market, but the trend remains. You traded your effort for rewards, and both were worth what you THOUGHT they was worth. Diablo 3’s auction house changes everything. It provides a near-infinite amount of sellers and a near-infinite amount of buyers. Searching for the best deal is (relatively) easy for buyers, and you have no reason NOT to take the best deal, since all the sellers are completely faceless and anonymous. EVERYTHING is priced in a discrete currency, so you can precisely and quickly gauge the value of goods. And with the way that Diablo 3’s items prioritize a clear, easily understood set of stats, it’s easy to weigh which gear is more usable, too. Driving a hard bargain couldn’t be easier for buyers.  Amazing design. Shame there's no point in getting his stuff. “Bargain” is the word: everything’s cheap. It’s so very cheap. Thanks to all those sellers driving down prices, you can get amazing, top-notch gear on the auction house for a pittance. Early “Rare” gear, which only occasionally drops in Normal mode, can cost a few thousand gold, which players can farm up in a pretty short time. Gear that outclasses anything you find, anything you find, is so incredibly cheap that it takes your breath away. The market’s set the prices, and those prices are damned low. Seems great, at first—until you find out that the stuff that YOU get isn’t worth anything at all. Since the gear outclasses anything you find, you don’t really have any need to use the stuff you get. You can’t sell it, either: most of it is low-level “magic” gear that is so incredibly outclassed by the things other people are selling, it won’t sell on the auction house at any price. You could turn it into crafting commodities, but those are just as cheap as the gear, if not cheaper. And why would you bother crafting in the first place? Crafting in Diablo 3 is a expensive, randomness-plagued experience. The stuff you make likely isn’t worth much, and even if it’s perfect, it’s still not going to be worth any more than the cheap stuff you’re finding on the auction house. Inevitably, auction-savvy players realize that they only thing they can do with the vast, vast majority of the stuff they find is to sell it to the vendors for almost nothing. The stuff that they find is worthless. It’s worthless to others, and since they’re buyers just like everybody else, it’s worthless to them, too. That’s what that big, convenient Auction House economy ends up telling these already-alienated players: nearly everything they find and make is worthless. Crafting’s worthless, drops are worthless, gems are worthless, all of it. Sure, that might change as they level up to 60 and get into Inferno mode: but that’s hours and hours and hours of gameplay where you’re just trashing everything you find. Players have already complained that gear in Diablo 3 isn’t really that interesting. How much worse it when it’s literally garbage? Blessed Ignorance Not pictured: The player's gnawing ennui. These two issues add up to real dissatisfaction. You aren’t really connected to what you make anymore: you never use it, and don’t trade it to friends, but just sell it on a big faceless auction house. That might be okay if you were making good money out of the deal, but the vast majority of players don’t see a dime out of anything but the most valuable gear. There’s no point to either crafting or looting. It’ll all just get trashed anyway. If it weren’t for the pittance you get from vendors, you might as well just leave everything to rot. I think that’s one of the main reasons why people have been so vocally dissatisfied with the game. Even if they don’t realize that it’s the combination of the gold economy and the deflated value of what they find and make, it’s always there, right under the surface. It robs people of a lot of the satisfaction that they could get out of game like Diablo 3. Diablo 3’s game mechanics are so good, too, that it’s almost tragic that this is taking place. Worst of all, there’s no going back. These issues are all about knowledge. If you know that all the awesome stuff that you find is ultimately only valued in gold, and if you know that it’s not even worth that much gold, you’ll never forget it. Even if you never actually use the Auction House, you’re going to be aware of what the options are. Some may argue that they can just turn their back on it and ignore it. They might even succeed. But you don’t know if you’re one of those people. For many others, it’s always going to hang like a shadow over the whole experience. There’s a way out, though. NEVER VISIT THE AUCTION HOUSE. EVER.  Don't seek it out. It's not worth it. I know it sounds drastic, even ridiculous, but it may be the best choice. You will never have to deal with any of these issues; not the gold economy, not the low prices, none of it. You won’t even know. There’s precedent, too. Look at all the positive Diablo 3 reviews that are out there. Notice something missing? Like, say, everything I just mentioned? I don’t think that’s because they’re being fawning or fanboys or anything like that. I think the answers simpler: they gave the game those high scores and the laudatory reviews because they played the best version of the game: the one where you never even see the Auction House. High-profile reviews at places like IGN or Gamespot rave about “finding new loot” and “trading with your friends”, and a few mention the prospect of selling things on the auction house. Look at Arthur Gies’s incredibly positive review on The Verge: he never really talked about the experience of going to the Auction House and replacing everything every few levels, or the realization that crafting wasn’t worth it. He didn’t really talk about the Auction House at all. Many happy reviewers like Gies didn’t, because that isn’t the experience that they had. They looted and traded and crafted and had a grand old time, precisely because the gold economy and the Auction House weren’t looming over their whole experience.  He's enjoying himself. You should too. So, now, you have a choice to make, at least if you’re lucky enough to be one of those people who hasn’t used the Auction House yet. Do you want to play the version of Diablo 3 that got the game all those amazingly high scores and had Arthur Gies saying that Diablo 2 was “obsolete”? Or do you want to play the version where so many people are vaguely dissatisfied and not sure why? Do you want the economy that’s fun and rewarding and exciting? Or do you want the one that makes you feel like you aren’t playing the game properly unless you trash almost everything you make and find? Me, I think the choice is clear. Stay the HELL away from Diablo 3’s Auction House. Never click on it. Never even think about it. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Do your best to BELIEVE it doesn’t exist. For Heaven’s sake: play the better game. (Diablo 3 Screenshots and Artwork are from the Diablo 3 media section on Battle.Net. Images of Supply/Demand curves and of Karl Marx are Wikimedia Commons media found on The Wikipedia.) |
What an outstanding article. You’ve articulated all the reasons why I never ever touched the auction house. This is more or less a perpetual game with the only goal being to improve your character, and for all the reasons you’ve mentioned it is far too easy to skip to the end of your only goal. Loot drops are the only thing that upgrade a player’s perception of this game from pointless to hopeful.
And the crafting. “Master blacksmith, what can you forge for me from these raw materials?” “LOL, iono! Gimmie $7,000 and find out.”
This game succeeded wildly for me during my first playthrough. The story is basic but the dialogue and voice acting (of your hirelings at least) are superb. The graphics are great and you get a good variety of enemies and locales. I felt satisfied in the 20-odd hours it took me to finish the game (including time to redo many sections when the DRM kicked me out and lost my progress). I loved my male mage’s dialogue as well – he’s wise and snarky and has great comebacks for everything.
Subsequent playthroughs? Never happened. I continued to Nightmare difficulty on my mage, but by then the auction house had been released and I found the difficulty way too high in my meagre “earned” gear. Hardcore mode gave me some thrills but in the excitement paled in comparison to the other Diablos and even (especially) to the free-to-play Realm of the Mad God which forgoes all but the most rewarding elements of the genre.
I guess I feel like I got my $60 worth, but I had to think about it before answering. I can’t argue with 20 hours of enjoyment. This game is not terribly significant in the grand scheme of things, though. It’s beneath Blizzard’s abilities as a grindable, endlessly enjoyable experience. It seems a petty expectation, like having an orgasm but wishing for tantric sex, but Blizzard set its own high watermark.
It’s just a shame that the proper way to experience the endgame is to fast-track your way there through artificial means. I may be the single solitary chosen one, but I still have to shop at ChosenMart.
Well, that’s pretty much what happens when what was scarce becomes abundant, or rather, infinite. It’s one of the major questions regarding virtual items: should we apply artificial, arbitrary restrictions to a good that’s endless or should we simply see their values plummet?
However designed that auction house didn’t know a thing about economics.
@Brauhaus I didn’t mention it in the piece, but the biggest problem is that Diablo 3’s economy is wildly, wildly deflationary. Both gold and gear are always coming into the economy, but while Blizzard took great care to ensure that there were gold “sinks”, good GEAR could stick around forever.
If the supply of gear is constantly going up, whereas the supply of gold remains stable, prices are going to deflate These cheap prices were INEVITABLE. The only surprise was how quickly it happened.
i agree with the conclusion of this article, although I have 2 things I would like to add.
The first is mundane, in that you can make a lot of gold crafting, but it “takes money to make money.” I spent 30-40m per day crafting and actually employ 15 people to sell my wares for me because of the time/sanity/ah-slot investment required to do so otherwise. Crafting in anything other than high-volume is simply gambling, and the odds are against you. High-volume crafting is reliable and safe money.
The 2nd point, only somewhat related, is that I think another major problem contributing to the dissatisfaction with the game stems from the complete lack of social infrastructure. I’ve stayed engaged with the game this long in very large part due to playing exclusively with 2 other people. If i played alone (or god forbid random public games) I would have quit long ago. The game needs a guild/clan system and some way to organize groups of strangers (not just individuals you have played with in the past, but earnest groups) so that you have easy access to reliable partners, advice, people to vent to.
I think the dissatisfaction with loot stems from the problem you have described and the dissatisfaction with gameplay stems from the lacking social elements.
excellent article
@RowanKaiser @CraigBamford I’m still super baffled that people have taken an action RPG with multiplayer and are treating it like an MMO.
@dalziel_86 @CraigBamford Well, Blizzard is at the forefront of that
@RowanKaiser @CraigBamford Oh, for sure. It just seems kind of weird that people are buying into that. Not that they didn’t with Diablo 2.
@RowanKaiser I live to give. (Also being able to apply both Marxian and neoclassical econ to a game was just WAY too awesome.)
@CraigBamford I can imagine.
@RowanKaiser Actually been a bit surprised that I haven’t got more “THAT ISN’T HOW MARX/ECONOMICS WORKS!!” responses.
@CraigBamford Also, I’m glad you’ve moved beyond tweeting to also publishing.
@RowanKaiser Thanks, man.
@CraigBamford Cool article, man; good stuff! Just FYI, though: it’s Marxists, not Marxians (which makes them sounds like space aliens).
@sinisterdesign Oddly enough, it IS Marxian. “Marxist” is the ideology. “Marxian” is the school of analysis. http://t.co/2Lg6YWnG
@sinisterdesign I wanted to make that distinction because the “Marxian” thing shows that you aren’t *advocating*, just *analyzing*.
@sinisterdesign And yes it absolutely does make them sound like aliens. Fringe benefit, really.
@CraigBamford Ahhh, interesting. You learn something new every day! (And by “You,” I mean “I.”)
@sd0s great read!
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I did not play D2 but do play WoW and I see WOW as not quite “World of Warcraft, for example, there were stark limits on what you could buy; most high-level gear needed to be earned through gameplay. ” My last druid skipped normal and heroic 5 mans and got the iLevel to do LFR within an hour of getting 85 using only purchased gear. Most progressing raiders start out an expac with a Dark Moon Card and probably a crafted epic or two. Most raiders (e.g. non-heroic geared) have several prices of gear that are purchased with the different currency (Valor Points) and I feel guilty if I do not grind for Jewelery tokens and cooking tokens and DM tokens and VP and HK and … I see the amount of currencies continuing to grow. I find it simpler if there is just a single currency instead of designers trying to be too clever.
TBH, I prefer the EVE Online design goal of wanting to make just about everything be player manufactured.
@SallyBowls1 Sure, WoW definitely has currencies. The difference is that it’s really only one-way: you can use valor points to buy gear, but you CAN’T sell gear for valor points. It’s that convertibility that really nails down Diablo 3’s cash economy.
As for EVE…well, that’s a whole different beast entirely. I’m not experienced with that one, but what I read suggests that people do approach it very differently because it’s clear about how it’s user-generated from the bottom up. It DOES have attrition, though, in a way that Diablo doesn’t: not only does it have gold sinks, but it has people constantly building and losing ships. Valuable Diablo 3 gear never gets destroyed; that’s why there’s so much deflation.
(Sure, stuff gets vendored, but you don’t vendor what you can sell.)
I did not play D2 but do play WoW and I see WOW as not quite “World of Warcraft, for example, there were stark limits on what you could buy; most high-level gear needed to be earned through gameplay. ” My last druid skipped normal and heroic 5 mans and got the iLevel to do LFR within an hour of getting 85 using only purchased gear. Most progressing raiders start out an expac with a Dark Moon Card and probably a crafted epic or two. Most raiders (e.g. non-heroic geared) have several prices of gear that are purchased with the different currency (Valor Points) and I feel guilty if I do not grind for Jewelery tokens and cooking tokens and DM tokens and VP and HK and … I see the amount of currencies continuing to grow. I find it simpler if there is just a single currency instead of designers trying to be too clever.
TBH, I prefer the EVE Online design goal of wanting to make just about everything be player manufactured.
Great read. I have one thing to add, though. I think the root of the problem is not in the auction house, but the gear itself. The price of a piece of gear is determined by how big the numbers are in a selection of affixes, namely the ones that give either damage or survivability. All one has to do is simply look at how big the numbers are to determine if the item will give x more dps or x more protection. Since so many of a player’s given drops have such low numbers compared to everything on the AH, its tough for a player to feel satisfied.
A solution to this would be to have less boring and simplistic item affixes like “cannot be frozen”, “triggers ____ability when hit”, or “ignores defense”. Sound familiar? Diablo II, the game that’s been out more than a decade with people still playing it. If it was possible to have items with such affixes in the game that one can feasibly acquire through regular gameplay, even low level items have a chance of being valued and useful. Loot would feel much more rewarding and the game would thus feel more enjoyable, and the Auction House might not even be a problem since the price of an item is not merely determined by a simple number.
It’s a shame the developers of Diablo III had forgotten what made people so invested in playing Diablo II so much and so long- interesting, rewarding loot.
@TimLi1 I think those problems would be there anyways even with the cool affixes except now it would be garbage unless it had perfect stats AND those affixes… it would only shift the problem he is speaking about. However I think those things should be added… I’m just saying it wouldn’t change anything.
@TimLi1
Quick side note on a few issues.
People have been saying “BUT THAT’S NOT THE AUCTION HOUSE! THAT SCREENSHOT LOOKS NOTHING LIKE THE AUCTION HOUSE”! Well, no, it doesn’t. It was taken from Blizzard’s media page. You can find it at <a href=”http://us.battle.net/d3/en/media/screenshots/?keywords=&view#/auction-house-searchequip-currency.”>http://us.battle.net/d3/en/media/screenshots/?keywords=&view#/auction-house-searchequip-currency</a>. All the Diablo 3 images in this piece comes from their promotional media. It’s not home-grown screenshots.
There ARE huge differences between what’s there and what we get now. What’s sad is that the one in the promo shot is better. I’m not sure why either.
The other main response is similar to Stephen Keller’s point on Twitter: “Inferno is different!” Yes, it is. So little gear is actually useful in Inferno and so much farming is taking place that you end up with inflation instead of deflation for useful gear, and you don’t have the issue of drops being constantly below your level that happens while you’re leveling up. The problem is getting there. Most players aren’t going to push through the entire rest of the game to get to Inferno; they aren’t World of Warcraft raiders just killing time until “end-game”. If the experience prior to Inferno just makes them feel bored and annoyed, they won’t stick around. And, honestly, Inferno isn’t so compelling that there’s good reason to stay around in the first place. That’s a whole OTHER issue.
Plus, most people seem to agree that you really can’t play Inferno at all without the Auction House, and I know a lot of people are dissatisfied with that.
In any case, thanks for reading and for the interesting responses, both here and on Reddit.
Quick side note on a few issues.
People have been saying “BUT THAT’S NOT THE AUCTION HOUSE! THAT SCREENSHOT LOOKS NOTHING LIKE THE AUCTION HOUSE”! Well, no, it doesn’t. It was taken from Blizzard’s media page. You can find it at http://us.battle.net/d3/en/media/screenshots/?keywords=&view#/auction-house-searchequip-currency. All the Diablo 3 images in this piece comes from their promotional media. It’s not home-grown screenshots.
There ARE huge differences between what’s there and what we get now. What’s sad is that the one in the promo shot is better. No, I don’t know why either.
The other main response is similar to Stephen Keller’s point on Twitter: “Inferno is different!” Yes, it is. So little gear is actually useful in Inferno and so much farming is taking place that you end up with inflation instead of deflation for useful gear, and you don’t have the issue of drops being constantly below your level that happens while you’re leveling up. The problem is getting there. Most players aren’t going to push through the entire rest of the game to get to Inferno; they aren’t World of Warcraft raiders just killing time until “end-game”. If the experience prior to Inferno just makes them feel bored and annoyed, they won’t stick around.
(Honestly, Inferno isn’t so compelling that there’s good reason to stay around in the first place. That’s a whole OTHER issue.)
Plus, most people seem to agree that you really can’t play Inferno at all without the Auction House, and I know a lot of people are dissatisfied with that. It also doesn’t change the issues that a cash economy introduce into games. If anything it seems to make them worse.
In any case, thanks for reading and for the interesting responses, both here and on Reddit.
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What an absolutely top article, I’m an economics nerd myself but this really spells out exactly why D3 was such an unsatisfying, indifferent experience for me. But the economics part aside, there are gaping holes where the social part of the game should be as well.
I realise many people enjoy D3 but after a few weeks logging into games and playing for long sessions, it really started to hit home that the grouping/teamplay mechanics that would sustain replayability – economic issues not withstanding – just aren’t there.
In far too many games it feels like 4 totally interchangeable randomers who happen to share a map and nothing more. If they happen to be running in one direction then cool they might work together (in the broadest possible sense of the term) but fundamentally they and I might as well have been playing with bots, or simply alone. What really sums it up is the proportion of people who will just watch you get steamrolled and then instead of rezzing you just ignore you entirely so you have to run back instead.
What a waste of an IP and my money.
Excellent read, especially the part about worker contribution towards end products. Thanks for sharing this knowledge. Somewhere in there though, is the suggestion that ignorance is bliss, and to that I say: We shouldn’t have to be blind to be happy.
I love this article but I think that it is funny that he stated near the end not to go to the auction house and “You won’t even know” about these problems. You just explained them all in detail!
Spot on. I hope someone at Blizzard reads this. because it really is a damn shame for such an amazing game to be cheapened in this way. I didn’t start using the AH until I hit nightmare difficulty and things got a little dicey. I bought amazing gear and then stopped playing the game entirely a few days later. I wasn’t sure why I lost interest until I read this.
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