When Diablo II first released it did not come with an auction house of any sort. In order to trade you typically had to go to forums to list your items, much like a Craigslist, or trade via in-game chat. Very quickly, and since Diablo is very much an item-based game, some players realized that they could create their own real-money auction house outside of the game. These 'entrepeneurs' benefited and profited greatly from this endeavor, and many argued that it hurt the in-game economy. Still, a relatively small number of players used this third party service, and even so scores of users' accounts were hacked with the intent to steal items and list them on the third-party auction site.
When Blizzard announced that Diablo III would come with an in-game AH coupled with a RMAH, they were trying to protect players from hacking attempts but to also give them options. Because of the relatively small AH users from the previous Diablo, Blizzard estimated that the users of the new implemented AH and RMAH would be relatively low. I suspect this was possibly a major factor in Blizzard deciding to charge what they do for AH and RMAH transfers.
To say that Blizzard is greedy by implementing the RMAH is slightly short-sighted, because we have to remember that the players (as a whole, not individually) benefit far more than Blizzard does; they're taking advantage of this service too, and there are a few people who have at least temporarily made a living off of Diablo III's RMAH.
Blizzard is just selling an additional, optional, service within the game. That service has benefited the players (sellers
and buyers) who use it; I've used it and I neither like it or dislike it; I just don't mind it.
It's true that the AH and RMAH both have had a negative impact on the game, but to put blame on the RMAH (and then equating it to greed) without even looking at the in-game currency AH is again short-sighted. Even if there was no RMAH but simply only an AH the effect would be the essentially the same; the
only difference is that neither player nor the company would benefit from it. For a reason I don't quite understand many of those who criticize the RMAH like to stoke the fire and only mention the negative effect of the RMAH without looking at the overall picture.
To say that the RMAH has had an effect on the 'end-game' of Diablo is a little naive in that Diablo doesn't have an end-game. In Diablo, unlike another game like WoW, the whole point is the progression to the end (in WoW it's both the progression and even more-so the end-game content). In that way, the whole fun and intent of Diablo is the farming and itemization progression; not leveling, not bosses, and certainly not end-game content.
You said that your friends could not survive past Rakanoth because of their gear. I don't understand how using the regular AH applies to the argument of Blizzard being greedy.
I
do agree that the RMAH transfer fee is quite high.
I also stand by the opinion that Blizzard poorly implemented 2 factors which hurt the overall game, and that is:
1. instead of choosing to fully randomize zones, they opted to only randomize certain dungeons within the zones. This, I think, hurt the longevity of the game (and I still think they should have included an editor so players could create their own content, bosses, and dungeons)
2. Since the Diablo team opted to go with non-randomized zones, I feel that perhaps they suspected this might hurt the longevity of the game and might have chosen to go with a more randomized item generation formula (or perhaps it's the same randomized formula as in D2, who knows). Either way, the auction houses not only backfired but really completely negated the longevity of randomized items. Blizzard admitted that they didn't anticipate so many players would use the AH, which snowballed the issue and made it so that players were 'beating' the game much faster than they anticipated.
Odale said:
I think its funny that Bowser thinks it was to protect the economy in D3 - because that's what's been affected the most.
You clearly didn't read where I said
Bowser said:
I think it was something that they needed to do for the fans, to not only support them but to also kind of protect the economy of the game. Unfortunately that backfired
Lastly, not using a credit card for fear of its transaction becoming compromised is not understanding how the whole credit card transaction process works, but that's a different story.
