Blizzard is shutting down the Real Money Auction House in D3

When we initially designed and implemented the auction houses, the driving goal was to provide a convenient and secure system for trades. But as we've mentioned on different occasions, it became increasingly clear that despite the benefits of the AH system and the fact that many players around the world use it, it ultimately undermines Diablo's core game play: kill monsters to get cool loot. With that in mind, we want to let everyone know that we've decided to remove the gold and real-money auction house system from Diablo III.

We feel that this move along with the Loot 2.0 system being developed concurrently with Reaper of Souls™ will result in a much more rewarding game experience for our players.

We're working out the details of how the auction house system will be shut down, but we wanted to share the news as soon as we made the decision in order to give everyone as much advance notice as possible. Please note that the shutdown will occur on March 18, 2014. We will keep everyone informed as we work through this process.

Josh Mosqueira and I wanted to provide everyone with a little more information behind this decision, so please have a look at the video, and stay tuned to this site for further updates in the months ahead.

Will that make me happy with the game, problery not. The always online DRM screwed me over. Imagine trying to play diablo in a wierd mode where you had 7 mins to clear a map or reach a checkpoint. Thats what my diablo 3 is like with there DRM.

There customer service completely ignored me. Only giving placebo tips like join global chat.

This never happened in the beta and I never had this issue with playing other blizzard games, Starcraft 2 / Warcraft.

So the real money auction house never bothered me. It just made the game boring in the long term. As I can't play the game in the long term unless someone plays with me its kind of pointless.

Diablo 3 Team PVP shelved

Yep, it looks like another Blizzard hyped feature has gone the way of the Dance Studio.

" Simply fighting each other with no other objectives or choices to make gets old relatively quickly.  We've brought a lot of people in to try out Team Deathmatch and, while some found it entertaining, most of our testers didn't feel like it was something they'd want to do beyond a few hours. Without more varied objectives, or very lucrative rewards, few saw our current iteration as something they'd want spend a lot of time in. "

 Isn't that what Diablo 2 PVP was, just simply fighting each other with no other objectives.

I don't really know whats changed at blizzard they do way too much thinking. 

Diablo 3: Wrath

Diablo III Launching May 15

Diablo III Launching May 15

Diablo 3 Delayed .... Again

 There’s a lot of work left to be done, though. We’re constantly tuning and making balance changes; it’s a massive task. Some of these changes can be seen in the beta, like changes to item rarity, the levels at which we introduce affixes, and how many affixes enemies can roll up. Some you can’t see in the beta, like balancing the difficulty of the entire game for four different difficulty levels, adding tons of new affixes, creating legendary items, filling out crafting recipes and itemization, working on achievements, and implementing Battle.net features. We’re also working on a number of other large systems changes -- specifically with the skill and rune systems. We're not quite ready to share what those are just yet, but we look forward to being able to do so in the near future.

We want Diablo III to be the best game it can be when it launches. To get there, we're going to be iterating on designs we've had in place for a long time, making changes to systems you've spent a lot of time theorycrafting, and removing features you may have come to associate with the core of the experience. Our hope is that by embracing our iterative design process in which we question ourselves and our decisions, Diablo III won't just live up to our expectations, but will continue to do so a decade after it's released.

Will they haven't annocuned a relase date, its sounding more unlikely its going to be ready for March. 

D3 10 character limit

Its offical:

We're sticking with a 10 character limit per region for the foreseeable future.

 Now if they only up the 10 character limit pre server in Warcraft.

Diablo 3 intro

My thoughts on Blizzcon

So Blizzcon is now over and my impressions on this year is that it was a billion times better than last year.

First off they had something to talk about. Last year they only had Diablo 3 which is really hard to be interested in when its was still a year away.

First off the news that Heart of the Swarm is going to be a expansion not a stand alone game has me interested. It is going to be shorter than Wings of Liberty but this feels better than buying the same game 3 times.

Diablo 3 was kind of the same as last year. The real money trade auction house is interesting that they are letting people cash out for real money on items. I would be super worried about this if it was going to effect my game but the way I see it is I have no interest in the auction house or letting any randoms into my games so as far as I am concern it doesn't exist.

Now onto the big one.

Mists of Pandera for Warcraft.

I personally think this expansion is what the game needs. They are finally taking the game sideways. If you plotted out warcrafts expansions you would see this stead climb towards a even greater evil.

WoW:

Deathwings Children -> Slithid -> Naxx

Burning Crusade:

Illidans groupies -> Kil'jaeden

Wrath of the Lich King:

Lich King

Cataclysm:

Deathwing

After that there isn't much left. Pandera lets us go back and just be ourselves in a new land. There is no looming evil. I am hoping that theres no Titan instances or lore in this expansion.

Titans feel like midichlorians, something added that just doesn't fit. They are almost as bad as troll instances with the way they pop up in game. They come off as technology in a world of fantasy. They need to be forgotten about, much like the Naru. 

The other features which sound good is the new Talent system. Putting points into things has become a bit redundant and blizzard have seen this and so removed the point system all together. Now you just select 1 of 3 skills every 15 levels. I am not sure if this is going to make leveling feel a bit stale, nothings worse at the moment when you level and you don't get a talent or a skill.

PVP is a big push with many new game modes and a hint at Warcraft Dota. WoW Dota would be such a huge thing to the point where blizzard could sell it as a separate game. I have a feeling WoW dota will be something that gets pushed to the side lines.

Tech wise the engine upgrades look good. Blizzard are adding SSOA, does make me laugh when they hype it up but it is something very easy to add to a game.  They are toying with IK animation shown in the Pandera belts. They sway more dynamically than a canned animation. Full IK would be nice they could even add ragdoll system to the game if they did that.

The texture painting tools they showed in the editor blew me away, to the point where I am thinking of how to add this sort of thing to my game. Unity might already have something like this with Substance.

The Pokemon system, well I am holding judgement on that for now.

PvE Scenarios, I still don't really know what they are. When they talked about them it jumped all over the place.

Outdoor missions which are public quest for 2 - 3 people in a instance where you do battlegrounds against mobs ?

What they showed was something that looked very much like rifts system for rifts. A 3 stage event where you do x number of tasks. Unlike rift theses aren't all about the same thing.

Challenge mode Dungeons, 45 min barren run with leader boards and no loot. Still that was the barren run in a nutshell. Its a interesting concept, they are making them imposable to out gear which is also nice. The rewards is armor with no stats which you can transmog. Not sure how popular this is going to be but its something else to do that's not raids.

The Pandera And Monk Class. they look cool. The opportunity here is huge for gear styles and something really different. The fact that they start neutral and then join sides is perfect. I was really worried pre-blizzcon con that someone would end up with the boobie race ( the debate is still out on that for Cataclysm ). I shouldn't roll a monk as the RSI OOS will be insane. They don't have auto attack so you must do a action every move. They want a street fighter feel, so they should make high kick/punch low kick/punch skills.

Wrapping up, I feel that this expansion is what Warcraft needed. Its a holiday from itself to explore something different and I will be looking forward to its release which is set for some time next year.

Here is the updated Bingo Card. I was reluctant to cross off public quests and I left duo dungeons uncrossed as they really need to lock down what a PvE Scenario is.

Blues on Diablo 3 beta

Just a quick link:

http://www.bluesnews.com/a/2534/diablo-iii-beta-preview

Brings up some interesting points and worth reading.

Delays and Release dates

The Delay:

Diablo 3 has been delayed until 2012. I am hoping this is so they can rethink the always connected DRM which I have heard from the BETA sucks.

I do not mind having to log in to play a game. Steam does this seamlessly and doesn't bother me. Starcraft 2 was ok as well but with Diablo you are playing online and are relying on that connection for your enjoyment.

At launch of Starcraft 2 I was constantly getting messages that I have disconnected from Battle.net and that achievements would not be tracked or something and thats about it. My guess is Battle.net could hold the load. With Diablo 3 if this happens you will be kicked from your singleplayer game, loosing any progress since the last way point. You won't loose any items but you will have to hack your way across the map again. Also you can not pause in singleplayer because its not really singleplayer and if idle you will be auto disconnected from Battle.net.

This is why I am against Blizzards Diablo 3 DRM its full this increasing sort sightedness the company has been having since around 2006. Where is the voice of reason in BlizzHQ or did they all leave to go work on Torchlight 2.

The Release:

In other news, now that EA know Blizzard won't have Diablo 3 out this year, The Old Republic has a Launch Date.

December 20, 2011

Unless you live outside of America and most of Europe. Then its unknown. What is known is the subscription costs are the same as every other MMO.  $14.95 USD per month.

If I was a Bioware network engineer I would be totally pissed off with EA/Bioware right about now. As they won't be getting a Xmas this year.

As mentioned a paragraph above, there is no talk on the release date for OZ/NZ. They won't even comment if the delay is because they are securing server space for us down here. I am not fussed, the game has lost a lot of its magic from a few years and my excitement is nearly gone. I put this partly down to Rift showing just how generic MMO's have become.


Summing up, I think Blizzard have played their cards well. The old republic will be out over Xmas then at a guess Blizzard will try to release around the 1 month anniversary of The old republic, tempting people to cancel there subs.


Bioware better hope that their game isn't a two week ride to the level cap. There needs to be enough content there to last 3 months on a single character. My guess is there isn't and they are hoping people will just rolls alts until  more content shows up.

Diablo 3 - Cash Auctions

First off, what the ?

Don’t Need It? Put It Up For Auction!
Nearly everything found in the game, including gold, can be exchanged with other players directly or through the auction house system. So say you’re a witch doctor and you’ve just found an incredibly rare, incredibly powerful axe that only barbarians can use. In the previous Diablo games your best option might have been to sell the axe to an in-game vendor, but in Diablo III, you now have the ability to list that axe in the auction house for your fellow barbarian players to bid on. And you know another player will probably appreciate the true value of that axe more than some heartless vendor who’ll likely just melt it down for scrap….

 Even gold ?

Then I saw this:

The Choice Is Yours
Use of either the real-money or gold-based auction house is completely optional -- that decision can be made on a per-item basis, and both versions of the auction house are functionally the same. In addition, players have the option to simply sell the items they obtain to in-game vendors for gold. They can also trade items to other players through a direct character-to-character trading system in the game in exchange for gold, other items, or just an overwhelming sense of goodwill.

Real money for in game items. Its supposed to be only for the auction house and its optional but what the hell has Blizzard become. Its become Blizzard ActivisiSUN this is just a vailed layer of the pay to win model and my interest in Diablo 3 is almost all but gone. The players make no money out of these auctions and Blizzard just pockets the profits themselfs.