This is partly a Reaper of Souls topic but I think that this will be released before the D3 game and it will happen in D3 as well so I figured its also relevant here. Anyways, here is the link!! AH will be closed down! http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/

Does this change anyone's opinion about anything? I feel like quite a few people from the GB community didn't like the AH. I personally didn't mind it but I have to admit that I got bored of the game a bit quickly and maybe the AH is to blame.

Hallelujah.

I just saw this. Great news. I hated hitting a DPS or survivability wall where I needed to gear up for a boss on a higher difficulty, and it was just so much more convenient to shop for exactly the gear and stats than to hope for "earning" a drop. Also trying to sell and price things was super tedious. I have definitely wanted to go back to try some other classes when I heard about the better loot system coming, and this is just all the better if the game can truly be balanced around getting your own drops.

Awesome.

So either A) we're going back to using shady bootleg 3rd party sites to buy items or B) they're going to make it stupidly trivial to get amazing gear or C) some magical third option that prevents both A and B.

Great.

Great news everybody!

I dont think I ever even looked in the AH. Dont bother me one way or the other if its gone.

I personally though the RMAH was an awful solution (basically pay to win). I wonder if this is related to the pvp that had been planned.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

FUCK YES!

YES

YES

YES

YES

About fucking time. Bastards.

This was one my one and only huge gripe with D3, that i said over and over again that the AH devalued the endgame loot finding completely, just totally removing any drive to get items yourself.

AND this will make sure you actually now get better drops instead of 99.99% of loot at higher levels being garbage.

They just sold me the expansion.

(kind of not surprised that Blizzard finally came to the exact same conclusion like myself, they're smart like that) >.>

@starvinggamer: It's option B) tho not quite as bad you put it. The console versions already have a similar fix implemented. It definitely going to be easier to get gear relevant to your character. They are basically circumcising the awful amount of bullshit loot that is useful to no one, as well. But it's not going to be as dire as you think. The current Inferno endgame loot drops are just ridiculous. I went back to playing it recently on PC because i convinced my brother to play as well and we had a hell of a time, but I basically did not find a single weapon upgrade from inferno act2 mp0 to act2 mp1; that's an entire games length worth of drops.

We made a pact to not buy a single item on the AH with him. Because as soon as you cross that barrier, you finding loot for yourself that as an upgrade will become a thing of the past. I can pay 1-2 euro to get more money then i will farm in a week and increase my barbs stats to twice the survivability and twice the dps without any effort. I pay more for coffee every day. Heck even if you discount the RMAH, the AH itself still does the exact same thing, just requires you to farm (for gold or shit to sell, not really in any significant hopes of finding something for yourself).

As soon as I got any other character to 60 and decked them out in the bare basics for not even half a mil (less gold then you get just going through content) all drive to play on Inferno completely evaporated, each time. Because at that point what the fuck is the point? You buy AH items which are 10x better then what you have when reaching 60 for peanuts. Then. Go through Inferno mp"X". But why? If all the challenge is reduced because you have purchased gear from AH. You can increase the mp difficulty, but then you are only increasing it to compensate for the AH items. Which bring us back to square one, why then did you buy items from the AH to only bring up the difficulty. Chances of upgrading yourself are still negligible, it more assured that you will just farm with little to no challenge for the next upgrade, then increase the mp. And so on in a perpetual cycle of artificially decreasing the difficulty and then increasing it once again, with 0 sense of achievement.

At least when you ignore the AH there is a sense that you are achieving your own progression, slowly but assuredly and increasing the difficulty because of the upgrades you managed to be able to get through hours of blood sweat and tears. Gradual able to increase the difficulty because of your effort that made it possible and surviving with only what you got. But I shudder at thinking about trying to do that when playing solo (playing with 2 people the entire time we got better drops by default and were able to share and swap fund loot to at least keep up).

And it totally worked. The strictly enforced mutual rule of not going to the AH made me jump for joy and yell loud enough to wake neighbors when we got a barbarian set weapon to drop (tho even with loot sharing i was at a point of desperation as the difficulty kept climbing while my gear stayed mostly the same for the longest time). Something I have never experienced back when playing my monk in Inferno near launch.

Frankly I've grown to like D3's "always online drm" as it became very obvious how much smoother online gaming experience became (it even recognized we were on the same lan). And the strict no hacking the game it enforces (as i have spoiled quite a few dungeon crawlers for myself that way eventually). But the AH was the one renaming beef I had with D3, the single major design flaw I saw and apparently Blizzard finally came around to the same answer.

@starvinggamer: You're creating a false trichotomy. A variation of B is the correct option, in that they can improve the drop rate while not making it trivial to get amazing gear. The drop rate is horrendous in D3, so there's certainly a lot of room for improvement without making everything entirely overpowered and easy.

Cool, but I can't see myself going back until the next expansion comes out. Diablo 3 was my first Diablo and the loot, while nice, never quite compared to the rush I got from loot in WoW.

I played a ton of Diablo 3 but I could never ever get either of the auction houses to work effectively for me so I basically ignored it. No loss for me.

As long as the system is closed, that is the only items that can be created/generated are on official servers, then we won't go back to the worst days of Diablo 2. People keep glossing that over that it wasn't that "third parties" where offering gold or items for cash that was the huge problem but they were offering hacked items or breaking accounts to do it. You ran a serious risk of breaking characters and accounts in Diablo 2 by trading with **anyone** because hacking was so rampant let alone shady individuals. As long as the system is closed with the life cycle of items being completely on Battle.net then that shouldn't happen which I am all for.

I do think Blizzard is "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". There is a real need for a secured market place in Diablo 3 but it shouldn't revolve around gold but items. They should have gone for a "item for item" trading place instead of trading on gold/real money. It would be nice to "publish" a list of items the player wants to trade and can be contacted with offers and counter-offers.

Notice how when Microsoft reversed their policies based on consumer reaction, they got shit for it and were called fickle and it was said that they have no idea what they're doing. But when Blizzard does the exact same thing they are lauded.

Oh, gaming industry.

Gee it is like Microsoft dreamed up some crazy scheme they never implemented while Blizzard actually executed on their plan, saw the results, and admitted failure. Its like the same thing but complete different.

I'm neither a fan of Microsoft or Blizzard, but I don't feel this is quite the same thing. This wasn't the same kind of knee-jerk reaction that Microsoft did.

Also I'm not getting the impression that people are "lauding" Blizzard for this. They're happy they're correcting a dumb mistake, which was pretty much how people felt about Microsoft.

@bisonhero: @tennmuerti: But as long as acquiring loot is not trivial, there will be a desire for trading both in-game items and real money. People always tell me that the rate loot dropped in D2 was so much better than it is in D3, yet there was no shortage of scummy third-party websites and eBay auctions offering you SoJ's for cash. There are always going to be players with more money than time, and a game as wide-reaching as D3 is going to attract a lot of them.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the desire to have better drops in D3. I just don't understand why better drops and the AH need to be mutually exclusive. The only advantage to having fewer options is to quash all the dissent coming from people with crazy mental hangups over the sheer fact that the AH exists. Granted they do seem to be quite numerous.

I don't know. To me it's similar. The auction house was enough for me and many people I know to stop playing or not even buy the game altogether. It is the same with MS's original X1 plans and how that was enough for many people to stay away.

I think the key thing here is that they were both based on consumer reaction.

I'm probably looking too far into this. :P

So I guess xyzxgy is going to whine about every failure and reversal is exactly like the XBox One....

I definitely agree with Starving. As mentioned in my post there is a need for a secured trading system. If you have a Legendary item you don't care about it but someone else has a Legendary for a character you want to focus on or build up, why not let both of us trade them? Or if I have extra items for a class I don't care about, when not just throw them at a friend who loves playing that class? Trying to do that through the auction house is crazy. Doing that in game is burdensome.

A framework to trade items without being on a character or even in game is a good feature. Trading just in an auction house that used currency in trade was not that useful or valuable. With only the auction house as a mechanism of trading lead me to only make "drop trades" or otherwise it would be too much of a hassle to try anything more.

I don't care about scummy third party sites existing and selling loot. They won't affect my game. AH was affecting my game, because the loot drop system was disigned with it in mind. The drop rates were made purposefully low, shitty and diluted with garbage gear to make AH relevant and to incentivise player trade. Now it will become viable to progress in the endgame without going to the AH.

As to why they are mutually exclusive. Because as long as the AH exists, if the drops are increased or made better, then the AH will simply devalue everything yet again and it will be still cheaper to buy and gear yourself through AH, rather then drops. Thereby making the game way easier and way more trivial then normal drop rate intends. You would be able to breeze through inferno MP difficulties and players would find themselves bored and unrewarded yet again. Removing a sense of achievement for a lot of people. Like it or not, making trading unofficial and moving it back to shady sites creates a very significant barrier to entry, which for most people will be too much of a barrier (especial if they can gear themselves without an insane grind).

If Blizzards goal is truly for the best gear to be obtainable through looting it yourself, rather then simply buying it with 0 effort all the time, the AH simply can't exist in that equation as it will always make it faster and easier and more convenient to get gear through it.

If you really want to think about it further for funzies:

• the Blizzard reversal is taking place more then a year after the game came out, unlike the Microsoft thing
• the Blizzard reversal is 1, it's a lone reversal, whereas Microsoft did a turn around on item after item after item, making them seem fickle and not sticking to any of it's guns
• the audiences for the 2 reversals are very very different, most of them aren't the same people, on one hand you have PC gamers likely dedicated Blizzard fans, on the other you have a return of the system wars with console fan boys trying to shit on the opposition at any opportunity (granted there is overlap, but the specialised demographics are quite different)

That's what i could think off of the top of my head.

Fair enough.

<3

The auction houses aren't the real problem with the game. It's the decision to balance the loot system in favour of capitalising post-purchase revenue generated by the auction houses that made Diablo 3 vastly more underwhelming than its predecessor. The game probably would have been perfectly fine if drops rates and item quality were comparable to D2 levels.

With that said, removing the auction houses completely does solve the problem of having to balance around them, and we might be looking at a far better experience this time around. A trading UI should be implemented, however.

Cautiously optimistic about the future of D3. Unlikely I'll be getting the expansion day one, but if the general consensus is positive with it, I might give D3 another shot.

I am not sure I believe that since "the best gear possible" would not be possible through buying it "with 0 effort" but I have to admit I never even entertained the idea of messing around the RM side. Part of the reason why I could never get into the auction house is because of the amount of work it would take. Buying items at 10+ million, which were not the best items, was definitely not "0 effort". For me that was really what the issue was. To buy the best items you were farming and farming and farming and farming and farming going through and gathering some high quality and respectable gear along the way. By the time I got the amount an amount I needed to buy out some item, that thing really wasn't that valuable any more. This lead me to farming more than I should have while never being happy with the result. Without that auction house system I probably would have been content with what I was getting but knowing bigger stuff was out there.

As a side note, it was speculated that if D3's auction house worked well, this would show up in WoW and "Titan". Now it looks like Blizzard will probably stay with strictly separating in and out of game markets.

I feel core mechanics make the game less appealing. Which is weird because it's still a fine game, but not as good as it could be. That's the best I can describe it. The AH really was not the problem for me with this game, although better loot drops may certainly make it a little better skill customization is much more interesting.

To sum it up; It's weird (to me) that I enjoy Titan Quest more than Diablo 3.

That being said its entirely possible they find ways to make the game play better with the coming expansion now that there is no AH. So I am more than willing to check it out again. Again, its not at all a bad game.

I did all my Diablo 3 playing before the AH even opened... and by the looks of things the next time I'll play it, it'll be gone. So I guess I've never experienced it and I never will.

So a game I haven't had even one iota of interest in for over a year is finally undoing a stupid thing it never should have done in the first place. That's nice. Am I going back to the game? Can you say "Day late, dollar short"?

@extomar: I feel like you just described the exact opposite of what most players experienced and what the game should have been like. The biggest problem players had was not being able to find useful and relevant gear through play and farm. Plus, farming isn't even really farming in the regular sense, because all drops and item stats are highly randomized. The chances of getting a desired drop is worse than playing the lotto, since even if one gets the desired item the stats might not be desirable. Anyone who tried clearing Inferno prior to Monster Power should be able to attest to how bad this really was. It was either get some Life on Hit weapon and high resistance gear from the auction house or just run around and hope you get really, really lucky. Heck, when I first hit Inferno, my gear was clearly underleveled and I went back to Hell to farm. I eventually just gave up since I was getting jack all done and invested in some auction house gear and cleared Inferno Act 1 which, again, dropped jack all to prepare me for Act 2.

Yeah, great news. But the key to making it work and adding the fun back is the loot re balancing they are doing at the same time.

I was just about to ask if they were retooling all of the items, particularly legendary drops. Good to hear that they are doing it. :D

I have had fun with diablo 3 with just ignoring the AH, this will be awesome.

As others have said, it makes me want to give the game a second chance once the expansion hits.

This is a huge relief, and it gives me a reason to possibly return to the game.

The problem with the AH was exactly what they said. You are playing Diablo in order to get drops and rewards, and since you could just buy what you wanted, it meant that gold farming meant more than anything else. Eventually, once gold became so inexpensive for REAL money, it meant that gear was no longer rewarding. Mix that with a lack of honest end-game stuff and it made for a rather bland and uninteresting experience.

That's not to mention that the 1.03 patch debacle was bullshit, then badmouthing everyone that said "base character stats are important" and then adding Paragon levels because WE WERE RIGHT, and all the shit talk that they moderators were doing to people on forums after the 1.03 patch dropped... Yeah, that shit rubbed me and a LOT of other people raw.

Now that they have realized "HEY WE FUCKED UP AND MAYBE WE SHOULD DO RIGHT BY THE PEOPLE THAT GAVE US MONEY," D3 sounds interesting again. Unfortunately, I have to wait until March for all of that bullshit to happen.

Even then, I expect that they will most likely fuck something else up around that same period (much like they killed off honest PvP because...well...they bit off more than they could chew) or during/after the release of the expansion.

Here's to hoping, but as it stands, Blizzard is quickly becoming the developer I least give a shit about.

@forcen: In watching that video, it makes me realize that I'm just going to start a whole new character whenever Reaper of Souls comes out because of how they are changing up the Paragon system. Why go in with my already-at-100 Paragon character when that's a net loss of 100 points on that character already?

Nonetheless, this all sounds very promising. Loot runs particularly make me happy. FINALLY, SOME FUCKING ENDGAME!

Yeah, I'll probably start a new character again when the expansion comes out and the AH is gone. Last time I played it there wasn't the Paragon system, so it'll be interesting to see how different it feels with that and the lack of an AH (which hopefully means more/better drops).

Thank fuck! Now the healing can begin.

Now I can actually play the game and (hopefully, when everything is said and done) feel like I'm getting the complete experience. Really excited for this to happen, as the AH is the number one thing that prevented me from getting the game in the first place. Good move on their part IMO.