Diablo III's Auction House Is Shuttng Down

FYI @patrickklepek, the article title is missing an i in Shutting.

So it took Activision 16 months to realize that allowing players to purchase items with money would upset the game's core philosophy of obtaining items by defeating enemies? Right, that makes sense. Let's be real. Core gameplay has nothing to do with the removal of the AH. Activision has simply deemed the AH's removal more lucrative than its maintenance. With the upcoming expansion release, Activision wants to win the purchase of those who stayed away from the base game because of the AH and those who won't purchase the expansion after having not liked the implementation of the AH in the base game.

I don't know if there's some kind of market index on the RMAH, but if there was, it'd be going to SHIT right now!

This is extremely good news.

The AH basically completely made D3 endgame pointless. Because finding loot for yourself was near impossible, while the extreme ease with which you could gear yourself soley from the AH made killing monster for gear irrelevant.

I've identified this problem for a while. It was a glaring design flaw. Good to see that i still got it when it comes to breaking down and analyzing games. Even tho it's fairly logical :P

Made me care about the new expansion.

All of the changes they made to the loot and progression systems came too late for me to care about, but with an expansion coming out, this is a bit more interesting. "Undermines core gameplay" is a gross exaggeration and it's a bit sad that it's taken them this long to do something about it.

There really is no need for that on PC. You can simply hold down the button for most skills, such as main attacks or channeled effects. With only ever needing to re click if another enemy is too far out of range.

Huh. This is interesting to me. The Paladin was my favourite class from Diablo II, so I thought the Crusader class from the expansion sounded right up my alley, but I hadn't checked out the main game yet. This might be just the push I needed.

The AH crashed, literally, it stopped working as soon as the announcement went public.

Have enjoyed D3 with (PC) and without (PS3) the AH, so doesn't matter much either way to me. But great news for the people who really, really hated the thing I guess.

Don't think it's going to bring any of those people around, but there you go.

I can't believe it took them this long to realize that they needed to do this. The gold auction house in particular has been the biggest drawback to D3. On PC, drop rates were tuned drastically downwards per player solely because the developers didn't want the auction house flooded with top tier items within the first few days. This in turn made actually playing D3 suck, because it took practically forever, even with maximum magic find to find a relatively decent item in your particular play session. Going forward, using in-game chat or sites like D2JSP or the battle.net forums will be used exclusively for trading items the old-fashioned, and substantially slower way. I'm very OK with this, especially seeing how they're basically overhauling the loot system in the next expansion pack, making actually playing the game the preferred way of gearing up.

Yayyyyy!

Blizzard, you only killed Diablo but hey that's okay, at least you realized the error of your ways. Better late than never.

The consoles loot system is just a tweaked version of the loot system they're building for the pre-expansion patch. It all sounds great.

I haven't played Diablo 3 since it first came out, not because of the presence of an auction house but because I finished it. It's interesting to see them shutting it down; I had no idea it was screwing things up. I wonder what kind of effects this will have on other games with similar systems.

YES! but that's a long while yet.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, I bought something on the real-money AH: 50 million gold for €1.5.

Today, both AHs are announced to close down. Just my luck.

I feel somehow responsible for this. So, sorry, duders. ... or is it "congrats"?

@sferics said:

Not really at all, since it will coincide with all of the major revamps they're doing (Loot 2.0, Paragon 2.0, etc.) as well as likely happening right before the release of Reaper of Souls. If anything, they're just using the level cap increase/gear reset as the best time to shut down the AH, and rightfully so.

Always sounded like a stupid idea

Cool. I thought that the AH was a brilliant idea at first, specifically how it both shuts down the black market for items and puts money into Blizzard's pockets. I hope this reinvigorates the game, I know I'm definitely interested in Reaper.

Diablo 3 is a good-ass game, the friends of mine that were 'disappointed' in it all beat it at least three times. Sorry it's not an infinite wellspring of entertainment.

Good news! That's also happening.

Awesome. It'll be nice to stop hearing people bitch about the damn thing every time you bring up the game.

A good call on Blizzards part. I wish it would have come sooner though.

This is nice and all but I think my moment with Diablo 3 has long since passed. The story and late game nonsense were always bigger problems for me than the auction house, and you can't as easily fix them.

It's good that the auction house is going away, but I'd say that the worst part of this is simply that the issues with the auction house largely existed in the first place because of the many, many ways in which they repeatedly made bad decisions around it. Let's just look at a list:

1. They balanced loot drops primarily around the concept of the auction house existing. Loot was absolutely atrocious as a result despite constant upgrades normally being a staple feature of games like this (and buying your upgrade isn't as much fun as finding it).
2. They balanced loot itself around the existence of an auction house. For months after the game's release set items and uniques were virtually worthless in large part because Blizzard wanted people to have a variety of equipment at their disposal and everyone buying the top tier sets would make everyone virtually the same. This didn't matter much since Attack was pretty much the only worthwhile stat and the focus was merely shifted from buying the best sets to buying the stuff with the most Attack.
3. They didn't limit the auction house in the slightest. There is really no excuse for this unless greed or gross carelessness counts as an excuse. In just about any other multiplayer rpg there are limits to what can be put on the auction house; endgame sets and on-par items being amongst the most common. Had they simply bothered to make more items bind-on-pickup (or even bind on equip for that matter) it is likely that the quality of set/unique items and of drops in general would have been much better from the start.
4. They didn't prioritize protection. While it's virtually impossible to eliminate gold sellers and a few hacked accounts here and there are simply bound to happen, Blizzard outright did not act against account hackers during the first few months of the game's release, even when there were threads on their own forums naming known hackers. This is already bad in any game, but it's inexcusable in a game where real money is at stake to literally come out with a message along the lines of 'don't use hacks and hack accounts because we'll ban you in the near future'.

In short, Blizzard has fixed many of these problems to some degree since Diablo III launched, but many of the problems existed in the first place not so much due to the concept of a real money auction house as due to Blizzard balancing their entire game around the existence of one.

@tennmuerti: Oh I had no idea you could now move around without clicking on the PC. Wait, you still have to do that? Pressing and holding a mouse button causes the same if not worse issues with repetitive stress.

Good stuff. I remember my first play-though with a Demon Hunter that i had tricked out with Oranges and yellows, and as i was fighting THE VERY LAST BOSS I never got hit. I knew right then that something was definitely not right with the Auction House system.

I was already looking forward to playing the expansion, but now that interest has increased.

I don't see how the AH broke gameplay if you ignored the real-money AH. If you're playing for the gameplay first and the gear second, then drops and self-crafted items are cool enough for me.

I beat the game on normal difficulty with a friend in a weekend. I want to beat it on harder difficulties. I can't say the AH had anything to do with that desire, one way or the other.

I'm not sure I'm entirely down just yet with Blizzard executing the final solution on the auction house. I'm guessing they've got safeguards in place to prevent the epic levels of trade spam of Diablo 2 from returning, but the secondary market for a Blizzard game will always be a terrifying place. I'll miss having a villain-free zone for finding something specific. Changes were definitely necessary and I'm guessing they probably experimented with much steeper limitations on AH usage to determine that removing it was the best course, but it seems like a little much from my position on the sidelines. Hopefully the new loot system and all that stuff made it moot anyways.

Nope. What undermines Diablo 3's core gameplay is the shitty, shitty story/dialogue you have to suffer through to play it over and over.

hurray

Am I the only one who thinks it's kinda brazen for them to be talking about their "reward loop" in a public video?

"Hey guys. turns out the fuggin Skinner-box we set up for your asses isn't keeping buts in seats the way we hoped. We hope to tune the win-button to deliver fewer, and more compelling pellets in the future."

I have opinions about a thing that neither hindered my enjoyment or added to my experience. Harumph!

Hearing about things like the real money auction house was one of the things that kept me from buying D3. It made me feel like they were putting too much focus and attention on that aspect of the game instead of the actual hack and slash of the game itself. I fully realize that loot is a huge part of the game, but I didn't like the idea of this metagame economy with its roots in the kind of Stone of Jordan trading that always seemed slimy to me back in the day.

Maybe I'll buy the game now, but probably not till there's a package deal for the base game and the expansion.

It might when it becomes apparent that loot drops are a rather frustrating and incredibly time consuming way of playing through those difficulties, with the current system.

Yes, there really is very minimal clicking involved. The other part would depend more on you and on your mouse. A mouse with a light enough touch is good for not having any strain even after days of playing.

Wow this seems like the year of the "big backpedaling", first MS now this.

Kind of funny considering that many many many fans have voiced exactly that concern, even prior to the release of Diablo 3.

But isn't there another way to do this, without removing the Auction House completely?

The biggest problem is really the way you have pay for items, with Gold (will get inflated) or Real money (pay2win). But if they set up the AH in such a way that you can trade items with items (based on item level) the AH could have a place in a Diablo game. It would basically replace the old and tired "meet up and trade stuff" from Diablo 2 and make trading much more approachable for casual players.

So this feels kinda like the cheap way out.

I don't think that's ever gonna happen, they changed way more about it then just controls. Skills and movement behave completely different. So adding controller support to the PC version would also result in changes to the mouse+kb gameplay.

Maybe my hands are weird, but my index-finger/middle-finger are doing exactly the same movements when i hit mouse1/2 on a mouse or the right trigger/bumper on a controller, seriously it's exactly the same!

Maybe, just maybe, I will play this game again. Got to Inferno in a few weeks of this game releasing and quit because the auction house was just a way for Activision/Blizzard to make a ton of cash by fucking with drop rates.

Weird they made a trailer about removing a feature.

I do always like seeing an organization come out and openly admit their community's most crotchety aspects were right all along.

Maybe i'll finally play Diablo 3 then.

Why?

@nethlem: Skills didn't seem to change very much that I've noticed, somewhat to its detriment as anything you need to really snap target to is kind of frustrating to use. And with movement I can only think of the Right stick to dodge ability.

It's too little far far far too late for people like me who got massively turned off by stuff like the auction house and the DRM. I doubt they care too much about that though. The sold a great amount of copies

I'm locked out too. Somebody else got their hands on it, or at least got my hands off it and I see no way to get it back. At least I never did anything credit card related with that account.

I wonder if this means the rise of spambots like what happened with D2...

So they're removing the auction house, does that mean they'll be implementing the loot system that exists on consoles? You know, the one where you actually find loot that is not only worthwhile, but be even be used by your class?

Might pick this up now if it goes on sale this Thanksgiving, which seems to be the one time of the year Blizzard puts their games on sale.

Because a lot of people quit due to the Auction House. This is kind of "We're sorry. Come back and play."

Yes, its a feature coming in the pre-expansion patch. Loot 2.0 is the system that the console team looked at and based some of their decisions on. It won't be exactly the same, but the end result should be pretty damn close.

The funny thing is that without the RAMH players will go back to selling loot on forums, and somehow they will think it is way better.