pocahaunted
Arcane
ArcturusXIV said:Awor Szurkrarz said:Isn't selling/buying in-game gold and character's a common practice in MMOgaming? Except that this time it's Blizzard getting money for it, not eBay?pocahaunted said:So, apparently we'll be having a torrent of info on Diablo 3 released soon enough, but some German bros do not understand the concept of a NDA so there have been some leaks.
http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?p=7958319#post7958319
Now, everything's pretty much irrelevant except for this:
"Real Money" Auction House. You can sell and buy Items for Real Money. You have to pay fee to Blizzard for it. You can also use an Ingame-Gold Acution House.
I gotta say, this sounds pretty damn disgusting, even if I realize WHY they did it -- who cares, they're still going down a damn dirty, despicable road. If they manage to be successful with this bullshit, we can expect microtransactions to become even more mainstream as, apparently, developers love to copy Blizzard/Activision business models.
Exactly, this doesn't bother me at all, since it happens on auction houses anyway. At least it's players getting/spending money rather than Blizzard getting/spending money. A downpayment to sell is not bad, and you could actually create a profitable business margin this way, if you're an enterpreneur. Now if Blizzard creates a "tariff" tax on each item, I might be disappointed... But one flat fee is not bad.
Random rune effects? That's a LOT worse. You'll still be able to find the same items on the regular auction-house for trade. I hope servers are location-specific, i.e. North America only, or else you'll be undersold by the third world.
Yeah, it's a flat fee, which is kinda good. Still, it happened in MMOs illegally and the fact that now it will be more accessible means that a lot more people will be using it. I don't really case anymore, though, as hardcore will not have this bullshit. What I'm really worried about is character customization which appears to have been thrown out of the window.
Well, there will be region locks, but anyone can buy a NA copy and play on the NA servers so Chinese farmers won't be going away. i.e. there's a retail lock, but no IP blocks.