Diablo III

Diablo III devs hate Brazilians.

They basically laughed a BR off stage for being BR and agreed that there should be no BRs on Diablo III.

 

The problem was always an obvious one:
There are three ways to price the conversion:
1)Too high - No one will buy because they will feel cheated
2)Just right - No one will buy, because they will feel cheated
3)Too cheap - The only people who will cry about it are the people who aren't PAYING.

The problem with this concept is and has always been:
Customers > Players
This is how every game with pay2win works and it won't change, Blizzard will capitalize on this big time, that's not even a fucking question, they will try to make as much as possible, the only difference between them and others is that they're looking much more midterm and not short term, they plan to try and get this money out of the next 10 years or so instead of the next 1 (prices would be much much higher), however not long haul (not even having this shit which will give them money but fuck them up when they want to make a fucking D4 and no one plays the shit cause D3 is plagued with retards).

Typical Community Manager spouting shit, all of them are terrible, always have been.

 

Oh, but you are.

You're winning time. All MMOs/online games come down to one main concept (oh and D3 isn't an MMO just thought I'd put that out there): Time spent = How good you are.

It is too difficult for people to wrap their head around coding for actual skill, it's much easier to code for time, and thus they do, more time spent, more win. Normally now there is a little luck tossed in but in general there is a minimum time you will hit X and that will limit you with skill, stuff is shared easily, guides posted, and there are no secrets, it becomes simply if you follow this which is the most effective guide mathematically and technically as proven time and time again you can reach level X in Y hours. Gaining gear is about the same, realistically you spend a lot of time doing it, in general the point is this even assuming that there won't be any 'OP buy only gear' or 'twink gear you can only get from higher levels to fuel the marketplace', you could get your gear with stats +30 at level 10 while the guy who just hit level 10 and doesn't buy shit has to MF a bit at lvl 10 to get his gear at +30, it might not even be worth the time investment and thus he's stuck with his +10/20 gear until he hits lvl 20 by which time maybe he found that full set maybe he didn't.

One could argue that selling your gear will profit later, but that's a bad pretense, if everyone had the gear to sell the market would be oversaturated, it's a simple problem, so you can't simply get enough out to put back i, not without being extremely lucky because skill would have little to nothing to do with it only luck as you would have to assume there are a lot of 'rare's at the level that you still need to buy things that you might find and can sell for a pretty penny, enough to cover what you want.

This is normally no problem inside a regular game with a closed market, or even one with a 'black market' but when the market is free to trade with real money that doesn't become a problem, let's see this rare drops at 0.01% chance for a level 20 (Assuming max is 60-100), okay I'll give you $5, maybe it'll cost $10, hell let's be bold and say it costs $20.
$20 isn't going to cost you the same as it would someone working a job, gold won't convert on average to someone playing the game 2 hours getting as much as someone working minimum wage working 2 hours, it'll be much cheaper, the equivalent will probably be something about ingame gold you can gain per hour costing about $5/hr, and that's at max level.

If it didn't the whole thing would collapse upon itself.

There's no such thing as cash shop for anything except pure cosmetic NOT being pay 2 win.

 

Your skills are limited by your gear, this is true of WoW and every other game, the skill ceiling literally moves with your gear.
P2W is buying anything that effects gameplay, anything.

MS is a different story cause MTS is kinda strange and they took a long time to really make things right, it also has several different ways to make things max out so you would need a different variety of scrolls to truly make a perfect item and the sheer chance of not only getting the item but then scrolling it perfectly on one front, and another, and perhaps a third makes a perfect or near perfect thing fucking invaluable.

When you have a fucking brown WG per se with 8 slots and you try 10% scroll on each fucking slot and get 7/8, that's a fucking boss move right there. That should be 1 x 10^-7, or basically so small a fucking chance you'd have a better chance of reviving your pet that died when you were 2.
The fact that that alone is fucking ridiculously small and you couple it with HOLY SHIT MOTHERFUCKER a chance of getting 3 of another thing with like 10% all right or even a good deal of them right, bro, the chances there, you just, don't even go into that territory, holy shit.

Unless D3 had some scrolling system of rare shit it wouldn't even come close to the conceptualized rarity in MapleStory.
I'd often sell accounts for hundreds of dollars in MS back in around 2006 for this simple reason.

Yes, D3 can go many ways, I have not paid attention specifically to any plans for adding stupid amounts of rarity like this to inflate some items' prices like crazy, but as soon as they realize it's required I'd imagine it will be added whether in a patch or elsewise.

To give an example, in Path of Exile something similar is already in place, for items you have:
1)Color of slots (up to 3 colors)
2)Number of slots (Up to 6 on armor/2handed)
2)Linking of slots, are they all 6 linked, (3,3), (2, 3,1), (5,1)? Makes a big difference.
3)Rarity of item, is it blue, rare, unique?
4)Explicit stats on the item(Prefix/Suffix), of which there can be up to 5 on a Rare(gold) item, and they aren't easy to change.
5)Number tied to each explicit stat. Is that +%Physical damage 50% or 200%?

It takes on average 200+ Jeweler's Orbs to get 6 slots on an item.
It takes on average 200 chromatic orbs to get all 6 colors the way you want. These are easier to get but still that costs a lot.
It takes on average 300 orb of fusing (not exactly super common) to get 6 slots linked together, that's a lot of dosh in the game, a lot.
Rarity isn't that big of a deal if it was white you can make it gold with Orb of Alchemy (easy enough to find) if it was Rare it's already rare, if it's magic, that's another thing entirely hard to change it to gold.
Choice in the stats, hard to get the exact 5 you want, if you try to do the 'change' it usually changes all, the chance of getting all 5 you want is fucking impossibly hard, no idea the chance but of a pool of like 50+ prefix/suffixes for an item you can have up to fucking 5.
Explicit stat is a big fucking deal, the number values there are so crazy they can range over 50 for an itemlevel and there are 5 stats to focus on here, holy shit.

That's easily more of a chance in exactly what you want/close to what you want showing up than MapleStory, there's no Real Money Auction House, but if there was, it would actually fucking work here.

(It would still be pay2win though, and I know it could still happen without the company wanting it, as it did in D2 for so fucking long and MS and all the other games, but that's a blackmarket it's a totally different thing)

 

Do you mean for PoE or D3?

I'm not sure what D3's plan is of increased rarity on items to make some sort of fake difficulty in obtaining items.

PoE's is sure to change yea, hopefully making things a bit easier cause right now it's a bit silly and thinks like orb of fusing having no recipe or tradability (to merchants for other types ) is ludicrous when it is one of the most useful orbs.

 

No, people accept it for two reasons, they're either:

1)Casuals who don't have any skill so are happy to spend hours to gain 'power' because they couldn't do it any other way
2)Deal with it because they understand that programmers can't do better or refuse to.

While time should always be required a very low ceiling on it is generally the problem, in a balanced game where skill and planning take effect, good skill, good planning, a person with a good plan and high skill should be able to do something 2-10 times as fast as some newb with no skill, a general lack of planning who just runs through the game.

The problem is that this isn't the case, and that in the end they will end up there at roughly the same time, at most the guy with high skill assuming he has no backing and it's his first character. This is usually how it ends up, and how it will stay in this genre for at least another 5 years no doubt. It's a shame but it's how it works for now, it tricks people into thinking that this is the best option, but it's not, it's just a stall.

Games like Dark Souls seem to try to combat this in some sense but they still lack something, they still have a feeling of.. not quite hard enough, not quite enough skill required, everything can still be learned by someone without it.