Diablo 3 auction houses, global play detailed
Blizzard unveils details for its Diablo 3 auction houses. Yes, two types: One for in-game currency and the other for real world money.
Many MMOs have utilized auction houses to help players generate in-game income. Now, Blizzard has taken the wraps off its new auction house format for Diablo III that will allow players to generate both in-game income and real-world cash.
A comprehensive FAQ tells players all about the marketplace. Players will be able to choose which type of auction house they want to use, but the game will choose the appropriate auction house for real-world cash sales.
A step-by-step guide tells players how to use the system to buy and sell items they acquire. The real-world cash auction house will allow PayPal, credit card and Battle.net Balance transactions.
The in-game cash auction house will launch with the game on May 15. The auction house for real-world money is expected to launch a week later to ensure the system is running smoothly.
Blizzard also announced that Diablo 3 players will be able to play with friends around the world with few restrictions. The global servers are divided into three groups for The Americas (which also include new Zealand, Australia and Southeast Asia), Europe (including Russia, the Middle East and the United Arab Emirates), and Asia (covering South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Makau). The players will create characters on servers in their home region, based on where they live, but they can switch to other regions before or after they log in. Action houses, however, will only be accessible on in the player's home region.
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replyJohn Keefer posted a new article, Diablo 3 auction houses, global play detailed.
Blizzard unveils details for its Diablo 3 auction houses. Yes, two types: One for in-game currency and the other for real world money.-
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Players only. I'm rolling on a RMT server for sure.
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Curious, isn't it, how they design a game around collecting rare items just so they can sell those rare items to make more money. One could say there's almost method in the madness.
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Technically, they're not selling them. A player is selling them, and they're taking a cut!
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I'm sure this has been their nefarious plan all along since the first Diablo with exactly the same game mechanic came out in the mid 90s! It's taken nearly 20 years but world domination is finally within their clutches!
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I'm glad the hardcore-mode master race doesn't have to deal with this idiotic RMT business.
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Yet...
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I don't think they will ever let hardcore get in on rmt, well I hope not
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They were opposed to it but in a recent blue post they said if there is enough interest they may consider it.
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The same level of items would be much more expensive. Presumably, Chinese farmers would be basically locked out by the difficulty, but who knows, where there's a will there's a way.
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How do they limit that? Can hardcore only play with hardcore?
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Man I never realized this. I always assumed they could play with regular players. Obviously I didn't play a lot of D2 onliner
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That would be entirely too hardcore.
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I do not see the problem with this. They just cut out Ebay. If I get tired of the game I might be able to cash and make some money, too.
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Play a game in another region with an alt and drop the item? Sounds fairly easy to me.
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Blizzard also announced that Diablo 3 players will be able to play with friends around the world with few restrictions.
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Can I play my hero in another region?
Heroes are available to play only in the game region in which they were created, and you are not able to move a hero from one game region to another. Each game region has its own independent hero list, and you can have up to a total of 10 heroes per region (counting both normal and Hardcore characters) at a time. You will be presented with a region-specific hero list whenever you change game regions.
http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-global-play-faq
Being informed is not a bad thing.
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and The players will create characters on servers in their home region, based on where they live, but they can switch to other regions before or after they log in. Action houses, however, will only be accessible on in the player's home region.
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It was supposed to be part of the first post. No "digging" involved. And all of it was fromt the shack article, so not much "digging" was involved. If I'd read beyond the shack aricle, which didn't go into much detail, I would have seen it. But if you really want to continue to act like an ass, you can keep replying if you want.
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No. I posted both replies before you replied. And your still an ass.
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I don't see how this can do anything, but INCREASE the number of third-world sweat shops farming gear to sell. Now it's official and legal, then we'll have 1,000's of people hired at minimum wages running loot areas, draining all the drops, and selling them at high prices.
It happens in every MMO (yes, Diablo 3 is too), and it will make the idea of buying and selling stuff for the fanboys who think dropping $200 -$500 on an in-game item is OK.
The rest of us will have to make do with our own drops, like always, and only ever dream of completing a set of high-level equipment.-
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I think there may be "unique" items.
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Are Unique items one-offs? Figured they were just extremely rare.
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There is no truly unique items. Which is why they are called Legendary items now.
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more chinese farms = more items = lower prices. hooray!
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If you're playing on the Chinese servers, yeah.
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Except...
You will only be able to bid on items in the auction houses you have access to as described above, and items cannot be transferred or posted across game regions.
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It's actually a pretty reasonable setup. If you just wanted to buy stuff on RMAH you can by first selling something, thereby earning "Blizzard Bucks" and using that $ to buy something you really want. You only have to pay the additional 15% if you want to cash out (via Paypal). Plus, an extremely rare item could theoretically go for a lot of "Bliz Bucks" and you only have to pay a $1 fee for it when and IF it sells. If the items does not sell there is no fee.
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Why would a player use the "real" auction house when 3rd parties can undercut these fees significantly?
I thought the original concept was to eliminate 3rd party transactions, security and credit risks?
The auction house was supposed to create this one shop stop secure environment all it has done is create an opportunity for 3rd party merchants.-
You can believe the original concept was to eliminate 3rd party transactions, if you'd like. IMO the original concept was always to make as much profit as possible.
But I really don't care if people buy from the RMAH, 3rd parties, whatever...
Just so long as *most* of the best items are available on the gold auction house, where I'll be working my mojo. -
Some people who never would use or even know about the 3rd party sites might use the RMAH because it exists. Some people who used or thought about using the 3rd party sites might use the RMAH because it is official and probably safer. Some people will continue using 3rd party sites because they are probably cheaper.
I mean, in EVE you can buy timecards and sell them in-game for isk but some people still buy isk via 3rd parties because it's cheaper.
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I'm massively sad there will be no Australian servers.. It just seems absurd that for the price of running 1 server, even if it might only hold 1000 players, they would rather the thousand players have a bad experience playing with 250-400ms pings in what is obviously a quick-reaction style game.
Instead they place us on a US server, where it's a 30000km round trip at best. It's even going to negatively impact the US players to some degree.
This from a company like Blizzard, who must clearly have the cash deposit to run that server.
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I do see this comment now in the FAQ:
"If I live in Australia/New Zealand/Southeast Asia, what server will I play Diablo III on?
Diablo III players in Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia will, by default, connect to the Americas region. By connecting to this region, players will have a wider pool of people to play with and access to a more vibrant and active auction house marketplace."
I guess it doesn't technically say, but I agree that if that means everyone in AU, NZ, and SE Asia will physically be connecting to servers located on some North or South American continent that is pretty lame.-
It'll probably tend to group players based on locality anyway, if you're just looking for random games. We'll see.
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The ultimate irony, indeed.
We already have a LAN planned for Diablo 3 soon after release.. It will be at one persons house, I will be able to look over and see them (more importantly throw things at them), but them little tcp packets - ooohh nope, you are going to travel from my pc, through my mates router, via singapore, 15000km to san francisco, to wherever the server is, then all the way back to my mates router, just to tell them what I did 8-(
I'm not bothered about the LAN aspect or no direct IP comms, but using an internet server across the world for a low latency game seems ridiculous.
Server population really is not a response from Blizzard. This isn't an MMO - if you've got 1000 players in Australia alone (and I'd expect closer to 30,000) then you've got vastly more than you will see in game!
So still, sad face 8-(
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Have you played it yet though? It may not be as much of an issue as it has been in Diablo 2 and WoW. It seems like they're doing a fuckton of stuff client side and there's almost no appreciable lag.
I heard this before I played it, and I was honestly pretty skeptical, but I played god knows how many hours of it during the open beta weekend and didn't see any noticeable artefacts of latency, except for 2 or 3 occasions where my character snapped back somewhere or something else funky happened. (Presumably the server has authority and has to correct the client in the case of prediction errors or lag spikes).
So in my experience, that's almost zero issues despite having 200+ ping and the servers getting hammered during the open beta. The game was very smooth and responsive and I didn't feel like I was waiting for commands to execute during combat. I'm relieved because the lag was my biggest concern too (I did play a lot of D2 on bnet despite the lag, but it was always an inferior experience over playing locally in terms of responsiveness).-
Yep, and this was my first post on it: http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=28054657
Less subtlethat post, and I still can't see why Blizzard with their billions of dollars can't afford a single fucking server, regardless of how the game might still run with lag.
As in my old post, 99% of the time it's fine but that one moment when you run from a boss, then because of the lag is snaps you back and are considered "instantly dead" you will want to throw your monitor through the nearest fucking blizzard employee for not giving us a local server.
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Oh yeah, I agree with you in principle for sure - it's so aggravating that something which could be done so cheaply (and would have a massive benefit to a chunk of their user base) isn't deemed worth the effort. Yes, I know we're a small slice of the market, but surely the whole 'oceanic' user base in total is fairly large.
I get that the costs might be higher here and they'd prefer their main techs have physical access to the servers, but it's not like these are insurmountable obstacles for the megabucks megacorporations.
After playing it though, I'm kind of relieved that the latency wasn't a major issue. I'm sorry to hear that you had a worse experience with it - mind you that kind of incident wouldn't bother me at all if it was that infrequent - except in hardcore of course, it's gonna suck to die to a lag spike!
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Australian gamers are a fun bunch to get on voice com with.
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Heh, so you think one server can hold 1000 players in a game like this? The numbers might be close to that, but anway - what do you think happens when they hit the cap? Server queue?
People would be so pissed at that. The casuals rather play at 300 ping, and you know it too. Aaaand, the casuals are their primary market.
And no, it won't impact the US players to any degree. You got no clue.
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I can't wait to see the day where someone buys the whole auction house and raises the cap using real money.
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