What Exactly Killed Diablo 3's Economy (and Implications on PoE)

Great bullet points here for the side effects of the auction house. I never really thought about how destructive the ah was beyond the obvious circumvention of loot finding.

However, like the guy above me said, my first thoughts when finding a unique in my first arpg (single player Diablo 1) were never "how much is this worth". I was just happy to find a unique that was typically overpowered at the level I found it. But I can recognize that this magic is gone forever, and I lament it.

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JahIthBer89 wrote:

Great bullet points here for the side effects of the auction house. I never really thought about how destructive the ah was beyond the obvious circumvention of loot finding.

However, like the guy above me said, my first thoughts when finding a unique in my first arpg (single player Diablo 1) were never "how much is this worth". I was just happy to find a unique that was typically overpowered at the level I found it. But I can recognize that this magic is gone forever, and I lament it.

The AH isn't destructive, its just a trading tool. The problems run far deeper than the AH, and the AH simply emphasizes them, or magnifies them, and it doesnt help they completely botched it anyways.

There is literally no reason why an AH should be an entire continent of players. What do you think is going to happen? Tons of items constantly spammed from all over NA. It should have been divided into smaller servers, like East coast, West coast, etc. and then less top items would be flooding the market all the time. Maybe even make them BoA after purchase. That way, it stops AH bots and flippers. But thats just the AH problems.

Blizzard tuning their game's drops around the AH because it was so freaking big and items were too easy to find didnt help. I remember at the beginning, for a minute there you could actually find good drops if you were capable of farming act 3 inferno, which only DH and Sorcs could do at the time. They nerfed the item drops pretty significantly early on.

Also, the fact the game is basically an action game with a paper doll addition. Its like you are playing Dynasty Heroes, or God of War, or any action game where you pick stuff up that makes your guy better as you go along. There was no RPG to that game. Couple that with zero customization, no skill trees, level cap, no pvp, nothing, and all you had was items to get. Nothing else.

Then, the items were basically as boring and bland as they could be. They are just stat-sticks; there is nothing fun about them but a couple more points; no elemental status effects, no weird builds to try, no real unique items with unique properties like Frostburns, or something. They were just more powerful rares. So not only is the game just a boring hack and slash action game, with no RPG elements whatsoever, it had some of the most boring itemization you could even have, and this boring itemization was magnified by the AH. You were always just looking for 2-3 more dex, or 10 more all res, or whatever it was, and no fun builds, nothing.

The core game is garbage. The AH was one of the only good things the game had. Combat, polish, AH. That was basically the only good things about the game. The core game itself is trash, and removing the AH is just a way to "hide" how bad it is since they dont actually want to fix it. I liked the AH. I hate trading. I cant stand it. I dont even trade in PoE. But, luckily PoE isnt a game where you find stat sticks all the time, and you can do fun builds, weird builds, customize, etc and generally not have to worry about JUST improving your stat-stick by 3 points.

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tikitaki wrote:

you're overthinking it.

what killed the d3 economy was best-in-slot unique pieces.

Nope; the boredom was starting to set in for me far before the 1.04 patch.

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pneuma wrote:

Improving 4.2 (silent auctions) and 4.3 (no instant trading) only benefits people who trade.

Close, not quite. Not just those who trade, but also those who appraise; which generally indicates a desire to trade, but does not require the act itself. I am sure a lot of Diablo 3 players were frustrated more by the times they determined they couldn't use the auction houses than they times which they actually did.

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Charan wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Go back to the first time you ever found a unique item in an ARPG. Presumably, you didn't have a lot of market experience yet, as you were kind of learning the ropes, and all of a sudden you see those orange-brown letters. You get excited. Have you won the lottery, and are about to either trade this away, or wear ubergear for a few levels? You don't know, but the anticipation is awesome.

Then you identify it. It has this mod and this mod. How much is it worth? You still don't know, but you're a little closer to solving the puzzle. You are still hopeful, but depending on what you saw a little bit more realistically so... either your hopes were confirmed or slightly minimalized.

Actually you've got this entirely wrong for Diablo 1 veterans, given that many of us played single player/offline first -- the shareware demo had a few low level uniques in it and naturally you didn't wonder 'how much is it worth?', at least not in player-trade value.

I'll admit readily that my first serious ARPG experience was Diablo 2, which I played thoroughly as a PvE summon necromancer (and even dabbled a little in PvP).

I did play Diablo 1, and even beat it once as a Warrior... but I had zero desire to reroll, and if Nightmare difficulty existed I certainly never stuck around long enough to find out.

It's true that I maybe assumed trading a little too hard in Section 1. However, it's still true that, as self-found, it's difficult to know exactly how useful various items will be to you, providing the item system is diverse as described. Simply put, self-found is more resistant to that problem scenario of looking at a ring and immediately converting it into currency; self-found only converts to currency through the vendor. That doesn't make it totally immune; a simplistic itemization scheme is much less likely to reward situational gear swaps, and thus you'd be vendoring more and keeping less in Diablo 3 even if you didn't use the Auction House one bit. When even self-found loses that magic, you know something has gone terribly wrong.

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pneuma wrote:

Improving 4.1 (itemization) benefits everyone.

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Ataka wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

1. Simplistic itemization.

I am surprised this isn't the key factor in your analysis. Lack of variety in items and builds kills the appeal of any game rather quickly.

I made it point #1 for a reason. I could probably write another entire OP, equally as long as this one, on the subject of good itemization itself. I didn't, because it's beyond the scope of the piece. However, just to clarify: yes, this is by far the most important thing to consider here, and if the itemization is shit, it probably doesn't matter what else you do right, loot-finding, and thus the entire game, is going to go to shit.

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Ataka wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

2. Searchable pricing.

I have to disagree with you here. Any game with an economy ends up having a community generated price guide where you can instantly look up the value of any static item (items with random stats similar to rare items are a little trickier to price in any situation and from past experience this is true in AH's as well). Using your own example, D2 had/has numerous price guides yet the game is still fun for lots of people and was fun for lots of people for years despite being able to price almost any item you found.

D2 price guides were by and large the work of one individual person (much like my OP is my ideas), and not necessarily a community consensus. Searchable pricing, on the other hand, taps into the cloud; it creates a true community-wide attempt at price determination. It's like a fight between (in the blue corner) a thread with a bunch of helpful links to guides, and (in the red corner) Google. You say they're the same thing, but they're most definitely not.

I want to clarify that the ARPG developer should understand that players will try to cooperate with each other to determine pricing. It's just natural, they're trying to beat the item valuation game, and strategizing appropriately. However, it is on the developer to make this game difficult to beat, not just against a single player, but against a mass of players working together. You need "raid level" difficulty in item valuation, something far beyond the scope of one person acting alone.

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Ataka wrote:

PoE has poe.xyz and I don't think having that ability to price items based on b/o has ruined the game in any way, has it?

It has started to ruin the game and the effect will become stronger as more players become wise to the tag.

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BINARYGOD wrote:

Weird, I thought what killed the desire to farm was that the drop rate was adjusted due the AH, and so you kept pulling the arm of that slot machine and NEVER winning. Which is odd, because ARPG's are just a long series of fun slot machines where you always have a chance to finding something cool.

Blizzard did not adjust drop rates due to the AH. In fact, their initial projection was that 10% or less of the playerbase would use the AHs on any regular basis; their naivete was incredible. Believe it or not, those drop rates were those they intended assuming barely any auction house at all. (However, the decision to have a permanent, never-wipe economy may have factored into their droprate calibrations.)

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Charan wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Go back to the first time you ever found a unique item in an ARPG. Presumably, you didn't have a lot of market experience yet, as you were kind of learning the ropes, and all of a sudden you see those orange-brown letters. You get excited. Have you won the lottery, and are about to either trade this away, or wear ubergear for a few levels? You don't know, but the anticipation is awesome.

Then you identify it. It has this mod and this mod. How much is it worth? You still don't know, but you're a little closer to solving the puzzle. You are still hopeful, but depending on what you saw a little bit more realistically so... either your hopes were confirmed or slightly minimalized.

Actually you've got this entirely wrong for Diablo 1 veterans, given that many of us played single player/offline first -- the shareware demo had a few low level uniques in it and naturally you didn't wonder 'how much is it worth?', at least not in player-trade value.

Hell, some people who were around for D1's launch didn't even think about player trading at first blush with Diablo 1.

Compared to the very basic blue items, uniques of D1 were pretty crazy. They could both do 'unique' things AND they broke the rule of two attributes (prefix and suffix). This is of course before 'rares', which only broke the latter rule.

Rares were the single-most direct cause for people losing appreciation for unique items.

So while what you've said may apply to many ARPG players, I feel it doesn't apply to those who were here from the so-called start, which might as well be Diablo 1 Shareware. For us, player trading is almost tacked on, some byproduct of multiplayer wherein you can share unnecessary loot with friends.

Some part of me still marvels at the concept of an ARPG economy.

So no, when a unique dropped, my first unique (Torn Flesh of Souls, of course), I didn't wonder what it was worth. I put it on and was like 'this is awesome, so much better than those rags!'

The Butchers Cleaver for the win! That insane damage, that incredibly low durability, +10 str? Damn right.

In fewer words, I agree with this.

As a player who's main source of "income" in POE is playing the market, this was a really interesting read.

im curious about how you feel about poe's itemization for rares particularly end game mirroable pieces. uniques are a sticky subject matter.

tbh, the mods in poe are not much more diverse than d3's once you break it down into dps gain vs hp or es gain.

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conall88 wrote:

convenient oversupply of items which would be god tier in any other game (which then end up on the AH) killed the D3 economy by utterly devaluing "good" items to the point where there was no sense of reward for playing the game.

+1

The simple fact is that RNG economies do not work. There is 15+ years of evidence that the only viable option is a complex crafting system.

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Nephalim wrote:

im curious about how you feel about poe's itemization for rares particularly end game mirroable pieces. uniques are a sticky subject matter.

I have a major grudge with % Spell Damage vs specific elemental damage (e.g. % Fire Damage). The general affix gives a max of 74%, the specific affix gives a max of 30%? That's bullshit! Those values should be flipped; you should get items with 70+% Fire Damage, and think of 27% Spell Damage as a pretty darn good roll. This would make it so the question is no longer "is this a good caster wand?" but instead "is this a good Fireball wand?" The second question is a much better question to be asking. (It would also make rolling attack versions of melee caster weapons much less frustrating if you're planning on elemental attacks.)

When it comes to weapons, I feel attacks tend to be a little more balanced in this regard. You've got all these elemental damages competing with physical damage, which forces you to make decisions on what to build around. The one thing that does bother me with weapons, however, is the base item types themselves. Corsair Swords, Thicket Bows, Siege Axes... attack speed is obviously king. The slower weapons need more base damage to keep people arguing about which weapon base is best.

I really like the way most shields are designed. There's variance in implicits like Spell Damage, block chance, and base defenses which make different bases better for different builds. I'd like it if the other armour pieces were more like shields, where the highest-level available wasn't necessarily the best. You see a little of this in implicits like Assassin's Garb and Occultist's Vestment, but it would be nice if this was explored more thoroughly throughout the entire progression.

On chests, I would like it if there was more competition between +% defense, +flat defense, and +Life (or +% ES, +% ES/stun, +flat ES on ES chests).

In general, I think we do need a little more affix competition than we do now, and it would probably be worth it for GGG to take some data on which affixes are least/most likely to be traded and to give out some buffs to the "bad" affixes, making it harder to settle on which three are best.

to much to read... so i will ask this, you trying to explain that you Think GGG is about to destroy their game?
You want them to add more rarity on items, or bigger gap in stats from them, either high or low stats?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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I feel the affix pools are too small and the desirable affix for some parts is almost set in stone. The only issue is the cost associated with such items. However, poe will reach a state when even those items become accessible and then we will see a great deal of homogeneity for even rares but shouldn't you have choose which mods you want and need?

The simplest example is boots:
what do you need on boots?

89 life
30 move speed
45 resist
45 resist
30 chaos or 45 resist
120 armor %

such a pair of boots would be perfect and there simply are not any other mods to compete and would essentially be a a bis unique if anyone would ever mirror such an item (no one would for many reasons).

The same can be said for most weapons and definitely so for amours.
Eternals are making these items now attainable assuming you have enough wealth where as before even 1000 exalts could not guarantee a perfect item.