Time Capsule from PoE Closed Beta -- a classic PoE vs D3 thread circa 2012

Tagek, as one of the most ardent (and generally reasonable) D3 supporters around, I'd be interested to get your take on one of the elements that seems to be missing from this discussion (admittedly I haven't read all 66pgs.), namely, the difference in mood/atmosphere of the two games.

For me, this is what killed D3 and what makes PoE so appealing. D1 was all about the dark macabre atmosphere, something that PoE lives up to quite nicely (dead babies anyone?). D3, on the other hand, seems to have washed out all of the darkness and sinister brutality. Characters seem like superheroes out to destroy equally comic-bookesque villains. The horror is gone. For me, every other element of gameplay could be amazing, but without the sinister macabre atmosphere it just isn't worth playing.

Any thoughts?

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protolight wrote:

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Tagek wrote:

For the petty profit they will make off of it it wouldn't even be worth their time to set it up if it was just for the money.

implementing RMAN for money income wasnt worth blizz time, but its worth there time to implement it for other reasons that almost wont make profit for them right?)
that sounds strange to me cus I dont think illegal market would prevent people from buying D3.

btw I like the idea with RMAH its kinda intriguing, but I dont think preventing illegal trading was main reason for it.)

I mean it wouldn't have been worth their time to set up JUST for the money.

'that sounds strange to me cus I dont think illegal market would prevent people from buying D3.'

A metric TON of people have complained that this ruined the game's economy. So it's wise of blizzard to look for a solution (whether or not you think is a good one, i don't care, I think it is.)

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Nachash wrote:

Tagek, as one of the most ardent (and generally reasonable) D3 supporters around, I'd be interested to get your take on one of the elements that seems to be missing from this discussion (admittedly I haven't read all 66pgs.), namely, the difference in mood/atmosphere of the two games.

For me, this is what killed D3 and what makes PoE so appealing. D1 was all about the dark macabre atmosphere, something that PoE lives up to quite nicely (dead babies anyone?). D3, on the other hand, seems to have washed out all of the darkness and sinister brutality. Characters seem like superheroes out to destroy equally comic-bookesque villains. The horror is gone. For me, every other element of gameplay could be amazing, but without the sinister macabre atmosphere it just isn't worth playing.

Any thoughts?

First of all thanks for the semi-compliment. ^^

Secondly, I do believe we have discussed this in the thread, but I don't blame you for not reading all 66 pages. :P

I don't feel this way. You could argue the graphics changed the atmosphere, and I definetely can see why you feel like that even if I love the current graphics.

However, the horror is definetely not gone from the game.
If you take a closer look at footage from the game there are still plenty of horror elements. I have seen people hanging from trees, people exploding and turning into zombies, and plenty of corpses lying around.
I'm sure there'll be plenty of disturbing things in the final game as well.


I also feel like the characters are actually very believable. The barbarian is a huge guy, but that's logical, he's a barbarian (and one of the strongest, at that), just like the marauder is huge.

The witchdocter looks exactly like a player version of the guys from ACT 3 in d2, which I personally love.

The character that shows the most believability for me is
the monk.
He's the exact opposite of what you would expect a male melee fighter to look like. He looks sleek and fit, but in no way bulky or extra muscular.
So yeah, I think the characters look great and very believable. (And the monsters I've seen so far looked great as well)

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Tagek wrote:

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protolight wrote:

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Tagek wrote:

For the petty profit they will make off of it it wouldn't even be worth their time to set it up if it was just for the money.

implementing RMAN for money income wasnt worth blizz time, but its worth there time to implement it for other reasons that almost wont make profit for them right?)
that sounds strange to me cus I dont think illegal market would prevent people from buying D3.

btw I like the idea with RMAH its kinda intriguing, but I dont think preventing illegal trading was main reason for it.)

I mean it wouldn't have been worth their time to set up JUST for the money.

'that sounds strange to me cus I dont think illegal market would prevent people from buying D3.'

A metric TON of people have complained that this ruined the game's economy. So it's wise of blizzard to look for a solution (whether or not you think is a good one, i don't care, I think it is.)

I don't know Tagek, my impression was the RMAH was the development team's primary means of funding maintenance and future development on D3 (beyond upfront sales that is). It seems like outcompeting 3rd party sales is a secondary, though legitimate, concern. Didn't read the ongoing debate over this so I don't know what is at stake in the argument.

Previous stuff:

For the petty profit they will make off of it it wouldn't even be worth their time to set it up if it was just for the money.[/quote]
implementing RMAN for money income wasnt worth blizz time, but its worth there time to implement it for other reasons that almost wont make profit for them right?)
that sounds strange to me cus I dont think illegal market would prevent people from buying D3.

btw I like the idea with RMAH its kinda intriguing, but I dont think preventing illegal trading was main reason for it.)

/quote

Me:

I mean it wouldn't have been worth their time to set up JUST for the money.

'that sounds strange to me cus I dont think illegal market would prevent people from buying D3.'

A metric TON of people have complained that this ruined the game's economy. So it's wise of blizzard to look for a solution (whether or not you think is a good one, i don't care, I think it is.)
[/quote]

Nachash:

'I don't know Tagek, my impression was the RMAH was the development team's primary means of funding maintenance and future development on D3 (beyond upfront sales that is). It seems like outcompeting 3rd party sales is a secondary, though legitimate, concern. Didn't read the ongoing debate over this so I don't know what is at stake in the argument.'

/Quote





ACTUAL POST:

Well Imo the amount of money they can make from it is just really small. Pretty much all the items that will be sold on there are high-end items that will go for a large amount of money. This also means they won't be bought by the majority of people (I'm talking 15$ prices etc).
If you take a 1.25 dollar posting fee (I'm not sure what the exact price will be), let's there's a million transactions made on the RMAH in 1 month (which, given it's most likely high prices, is a pretty damn high amount of sales I'd say) that means you would have :

1.25 x 1 million = 1.25 million dollars in 1 month.

And so 1.25 x 12 = 15 million dollars a year.

Now, to put this into perspective, I read that activison (blizzard)'s CEO makes roughly 15 million dollars a year.
So if you'd compare this amount of money to the total income of even just the blizzard branch of activision, it's just peanuts. About them funding D3's development costs and everything else with it, that could be true, but why would you blame them for funding their costs.
(Not to mension that posting fees are needed to avoid the needless spamming of useless items on the AH)

PS: DAMN YOU QUOTING SYSTEM! Y U NO LET ME QUOTE MORE THAN 3 QUOTES!!!! /rage.



EDIT: Posting fee = Transaction fee, there is currently no posting fee. (Cba to change it in the text, just keep this in mind.)

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Tagek wrote:

I mean it wouldn't have been worth their time to set up JUST for the money.

Agreed. Most features are not in for a single reason. But on the other hand, that suggests that they DO try to get something out of it, too.

As far as I am aware (feel free to correct me on that, I'm not in the D3 beta), "Real Money" auctions read like this:

They are not really "real money" auctions. They are "Blizzard Points" auctions:
Blizzard Points (as I call them) is a meta currency. It's practically coin you can use to buy services from a certain publisher -Blizzard-, but ONLY there.
For example:
For $15 you can get 100 Blizzard Points (BP). You now have the option of subscribing for a month for WoW (100 BP) or spend it on the RMAH. Or you can get one or two WoW pets (50 BP each).

The point is: Everyone pours real money into Blizzard's battle.net and uses this meta currency in the so-called RMAH to purchase items there (or anything else Blizzard offers). But if you use the RMAH to sell items, you are paid by BP as well, meaning that the "real money" that someone spent to purchase your [Axe of Ogre Decapitation +3] and that you earned... you can only spend on Blizzard products. You can't get a bagel for it.

However you turn it: Blizzard is making all the money in these scenarios. The difference for the individual player is that they might save $15 because someone else already paid Blizzard that money.

^

You can retrieve your earned money through paypal (or whatever other pay-out services), so it's not a money only goes in kind of system.

That's why it's also kind of cool (imo), if you find a really awesome item you can choose to trade it for gold to get great in-game items (or trade it directly), or maybe you want to sell it and make yourself 15 real dollars.

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Tagek wrote:

Ofcourse, they implement it to make a profit. I'm not denying that. I'm just saying there are other motives besides making a profit for them to implement this system. And really, if you'd think about it for a while longer then you'd see it really won't bring them any amount of money that even begins to compare to game sales or wow profits. But enough of this.

The thing is, that they saw that people are selling on other sites, so they wanted a part of the cake. That's the reason for implementing RMHA, it's not to stop gold famers per se, but to get income from it.

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Tagek wrote:

You really don't understand how item selling works.

A goldfarm is a company, generally driven by a couple of people. I'd say if you assume 50 employees per company that's a very high end assumption, but I'll assume it right now anyway. So 1 company that has it's own prices, has 50 employees farming for them. The more items a company has available, the lower the prices.
Since the company only has 50 people working for them, they can only bring in a limited amount of items in a certain amount of time. For example: In diablo 2 you often saw that item farming websites never really had more than 5 pieces of a particular item at the same time.
The RMAH, however, Is basically a company too.
Except this company is driven not by 50 employees, but by several million employees. The employees in this case being the players who play the game and sell and buy items from the auction house.
When the RMAH has that much more employees than another company, it will have many more items available than the illegal websites. This results in it having a lower price (again, following basic economics, more goods = lower price) and thus the RMAH will always have lower prices than Illegal websites.

So yes, illegal websites can still try to sell items, but you'd have to be one hell of an idiot to buy something illegally and for double the money when it's available legally for a normal price.

I was not thinking on sites, so sorry I misread it.
Your logic would be good, if there was only 1 site that sells items, so they can keep the prices up, but that was not the case.
Also the RMHA employers how you call them, don't sell items only, they also buy items. Where illegal sites only sell items. There will be no lower prices, if there is high demand for items, because they don't only sell items, but also buy them.
And the last thing, I don't know why you think that illegal sites would sell more expensive items than on RMHA. They will sell items depending from diamond, but because of RMHA limitation it will be much more cheaper to sell it on sites.

I wasn't a really big fan of the WoW look either, but it's not as bad as people say about it...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0a7Ee7ukOo

But I think they did this to avoid the gears of war effect, where everything looks bland and repetitive. I guess each area will look unique.

I'm also not a big fan of the power rangers armors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i3gAg7vP7o


But what I do like is the gameplay, but no one seems to acknowledge this here. It's cool to have a good looking game, but it's even better when it has a solid gameplay.


edit: so... people here don't like RMHA because Blizzard will make money of it, and ackowledge it's not because it doesn't prevent gold farmer?
lol :)

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Tagek wrote:

If you take a 1.25 dollar posting fee

but there also will be additional fixed fee if the item is sold.