Diablo 3 Auction House *Required* For Success?
Posted 28 May 2012 by FluxBashiok replied to a couple of more questions in the thread we newsed up yesterday, about the big State of the Game article coming from Blizzard on Monday.
As many people have noticed in the game, and debated in the forums, and talked about on the podcast I recorded about an hour ago, there are several spots in Diablo III when the difficulty seems to take a big jump. At those times players are finding it very hard to advance, especially players who are playing solo and farming/crafting their own gear.
In those cases, such as the big jump up to 
Inferno, and especially to Act 2 Inferno, it’s now much easier to hit up the GAH and spend some gold on an item than it is to find/craft that item yourself. Especially since you really need to be in about Act 3 of Inferno to find the quality of gear you need to survive in Act 2 of Inferno. It’s like that old joke that you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience.
Have a good weekend!
This is a bit frustrating as answers go. So, is it your intent that people gear through Auction House? It seems you’re saying “yes” but it isn’t clear.
I’ve been farming Inferno Act I quite a bit, rolling 5 Valor stacks at various times, and I have to play for a very long time to see anything that passes as an upgrade. In fact, I think almost every piece I am using is from AH, and I run with people that share all of our drops. It doesn’t feel like AH is part of gearing, it feels like it is the only source of gear. I’m sure it is possible to gear without it, but I can’t imagine the time investment required to do so.
This isn’t a new concept. In Diablo II gear was randomized and so absolutely ridiculously rare that you could almost be guaranteed to never find the exact item you were looking for just by farming for it yourself. To be the best you had to trade items with others, as you might find an extremely rare item, they may be willing to trade for yours. If you wanted to get ahead within any reasonable amount of time you had to trade. Now, Diablo II had one thing going for it which was the mass proliferation of dupes for the rarest items, which completely tanked its economy and quickly allowed anyone to gear themselves in the best possible items for nearly nothing. In Diablo III you don’t have that luxury, you need to actually find the rare items, or trade for them.
Now, you have a couple options, you can jump into our Trading Forum, post up your item/s and then meet someone in-game and barter a trade. You can also use the in-game Trade channel, and again barter trades. Or you can use the auction house system. How you trade items is up to you, bartering out of game, bartering in-game, the AH for gold, or real money once it launches. We’re not forcing anyone to do anything, and if you don’t ever want to trade with other players that’s your choice as well, but due to the nature of drops in Diablo games, if you want to be the best you need to trade.
The difference in Diablo 2 was that you could solo act 4 and 5 with gear you farmed yourself.
In Diablo 3 you have no chance in act 2 and onward unless you buy gear from the auction house. The best gear drops in the later acts (Jay said there was one tier of drops in each Act), so there will be a looooong while until I even have a chance at starting farming the best gear.
Basically I have to gear up so I have a chance at gearing up so I have a chance at getting the good loot.
In D2, I could start farming the best loot the game had to offer by myself.
Good point! Yes, Diablo III has an additional difficulty level, Inferno, with a very steep difficulty curve. One bit of misinformation is that loot is static in where it drops, but in fact the loot table bands are quite large. For example the “Inferno Act I loot” has a chance to drop in Hell Act IV as much as it does Inferno Act II. You will need to farm Inferno Act I to get a shot at those higher level items to drop so you can continue progressing.
I think Inferno and maybe the item economy need some fine-tuning yet, but players seem to have unrealistic expectations. If you could easily or reliably find or craft the top quality gear you needed for Inferno, wouldn’t that be too easy? What’s the point in having difficult content if you can pass it with easily-found gear? You can’t demand that Inferno be super challenging and then complain that you can’t find the gear to power through it less than 2 weeks after the game launches. What, is the game to know that you’re the one special person who deserves the super great item drops, and it’s just all those other people who the “rare items are rare” rules apply to?
Also, if those items were readily-available they’d clogging up the GAH, which would only exacerbate the problem. Then you’d be able to find the best items easily, and buy the best items very, very easily. That’s not progress.
Finally, we’re getting a lot of those infamous rose-tinted glasses about D2 again, with these demands for instant gratification. Yes, you could find the top end game gear in D2… but not 12 days after release. You can find it in D3 also; after all, it’s other players who are selling that stuff in the GAH now. But it takes time, or luck, or both. It did in D2 also.
In D2C it was really hard to find top quality items. It got easier in D2X, especially once there were runewords and so many elite Uniques, but even then, many people played D2X for YEARS without finding a rune higher than about Vex, or many/any of the Treasure Class 90 uniques, etc. Eventually those things became more common, cube recipes were added to allow rune upgrades all the way to Zod, duped runes devalued the economy, etc. But finding any of that stuff yourself took months of play with very good MF chars, and no one has invested anything like that sort of effort into D3. Yet.
Diablo III’s economy and game difficulty will look VERY different in July or August than they look now. What do you bet that the people now arguing that they can’t find the top .0001% of gear will be the same people complaining that Inferno’s gotten too easy and that top gear is too available, three months from now?
100% agree with Bashiok and Flux on this.
I go back to D1, as I’m more familiar with it (and had more fun with it than D2). How long did it take you to find an Obs/Zod? What about a perfect one? What about an Awesome Full Plate of the Stars? If you had these items (legitimately), did you find them or trade them from someone known-legit?
In D1, you ended up running Lazarus games for ages trying to find this gear. You’d play a month’s worth of hell/hell games to go from clvl 48 to clvl 49.
I think these people have just lost perspective, and probably also D3′s fast and furious gameplay that doesn’t take a lot of skill to beat Nightmare has further engendered a feeling of “I should be able to finish this difficulty off with 3 or 4 days of sustained effort” that just isn’t justified from the core mechanics that have always been present in the Diablo series, but was simply obscured through hacks and cheats.
Or may what people really what is hacks and cheats, and now they’re complaining that they don’t have them?
The only thing I’m afraid of is that they can add tons of Legendarys later on with patches and all but whats gonna differentiate all the 1H legendarys from each other if they all have the same chance of rolling the same stats…
Other than that I mostly agree with Bashiok and Flux
I think you’re missing the point. They’re saying that we could find gear to get through Hell in earlier acts of the game. Diablo 3 isn’t like that. Diablo 3 takes a more WoW approach that you find the gear for the next act in the previous act, and sometimes not even then.
If I wanted to go through Hell in D2, I could find gear in NM that would easily let me get through a lot of Hell. There’s nothing like that in D3. I understand the argument that the game hasn’t been out long enough, but we can look on the website and see that legendary items aren’t going to be strong enough, even if they’re perfectly rolled.
I guess it just comes down to D3 feeling more like WoW instead of D2. That’s a personal opinion, and I am REALLY hoping that Blizzard has something up their sleeves with this report tomorrow. Admittedly, I don’t have much trust, though. I think they will come out and say basically what Flux said. They will say the game is fine and we just need to play it more. I get that, but as I said, playing the game will not fix the terrible itemization.
I disagree. You’ll find sufficient gear in Normal to take on NM (at least up to Act 2), and similar find sufficient gear in NM to take on Hell.
The only question is how long it’ll take to find said gear. It *is* findable, but it might take you 100 hours of runs to get it. Perhaps it only took 20 hours in D2, but that isn’t your argument, your argument is that you can’t find it fullstop.
What you say is true, but the main difference with D2, (or alot of other ARPGs), is that the drop rates for this farmable gear are quite low. I believe that this is mainly due to the AH implementation and therefore puts players who would prefer not to use the AH at a disadvantage, not saying that it’s bad but I’m not a fan of the AH, it makes me feel the same way when I joined a trade game only to have a high lvl guy drop a bunch of great free loot, I got a reward that I don’t think I deserve.
Yeah, I can definitely see the angle in that.
In D2, the best unique items and runes were really rare. But getting a perfect or very good small charm wasn’t too low of a drop. Once you got a few of them, you could combine them together and hopefully trade for a nice unique item, to the right person.
But in D3, all it takes to buy a nice unique item off the AH is gold. Which you can find in Act 1 Road to Tristram if you want. Every blue item you find is generally worth at least 50 gold as well and for the later acts 100-200. Mathematically it’s only a matter of time until you find enough gold to be able to buy that nice unique item, without having any individual moment of “woohoo I finally found a good charm I can trade!” and the excitement that comes with it. Similarly the GAH also makes trading up very easy: you can simply sit, refreshing the search results and buy up an under-priced item you see and flip it for more. Do that enough times and then you get the gold to buy the nice item. That wasn’t really possible, or took a lot more effort in D2, as you had to find someone willing to trade what you had for what you wanted which wasn’t always possible.
You do realize that the cow king’s return and invite to whimsyshire was the only truly creative piece of writing in the game, right?
They’re making fun of endgame players for being cattle.
Enjoy your Ebayblo, brave grinders! And don’t forget your runed plastic card of +25 balance transfers.
Moo.
Sorry but argument about game beeing 2weeks old is just pathetic. So far i havent seen any single rare ring from ACT I for ACT II i need gear with at least 60 rezist all on each piece and such gear just doesnt exist in ACT I. We (melee) just need gear from ACT III/IV to survive in ACT II. I really dont mind farming it for next months but i would like use for it ALL game content – not beeing closed in ACT I – i’m already sick of it.
Blizzard is so right on this. Good gear should be rare, almost next to 0.1% chance of finding some. I was happy on finding a plate armor in D1 after those rags. When people did a legit enigma in D2 it was something. people lost track of value over time with what real Diablo is concerning gear, loot, drops.
We are going back to what it is supposed to be and I am happy with it.
And crafting is a preety big part of the game now…which i see almost everyone just ignores. Not every good item drops, you need to work more if you want good gear. Otherwise this one is the wrong game for you.
Crafting ? – crafting in this game is pointless – cost are just too high – to craft 1 item you need around 200k (combined crafting cost and mats) and becouse all stats are random it will take lot of try before you get your desire or close to it item.
Crafting in current form can be removed from game it’s just pointless. (thats why mats are so cheap).
I can’t speak for end game, but crafting is not pointless for low lvl chars. I upgraded my dps from 50 to 100 yesterday with some well crafted gear.
We are hearing complaints from people who just don’t have patience. They expect to be able to beat the game as quickly as possible. They expect to be spoon fed and have everything gift wrapped for them. God forbid they actually have to play a game.
I think to some extent the problem is exacerbated by a lack of feedback in the game. It’s hard to tell yourself “All I have to do is keep at it and I’ll find upgrades that’ll get me to the next act” when the whole time farming you find that 95% of the items have level requirements appropriate for a character 3 acts prior to your farming zone.
Nothing about the loot says “You can actually upgrade every piece of your equipment here if you keep trying” so players want to push to later content expecting much better gear more often than the perceived lottery win that they are relying on in their current location (or even thinking as though that there are no upgrades to be found in their location at all which is a common belief regarding act 1 inferno).
To some extent this may simply be a lack of experience due to the limited of time the game has been out. Perhaps in time it will become common knowledge that an item at level X can have stats that vary between Y-Z such that it will be obvious where to farm and what to expect from it. Right now that isn’t really clear because the loot distribution is ridiculously random in terms of the level requirements you’ll find and the shear stat range appearing on them (level 30 items with 170 int while some 50 rares have scarcely 30 at times).
I still feel that the AH plays too great of a role in progress. The probability of finding a cool upgrade is vastly dwarfed by the relative cost of items on the AH that are upgrades at level. A short play session can net you 30,000 gold which can buy a half dozen pieces that are upgrades to gear that you found, upgrades that’ll not be surpassed by dropped loot for another few acts. It feels like a very cheap victory to buy loot compared to finding it. It wouldn’t be so bad if progression wasn’t so heavily gear dependent. Upgrades are almost a requirement just moving from act to act which makes it all the more important to find good loot often which sadly doesn’t happen and turns many to the AH.
I don’t really see this as any different from D2 though, if any thing it isn’t as bad. In D2 (and D1) you could very easily find Caps, Skull Caps and Rags off Act 4/Hell bosses. It seems in D3 that there does exist a filter that prevents the very lowest base items from dropping in higher difficulty areas.
I agree. The point (at least from my perspective) in D2 was to ‘grind and find’…Just farming gold so that you can run to the AH and cop that ‘rare’ item is pointless. I’ve posted a theory that mirrors this topic. IMO it seems as if your forced to run to the AH to make any sensible progress towards leveling to Inferno. Not having runestones to assist you (which made farming for the socketable item -ie.~3 Socket Bow) a major part of the ‘grind and find’ experience. I’m sensing from other posters, and the “distorted” or “ridiculously” low drop rates for rare items is forcing the D3 community to go to the RMAH/AH to get to the endgame. I think Bliz designed it that way so that they could profit from everyones insatiable desire to have the “Best Gear” for the endgame.
I find it kinda funny how Flux’s articles on the economy are way better Azure’s.
Just sayin…
Really? Have you heard the two of them in a pod cast? Flux sounds like a rambling kid next to that guy.
<3 Azure
Let’s hope you never learn the amount of editing I do on most of the podcasts to remove extraneous stuff and misstatements from them.
Go poke Azzure about writing more articles. He keeps IMing me about all these great fortunes he’s making in D3 and how he’s found super quality items, etc. And I’m like, “I look forward to reading your article about the current high end economy.” And he nods and says that would be cool and goes off and spends 4 more hours scalping low and selling high in the AH.
That came out wrong man. No offense. I just meant to say that Azure seems less of a fanboy
Don’t take it the wrong way dude.
PS : <3 Flux in a non *** heterosexual way…unless you are ***…then there is nothing wrong with that either. <3 all around
****ing whiners. First they want **** that is too hard to beat. Then the bitch that its too hard and they can’t get items needed to progress WITHOUT farming for ages.
FFS when are these people are just going to stfu and play the game.
PS: Got my frist legendary item last night. Dropped from a corpse in Normal ACT II sewers. A quiver..demon seeker something cant remember and too bored to look it up.
Unfortunately i was playing a wizard
I disagree. That’s probably how the game should be, but I think that was – and possibly is – what I don’t like about Diablo series. I’ve always fancied bow-wielding characters. What kept me playing D2 was the inclination to get Windforce. THE bow of D2 (not really, because you could do builds that would benefit from stats other than those present on the Windforce). And the whole point was to find it myself. On one hand, online stuff was possibly duped. Even if legit, then you needed really good stuff to trade which was as difficult to get. Either way, buying the item was a different experience than finding it myself (\my own true, legit Winforce…\). I didn’t really dig the online games because I never played with a group of friends. And if you play with random people, nobody will want to share the drops. Even though this bow was really one of my goals, I think in the end it was out of reach in offline solo which I really preferred. In expansion we got runewords. The lowest runes dropped quite often and you could always cube them. Again, this required lots of playing, but at least some pretty nice runewords were in your reach. Then you could build your own farming sorc… If you put a content into a game, the players will want the best of it. I always wanted to do solo Baal in Hell with WF. Unfortunatelly for me, this wasn’t really doable without trading. I think I’ll have the same sentiments towards D3. But I think this could possibly be different in D3. You could make the drop chances high enough so that you could farm your dream item in 100 hours of play (really, 5h/week for 5 months with full-time job and a family…). Then another 20 or so months for other parts of your gear. To keep the AH from saturating, you would make the perfect rolls of items really, really, REALLY hard to get – as a result you could solo high difficulty levels with decent roll, but perfect rolls give you an edge in PvP.
My experiences in D2 mirror yours. I think its lost on the developers at Bliz that people want to play D2/D3 as offline solo players. If you have a job/family, where do you find the time to spend farming for items with ridiculously low drop rates? A game that could be played in months, turns into a game that needs YEARS. I too, was wary of going into Battle.net to acquire items as the risks seemed more then the reward. My highest success story in off-line D2 was a lvl 87 MF Barb (495% MF w/ follower gear) and I found everything for the Immortal King except for the Ancient Armor Immortal Kings SoulCage. Accomplishing THAT took close to 2 years! After he perished (saddest day of my life) i started again and concentrated on the Runeword gear and that shortened my game by about a year. The ‘grind and find’ was the ENTIRE point of my experience.
Now however, it seems all I need to do is grind gold, run to the AH and cop the gear that I can afford. IMO that is not very rewarding, and truthfully, it diminishes the characters who choose to grind their gear.. as well as when you encounter those players on Battle.net your left with the lingering question: Did they actually play through to acquire their gear the ‘old-fashioned way’, or did they cop-out and just buy it?
It seems to me that quickly leveling to 60 and then going to the AH offers little to competitive gameplay; and cheapens the experince.