Jay Wilson Interview @ MCV Pacific
Posted 10 May 2012 by FluxAnother Jay Wilson interview from his Australasian press tour earlier this month is available from MCV Pacific. They presented 
and , with about five questions in each. Nothing real ground breaking, but Jay was in an expensive mood and gave some nice replies.
Here’s a quote from part two, with an extended analogy explaining why they structured the Auction House / trading system as they did in Diablo III. As usual, thanks to fmulder for the tip.
The decision really came from looking at Diablo 2 and what players did there and what players want to do.
I think one of the things we try really hard to do at Blizzard is not make a lot of assumptions. We’d say: ‘Don’t go against what your players are trying to do. See if you can find a way to enable what they want.’
A great example is the quest system in WoW. In most MMOs before that, you just grinded to level up, and we didn’t think that was very fun, so we wanted people to do questing. We could’ve hardwired players into that, but instead we wanted to include it while allowing grinding, giving players appropriate rewards. It just made questing more beneficial.
What we’re really doing there is embracing what the player wants to do. We found that the player is looking for efficiency – they’re doing the most efficient thing even if it’s the least fun thing. So we just decided to make the most fun thing also the most efficient thing. And that’s making sure we’re following player instinct.
It’s the same thing with the Auction house. People want to trade. They traded in Diablo 2 (for real money) – they just did it outside of the game. And players want to buy items. I can’t tell you how many hardcore Diablo players I know who pay money for high-level items. I also have a lot of friends who went to pay real money for in-game things and got ripped off. It’s a game about trading items; it’s a game where trading is the best path to getting the best items.
But Diablo 2 didn’t facilitate trading at all, so in doing the Auction house we really want to facilitate trading, and we really wanted to embrace what players were doing, and what we knew players were going to do regardless of whether we did real money or not.
Has everyone accepted the 
Auction House now? It was very controversial when first introduced, especially for the Real Money Trading aspect of things, but I haven’t seen a lot of complaints about it lately. Some people still take umbrage at the RMT aspect, but it seems like even most fans who dislike the real money intrusion into the game have grown more accepting of it, if only because $$ will just be another type of currency required to trade.
You find a good item, you sell it for gold or $$, and then you spend that gold/money on another item. It’s not “real” money unless you deposit into the system, or withdraw via Pay Pal. So long as you leave your Bobby Bucks on your account, they might as well be another type of gold; just one you can’t actually use in the game to train Artisans.
So there are no ethical problems then… right?
There was always real money trading, so if blizz will take profits from this and it would be more civilized I can’t see anything wrong about it.
There will be more reasons for them to patch and add new content
It’s not that much of an issue for me.
The only thing I don’t like is rich/spoiled kids without skill buying high level gear and being all arrogant about it, but since D3 will require a fair amount of skill to actually progress through your levels and difficulties, I guess it won’t be game-breaking. There are hard level caps for difficulties anyway, and you can’t buy your aiming skill, mobility, or upgrade your real-life reaction time for pressing your healthpot button.
Even games with account/character-bound items are prone to unskilled people posing in high-level gear, they’ll just buy complete accounts on sites like eBay. You can’t really fight it, so RMAH is a pretty okay-ish compromise.
I won’t be using it much, maybe just sell some items to buy other items, but I will not be depositing or withdrawing.
To make this clear: if Blizzard made inferno right, gear will never trivialize the end-game. You will still need to be a skilled player. Therefore, buying gear might make the game easier, but it won’t beat the game for you.
And to avoid confusion, I agree with you!
and if Blizzard doesn’t make it right the first time. They already said that they will fix it.
Inferno is not meant to ever be trivial… even with perfect gears
I don’t care what other people do, as long as I can play the game the way I want to enjoy it without being forced to use some mechanic in order to be successful. In this case, it being the RMAH.
Sure, I might use my earned gold to buy some mats to craft a piece of gear that I found the plans for, sure. But using the RMAH is out of the question – unless there are some purely aesthetic changes that I can use to customize for example the appearance of my character. But never anything that would give me progress or make it easier.
The inclusion of the RMAH and people using it to buy gear does not ruin my personal experience of the game in any way, shape, or form. Glad it’s there, wouldn’t care if it wasn’t.
Who let an adult into our little community?! This is an outrage!
sdemon, did you read my thoughts? =)
I know that at one point we were talking to a well-known famous actor to play one of the characters and we decided not to because the number of lines was something like 25’000 and the cost per session was reasonable, but the number of sessions we needed to do was kind of outrageous.
So in order to do it, it’d have to be a Sean Bean character who can die in the first act?
Exactly. And with a role like that, can we really justify getting a well-paid famous person acting in that role?
——–
As far as I’m concerned, Sean Bean is a well-paid famous person.
That was the point. That they could only get a well paid famous person if the role were limited, and died early in the game.
I dunno I think it’s ambiguous. You’re probably right, but to me it reads “Why get a famous, well paid person….for a Sean Bean role?
Because he played Eddard Stark in Game of Thrones, who dies in the first book. That’s the point of the whole reference, I believe.
Spoilers!
Yeah I know I read ‘em up to the latest one, which I haven’t bothered with yet. He also kicked the bucket in LotR pretty early iirc. I’m probably not explaining myself properly. If we take “A Sean Bean” to mean a famous / paid actor that dies early, the developers answer to the question “It’d have to be a Sean Bean?” is “Can we really justify getting a Sean Bean to play a Sean Bean?”, which makes no sense at all. If he’s simply saying “Can we justify getting a Sean Bean?” it makes perfect sense, but that’s not what is written.
I realise this is a bit convoluted and pointless ‘cos he probably meant what you’re saying he did.
What the developer means is probably that – it was a one-season role. If a well-known celeb was looking for a TV series, he was probably looking for a long (for the money) and starring (for fame, good reviews and MOAR money!!) role. Sean Bean would be getting only one half of the coin if he took on the role of Eddard Stark since he would be forgotten by Season 2. So the producers were jittery about approaching him.
No, he’s saying why bother spending big bucks to get a person like Sean Bean for a short-lived role when they can get a lesser-known-mostly-voice-acting type person. The person asking the question is referring to Sean Bean’s role in Game of Thrones where he dies at the end of season 1 (and the end of the first novel it’s based on) even though he’s one of the most important characters.
Edit: gah… beaten to it…
Patrick Stewart would have done it for all those lovely Dollars I reckon.
I’ve always been happy with RMAH, because it allows Blizzard to have their extra money without making me pay extra. And if I will ever feel like buying there, then I will be happy, because, well, then I will feel like it.
And recently I’ve got into Tribes, where you buy weapons and classes for money or XP (with a pretty draconic ratio of approximately $10 ~= 20 days w/ 1hr/day ~= 8 days w/ 4 hr/day), and pay them a lot. Because it is a cool game, it does not make you do thing you don’t want, and it makes you feel good. I could not actually afford $150 for two accounts… but I did.
The point is… I think everyone has his moment when he has more money than time. So I do not believe anyone who’s saying RMAH makes the game worse. Unless this person is Azzure.
Tribes is a different case. First of all, it’s a F2P game, which still tries to get thier pricing right (i agree that some weapons are outrageously expensive) and “micro” transactions are sole source of revenue, and second of all – buying upgrades is irrelevant most of the time!
).
How having 100 hp more on your armor gonna help you if you’re getting direct hit with every spinfusor shot coming at you? How upgrading Fusion mortar to Mirv launcher will help you at clearing base defences, if you can’t aim it to save your life? Upgrades there make barely any difference and in case of weapons they are most of cases sidegrades (unless overpowered on release, like plasma gun >.<). What matters in this game is skill, not upgrades (again, unless it’s overpowered on release
On a side note, i would love to sink some money to support hi-rez, but i’ll do it when i actually get a pc which will run it better then 15 fps >.< Well, that’s my tribe rant/speech/watever.
I suggest putting in 10 (or whatever) bucks so you can at least get the VIP bonus. Pays off alot in the long run.
Well, i don’t really play that often with the framerate i have, so i’ll probably end up doing so when i upgrade my pc.
“we knew players were going to do regardless of whether we did real money or not.”
Right. I hope they won’t let you sell characters though, because the same reasons wouldn’t apply to it. People couldn’t sell characters as easy as they can items, UNLESS Blizzard let you. Characters are tied to your Bnet account and region iirc., so even if some people did do it, it would remain very small. So again, Blizzard has no excuse for allowing character selling.
Why am I saying this? Because Bashiok said they were considering it. I think it would be a terrible mistake. In Diablo 3 there are no “character sinks”, as there are gold sinks, so the market would get quickly saturated with level 60 characters that people farm up for others and then sell. Eventually the price of level 60 characters would be dirt cheap, and you would be a fool to play from level 1 to 60 on your own and not just buy one.
“you would be a fool to play from level 1 to 60 on your own and not just buy one.”
Not sure that’s true really. If you just bought a level 60 character having not played through the game with that class before, you’d not have much chance of surviving in Hell/Inferno as you wouldn’t know the skills well, or which to use in any given situation.
I agree that it seems strange to be considering selling characters, as with the new skill system, all that could be different (taking items out of the equation as you can get them seperately) is the choice of runes that player has made – which costs you nothing to duplicate.
Maybe some people would consider it a way of selling an item ‘package’ all at once, a convenient way to display an item set maybe, and get a higher price for selling the whole set at once, rather than just each individual item. If that’s the case though, a better solution surely would be to allow us to sell groups of items on the AH also, without having to tie them to a character.
Perhaps if you’re very new to the genre then maybe yes…otherwise the advantages of buying a high level character are pretty obvious (even though I wouldn’t care much):
1. You don’t need to play with the restrictive abilities
2. No need to play through the forced starter difficulties because it’s effectively what most will only do (even more than half of you that read this comment…including me!).
2. You don’t need to play with the restrictive abilities (really the beta felt worse than the starting hours of WoW…and that felt really “hold-handy”).
Really they’ve made the first few pieces so much like WoW that it’s actually kind of funny (really – do we honestly need to play for at least three hours before we get some real choices?)…I don’t want to have any hand holding (imagine this on your fourth/fifth character…).
Either way I don’t care for transactions in the game of any kind (RMAH or Gold-based AH) because I never did before when playing D2 – I was “casual” and offline 99.999% of the time (with online only recently to test the waters because of the forced online in D3) in D2 where I had the luxury of just playing in my own time, whenever, wherever provided I had a PC and electricity (for all those D3 forum trolls) and with my own schedule…why would that have to change in D3 (apart from the now forced online connectivity)?
Okay so I would love to play Diablo III (perhaps I was a little to negative above?) but I’m patient enough to wait until things have settled really nicely before I jump in because I just don’t want my experience screwed up because of a Queue, maintenance period or something similar (Yes – it’s not an MMORPG so let’s hope it doesn’t play like one).
I’ve never liked the RMAH, but at the same time I don’t care because it’s something I won’t use. I get why it’s there. Plus, I don’t think it’s ethically wrong to pay for items since you “earn” items just like you “earn” money. Time + effort = reward.
Really, I think you don’t hear much about it these days because everyone knows it’s going to be in there, regardless of how much you may or may not have complained initially. You might hate it, but there it will be. Fighting an inevitable fact is pointless. …True, a lot of Interweb whiners still exist and will take on the entitled, I’m-always-right perspective. But at this point, complaints won’t do anything. The RMAH is here to stay. Besides there’s plenty of other shiny new things to complain about, like BattleTags and exclusive Feats of Strength!!
You had to remind me that crap? god I hate Blizzard sometimes
RMAH is something I’d prefer not to be in the game, yet I admire it’s presence for the sake of being one hell of an interesting social experiment. I’m really interested to see how it’s going to develop and grow, I’ll enjoy sitting back on my haunches to see how it develops.
I’ve also spent some time looking over all the available Merch on the Blizzard Store…there’s quite a few things I’d be pleased as hell to get for myself simply by selling in game items.
The only thing I don’t like is what happens when I find uberitems. I mean I’d be dumb not to put them on the RMAH if I can sell them for e.g. € 50,-. Which is not directly all bad but still…
That really depends on your perspective and what you’re playing for. Are you playing to earn money or are you playing to play? If you find an uberitem that is just awesome for your character and you submit to the temptation of easy money, then you’ve just changed your game.
However, for example finding an uberitem for a Witch Doctor, but you don’t have one, nor do you ever want to roll one, then, selling it does not change your game.
Same goes the other way – do you buy an uberitem that some person just posted for some small price? Do you resell it? Do you use it instead?
It’s really just a fine line that you draw yourself. The constraints for your game in order to either achieve something you want, or get something out of it – you define for yourself.
I guess my point is – it’s not necessarily stupid nor smart to sell that item for money. It’s just that if you want to play for items or play for money or play for a little bit of both. There is no wrong, no right, no stupid, no smart in actually making those decisions. It’s you that’s playing and it’s you who is playing the way you want for whatever reason you find more enjoyable or profitable.
Did that make any sense at all? I seemed to ramble there =p, anyway my view on this.
It’s a good thing that there is no soulbind in D3 in this case… That way you can try the items first then if you don’t like it, bored with it, or find something better, then you can sell it for a nice sum… Best of both world
I don’t want to make use of the AH of either currency, as I enjoy the item finding aspect a lot – I’m cool they’re both there, as it gives players different options.
One wonders, though – of the many people who’s been calling the RMAH worse than crap, how many of them could pass the temptation to put an item up, if they felt they’d found something truly epic?