I *really* hope they can fix the problems with currency, and it seems at least that there’s a lot of attention paid to it. One of my most hated parts of D2 is the difficult and, really, not fun nature of trading your items. It hilights all the worst aspects of the barter system.

First, most items become essentially worthless and even if you wanted one you couldn’t find it. Then, say you wanted to get Tal’s armor, and someone tells you it’s worth 2.5 SOJ. Which you don’t have, and will never find. Besides, what’s 1/2 a SOJ? So you have to find some kind of high level item worth at least SOJ to get one to then trade for your armor. Now let’s assume you have no idea what that armor was worth to begin with. Or that you found an Arkaine’s Valor in 1.10. Is this good anymore? What’s it worth? Or you sold some awesome poison charms because you have no idea they’re worth anything. Obviously, trading happens all the time, and you can become good at it. It’s just not fun for most people, and the barrier to entry of such a fundamental aspect of the game is very steep for a game with such casual appeal.

Bashiok is wrong on one point, though, that runes became the currency because they were duped. *High level* runes became the currency for this reason. If they could not have been duped, I feel like the currency runes would just have dropped a few rungs, because there was still a currency void that needed to be filled with the worthless nature of gold, and runes provided a convenient, convertible, interchangeable, and denominated item to use for this.

Let me summarize the first paragraph by saying this: It’s supply and demand.  It’s that simple.  4 years of casual playing and all I got was 1 UM and 2 PULs.  Maybe I suck but I mean come on, with that kind of drop rate what good is the rune word list for.  If I were to find one rare rune then I’d surely find ways to dup it too, that’s what a normal greedy Diablo player would do, no?

Like someone previously said, it’s what dropped that makes the game fun, not what doesn’t (never) drop.

I’d like to try different builds & runeword combo but at this rate looks like I’ll never be able to do that.  I really, really sincerely hope that drops will be fixed in 1.13.

there is no 100% claim here in the slightest that duping will not be tolerated.

very luke warm!

“And it won’t happen as long as there is a intentional and low-barrier currency (gold), and the game is designed and maintained as to not allow creation of illegitimate items.”

Well the “as long as” statement is the worrisome part eh?

I thank you for responding to the comments though.  I will get some feedback from the other side of the tracks to see if this is going to come to fruition or just another d2items crapfest.

@tooney
it was the same person (bashiok) who said that the items you find make the game fun, not the items that never drop.

This is comforting but ultimately to be expected anyway.

Blizzard has experience now creating an economy that actually works for the most part (see WoW) so it seems hasty to assume that this can not be done in the world of Diablo.  Additionally, hacks have been at a minimum in WoW as well, and they have done a lot to keep it mostly bot free and hack free as well as ultimately dupe free.  I am not sure why the assumption is that D3 will be an instant step back.

One of the things that made runes from lem to zod tradeable on d2 was the fact they had a fixed “price”. 3 lem = pul, 2 pul = um, 2 um = mal and so on.

So basicly, every rune from lem to zod was ranging from a 1$ bill to 100$.

On nonladder, you can gul and mal are worth nothing, because the lack of upgrade recipes.

Did you ever find twice as many ums then mals? twice as many vex as ohm? I don’t think so

oh, and as a sidenote, what bothers me the most about dupes is the fact every unique in the game becomes pul~ish value. Like, i find a shako. OMG I FOUND SHAKO! oh right, its only worth pul :(

You can buy WoW Gold in the thousands online.

This will be even easier to kill trading.  one official currency that you can just brute force buy.

wow economy is terrible.  I play on a free server in europe where people dont buy gold.  things are so much fun to trade.  no bots needed. shrugs.

Of course you can buy WoW gold online, but ultimately you’re playing the game for your own sake, so buying gold to obtain items will not so much take away the fun for others as it will for you.

Much of the fun lies in hoping to find certain items and eventually finding them, it’s the pursuit and expectation that keep people playing what is essentially an item collecting/trading game. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that once I got those few items that I really had been looking forward to, the novelty wore off pretty quick and I found myself not really caring as much about them as I thought I would’ve.

Yes, gold farming will probably be very hard to detect in D3 because a gold farmer would likely be playing the game the same way as most people would (unlike in WoW) and yes, it will have a small impact on the economy. I highly doubt it’ll kill the economy, though, as long as they add good enough gold sinks to keep the economy balanced - good enough to make up for the lack of soulbound items - then that will likely slow down inflation.

Personally, I believe D3 economy will need some kind of reference to make trading easier, like a place where you can see roughly how much worth certain items are. In WoW, an auction house does just that.

I realize I’m using WoW for comparison’s sake a lot, but that’s partly because I think it did some things pretty right and partly because I don’t doubt for a second that D3 will borrow many ideas from it, especially those related to the economy.