One of the biggest new additions to the Diablo franchise in its latest iteration is the Real Money Auction House (RMAH), which will allow players to exchange spare gear and even complete characters not just for ingame currency but cold, hard cash. How is the Dollar bill going to change the game? In part one of this two-piece article, our author Stefan "Devt" Kreutz shares his thoughts.
Purchasing items or currency for real money has been a part of MMO culture for as long as it's been around. Diablo 2 is no exception; whether on eBay, through external forums or in private, the buying and selling (and subsequently, duping) of items has always been a huge boon to the community. In a move that was a stunning surprise to most fans, Blizzard has introduced the option to buy and sell Diablo 3 goods for cash "legally", through their own system.
My name is Devt and I am a marketeer. I have spent much of my active time on World of Warcraft "playing the markets"; the auction house as a stock market equivalent always had its appeal on me. At the height of my game, right after Cataclysm, I owned over 500,000G. Suffice it to say that I did pretty well for myself. I have been toying with the idea of writing a piece on Diablo 3's economics and how they are affected by the RMAH for a while now and the more thought I put into it, the more I realized that it's much too big a topic to be dealt with in a single piece; thus, you are looking at the first of two parts of this article.
To clear up any misconceptions you might have about the RMAH, let me introduce you to the rules once more: Every item you can sell on Diablo 3's auction house, you can choose to sell for either gold or dollars. Consequently, you can also buy gear for cash but only if the seller of the auction chose for it to be a real money sale; you can't "force" your paper onto someone. Furthermore, Diablo 3's AH includes the option of selling whole characters, including gear, also for gold or cash. Lastly, the "real money" portion of the RMAH is not accessible for hardcore players; they can only buy (hardcore) items for gold.
With this out of the way, let's share a look at the economies of both Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft, as these are without a doubt the ones Diablo 3 will lend from the most. Like in so many other aspects of the game (this is where you go read my articles on the Barbarian and the Wizard), Blizzard seems to aim at creating a "hybrid" of these two games with their latest creation. Whether on purpose or not, it's safe to assume there is going to be ample overlap between the three titles.
When looking at Diablo 2's economy, the biggest factor arguably is the duping of items in order to sell them for cash. As soon as the first methods of duping became known on closed battle.net, the economy took off in a fashion that hasn't been known at the time. eBay was (and still is) full of auctions for highlevel gear in incredible amounts. Blizzard has made great efforts in order to reduce the amount of duping that takes place; "Operation Ruststorm" managed to delete a huge amount of dupes everytime it happened, part of the reason the current ladder system is in place is because it offers a free "reset" of the economy everytime a new season begins. And yet, duping remains a staple of the game, something that has made trading with the public basically impossible if one does not want to risk getting duped (get it?). Clearly, the massive financial potential to selling such gear was the driving force behind these dupes.
World of Warcraft on the other hand does not do a lot of cash-for-item trades; the implementation of the soulbind system as well as the significantly higher challenge of duping gear in an MMO (there have not been any major occasions of duping in WoW's history to date; not big enough to make a lasting impact at least) prevented that. Instead, most of the cash goes either into gold or characters as well as leveling services. Without getting ahead of myself, isn't it peculiar that Blizzard offers the option to sell whole characters for cash in Diablo 3? Regardless, the sale of gold has always been the "big thing". It evolved from gold farmed by (mostly) Chinese workers to gold collected from "hacked" accounts (actually phished; there is no evidence of people being legitimately hacked on WoW yet), the latter of which is why we all have these fancy authenticators now.
So where does this leave us in Diablo 3? By now you will have found out that Blizzard plans to take the game into a very MMO-like direction: huge chunks of the game will be online-only, there is no single player to speak of and thus it should be as unlikely to dupe items in great volume as it is in World of Warcraft. Account phishing on the other hand will become even more profitable now that there are potentially two games with sellable items attached to every battle.net account; if I have someone's WoW login I might want to check if they also have Diablo 3 on their account and vice versa. WoW accounts are already more valuable than credit card numbers on the black market, this will only increase their value.
The introduction of the (RM)AH will undoubtedly change the entire metagame of Diablo 3. Diablo 2 went through several iterations of de-facto currency (Stones of Jordan, High Runes, gems, certain unique items) because gold as a ressource was both plentiful and (mostly) useless. With the AH in place, gold will be certain to keep its value and stay in place as the currency for as long as Blizzard can keep up with the inflation. This opens up a whole new perspective for players: If I were to start a new character in Diablo 2 today, my only options for trading are external forums which have a currency system in place (d2jsp to name the most prominent example) or finding someone who is willing to give me x item for my y item. The auction house allows me to sell what I have for gold and buy what I need with that same gold, without ever having to find a buyer myself. It doesn't get more convenient.
Buying characters directly in the game should open the market for leveling services provided by legitimate players. Since there is no such thing as permanent stat/skill allocation anymore, all level 60 Barbarians are the same except for their gear. Buying characters has been a very profitable market in WoW and history will without a doubt repeat itself in Diablo 3. It will be interesting to see if the prices for level 60 characters will terrace at a certain value or be driven down by the sheer volume of players offering their characters. It seems clear to me that leveling a character in Diablo 3 will always be in direct contest to buying one; why spend a lot of time "grinding" (and to some players, leveling is just that) when you can get the same result for a day's worth of earnings from your job? This is the rationale most people use when buying power-leveling services on WoW; now that it's effectively part of the game, the amount of players spending money to skip "working" has nowhere to go but up.
What will happen during the release rush on Diablo 3? How will players who quit the game affect the market? And why did Blizzard implement the RMAH in the first place? All this and more next week in part two, right here on gosugamers.net.
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