Guild Wars 2

Food for thought about Blizzard’s experiences with the Diablo 3 auction house given the similarities between the 2:

http://us.battle.net//d3/en/blog/8953696

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/03/28/diablo-3-director-jay-wilson-auction-houses-really-hurt-game

i read the 2nd one but i couldn’t suffer through the first one. ( i gave it a honest try)

maybe you could give a TL;DR version of the blogs and maybe highlight certain quotes to make it more clearer of what you are pointing at.

are you trying to say that the BLTP is ruining the game? or that it’s uncontrolled?

and i can’t find the similarities between the two systems.

D3:

• single player game
• poorly designed economy and have huge inflation problems (intentional?).
• it’s a online auction house.

GW2:

• MMORPG
• balanced economy, and they have the tools to change if something is not woring as intended.
• It’s a trading post.

D3 failure lied totally in the auction house existence (imo, and the bots ofc). the reason behind this is that the AH offered way better items and items that suited you better thn those that droped for you. i.e i played the game for a good 400h after max level on my barbarian and at max i had 1 item on me that had dropped for me or any of my friends. the rest was bought of of the AH. this made me very detached from my character and thus i lost the immersion of building a character witch always was the strength behind the diablo games.

D3 fail because it’s a AH in a single player game where the content was not designed for a AH.

TL;DR
maybe i’m missing something, but it would be nice if you made clear of what you ment with your post

The lack of a progressive gold sink like the TP tax in GW2 caused the D3 economy to go through humongous inflation, something you do not see in GW2.

The D3 issues are very different from the GW2 issues.

First, D3 has incredibly boring itemization. Absolutely everyone was looking for exactly the same items, which all just pushed damage and health up in slightly different ways. Better items just had more of the same stats. It was hyper linear, which made a ton of drops totally useless.

Second, they had zero item sinks or recycling. Nothing was bound to a player ever, so good items keep circulating through the economy – meaning that the value of the drops you get in game keep going down, as they can’t compete with existing hand-me-downs. You can’t blow up unwanted items to create valuable items either – especially after the patch that made monster drop only legendaries hands down the best items in the game.

There was essentially no character customization – look at how much money people spend on a skin in GW2. All that money is chasing slightly more powerful items in D3.

They did control the money supply in their game just fine – they have the same 15% sales tax that GW2 does. They failed on the item side, by making the loot totally uninteresting and totally neglecting the recycle / sink part of it.

Diablo 3 failed because it was a game that was all about items, and the items sucked. Which was a shame, because it got so much else right.

Guild Wars 2 has none of these problems. It has some production imbalances (CoF) that are hard to pull without setting the market crazy, and I think they’re way, way too timid and make far too many things bind on acquire, but the fundamental structure of it is sound.

Ursan.7846:

The lack of a progressive gold sink like the TP tax in GW2 caused the D3 economy to go through humongous inflation, something you do not see in GW2.

The D3 AH has a 15% transaction fee on sales.

D3 is in the same spot as GW2. At some point the things you desire are no longer viable to be earned by playing the game, but by playing the trading post game. Sure, in D3 you desire higher stats and in GW2 you desire more fancy looks, but that makes no difference in the end. You hit a wall and playing the game will take way more time than playing an economic model based on player activity.

But for what it is worth, D3 has a surprising depth when it comes to player builds and team builds. Everything might be solvable by throwing stats at it, but throwing builds and execution skill at problems works almost as fine. Granted, having both breaks the game. But which game offering multiple paths to success can say it was different?

cbabd.8053:

The D3 AH has a 15% transaction fee on sales.

Only for real-money sales, which isn’t a gold sink.

Waraxx.4286:

D3 failure lied totally in the auction house existence (imo, and the bots ofc). the reason behind this is that the AH offered way better items and items that suited you better thn those that droped for you. i.e i played the game for a good 400h after max level on my barbarian and at max i had 1 item on me that had dropped for me or any of my friends. the rest was bought of of the AH. this made me very detached from my character and thus i lost the immersion of building a character witch always was the strength behind the diablo games.

How much stuff on your GW2 character did you get from drops? Except for one alt with a couple trooper armor pieces from quest rewards, all of my characters are wearing stuff I bought from the TP or gem store. I don’t have a single weapon skin I use from drops or rewards. I’d love to get something really nice for a character from a drop or quest reward.

I read both and I do see blatant similarities with them and GW2. The main difference I see is that we are moreso in our infancy, where theirs has rapidly progressed to maturity. I venture to say we are on the same path (albeit ours is slower moving) of our tp doing more harm than good much as D3.

D3 had a 15% AH fee on the gold AH (it had a $1 flat fee on the RMAH, and paypal took 15% when you cashed out).

That’s about as far as the similarities go, however. GW2 has a well designed auction house and crafting system that is naturally stable – and easy to tweak with new recipes or slight adjustments in drop rates of things get really out of hand. D3 has a fundamentally broken economy, on top of a poor item system. It had a limited lifespan before its economy ran into the ground.

They really are not comparable at all.

If you read the articles, you would see that they were talking about how the auction house effected the mindset of the players. That is turned the core focus of the game to “how to get gold” rather than “how to play and have fun”. In this regard it is very comparable to our TP as it does essentially the exact same thing. They go on further to say that the “how to get gold” mentality was a major factor that negatively influenced the economy.
I contend that the articles are spot on in relation to GW2, as we too are becoming more of the mindset of “how to get gold”. The experiences that Blizzard had with D3 should not be taken lightly of how things may or may not turn out here.

@Essence Snow: The “how to get gold” mentality affects the player base of most MMOs to greater or lesser extents. It may be more exaggerated in games where the highest level of gear is able to be traded between players, but removing this type of trade then reduces the number of avenues that players have to obtain this gear.

Interestingly enough, none of the available ascended tier pieces are available for gold so far…

Astraea.6075:

@Essence Snow: The “how to get gold” mentality affects the player base of most MMOs to greater or lesser extents. It may be more exaggerated in games where the highest level of gear is able to be traded between players, but removing this type of trade then reduces the number of avenues that players have to obtain this gear.

Interestingly enough, none of the available ascended tier pieces are available for gold so far…

Oh I have no thoughts of it being removed…that would be asinine…just measures put in place to keep things in check. Much like how gold sinks keep normal play inflation in check, something is needed to keep things like trading/cof p1 runs in check.
Having some things in check while allowing others to run rampant is erroneous.

Essence Snow.3194:

That is turned the core focus of the game to “how to get gold” rather than “how to play and have fun”.

If they really believe that – if they believe that there was any model for a Diablo game that wasn’t players thinking about how to get items – then they really had hired blazing hot day on mercury stupid level developers.

You know going into it that players are going to focus on goals. When your game is designed properly, your reward structure, your items and gold and all that stuff, aligns with the kinds of activities players want to do anyway.

If they really didn’t get that – if they designed a massively vertical progression grind game and didn’t expect people to start grinding it out – I really don’t know what to say other than they had a pretty spectacular failure somewhere in the hiring process.

EDIT – Their game even had substantial content gating based upon the gear you managed to acquire. At least in GW2 you can go and run dungeons in exotics and you’re competing for skins; in D3 you had to spend a lot of time and money on gear just to be able to beat Diablo on the highest difficulty, ostensibly the goal of the game. How the hell could they imagine people wouldn’t be totally obsessed with item acquisition when that was an absolutely required part of the game if you wanted to beat the boss?

The lesson to learn from D3 is to not hire idiots to design your game. They’ll do stupid things because they are idiots.

GW2 has a really attractive economy design along these lines by the way – look at the way it plays out as you progress, you get rewarded for exploring, for killing mobs, for crafting, for questing, for progressing along the story. You have the individualized loot that rewards players for playing together to conquer content.

They have some issues with the weights of different activities in the end game (CoF1, for example, being so much more profitable than everything else) that aren’t trivial to solve, but they will be eventually, in the same way that Shelt/Pen were. They want there to be a lot of different ways to play the game that are profitable, and they’re gradually working towards that.

Cof p1 should be trivial to solve. Putting a gate up to require the bridge event…….blocking off the safe spots during the alcolyte event….adding confusion condition….etc. I really need to start reaching to figure out why it is left in it’s current state. The only thing I can come up with why they allow it is b/c the player base needs a method of gaining wealth that approaches the profit potential of playing the tp w/o actually playing the tp. I know that’s a stretch, but I am at a loss to the reasons.

MisterEction.9382:

Waraxx.4286:

D3 failure lied totally in the auction house existence (imo, and the bots ofc). the reason behind this is that the AH offered way better items and items that suited you better thn those that droped for you. i.e i played the game for a good 400h after max level on my barbarian and at max i had 1 item on me that had dropped for me or any of my friends. the rest was bought of of the AH. this made me very detached from my character and thus i lost the immersion of building a character witch always was the strength behind the diablo games.

How much stuff on your GW2 character did you get from drops? Except for one alt with a couple trooper armor pieces from quest rewards, all of my characters are wearing stuff I bought from the TP or gem store. I don’t have a single weapon skin I use from drops or rewards. I’d love to get something really nice for a character from a drop or quest reward.

good point. however, despite that, i don’t lose my immersion in the character because GW2’s main purpose of building a charachtar is not in the gear, it’s in the story and the things you’ve done with it. while in d3 the only thing you could change was gender and name, so every character was the same, the only thing making you unique was the your gear. here in gw2 gear is a small portion of the game, and can become completely ignored if you choose to just after a few hours played. alot of things makes you differ from other characters because the story isn’t as linear.

hope you get my point.

Essence Snow.3194:

I really need to start reaching to figure out why it is left in it’s current state.

A nerf to CoF1 will almost surely crash prices on the TP. It is generating an enormous amount of raw coin without corresponding goods, which is supporting the current price level on the TP.

I do not have the data that I would need to anticipate how hard prices would crash if CoF1 was unilaterally nerfed, but I suspect it would be substantial – and would affect every corner of the economy. Wide scale market crashes like that create a lot of ill will in your player base and make players distrustful of the market in general.

My guess? They’re holding off on nerfing CoF1 until they have a mechanism in place to replace the ‘lost’ gold from people farming CoF1 and consequently ward off the ensuing market crash. Such a mechanism is not at all trivial to design, which would explain the delay.

That’s what I would do, in any case.

Every passing minute that it is/has been left is only making the issue bigger. It was plainly obvious quite some time ago what it was producing and the problem (if size is of issue) could have been nipped in the bud w/o the added complication that time amasses.

I’m not sure how holding off to fix an issue that grows in complexity is a good thing. To me it make sense to fix things when they are easier to fix than to wait until they are harder to fix. Ofc this may or may not be relevant.