Blizzard said it did not plan to create a similar real money auction house for World of Warcraft, despite the prevalence of unauthorised real money trading around the massively popular MMO. Pardo explained that Blizzard felt the idea did not suit the "prestige system" of WOW's item game, where items are tied to specific achievements and bind to game characters. But it was considered a good fit for the "merchant economy" stimulated by Diablo's randomly created and freely tradable items.
Translation: We know doing this to an established IP that is currently playing would piss off players enormously. So we chose to do it an IP everyone loves and has been waiting for 4 years for instead.
By collecting a fixed rather than a percentage fee on auction house sales, Blizzard will have no incentive to manipulate the game design in order to make more money from the auction house, Pardo argued.
Mmhmmm. And I'm going to get rich by closing my eyes and just wishing real hard for money. Never mind the fact that they've tinkered with the loot system to hell and back, so loot only shows up for one person, and IIRC, you only see the loot for your class. No, they haven't manipulated gameplay
in the slightest to make money.
I didn't play SC2, so this all comes as a fairly unpleasant surprise to me. I guess I was being naive when I thought Blizzard wasn't going to emulate the worst of what the other publishers were doing. Battlenet was sending bad signals already but I thought that was the extent of it. I never dreamed Blizzard would monetize the AH system.
On the plus side, I'm sure pirates are going to try to find a crack to take D3 offline and I wish them the best of luck and god's speed. I'll buy the game, but I want to be able to to play it on the chance I'm poor and can't afford internet anymore. Unfortunately, it sounds like a Bnet connection is going to be written into dozens of places in game.
