Cash in on those +3 Magnificent Battle Greaves while you still can.
Blizzard will shut down the in-game Auction House in its popular RPG Diablo III on March 18, 2014, it said this week.
The Auction House "undermines Diablo's core game play," said Blizzard production director John Hight in an official statement. As such, both auction houses – the one that lets players use their in-game play money to buy more weapons and armor, and the one that allows them to trade the loot they've farmed for actual real-world cash – will be shuttered, he said. (Reached for comment by WIRED this week, a Blizzard representative said the company would be unable to provide additional comment for this story.)
When Blizzard announced the auction house in 2011, it sounded like a great idea.
The high-level loot that players acquired as they reached the deepest levels of previous Diablo games was the product of hundreds of hours of labor, even if said labor consisted of clicking and chugging Mountain Dew, and other players would rather pay money – lots of money – to get it without spending the time. So even though such monetary transactions were against Blizzard's EULA, a gray market for in-game Diablo II items flourished online.
"Players have found a number of different ways to trade and otherwise obtain items both within and outside of the game," Blizzard wrote at the time. "Many of these methods were inconvenient and either tedious (for example, repeatedly advertising for a desired trade in Battle.net chat channels and waiting for responses) or unsafe (e.g., giving credit card information to third-party trading sites)." With the Auction House, Blizzard sought to bring those trades under its umbrella, making them safer for players while making some money on the side – it took a cut of every sale.
It may have been built with the best of intentions, but the Auction House turned out to be a road to hell (and not the fun kind of hell that Diablo is known for).
So what went wrong?
Some players loved cashing in. One anonymous user said last year that he had made $10,000 selling loot.
But Diablo III's main problem was not exclusive to the real-money sector of the market. Rather, most of the game's woes center on the existence of the auction house in the first place, whether for real cash or fake gold.
MMOs like World of Warcraft have auction houses that don't upset the gameplay balance. But there are key differences that set Diablo III' and World of Warcraft's markets apart.
As a player nears the end of Warcraft, their goal is to continue to complete dungeons and raids and kill higher-level bosses, with the goal of obtaining better equipment that will allow them to kill even harder bosses. The majority of this epic loot is classified as "Bind on Pickup," meaning that once it enters a player's inventory it cannot be traded or sold.
In the Warcraft auction house, the most popular, most-traded items aren't weapons and armor – they're crafting materials, used to create consumable items (such as potions that grant temporary stat bonuses) used by serious dungeon raiders.
But Diablo doesn't have more dungeons, more bosses, etc. Players just play the same procession of levels on harder and harder difficulty levels, picking up better and better loot. In other words, the loot isn't just a helping hand towards their ultimate goal – better loot is the ultimate goal. And with the auction house, players found that the best way to obtain it was to just buy it.
And the next thing you know, they're not playing the game anymore. Why would they, when the reward structure that would otherwise motivate them to play was no longer there? Without the promise of better stuff, Diablo was all stick and no carrot.
Former game director Jay Wilson, who left the Diablo team for another role within Blizzard this year, had figured this out long ago – but not how to solve it.
"The Auction House can short circuit the natural pace of item drops, making the game feel less rewarding for some players," he said in a Battle.net post over a year ago. "This is a problem we recognize. At this point we're not sure of the exact way to fix it, but we’re discussing it constantly, and we believe it's a problem we can overcome."
Apparently not, unless nuking the whole thing from orbit counts.
