Why no in-game auction house?

"

potis wrote:

You dont want people using it for loot hunt despite everyone ALREADY DOING THAT with poe.trade?

"

Fapmobile wrote:

"

potis wrote:

You dont want people using it for loot hunt despite everyone ALREADY DOING THAT with poe.trade?

If "everyone is already doing that" then what exactly is the problem?
Whenever I need anything, maps, currency, items, I can just get them from poe.trade.

Does the problem have something to do with not getting everything you want in seconds?

"

Unquietheart wrote:

"

I can see why you might think that, but it's not a supposition. It's a fact. At the time, there was public documentation from the IRS talking about Blizzard and Diablo 3 that was dated just before the announcement they were shutting the AH down.

Mmm... a fact eh? Okay.

Citation Needed.

There's a lot of buzz out there certainly, but a casual search does not turn up any public documents from any legitimate sources. Activision Blizzard is a publicly traded company. They're required to report their earnings publicly. If there were real, factual issues surrounding the RMT-AH that concerned the IRS, then there should be either IRS documents, US SEC documents, or press releases from Activision Blizzard. Alternatively, there should be reporting on the issue from valid news sources, like Reuters, Bloomberg, Associated Press, Dow Jones Institutional News. etc.

Come up with a citation and I'll give it a look.

If you don't have a citation, then you don't have a fact. You have hearsay.

Blizzard has thousands of employees, their legal department alone is probably bigger than all of GGG put together. I'm sure that their legal team and their accounting team both went over the RMT with a fine-tooth comb before letting it go public. It's entirely possible that Blizzard was, indeed required to file 1099-Misc forums for everyone they paid out money to via the RMT system. But those people were not Blizzard employees, they were private individuals, their tax reporting status is their own legal responsibility. Not Blizzard's.

"

As to why they took the Gold AH down? It was tied into the Real Money AH in the sense that it wouldn't work without it. The entire dynamic of the game was based around being able to buy your equipment. Drop rates were terrible (a lot of people like myself enjoyed that dynamic though) and if you were lucky enough to get a great drop, it probably wasn't for your class or your build.

The two AH's were perfectly capable of functioning independently.

The ONLY change that would have been necessary would have been to disable the front end, the website that allowed you to trade on the RMT. All that would have been necessary would have been to disable the button that allowed you to switch from the Gold AH to the RMT AH, and the RMT front page. It wouldn't have actually been necessary to even touch the backend databases at all.

They had months to prepare and an army of coders (Between D3 itself, the Fintech specific team, the Authentication team, and the Battle.net team) who could have worked at it. If they had wanted to they most certainly could have kept the Gold-only AH running independently of the RMT-AH.

And they didn't, they took it down. For reasons they were happy to explain publicly.

As I said above, a simple Google search will take you to the Blizzard FAQ on the subject, or to the Wired Magazine article, or to the Forbes Magazine article, or to the ARS Technica article.

"

That's why they completely changed the game. Jay Wilson was head of development at the time and it was all his brainchild. They couldn't change one without the other.

It was shut down because of money, nothing else.

Show me a Citation then.


And finally, the D3 RMT-AH issue was simply an example of the underlying problem of using an AH in an ARPG environment.

Regardless of what the situation with Blizzard actually was, you still have not addressed the fundamental problem: Making trading too easy undermines the primary motivator that makes ARPGs popular. Water runs downhill, people gravitate to the easiest solution. Developers nerf drop rates when AH supply becomes too large and too easy to get, which in turn forces even more people into the AH system in order to procure upgrades allowing them to continue to progress through content, creating a vicious cycle.

And then people stop playing, because it's no fun grinding endlessly just so you can buy something from an AH.

You're looking for a conspiracy that simply doesn't exist.

"

Nubman wrote:

All they need to do is have an option for people to buy items directly from shared stash when listed for an exact price. Keep the interaction for unpriced items or people without premium stash.