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[Diablo 3] Reports of the Economy's death were greatly exaggerated
Posts
I think I will be fine with either a rollback or keeping everything.
oh boy
I guess there's like Monster Power now, like there was in D2? Where you could tell the game to up the level/number of enemies?
But what about stats/gemming; is there a general 'this is what you should do' regardless of class? Or is it pretty class/build specific what stats and gems you want?
I have a 55 WD and a 50 Wizard, next nearest thing is a 22 Barb, so I'm not gonna be blowing tons of gold to get really good stuff as it is; but I'd just like to kinda know for my own sake.
Is DPS still as important as it was; thus red gems in weapons? I know a patch changed that at some point.
And whats Bind on Account? I saw the Marquiese Gems, but is that it?
Also, I get the feeling I won't be able to play D3 tonight.
Here's the article on Monster Power: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/7540457/
The rest I'm not up to date on, I play a baers WD, and nothing else, and I'm probably the last person you would ask for advice for it anyways(my weapon doesn't even have a socket x.x).
That's not to say they won't take it all down; but yeah.
A rollback is almost guaranteed with the amount of dupers it seems. I thought it was just one or two people but hundreds-thousands of people have been doing this apparently. If they rollback anything that's done from when the game was patched on will be restored to before the patch.
Edit-- I was also getting a strange graphics bug on some of my items before AH went down, like here's a book overlapping the subtle essences, not to mention it's a 1000 stack when that's not supposed to happen:
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to have fun with all the duped gold gear
I'm not so sure. It's one thing to deal with the gold; but the RMAH presents a vastly different problem. Between the personal cost to blizzard to handle refunding/charging all the individual transactions, they'll be caught in chargeback hell with credit cards, disputes with Paypal; and the entirety of the Blizzard Wallet will collapse.
I honestly think they're fucked. They can removed the detectable duped gold; at least from those who duped it; but how much it interplayed with everyone even being legit in their actions...yeah.
A straight up rollback just isn't in the cards I don't think. Folks are seriously underestimating the literal financial hit to deal with the amount of RMAH transactions that no doubt took place today.
I had that too; when you logged into the game it was the correct item. It was just a visual bug in the AH.
Except that their ToS, if I recall, basically says "fuck you" in relation to all your loot. They own everything, always.
So they can literally strip every character naked tomorrow, and if you just spent $1,000 pimping yours out? "Fuck you."
Now, it's a PR nightmare if they do a rollback like that...but financial? Only insofar is it hurts revenues in the out years from the RMAH and expansions. That's it. That's the only concern.
EDIT: Not that I think they'll do it. Just that they can.
Either way, it serves to reinforce to the customer base at large that their gear could all become worthless at any moment, which harms the RMAH. Either duping could suddenly render all your gear worthless, or Blizzard can straight take it away at any moment.
Supposedly duping is already a huge deal anyway. Weren't a lot of the top items right now already duped? Like same name, stats, etc? Though now that it's coming to "the masses" I guess it matters.
Er...no, that's not the only concern.
It actually costs money for a company to refund/chargeback/cancel/etc on credit/debit purchases. That would be on Blizzard if they did a full rollback. It would cost them a fortune in fees to Visa/Mastercard and likely Paypal. It's not nearly as clean and simple as you're making it out to be. There was no doubt millions of individual transactions handled today on gems and other items from all fo this.
And TOS's afaik haven't shown to be very easy to uphold in court, at least in the past. Regardless, there's no way in hell a rollback without a full refund wouldn't result in god knows how many, questionably legitimate, lawsuits; that at the very least would just cost Activision/Blizzard a fortune just swatting them all
I was all looking forward to playing, but now? eeek.
I know ToS have limits as far as what will fly in court, but I'm pretty sure "we own all the items and gold on the servers" would. It's made pretty clear as part of playing the game.
Also, they always have the Steam route: initiate a chargeback, banned. Is it worth it for that item you thought you purchased?
EDIT: And if their case is airtight, and I think it is, I think the legal end would just be having their lawyers, who are certainly on retainer, send "fuck off" letters.
Except they're not going to do any of that. Diablo 3 is, perception wise, always on thin ice already. If they took that strong of an arm to the majority of players who did nothing actually wrong, it's going to cost them a fortune through other channels.
What I think will happen is dupers will be banned and/or duped gold removed if at all possible. It's highly unlikey anyone was buying gold, they were just buying other items with gold, so there shouldn't be much in the way of RMAH issues with gold selling/buying; it's just the gems, and in order to 'fix' that they'd have to do a complete and total rollback.
And I really think that's not going to happen. They can't, even if they could take the financial hit of halting/cancelling/refunding all of those charges, they couldn't take the PR hit. It would be all over both gaming and actual news, no one would use the wallet again, RMAH usage would tank (which no doubt makes them $TEXAS), and the perception would hurt whatever future games they have in the pipes.
No, I think they're gonna take that 15% cut they probably made a fucking fortune off of today, half-heartedly try to remove the duped gold, and call it good. Which will piss off people for a totally different reason (nakedly showing they care more about profit than they do about the status of the game) but it is what it is.
They should have just left the transaction work to third parties and do what they're hired to do. Game development.
I'm on NA servers and I can play the game fine? It's only the AH that is down.
Incidentally, that's another thing that leads me to believe that there won't be a mass rollback. They would have taken it all down if they were going to do that.
I agree that it'd be a PR nightmare, and that's why it won't happen. I don't agree that financially they'd have much obligation. But overall, we're in agreement that it probably won't happen.
Which, personally, has me furious. Like, something like this can't really stand. I hate to say it, at the risk of this devolving into a clusterfuck, but the game itself isn't that fun. Absent the pseudo-slot-machine aspect? I'm not sure how much more time I spend on it. I can't be alone there.
The loot grind becomes a lot less fun when all of it is rendered moot, forever, because you weren't online at 2pm on the 7th of May.
Is this the chinese _J_ ?
Lose: The opposite of win
Loose: Your mum
I'm sure blizzard has some deal with credit processors; but I know for virtually every retail job I've had any time we've had to cancel payments or issue refunds it cost us money, per transaction. Mastercard/Visa/Amex/etc just put it on the account on top of the per transaction billing. It becomes an issue, particularly for small transactions (and one of the reasons you see a lot of gas stations say that you can't use a credit card if it's not over a certain cost; both because of transaction fees and other billing issues with credit cards), to the point that when I worked at a Pizza Hut, one of the reasons we'd go out of our way to try to convince a customer to take free pizza down the road instead of getting a refund now is that in the end, it actually typically cost less to give them a free pizza than it did to give them a refund, cost of the pizza's they already got not withstanding.
I'm sure they had someone do maths prior to the RMAH and that's part of the $1 minimum purchase, to account for the potential of that all; but transactions of any sort with credit card companies cost money. You don't get a refund on a transaction if you have to issue a refund yourself, you're billed twice as the business.
And it adds up. Which is why I am saying what I'm saying about the financial obligation on their part. A rollback would be as expensive as fuck because they simply can't not refund people their RMAH spendings; particularly since you can just do instant purchases from credit cards and bypass the Wallet entirely.
Funny. I can access the AH but I can't create any games. Fantastic work there, Blizz.
edit: aaaaaaand now I can't access the AH either.
Well, they've been taking transaction fees since the RMAH has been up, so it's not like they'd be blindsided as to what the costs of reversal would be.
But when you are talking about real world banking, reversal of transactions due to things like stolen accounts is not really that uncommon. For example, the bottleneck on criminals cashing out of stolen access to bank accounts isn't the access to the bank accounts themselves, but instead finding suckers on the end who will make untraceable or less traceable transfers of money in exchange for a larger fraudulent transfer. That's because they have to take it as a given that the traceable transfers will be traced and reversed.
When something like this happens that will cause the Diablo economy to a complete fail state, they pretty much have to be prepared to roll it back and eat all the costs associated with doing so. Not doing so will come at a very steep cost, even if that cost isn't as easily quantifiable as the costs of undoing however many transactions happened this afternoon. I mean, can you imagine what sort of bad rep they'll get for setting up an in game economy explicitly linked to real money that they half assed a response to a completely system breaking bug?
They'd be nuts to not have an emergency plan for something like this, even if they really really don't want to use it unless they have to due to the costs.
Nice. This is going to be good. Definitely going to be keen to do high MP party games.
Lose: The opposite of win
Loose: Your mum
the RM thing is a lot murkier though
As reliable as a forum post, but there it is anyways.
What XP changes were there? Is it only for the paragon levels or whatever?
gw2: Tom.2439 (Short Giraffe, Saltycat, Saltydog)