Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
[Diablo 3] Reports of the Economy's death were greatly exaggerated
Posts
If you just google the name I'm sure something will pop out at you.
But it takes a pretty huge asshole to take advantage of it.
I'm sure it's tearing him apart.
Also after all this duping, inflation, banning, and devaluation, I really have no idea what the state of AH will be like when the market opens tomorrow. I have $37M in gold and not a whole lot to sell. I was thinking about item flipping, but I have no idea how that's been affected by these changes.
On a more positive note, I really like the monster density changes. I've found Festering Woods and Fields of Misery to be so packed with monsters I have near constant stacks of Gruesome feast going on. Also tried out Desolate Sands and Dhalgur Oasis, the latter of which was crammed with so many snakes that they couldn't all fit on-screen at once.
A4 is still a bit of a shitshow, the two Silver Spire areas are packed with enemies, but the anti-healing debuff makes it even more chaotic than normal. The Gardens of Hope areas are okay, but I've yet to find an efficient farming route for them.
Only the maximum bid needs to move up relative to how much they want to inflate the currency. The % cut are you talking RMAH?
More specifically, the claim was that they were using a signed 32 bit integer to store the size of the gold stacks in one place in the auction house, which means that stacks over the size of 2^31 or 2,147,483,648, would have the higher powers of two cut off when the auction was listed. The max sized auction under the new gold price floor $0.25 per 10 million is a cap of 10 billion gold per auction, so there was room for bugged auctions of stacks of gold. However, the problem made it so it only took the incorrect truncated amount of gold out of the seller's stash when the auction was listed, but it would return the full proper amount when the auction was canceled, increasing their gold by the difference each time. If this is truly what the bug was, then any sale of a stack of gold of at least 2.15 billion would have been bugged, and auctions over 4.3 billion would have been bugged if they had the same issue but used an unsigned 32-bit integer.
I can see why there may have actually been a relatively limited number of accounts that exploited this bug, even if they duped absurd amounts of gold per account. Only accounts that could scrape up several billion gold to sell at once and learned about the bug within the afternoon it was active would have been in position to dupe. So it should be relatively straightforward for them to isolate all of the accounts that duped and all the transactions they made within that timeframe, even if it may take them a bit of time to do the grunt work of reversing everything if they weren't prepared for something like this beforehand. The markets were screwed up by the price distortions of the dupers, but I can see pretty clearly the logic now for not doing a wider scale rollback.
Also, for all those young programmers out there, let this be a lesson! Always be careful about your data types and test the limits of your variables!
Edit: This might also explain why the 2 billion gold cap for the gold AH hasn't been changed at all. It may be limited by them using 32 bit integers in places they probably shouldn't have, presumably to save storage space.
I think Marquise Gems were a half-assed attempt at a large optional gold sink. Which is sad, because now that I've been to the other side of the wealth divide I realize just how sad of a gold sink they really are. What, 80M per socket? When a character is unlikely to have more than 5-6 sockets to fill? Gee, that'll make a dent.
Escalating auction house taxes based on the amount of gold in your stash. Increase taxes on the 1%! Make those rich bastards pay their fair share, the lower classes (witch doctors, monks) need farming subsidies! I can't even afford radiant star topazes to feed to my kids!
OCCUPY THE AUCTION HOUSE!
D3: Caretta#1196
It does make a dent, how long do you think it takes for 400 million gold to enter the economy? It's not going to bankrupt any fatcats but it is one counterbalance, and they're working on more.
This is why you turn on all the warnings when compiling. This is actually a really common mistake, and one that's hard to catch unless you have warnings set to catch it, because 99.9% of the time storing an int64 in an int32 works as expected, because your number isn't too big for the int32.
What I saw claimed that the AH would display the bugged number of gold when you looked up your auctions in the UI. So if the person looked at their large auction afterwards, there's a good chance they'd go "WTF?" and then cancel the auction, and then when they returned the money in the finished auctions tab, suddenly they'd have a lot more money that was duped. The example listed was the dupers putting up 6 billion gold auction, which would then display as 1,705,032,704 gold in the AH (which is congruent to 6 billion modulo 2^31), and that 1.7 billion which what was actually deducted when the auction was put up, but the 6 billion was returned when canceled.
If this display issue was actually there, that would make it rather easy to unintentionally find the bug and dupe a whole lot of gold if you put up a big enough auction. Because wouldn't you likely cancel the auction if you looked at it and it displayed a rather wrong amount of gold? Folks wouldn't even have to poke around too much trying to screw the system to stumble upon the bug. That would probably also explain why it only took a matter of hours after the patch for the duping to get out of control and necessitate shutting the markets down.
One thing that is bothering me lately, regardless of this whole event, is inflation is getting kinda crazy. I don't feel like drop rates need to be increased but gold is so cheap these days it almost feels like in order to get good items you have to spend money because it's so damn cheap. You can get the items by playing it's just SO MUCH faster to just spend a little money.
I had already (largely) decked my barb out with some decent gear including a mid-range crit mempo. The sky is the limit to what you can spend of course.
Lose: The opposite of win
Loose: Your mum
My life has a huge gaping hole in it right now and I think mindless monster smashing is just the thing to fill it. I'm interested in getting back into the game, but I haven't really touched it since 1.0 and I feel a bit lost. Can you guys help me out, or point me somewhere that can? I enjoy games most when I have a clear path of progression in front of me, and I love having goals that I can work towards. I love crafting my own stuff, and I heard that might actually be viable now. I'm not averse to using the auction house (gold only, probably) to supplement things though. I don't mind "flavor of the month" builds, as long as they're fun (which often just means powerful, because its fun to be powerful in these games). I've got a barbarian, I heard its good to whirlwind things these days. That pleases me.
Is there a nice guide for returning players out there? I did try googling around, but most of the stuff I stumbled upon was related to the latest patches only, and was a little over my head.
Oh, and here's my character: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/OldSandwich-1147/hero/1448664
I barely managed to scrape through Inferno Act 1 back in the day, with cobbled together auction house gear that is probably pretty laughable these days.
I guess I'm kind of asking two things here. Question 1) What should I be trying to do? If I'm interested in building up a character to a high level of play, mostly just for the sake of being a badass, what should my short and long term goals be? Question 2) What should I be doing to get to those goals? I might be asking a lot, so really any advice at all, or links to the same, would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Diablo people!
1) Beat Inferno
2) Increase your DPS to handle higher monster power
3) Creating some Infernal Machines and fighting the uber bosses to craft a Hellfire Ring
4) Crafting some nice gloves/shoulders/amulet with the new crafting plans
5) Beating inferno on Hardcore if that's your thing
The AH is your ticket here. People have been playing for a while so there's a lot of good stuff on there that will let you breeze through Inferno for next to nothing. Look for crit chance, crit damage, attack speed, strength, vitality and all resists. To get gold you can sell flawless square gems or some PA person can get you started. If you catch me online I'll give you 1 million if you want it (RandomEngy#1829).
Someone else can help you with barb builds, I'm more of a Witch Doctor here.
Has anyone around here gotten a suspension?
I keep seeing people posting on the official forums with "all I did was sell some gems on the Gold AH" which usually translates to "I'm going to claim this is all I did and hope I get people on my side" (I'm not cynical or anything...).
And I know there's several of us here that got in on the gem buying/selling. I haven't heard a peep myself (I think I bought and sold a grand total of 12 gems that I bought, plus a bunch more that came from my own gear), and just wonder if anyone has.
Don't shy away from the RMAH. You aren't forced to put money in, but if you get a good drop it's often better to sell it on that side, even if you just buy back into gold.
Aside from that, I'd say definitely work on beating Inferno, then building up a bit until you can beat like MP5 Inferno, then see about crafting yourself a Hellfire Ring. That ring will greatly increase your leveling, which will get you better gear (Paragon levels), etc.
I mentioned this in the old thread and it didn't seem to take off. Spending $.25 for 10M gold seems far more sensible than spending the amount of time it would take to farm 10M gold through normal means. When item prices increase beyond where they are now, I could understand why "normal" players would feel frustrated by their inability to obtain upgrades through natural farming (either by drops or through gold acquisition).
They have acknowledged that the item farming game isn't sustainable or satisfactory as end game content. The change to the gold price seems to be another aspect of that.
So, yeah, this be a problem.
Here are a few pages that may help you get some rudimentary knowledge:
Popular Barbarian Builds
Popular Barbarian Items
Those will tell you where barbarians are in terms of their builds and the items they generally use.
Your short term and long term goals would be the same: Obtain better gear. In the short term you'll want to get cheap get off the AH that lets you farm lower Monster Power levels. Then as you acquire gold / Blizbucks you will want to start upgrading your items. You can go through a more natural process of farming mobs to get gold to buy gear to bla bla, or you could dump $50 into the RMAH and just buy some higher level items / gold and be set.
Unlike games like WoW, there really isn't a nuanced progression curve for Diablo 3. It's just gear acquisition, and learning to smash your six buttons in the correct order. If you want a badass character you could just drop $200 over a weekend and be fairly well off for gear. Then it's just a matter of grinding out Paragon Levels for the sake of...having a neat character portrait.
I don't know, there is still a little base thrill that comes from getting a sweet drop yourself.
But yeah, knowing that I could spend $1 and get the equivalent of twenty nights of play like tonight in progression...that can be disheartening. If I didn't already have a decent bankroll working for me, I'd be fucked....you're never going to progress of what pops out of chests, and even hoping for that one big Auction House sale is a pipe dream.
It's like the real world. The haves make money by having money, and the poor stay poor. The only difference is that at any point you can just pay a few dollars to become a have in this virtual world. And then you never have to play again, and can just talk about item flipping all day.
Got another Plvl today.
This seems like too much xp.
Add me: Furie#1280. Your gear is very outdated. I will give you some spare gear and some other stuff. That will help. You appear to be running a 2H build which I also run but your skills are outdated. Run rend/bloodlust. You won't need revenge.
Lose: The opposite of win
Loose: Your mum
i also spent large amounts of money on gear, which i heard was something else they were looking at
it sounds like those people are dupers that are just lying
TSW: Trillions
PSN: Saint__Justice
I got in a little bit on the gem frenzy before I heard about the duping and I saw no indication of a suspension when I checked a little earlier.
The thing is, the nature of the bug makes it pretty easy for blizzard to determine just who duped and by exactly how much. If you put up an auction of at least 2.15 billion gold at once and then canceled it and returned the gold to your stash, then you duped gold, whether you wanted to or not. So they should just look at the gold transactions of the accounts after they had one of those auctions, and reverse them and then delete the excess gold.
I'd imagine they'd bust out the banhammer for the folks like on one of the streams who repeated the duping process over and over and use the proceeds to buy up everything they could in the AH, but were probably more lenient to the folks who showed more restraint. For the folks on the other side of the large transactions of the more heinous dupers I'm not sure what they would do for punishment, if anything, like if it looked like the dupers were potentially laundering the duped gold. Given how they should have logs to be able to trace all the transactions of the dupers, laundering duped gold probably wouldn't work all that well. They might have wanted to lock some of those accounts temporarily not as punishment, but in order to reverse the transactions and not risk any trouble from having the player online while they are doing it.
Lose: The opposite of win
Loose: Your mum
I think my next upgrade will be the weapon. All the other possible upgrades only give a small dps boost (mempo with crit, 80+ int inna, 150+ int witching hour, 250+ avg dmg 250+ int triumvirate) according to the tooltip. I could find a trifecta zuni ring, but that's worth billions.