Diablo 3 has shut down the auction houses.  A huge mistake for shareholders and players alike.  I played Diablo 3 for 800+ hours all because my core reward loop was the time was not wasted getting loot.  Now it is.  No real dollars equals waste of time.  After killing the umpteenth demon and I can’t cash my time legally, morally, or ethically?

For shareholders it means a huge revenue stream shut down.  My preliminary population and revenue estimates 6 months ago had the revenue at $4 million per day.  If they had kept it, the game would go on 20+ years.  And the real revenue figure is likely $10 million+ per day.  A huge cash goose.  Maybe they didn’t want that.  The shortsighted view of selling an xpac may have motivated the decision.  Hit and run and done.  Seems to work well for Grand Theft Auto’s modus operandi.

For the puritans among d3 players they place little value on people’s time or effort.  You cannot succeed at gold farming without play time.  And the rewards go to those who play the most.  Which I thought was something puritans are after?  Or are they looking for a handout and the difficulty mode permanently set to MP zero?  I noticed the scale of difficulties from release till sept 2013 as decreasing on all points of the game.  The game was much harder by 10’s of degrees early on.  (take whatever is being measured for difficulty, say, DPS, and divide it by 10 every month or so since release).  (compare it to what was available at the time)  The victory over the game during that time actually meant something.  The icing on the cake was cashing in on that play time.  I ended up getting uber items from drops just because I spent time actually playing the game and working the numbers.

Is it better to kill 40 monsters on mp10 or 800 monsters on mp6?  It’s the 800 monsters on mp6 due to more chances that the random item roll would pop out something good.  The chance of each individual item dropping is still the same but with more chances I am more likely to get a great item.  And to play one or the other (mp10 or mp6) took the same amount of time.  I did get great items and now alas, I have few incentives to do it anymore.

Blinding ourselves to some ephemeral spirit of the game leaves reality and virtual reality wanting for a company to do right by those who would see games become something more than a stereotypical game.