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Diablo 3: RMAH or Masked Item Shop
TheRegulator
Member Posts: 30
/tinfoilhat on
I can't help but get the feeling that the RMAH is just a facade for direct item sales. What better way to get players to buy exorbitantly priced digital goods than to lead them to believe that they are actually buying items from other players; when in fact, it was a cleverly disguised pseudonym generated internally by Blizzard.
I mean, altering droprates and then spawning items internally to sell in this manner is completely out of the realm of possibilities.
I question the integrity of the RMAH system. I would prefer to know for certain that I am actually buying items from Blizzard than buying it from Thorbius "AKA - randomly generated pseudonym 1,345,678"
/tinfoilhat off
Comments
Should probably put on a bigger tinfoil hat. They already said they aren't going to dip into the RMAH. An item shop would suggest that Blizzard is getting 100% of the profits when in reality it is going to the seller of the item. You don't have to worry about scams from random websites saying they are selling gold for the cheapest price and end up getting scammed out of it. It's a good idea imo.
The RMAH is pretty much disguised as a monthy fee to play Diablo 3. Lets say I play everyday and use the RMAH, for every item I put on the RMAH Blizzard takes a fee for using the RMAH and a charge for selling an item. Lets just say from all the selling I did it came to a charge of $5.00 a week to use the RMAH. So after 4 weeks Blizzard made $20.00 a month off just 1 person. You can use you free transactions if you wish but Blizzard is still collecting a monthly fee wether it came from your pocket or not. They simply found a way to suck a monthly fee out of a non mmo.
I see your post above. Since Blizz said they won't do it, you believe them, I don't. There's tons of money to be had and Activision is an evil greedy Kotick laden company.
You are looking at it as being a monthly fee, when actually it is a fee for using the RMAH. If you don't want to pay money then don't use the RMAH lmao. It's simple. Show me another MMO where I can pay 5 dollars to get back A LOT more than that by using their game. {mod edit}
Optional or not, its a fee to play Diablo 3 if you choose to do so. It is simple, Diablo 3 is not a mmo so stop comparing it to a mmo. Be in denial all you want but alot of us already know the RMAH is just a scam deal to get a monthly fee out of an action game.
I dont understand why they couldn't just charge a low monthly fee for server maintainance like how xbox live has. I was willing to pay 5$ a month in Diablo 2 just so they wouldn't delete my characters every time I decided to take a break from the game.
There will probably be more people not using the RMAH than those who are using it. Why charge $5 for a feature a lot of people won't use? Why not just individually charge people a few cents per auction as they use it? Wait..
And how isn't Diablo 3 a massively multiplayer online role-playing game? Which doesn't it fit?
Fine, assuming you're not trolling, I'll bite. It depends on the definition you take for "MMO". Now D3 will be multiplayer and online but not massive, that's part of the trick. Massive is subjective and can have a different fit for everyone. IMO D3 doesn't look to be massive. For me, you need an open, explorable world with just tons of area. For others the massively is defined by the player count. For others I'm sure it's even something else. The last reason I wouldn't call it an MMO is the lack of a persistent world.
Anyway, I don't consider it an MMO and since there isn't a set, agreed upon common definition of MMO, neither side is wrong! Yay for win-wins!
diablo 3 isnt an mmo just like league of legends isnt an mmo. both are just games that put a FEW players togethers for co op and/or pvp. if you took every game that put 4-8 players to co op and/or pvp in a map/instance, almost every game with online capabalities would be an mmo.
Hehe, that would be an epic scam.
Could also work on a personal basis: employees sneakily spawning or duping items and selling them under other names.
Yet another aspect in which this system needs a crazy amount of security.
My brand new bloggity blog.
If people think they can make money out of D3 RMAH they are DREAMING.
No way ANYONE can out farm a gold farmer and hacker/bot. ALL your items going to be under cut and won't SELL then you will lose money.
I don't know why people think RMAH is a good thing.
The money to be made could simple be the $ per hour an average human value his time. I think people underestimate the demand. When most players get their Inferno characters ready, do you realy think all these players will sell away all their items on AH at crappy prices in exchange for a couple real life bucks instead of investing to build their characters to become epic? If the game is so good people will trade for good stuff instead of cashing out real money and push up the value for their farming items on these trades.
And don't you think Blizz have a tool to find out if someone who is cashing out real money is a bot or not?
If blizz would be found to scam this by copy and sell stuff. What a backfire that would be on the company. If everybody starts to run around in epic inferno gear together with some drop rate statistic wikipedia I think it would get noticed.
blizzard and the people who run legions of bots will be the ones making money. blizzard isnt doing to stop farmers. blizzard is doing it because they finally understand its impossible to stomp them out. now what they want is a piece of the action instead.
also the easiest bots to write are the ones who use colors. in otherwords, since blizzard loves color coding everything for everyone, the bots will simply ignore those grey/white items and pick up them blues/purple/yellow.
Firstly, I disagree to those saying the OP is a troll. Let me be completely honest here:
1) I actually never thought of the issue the the OP is talking about with RMAH. I was too concerned with the other issues but never thought of this. I doubt they would sneak things in and hide it...but I would NOT put it past them to one day have a "Special Holiday Event" where they put holiday-specific things in the auction house that you can buy directly from Blizzard. I don't know if this will happen....but it's certainly a possibility if the broker fees aren't enough.
2) (See highlighted sentence above) You are making an assumption on approximating the percentage Blizz will take. We all have no idea what they are going to be releasing. How do you know it won't be......50% even? I think a lot of people are seriously having it in their mind that they are going to make really good money off of this game. I have no data to prove this, but I highly doubt you will make money off of this game. There are those who even think they will use this as a full time / part time job (not accusing the above poster of doing this). Don't forget your $5 worth of broker fees are non refundable if your items don't sell!
Disclaimer: This is not a troll post and is not here to promote any negative energy. Although this may be a criticism, it is not meant to offend anyone. If a moderator feels the post is inappropriate, please remove it immediately before it is subject to consideration for a warning. Thank you.
1) Hmmm....maybe not holiday-based items....maybe something more tied in with the lore. Maybe event triggered? X Number of people have slain a certain boss or something. Starting to sound more unlikely....I think I'm going to go back to my holiday idea and assume they will tie holidays to the lore like WoW.
2) Sorry I probably shouldn't have used the word "lots" until I had more numbers myself. But I have seen several people who aren't necessarily going to quit their jobs....but they call this a valid source of income without any concrete details of how it will work and seem to want to "hold off" getting jobs. Most of these people are likely teenagers and not people with real careers to begin with and plenty of time....but still. If they want to get their hopes up that is fine. Time will tell in how all of this turns out!
Disclaimer: This is not a troll post and is not here to promote any negative energy. Although this may be a criticism, it is not meant to offend anyone. If a moderator feels the post is inappropriate, please remove it immediately before it is subject to consideration for a warning. Thank you.
Definitely a tinfoil hat thread.
I think there will be so many of the same item type up on the AH that the prices will end up being a few cents...
Then again i'm picturing a million people in one region using the same AH. Take all the AHs' in NA WoW and slam them together and watch the prices drop (not to mention there will probably be a ton more items in Diablo)
www.wizardsdistrict.com
-I have not read this thread in its entirity but based on the Title, I agree.
This game is being set up as a covert Item $hop, but its actually even more sinister IMO.
Being developed from the ground up- With a real money auction house as the focal point (it is) the devs have adjusted the drop rates to be very , very miniscule for most high powered items. In fact, from what I understand, some drop rates are being set so as to keep a certain "quality" of Armor/weapons to be nearly impossible to get farming (very, very low drop rates)... It is known quite well that rare items will be MUCH rarer in this game than most other games to date- Since they make a % of real money, per transaction they have coded the game to ensure that there will be many rare and very high priced items- Its all in the coding.
Wheather of not they will place these rare items in the AH for 100% profit is yet to be seen, but its no conspiricy to look at the history of greed and see that things far more shady than this happen all the time in the buisness world.
We can argue the point all day but i assure you this is the truth and I will gladly necro this thread a few months into the games release.
i wouldn't put it past blizzard to throw "promotional/special event" items into the AH from time to time.
Haters gonna hate
But I can play this game too. Let's take SWTOR - one of the highest hyped games atm. It's EA behind it(ya, I know that BW developes it) and they love profits like every big bad company does. Now the tinfoil hat part:
What if several EA employees set up starwarsgold.eu site and offer exactly same stuff like regular goldsellers does. Now they don't need to farm items(they can spawn them!), don't need pay for accounts. Now all they need are bots spamming chats/mails or even forums a bit. Then juts let the cash flow. Heck You can even "hack" few "customers" and then offer authenticators for 5$.
What many are forgetting is that these items that are worth selling on RMAH first have to be found by a player and once found the player has to decide to
a. use the item
b. give the item to a friend
c. keep the item for an alt
d. break it down for mats
e. sell it on gold AH
f. sell it on RMAH
Let's not assume that everyone will flood the RMAH with any old drop.
As to to bot farming that wont be easier if at all possible due to the online requirement, bot's work in wow and other mmo's cus of the perdictable nature of the mobs and landcape, meaning virtual waypoints can be created and other stuff decided by reading colour values on the screen, as D3 has random dungeons and mob spawn it will be damn hard to write a bot that does not get picked up by 'Warden' as any good bot would need to read D3 memory space and warden will be watching.
Blizz take a nominal fee from the auctioned goods -whether it's sold or not.
So yea, it would be a wicked move from their side, but a profit reaping one.
So much whining, this is one of the greatest ideas in the history of online gaming and everyone is crying about it. Who cares, because there are going to be millions of people like me who will buy this game, pay to use the RMAH and enjoy myself. Would you rather be flooded with spam of item shops nonstop while you were playing?