The Diablo III auction house is gone. Just as promised back in September , as preparation for Reaper of Souls, Blizzard removed one of the most hated features of the game.
Completed transactions can still be claimed until June 24, 2014, but searching and bidding is no longer possible. We have to find or craft our gear from now on.
Comments
37 responses to “The Diablo III Auction House Is Gone.”
Maybe others here will correct me, but for most of my friends it wasn’t the AH they hated, but the fact the loot system strongly encouraged you to use it by not dropping relevant stuff. Loot 2.0 with the auction houses still running would have been fine for most of them.
As for me, I was never bothered by the auction houses before, nor am I bothered that they’re gone now.
Spot on ZJ. I would have been more than happy to have the auction houses with the loot 2.0 system. I disliked the fact that the AH was the primary method of upgrading gear, due to the spectacularly bad drop rates of anything useful while playing your own characters.
Exactly right mate, the biggest issue before loot 2.0 was that the drops were incredibly random stat wise, so bad in fact that you would get barbarian armour with +INT… totally pointless armour type.
I’m sort of Sad to see it go, i made $100 in the first couple of weeks selling in game gold and legendary items before i stopped playing.
TBH they could have just shut down the RM side of it; I found the AH good for generating ingame money to be used on crafting. Meant I didnt have to grind for money (just… gear :/)
Grinding gear is what Diablo is and always was about. 🙂
I agree with @dnr – I’ve seen too many wizard hats with +STR and +DEX on it that it made me lose my faith in the sense of the loot dropping.
I think the problem is that most people don’t trust the auction house.
Even if you could play the game without needing it, what about after the next patch?
By getting rid of it, Blizzard are making a definite statement to people.
now just remove the online requirement and i’ll be extremely happy… lol yeah right…
welll…. now that there is no AH, and after what just announced with SIMCITY… http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/03/simcity-finally-gets-an-offline-mode-today/
maybe not so far fetched…?
Pretty sure the online requirement was mandated first (as an anti-piracy/MMO social pressure measure) and the AH was just a ‘nice to have’ they implemented to make the best of that bad online-only situation. Kill a few birds with the one stone, as it were.
I still believe there was an element of preserving the sanctity of the auction houses with the always on requirement. Hoping to see offline announced in the next month or two once sufficient distance is achieved from any AH related decisions.
its not going to happen. it’s like asking for an offline WoW. Yes this game can be played single player but so can WoW. It’s a similar argument. The game is designed to run on battlenet, and to play with friends. Honestly I actually find it quite dull when playing alone.
Doesn’t that stance completely dismiss the console versions as a legitimate product? Works fine offline on there.
I don’t know anything about the console version. I imagine some considerable changes went into those versions. For starters you could still push the multiplayer aspect with consoles because you can play with multiple people on the same TV, you can’t do that on PC, thus the same theory is at play but with different implementation.
Or perhaps they had different issues with how consoles connect to servers or host games or route the traffic? I’m not too sure.
I wish! But I think unfortunately, Blizzard want a replacement for WoW, so they are focused on making Diablo III a MMO. “Social interaction equals player retention.”
true, but i still can’t see it happening… blizzard are fairly stubborn… that said the console versions play offline just fine… so they _could_ but probably won’t 🙁
Can’t wait to see all these AH haters still getting nowhere in the game and jumping on the next hate bandwagon. Loot 2.0 drops are, if anything, worse than the previous system and unless you have a stockpile of gold, the Mystic is not going to save your ‘gearing woes’. Unless you actually play it as intended as a multiplayer game with other people, Bind on Account is going to cripple any possible form of trading you could have ever done.
But I guess the vocal minority of ‘players’, screaming for off-line mode for their singleplayer game don’t care or even know about this, right? Let’s cater towards them…
what are you talking about seems like you are the one “jumping on the next hate bandwagon”. The loot system is miles better then what it was, loot 2.0 has never given me a useless item the worst it has given me is a item that isn’t my main stat to use on my followers, but the stats it had were perfect for him. Also gold is not hard nor would i call it a grind with the new adventure mode.
Move aside, “Hitler did nothing wrong”, there’s a new most-wrong-comment-on-the-internet!
Loot 2.0 is a fantastic improvement. It’s given the game new life, it’s proper fun now.
Gear used to be stupid. Barbarian helm? Have some int! Wizard wand? Have some str! And dex!
And it’s pretty sweet how the items scale with you. I’ve been playing through with friends on new dudes with the difficulty cranked up, and items have been great. Not to mention the legendary items.
There are downsides, but money isn’t really one of them. I’ve found going to town with an inventory full of blues and rares have been a good source of tens of thousands of gold. It’s a balancing act between salvaging and selling.
The problems I have seen though are: common items are incredibly rare! Next to no whites are dropping now, which means no common scrap for crafting. This might be because of group magic find, I don’t know.
Legendaries being BOA, I will agree is a bit of a dumb move. I can’t defend that.
But ultimately, still a huge improvement.
Legendaries are BOA for the same reason that gear is BOA in WOW. It’s to stop 3rd party selling sites which were rampant in D2. That was the initial goal for the AH. People didn’t like that (more due to the loot problems) and so now we get BOA instead of AH.
People complained about the “trading” system, so now we have next to no trading… Play with friends and you can still swap gear. Play solo and you don’t really need to. I don’t really see the problem
How does BOA work? Does that mean that if a Legendary item drops in a multi session, whomever picks it up then permanently owns it, and can’t pass it to a friend standing next to them that might better use it?
When a player finds a BOA, it has a 2 hour window to be traded to any of the people who were in-game when it dropped. It doesn’t lose this property when traded, but once those 2 hours are up, whoever is holding the item keeps it fiveever (that’s more than forever).
Is it two hours in-game or two hours real-time, I hear you ask. Well, I forget. I think it’s real-time.
So if I go buy the game now, my missus can’t give my new character any of those legendary drops she’s gotten over the last few days. That seems a bit restrictive. Thanks for clearing that up.
No she can’t. If she could then anyone could start selling items on 3rd party websites just like in D2.
Oh right, those guys. I guess it’s a valid reason.
Still a bit of a shame though.
I didn’t think it was hated as much as it broke game-progression because you could buy practically 2nd-best-in-slot gear all the way up to finishing the game on normal, for thirty seconds’ worth of mob-killing gold, which eliminated the gear-hunting component of the game entirely, leaving only the combat mechanics and story to stand on their lonesome. And it turns out they do not stand all that well on their own.
Feature I personally hated most was the Always Online, which offered brilliant new features to the old experience like:
* Forcing you to manually turn off general/trade chat every time you log in (because they thought it was a fucking MMO or something)
* Lag on mouse-clicks/actions
* Random unavailability
* Inability to use mods
* No local co-op / forcing your friends who want to play to set up their own account instead of using the second disc you have at home
BRILLIANT NEW FEATURES, I TELL YOU.
Couldn’t make online an option, noooo had to make it mandatory, even if you weren’t planning on using it and got NO BENEFIT FROM IT WHATSOEVER. We – players – lost dramatically more than we gained there, all so Blizzard/Activision investors could be happy about their anti-piracy efforts.
Assholes.
Totally agree. Although they did end up giving the console version an offline option which is actually why I ended up buying it for the PS3 even though I had it on PC.
So it is within the realms of possibility that they do the same for the PC version.
That’s one thing i’d really like for D3, not so much mods but addons to find out DPS and shit like that.
Hitting the nail on the head as to why I never got D3, the design around the Loot-AH relationship was also a problem, glad that’s over with though, but the always online is 120% a deal breaker for me, especially when its predecessors never needed it, e.g. Sim City.
You make me sad techy
Nope, it’s too deeply integrated in how the game is written. It’s a design choice.
We aren’t in 1998 anymore.
You know what sucks balls about non online games? games that don’t have accounts?
No bloody progress across different devices.
With Bnet, I can log in and have all my characters, games and accounts synced across my PC, my laptop or a friends PC.
If I really want to I can even let my friend use my account to try the game (which I actually did last week).
No disc required, no copying save files on a USB.
From a business perspective, it makes total sense to force online. You get to gather data, which leads to better/faster improvements, you get to develop online features such as the new clan and community integration. You get to see your friends list and chat across all blizzard games, automatic built in DRM…. the list goes on. What arseholes they are for trying to protect their work and investment.
we no longer live in a world of Starcraft 1 LAN parties with direct comp to comp serial connections. You’re just going to have to adapt like the rest of us.
Yes the lag can be an issue and yes general chat is plain stupid but at the end of the day if you want offline play then get off the internet and play D2. Games are not made to suit your particular individual style of play. Find something that does suit you and stop complaining about the things that don’t.
That kind of apologism is a serious hindrance to getting good customer service. There are plenty of companies which don’t force these mandates which do just fine for themselves. The lag in particular is inexcusable from a customer experience point of view.
There is no reason we can’t have benefits of an option to log in, account-based, and get all those neat cloud saves and achievements and other crap, as an enticement to be online. But forcing it is just unwelcome and unnecessary and anti-consumer, especially when it results in an inferior experience not compensated for. In those instances – and in D3 there are many – there’s no benefit to the consumer, only the publisher.
That’s how the publisher tells you, “We felt that our needs were more important than yours,” which, yes, IS the mark of an asshole. It should not be tolerated, let alone excused or even rewarded.
And actually, you’ll find that games ARE made to suit individuals’ preferences… just in bulk. If they complain loudly enough. Go take a look at the difference between DA3 and DA2, and ask the developers how much DA2 feedback influenced their decisions. Why do you think ME3 got an updated ending? Games aren’t made in a vacuum, so yes – complaints ARE constructive. Saying that, “We no longer live in that age,” when direct evidence to the contrary abounds is kind of ignorant.
Exactly…. people complained about the auction house system and the loot problems and Blizzard fixed it.
Granted it took them some time but Blizzard aren’t exactly known for doing things quickly. I think Blizzard has done an excellent job with improving D3 from what it was last year. I defended it back then for one main reason. It was still fun as hell. It wasn’t D2… it wasn’t supposed to be. It was 12 years later. Sure it had some problems and bugs and lag but so does every other new release these days. And while the design choice may not be the most popular, no one forced you to buy it. They don’t hide the fact that it’s online only. You know that before you buy it. Then you buy it and complain. That’s what I don’t get.
If you say to me “I didn’t buy the game because always online doesn’t suit me” then that’s perfectly fine.
But if you buy it, play it and then bitch and moan online…. that’s not OK. That’s just being a whiny, entitled prick (not you personally just that type of person). No one complains that hearthstone is always online…
You’re complaining that they didn’t fix everything or that they didn’t fix the things YOU wanted them to fix. Yet they did listen to the community and made huge improvements to the game. I don’t think it’s fair to attack them for not changing the fundamental premise of the game even when they made heaps of other improvements.
Also there seems to be this massive entitlement that just because it’s called Diablo it has to be exactly the same as the previous game.
Just like with the disastrous SimCity release. There’s nothing wrong with trying to make SimCity multiplayer. There’s nothing wrong with trying to make a slightly different game. Obviously in this case they screwed it up completely, both with the implementation of these “multiplayer” features and with the terrible servers, but my point is that the idea is fine. They screwed the execution but that’s no reason to not try new things. Sim City in a massive, living, interconnected world (or planet) would be awesome if done right.
Same goes for D3. They tried to change things a little bit. It’s probably not enough of a change to make it appear different, and quite a few mutliplayer features were cut during development, but you can’t blame them for trying.
I agree that the lag is problem. I even stopped playing because of it, back when Inferno difficulty was extremely brutal. Now with the difficulty balancing and scaling small lag spikes are no longer an issue. Of course it would be better if they weren’t there, but then we’d just find something else to complain about like a slight FPS drop with lots of explosions going on or something like that.
I’m sure Blizzard learned from the experience but expecting them to change something this fundamental now is unrealistic and saying they don’t listen to players is just plain wrong because they clearly have.
As a side note…. D3 has no ongoing fees. The team working on this game and supporting it is probably tiny, compared to Blizzard’s other projects right now. It’s not a cash cow like WoW which can afford massive gameplay changes and content updates every 6 months.
You seem to be missing the core point that forced-online is not a fundamental, core gameplay design decision, which you could have a preference for or against but it would be based on personal taste and how the game should play. It’s a protectionist publisher anti-consumer decision which adds nothing positive to the gameplay. The game, offline, could play EXACTLY the same as it does online to the single-player, only without the lag and without (granted, infrequent) server outages. That was not a design decision, it was a protectionist one. One with zero consumer benefits.
It’s not a trivial disadvantage, and it was also a far greater crime than the actual design decision of their looting/AH methods. That was a design decision and yes, they changed it. So yes, they changed a design decision based on what some players wanted, but they refused to change the non-design decision which only benefits the publisher, which players also wanted – I’d argue wanted more.
And even though the argument for maintaining online-only as a ‘design decision’ doesn’t hold any weight on its own, it’s completely undermined by the fact that they were not only able to, but DID remove the online-requirement for the console. It’s a doable thing. The reason it hasn’t been done is a DRM decision, not a design decision.
That’s very telling, and that’s very worthy of condemnation. It’s not even a case of ‘They didn’t make the game you want, so you can’t complain’. A) You CAN complain. B) They did make that game – they put it on consoles.
It’s not a defensible decision from a gameplay perspective, and it absolutely wasn’t critical to deliver the experience that they wanted to – unlike the (however misguided) goals Maxis claims to have gone in with on their interconnected regions.
Drops occur so often you get a handful of legendaries per act and rares pretty much drop all the time. I miss diablo 2 where trading was actually something! I feel like im roflstomping all my way through levels until you hit the next difficulty and you get one shot or you fight impossible elites with god like abilities.
Blizzard now days does not know how to scale for shit, it’s like wow Bigger numbers are very bad.
Have you even played since the latest changes? Your post sounds like you’re complaining about what the game was a year ago at release
I just played it over this week and today even, rares are dropped all the time, so much so that i don’t even pick up blues to sell.
It seems Blizzard have very sneakily added some Aus servers. I’m not 100% on this though, but yesterday my chums and I noticed that for the very first time, we had sub-100ms ping.
When did this happen? Did they announce this? Is it even the case?