Diablo 3 Auction House will utilize Real Money. Will Require Persistent Connection to B.Net to play

Diablo 3's Auction House will feature two currencies, the first one will be in-game gold and the 2nd one will be real life money. Yep, you read it right, Diablo 3 will let you buy items with either gold or real life money! It's also worth noting that you will also be able to sell loot for money, and transfer that money outside the game. I guess gold farming just got interesting.

How do I cash out from the currency-based auction house?
As an advanced feature, players will have the option of attaching an account with an approved third-party payment service to their Battle.net account. Once this has been completed, proceeds from the sale of items in the currency-based auction house can be deposited into their third-party payment service account. “Cashing out” would then be handled through the third-party payment service. Note that this process will be subject to applicable fees charged by Blizzard and the third-party payment service. Also, any proceeds from the sale of items in the currency-based auction house that have been deposited into the Battle.net account will not be transferrable to the third-party payment service account. Not all regions will support this advanced feature at launch. Region-specific details, as well as details regarding which third-party payment services will be supported and the fee that Blizzard will charge for the cash-out process, will all be provided at a later date.

As the Diablo III beta nears, Blizzard announced its anticipated action-role-playing game will require you to be online at all times to play. The characters you can create in Diablo III, up to a limit of 10, will be stored on Blizzard's servers, and therefore require a constant internet connection to access. This applies to all modes of the game, from co-op to player-versus-player to solo play.

According to Rob Pardo, executive producer of Diablo III, this was done mainly to combat the style of hacking present in previous versions of Diablo.

CorpsMan889 wrote:I just don't like the idea of the man who really worked his butt of in the game to make the in game currency not being priority because of the man with a fat billfold, because as we know cash runs the world and someone selling items isn't going to settle for in game currency as quickly as they would cash. If you pay the same ammount for the game initially/monthly everyone should be on the same regulated page including the chips you play with imo.

I guess if I could get over the fact that a rich kid with mommy's credit card could twink out every level

Diablo's Real-Cash Marketplace and You: Why immediately telling Blizzard to suck it, is sensational game-journalism doing it's job.

If you're still adamantly against (or *gasp* now for) the real-money marketplace in D3, let's discuss a little about what real impact you can see depending how you approach the game.

Single player
Intrusion of the marketplace is negligible. The items you purchase from the marketplace can be used in singleplayer games, and likewise any items you likely find in singleplayer campaign can be sold on the auction house. However to each individual person the game is still being played on a solo basis, without intrusion from ANYONE else. Remember, you'd actually have to let someone INTO your lobby in order for this to be multiplayer, so someone "buying their way" into the game in single player is a moot point.

At best, the argument against the Real Money AH at this point is that you are now required to have a persistent connection. I can understand why this irks you if you plan on playing in a LAN situation and I feel your pain, but that isn't the argument of this article.

Multiplayer
So now the controversial issue at hand. If one uses Mommy and Daddy's credit card to buy [Epic Purple Weapon], the world ends and the game is ruined forever for you. I argue that this line of thinking is what sensational gaming journalism has steered gamer opinion toward, and is so blindly anti-change that the industry will be hurt rather than saved from the evil marriage of real world cash and in-game equipment.

Let us be clear about something: Diablo 3's hybrid marketplace is NOT the same as the Free-to-play game's models of allowing players to gain a very clear numerical advantage over other players in terms of pure stats. In Navy Field and World of Tanks for example, you can purchase ammunition from within the game with real-world cash purchased credits meaning you can literally shoot money at enemies.

Evaluating the impact the hybrid auction house will have in multiplayer in D3 needs to be done in two separate ways: PvE and PvP.

PvE
Players banded together will hack and slash their way through hordes of hellspawn once again. But how does purchased gear really affect gameplay here? Remember that the new auction house system is HYBRID, meaning any given item can be listed either as a cash purchase, or a gold purchase. A player could find the same helm being sold by two different auctions, one for gold, and another for cash. This gives all players regardless of chosen payment method access to all the same equipment.

And in going against legions of demons, sometimes a little extra equipment could make the difference. PvE is a team effort, and no matter how a player's gear was attained shouldn't matter when hell's minions are trying to smash your face in.

PvP
Player vs player combat is the real crux of the controversy, but no one wants to admit it because they'd rather slam the game as a whole then talk about their true feelings. To this point, we've covered single player and PvE multiplayer, which are affected by the introduction of real-cash auctions either not at all, or in a way which can only be a benefit.

AtrumX wrote:Yeah, so that will only be annoying if it ends up making them worth WAY more in-game money because everyone sells for RL $.

S7 Interseptor wrote:Real money from playing a game? It sounds good to us normal gaming folk but you have to remember that there is a seedy side of things too. What about sweatshops and people dieing from being forced to farm gold in terrible conditions? Sure that sort of thing happens and there is nothing we can really do to stop it but Blizzard is making it completely legitimized. By offering real world money, it's like they are saying, "hey, people are going to do it anyway why shouldn't we make money off of it?" Because it's wrong and you shouldn't support that kind of activity. Make it in-game currency and be done with it. Sleep better and most importantly not encourage that type of behavior. It boils down to greed. They see this huge amount of money being traded from people farming gold and they want a piece of that pie. Too bad it's tainted.

I'll be honest, I just don't like it. It's seems wrong.

S7 Interseptor wrote:Real money from playing a game? It sounds good to us normal gaming folk but you have to remember that there is a seedy side of things too. What about sweatshops and people dieing from being forced to farm gold in terrible conditions? Sure that sort of thing happens and there is nothing we can really do to stop it but Blizzard is making it completely legitimized. By offering real world money, it's like they are saying, "hey, people are going to do it anyway why shouldn't we make money off of it?" Because it's wrong and you shouldn't support that kind of activity. Make it in-game currency and be done with it. Sleep better and most importantly not encourage that type of behavior. It boils down to greed. They see this huge amount of money being traded from people farming gold and they want a piece of that pie. Too bad it's tainted.

I'll be honest, I just don't like it. It's seems wrong.