Diablo 3 Discussion Thread

stevedave said:
I really doubt they make that much money from the Auction house....In fact it may very well be possible they lose money on it. So they get 15% of each transaction and assuming they don't split any of that with ebay or anyone else how much would it cost to break even over the cost of the equipment, electricity and manpower to maintain the auction house.

D3 sold around 10 million. Lets assume the average person spent 10 bucks on the RMAH ( I feel that is WAY higher than what the average actually is BTW) so that makes 100 Million and 15% of that is 15 million. This is chump change in the grand scale of things. Take into account the cost of the servers, facilities, and people maintaining them and its probably pretty close to breakeven...Drop in the RMAH development cost and the fact that the RMAH usage has dwindled to near nothing and profitability is more and more unlikely.

So from a financial standpoint I can definitely see them seeing the Auction House as an unprofitable investment for D3 thus not caring about doing account bound items.

In fact Blizzard probably made more money off of diablo 2 sales then RMAH....So they are likely truly trying to find ways to get people to continue to invest into Diablo 3 by making real improvements.

My knowledge is limited though. If the average spent in the RMAH is 100 bucks then I am dead wrong and they are making a pretty solid profit.



WOW> Skorn + shield with 10% crit chance and 300 strength seems pretty broken and awesome too me.
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There's more revenue than you think. A lot of money stays in the bnet system and each transaction is money made.

Even if people only put $10 into the system, a lot of people that sell items turn around ad buy items with the money they make. So instead of blizzard making 1.50 from the $10, they might make closer to $4 if people keep turning around and buying items.

It's no cash revenue like Wow subscription, but I'm pretty sure the profit margin is still good even after all the other money is needed.
 
lilbabycat said:
Do you really think that Acti-Blizz would have greenlighted the RMAH if it wasn't profitable?
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Well considering its pretty much the first of its kind they had no clue if it would or wouldn't be profitable. But I don't think profits in D3 was the driver for this. BitCon is going to be huge in the future and they have to be a part of that. Maybe not for D3 but definitely for future projects. This RMAH is likely a global strategic move and D3 just happened to be the first game to get it. I'm guessing pretty much every blizzard game will having something like this in future....possibly every game.

Breath_of_the_Dying said:
There's more revenue than you think. A lot of money stays in the bnet system and each transaction is money made.

Even if people only put $10 into the system, a lot of people that sell items turn around ad buy items with the money they make. So instead of blizzard making 1.50 from the $10, they might make closer to $4 if people keep turning around and buying items.

It's no cash revenue like Wow subscription, but I'm pretty sure the profit margin is still good even after all the other money is needed.
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I see the point you are making, but that wouldn't effect the average (if we knew it). Because if you Spent 10 bucks. Then Made 10 bucks and then respent that 10 bucks then your total would be 20 bucks spent. Just because it never leaves the auction house doesn't mean you don't count it as spent....So doing this would simply increase the average dollar spent per user...which we don't know.

Just too many unknown factors and blizzard will likely never release this information, but I know they have it. The best we could do would be to do a survey that asked much money spent on RHMA and get a [H] average and assume that is the same throughout. Which I'm guessing would be less then 10 bucks...but I'm just guessing.....There would probably be a HUGE standard deviation though from people spending nothing and others spending thousands.....But I'm guessing the 0's out way the 50+'s by a large margin.

What I do know though is the cost of building and maintaining the auction house is nothing small and at only 15% per transaction they will need quite a bit of usage on the AH for it to break even and become profitable. Expansion packs can only help the AH's profitability though.

Based on how I see things the AH was more of a strategic move to get themselves and their fans into the BitCon world....added profits is a nice bonus and side effect of that move.
 
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stevedave said:
Well considering its pretty much the first of its kind they had no clue if it would or wouldn't be profitable. But I don't think profits in D3 was the driver for this. BitCon is going to be huge in the future and they have to be a part of that. Maybe not for D3 but definitely for future projects. This RMAH is likely a global strategic move and D3 just happened to be the first game to get it. I'm guessing pretty much every blizzard game will having something like this in future....possibly every game.
.
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It's not first of it's kind. It's more or less another F2P (or Pay 2 win if you prefer) model with auction stuck into it. They instead save money by looping the items over and over again via AH instead of creating and selling new contents like any other F2P.
 
infojunkie said:
It's not first of it's kind. It's more or less another F2P (or Pay 2 win if you prefer) model with auction stuck into it. They instead save money by looping the items over and over again via AH instead of creating and selling new contents like any other F2P.
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I like this. You say its not the first of its kind. Then you describe how it is different then other systems. Thus making it the first of its kind.

I'm not in the loop with F2P but as far as I know you can't find Items then sell them for real cash in any other game besides Diablo 3....(and stay within the game.)

I Sold quite a few Diablo 2 items externally.
 
Is anyone here strong enough to help me with the organ collections? Can't seem to beat siegebreaker/Kulle on MP10
 
stevedave said:
I like this. You say its not the first of its kind. Then you describe how it is different then other systems. Thus making it the first of its kind.
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After you get past the auction house frontend; the backend is just another gateway for the transfer of many small amounts of money for a string of data representing an item, the same as any other existing system. There may have been D3 specific issues that came up, but as you might remember, those were patch far quicker than actual gameplay issues got patched (0-2 days versus 1-6months), so one can draw conclusions on where the resources of this game were focused from the start...again questioning the notion that it isn't a hugely profitable venture.
 
Breath_of_the_Dying said:
Maintaining the hardware of a server farm is just a fraction of resources compared to developing and maintaining the software and data used on them.
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Well yes it does cost something to do so, but these are more than likely the same server guys maintaining the WoW servers, and in all likelihood the same employees who write server stuff for other Blizzard games. I really doubt they went and hired a completely new server and software team just for the RMAH. Seems like it would be very wasteful and Blizzard has been cutting corners every since the merger with Activision.

RMAH seems like it was a brainstorm idea from a meeting that picked up traction and made it into the game. I just hate how it left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. Blizzard is in a unique position where the gold for their games is worth more than a box copy of their software. What they should do is just sell in game gold for a fee. I wouldn't have had an issue with that.
 
cageymaru said:
Well yes it does cost something to do so, but these are more than likely the same server guys maintaining the WoW servers, and in all likelihood the same employees who write server stuff for other Blizzard games. I really doubt they went and hired a completely new server and software team just for the RMAH. Seems like it would be very wasteful and Blizzard has been cutting corners every since the merger with Activision.
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They didnt, You're right in that would be very stupid to require that much work and new teams just for an RMAH. All I'm saying is that using just how many people maintain the physical servers is a very poor example to gauge the development cost or maintenance of any system. My company moves tens of millions of dollars daily. Our system admin only goes on site for about two hours a week. There's no way to determine how one guy going on location for 2 hours translates to total maintenance and upkeep costs.

If you consider the GAH already as part of the development costs for the game, than the RMAH really is a hop skip and a jump away. Like I said before, it's unlikely that the Diablo Team spent a large amount of time developing either auction houses. That work is more suited for the battle.net team: the team that handles account managements, paytime for wow, upgrades and CD keys. Saying that the Diablo team spent a huge amount of resources making the auction house would be like hiring a team of french cook specialists to make them all cook mexican food, its a different area of expertise.

The rest of the infrastructure for RMAH was already there in terms of server capacity. There's already payment and purchases through battle.net The only unique development outside of what was already there mostly goes to the legal team with financials and contracts with paypal. Granted, it's not a flick of a switch or a (*Legal in Elysium), but the RMAH was not built from scratch nor needed new teams just to make it happen.

This is also why blaming the RMAH for bad writing, short content, or bad artstyle is just plain stupid. Like some people think a 5th act could have existed if only resources were not used on the RMAH. Like the artists, writers, level designers, or even game engine developers had any significant part to play with making the RMAH. Just goes to show how ignorant people are of software development or game development. I guess in their eyes, a game developer is a game developer is a game developer.
 
Breath_of_the_Dying said:
They didnt, You're right in that would be very stupid to require that much work and new teams just for an RMAH. All I'm saying is that using just how many people maintain the physical servers is a very poor example to gauge the development cost or maintenance of any system. My company moves tens of millions of dollars daily. Our system admin only goes on site for about two hours a week. There's no way to determine how one guy going on location for 2 hours translates to total maintenance and upkeep costs.

If you consider the GAH already as part of the development costs for the game, than the RMAH really is a hop skip and a jump away. Like I said before, it's unlikely that the Diablo Team spent a large amount of time developing either auction houses. That work is more suited for the battle.net team: the team that handles account managements, paytime for wow, upgrades and CD keys. Saying that the Diablo team spent a huge amount of resources making the auction house would be like hiring a team of french cook specialists to make them all cook mexican food, its a different area of expertise.

The rest of the infrastructure for RMAH was already there in terms of server capacity. There's already payment and purchases through battle.net The only unique development outside of what was already there mostly goes to the legal team with financials and contracts with paypal. Granted, it's not a flick of a switch or a (*Legal in Elysium), but the RMAH was not built from scratch nor needed new teams just to make it happen.

This is also why blaming the RMAH for bad writing, short content, or bad artstyle is just plain stupid. Like some people think a 5th act could have existed if only resources were not used on the RMAH. Like the artists, writers, level designers, or even game engine developers had any significant part to play with making the RMAH. Just goes to show how ignorant people are of software development or game development. I guess in their eyes, a game developer is a game developer is a game developer.
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Agreed 100%. :)
 
refraxion said:
Is anyone here strong enough to help me with the organ collections? Can't seem to beat siegebreaker/Kulle on MP10
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Siege/Kulle isn't the hard one... that's Leroic/and what's her face.

If you have the DPS I can finish them all off for you (especially Monk/Barb 200k+ with decent eHP. Have to be able to survive Siege's reflection, bugs, arcane, etc). I have a p100 CM Wizard, full lock, but without adequate DPS killing things in MP10 is slow. My hand generally will feel like it's gonna fall off if I have to keep up a lock for 10 minutes. Plus it's aggravating as well.
I used to do runs with an MP10 carry group, but most have stopped playing... heck I took about a 3 month break.
Jeremiah#1810
 
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Breath_of_the_Dying said:
This is also why blaming the RMAH for bad writing, short content, or bad artstyle is just plain stupid. Like some people think a 5th act could have existed if only resources were not used on the RMAH. Like the artists, writers, level designers, or even game engine developers had any significant part to play with making the RMAH. Just goes to show how ignorant people are of software development or game development. I guess in their eyes, a game developer is a game developer is a game developer.
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The argument is that artists, writers, etc weren't hired or weren't given enough time/resources to make a good game, and instead that time/resources was given to the RMAH people. Looking at D3 in 2008 shows a title that is identical to the release version.
What happened in those 4 years? Planned features were removed and the RMAH was added. One can simply look at the state of the storyline (especially past act 2), act 4 as a whole (a rushed mess), and the lack of dungeon randomization to see that *someone* wasn't given the time/resources to make a "complete" game. This has all been discussed to death though.

What kind of randomization can we expect from the expansion? I've seen a (mocking) photo from the presentation that shows the minimap of one of the "random" dungeons and it was a straight line. Is that what we can expect?
 
lilbabycat said:
What kind of randomization can we expect from the expansion? I've seen a (mocking) photo from the presentation that shows the minimap of one of the "random" dungeons and it was a straight line. Is that what we can expect?
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What's this about "we"? You're not going to be playing the game.

A guy over at Diablofans/Reddit who tried the beta had this to say of the beta level design:

Also the level design for the couple of beta levels (only about 15 min per run, so not that much levels) looked improved, no endless dead ends, alternative routes to goals etc.
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UnknownSouljer said:
Siege/Kulle isn't the hard one... that's Leroic/and what's her face.

If you have the DPS I can finish them all off for you (especially Monk/Barb 200k+ with decent eHP. Have to be able to survive Siege's reflection, bugs, arcane, etc). I have a p100 CM Wizard, full lock, but without adequate DPS killing things in MP10 is slow. My hand generally will feel like it's gonna fall off if I have to keep up a lock for 10 minutes. Plus it's aggravating as well.
I used to do runs with an MP10 carry group, but most have stopped playing... heck I took about a 3 month break.
Jeremiah#1810
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I have a barb with about 230k DPs with wrath up. But only about 150-180k without Lol.... :(
 
I haven't been playing much but I figured I'd level up my Demon hunter to get more paragon levels...and god damn I forgot just how much he sucks.

Is there any way I can get some damage out of this guy so I can do some MP10?

http://d3up.com/b/992225

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/dirkdirden-1579/hero/10075785

I don't really plan on buying gear so I'm more referring to skills or builds. Multi Shot Seems to be the best that I have tried but nothing does enough damage. My Barb can Hammer of the ancients, My Wizard can Akon or CM lock, and my WD fire bats, and My Monk bells.

What the hell can my DH do to handle MP10 and not take years to do it?


also I have 217 Paragons ready for when they make it global.
 
stevedave said:
I haven't been playing much but I figured I'd level up my Demon hunter to get more paragon levels...and god damn I forgot just how much he sucks.

Is there any way I can get some damage out of this guy so I can do some MP10?

http://d3up.com/b/992225

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/dirkdirden-1579/hero/10075785

I don't really plan on buying gear so I'm more referring to skills or builds. Multi Shot Seems to be the best that I have tried but nothing does enough damage. My Barb can Hammer of the ancients, My Wizard can Akon or CM lock, and my WD fire bats, and My Monk bells.

What the hell can my DH do to handle MP10 and not take years to do it?


also I have 217 Paragons ready for when they make it global.
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Rapid Fire - Bombardment? It's a pretty crazy combo with Shadow Power, although I have no experience at MP10 so I don't know how competitive it is there.
 
Aix. said:
What's this about "we"? You're not going to be playing the game.

A guy over at Diablofans/Reddit who tried the beta had this to say of the beta level design:
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Nice, he also mentioned a new Gem type. Hopefully it adds a little bit more to armor customization beyond "get the gem with your characters main stat".
 
AceCR42 said:
Nice, he also mentioned a new Gem type. Hopefully it adds a little bit more to armor customization beyond "get the gem with your characters main stat".
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Possibly fix thorns as well. A pure defense build with a working thorns would be pretty cool.
 
stevedave said:
I haven't been playing much but I figured I'd level up my Demon hunter to get more paragon levels...and god damn I forgot just how much he sucks.

Is there any way I can get some damage out of this guy so I can do some MP10?

http://d3up.com/b/992225

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/dirkdirden-1579/hero/10075785

I don't really plan on buying gear so I'm more referring to skills or builds. Multi Shot Seems to be the best that I have tried but nothing does enough damage. My Barb can Hammer of the ancients, My Wizard can Akon or CM lock, and my WD fire bats, and My Monk bells.

What the hell can my DH do to handle MP10 and not take years to do it?


also I have 217 Paragons ready for when they make it global.
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Well, I personally believe that DH is a fundamentally broken class. I wanted to really like it, and enjoyed playing it during the beta (with a level cap of 13 if you recall) but at the top end it doesn't scale, and all the advantages that the DH once have had since been nerfed so badly that I don't consider the DH to be a top tier class... in well anything. It was the first class I played, I really tried to make it work (as the Amazon in D2 was my favorite class by far in D2, followed by the Sorcerer), made it up to 58 and just gave up. Moved to wizard and didn't look back.

Okay, that's it for the not helpful stuff, here's the as much help as I can give.

The best DH can work with is trying to balance defense with offense. DH has to rely more on utility than any other class, which more or less can run in and use only 1-2 skills to do brute force and everything else as support. DH requires probably the most active play out of any class to be good and stay alive. There is a stark contrast between playing DH and playing a Monk that drops tornados...

So with that said you're trying to maximize these two areas.
RC - Bola Shot - Thunderball. Everything is rushing you and you want to generally keep things away, this helps with that. It also helps that this skill does AOE damage.
LC - Spike Trap - Echoing Blast. I use this as a primary DPS skill. Once you get good at placement it's amazing. Basically I continuously fire with the primary skill and then without releasing LH, simply press RH to get the traps going, every time the traps blow up, setup another round of traps. If you get good you can start using the walls and narrow spaces to confine the traps. My favorite thing is to compress all three traps in something like a doorway and get all three to explode at once on one enemy. Certain enemies are large enough that it's easy to position two traps under them simultaneously, such as bosses. In any case it's a good skill to have. In addition to being high DPS, it's also AOE.

If you don't want to use Spike Trap then your other major DPS option is Elemental Arrow with either Ball Lightning or Nether Tentacles. I generally chose the life regen. Elemental Arrow is also AOE but functions differently than Spike Trap. I've played them both long enough to know the pros and cons of Spike Trap vs Elemental Arrow but it's harder to explain than be shown in practice. The super short version is that Spike Trap helps with wide dispersion versus Elemental Arrow which generally helps more if enemies are all charging you in a row from one side.

1 - Shadow Power - Gloom - Sadly, due to the brokenness of the class, every DH needs this. Don't bother trying to play without it.
2 - Vault - Tumble - Mobility is your best friend. It doesn't deal damage with tumble, but saving discipline is more important than dealing damage. Once you're at 0 discipline, you're as good as dead anyway.
3 - Preparation - Battle Scars - Not a whole lot needs to be said here. The guarantee of life with this rune is a life saver. Having access to this and a potion has saved me a multitude of times
4 - Open Slot. This can be used for many things. If you didn't pick up Elemental Arrow or Spike Trap, you can put that here. Or you can choose more Hatred Regen with something like Bat Companion. Another really good option believe it or not is Sentinel with the defense bubble rune (don't bother with the health one, 1% per second is basically nothing, the defense adds much more to your eHP). With the defense bubble up and Gloom, you can withstand a bombardment from a much wider range of enemies. After all, if you can't survive than dealing lots of damage doesn't help. I guess it also helps that the sentries themselves do actually increase your damage quite a bit. Another possibility is Marked for Death, with any rune (Grim Reaper is my personal favorite). It's a good skill, but I found I didn't like it for solo play as utility in another skill helped more. But you may want to pick it for something like ubers where it will help EVERYONE kill the bosses faster and you should generally be able to stay away from the mobs as you should have a barb/monk tanking.

Passives
Night Stalker - You need this skill. It's the only way to keep up Gloom and Vault up as necessary all the time. Trying to find alternative ways to keep your discipline up are just not viable.
2/3 - Are actually open in terms of what you can use, depending on your gear and play style. I personally use Archery and Perfectionist which of course are damage and Disc/eHP respectively. Other options primarily are damage (Steady Aim), but be a good player and don't bother with Sharpshooter. It's a worthless passive that pads DPS and fools n00bs into thinking it's good. Tactical Advantage is another solid choice for more mobility, but I picked the ones I'm using as the double Vault generally was enough distance, the only thing the additional running was good for most of the time is just trying to clear the map faster, not for survival at higher MPs.
 
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Aix. said:
What's this about "we"? You're not going to be playing the game.
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I was thinking exactly the same thing. Lilbabycat has mostly been trashing the game yet continues to post in this thread. I'm left with :confused:
 
Just curious, Harkamus are you still playing? Haven't seen any updates about your billion EXP per hour runs, wondering what you've been up to. ;)

LeninGHOLA said:
Same thing big_aug does in the PoE thread. Wanna have a prisoner exchange?
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Hit post, saw this and spit my drink onto my keyboard. Thanks.
 
StryderxX said:
That looks so much better that playing on a mouse/KB.
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Well I doubt that. It is just cool to have 4 players in the same room forced on the same screen. Reminds me of the many D2 LAN parties of my younger years.

PC diablo3 would probably be just as fun if you put 3 players in the same room where you can shoot the shit and shit.

I think growing up with tons of friends playing Golden eye, Mario Kart, worms, Bomberman, street fighter, ect has left a bias soft spot when it comes to multiplayer games.
 
LOL ! so with expansion everyones current gear is going to be junk and blizzard says thanks for the real money you gave us only now for you to spend more to upgrade hahahaha glad I never purchased anything with real money in the rmah.
 
TwistedAegis said:
Just curious, Harkamus are you still playing? Haven't seen any updates about your billion EXP per hour runs, wondering what you've been up to. ;)



Hit post, saw this and spit my drink onto my keyboard. Thanks.
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I hit paragon 100 one day before my first semester starting graduate school for my master's. I am now starting my third semester on Monday. I went full time every semester including this summer semester which just finished two weeks ago. I haven't had the time or energy to play much of anything. I have logged in a few times just to check auction house or muck around for a little bit, but never for extended play sessions.

I will say this though. When Reaper of Souls expansion comes out, I will most likely switch mains to crusader. I think the way I read it right, paragon levels are account bound, so every character that reaches level cap will start at your highest paragon level. It's not not having to level paragon to 100 again, although endless paragon is something else entirely.
 
Harkamus said:
I will say this though. When Reaper of Souls expansion comes out, I will most likely switch mains to crusader. I think the way I read it right, paragon levels are account bound, so every character that reaches level cap will start at your highest paragon level. It's not not having to level paragon to 100 again, although endless paragon is something else entirely.
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No, paragon levels will all be converted to "paragon points" that you can invest into various stats of each character. The points will be account-wide, so you can invest them amongst your characters as you see fit.

The new paragon points will not be capped, so if you want to continue playing and grinding out points you can certainly do so.

Edit: I don't believe they have stated whether higher paragon levels (attained now) will be worth more when converted to points. I assume it will actually be a straight X experience points = 1 paragon point, so those of you who ground out higher levels will be rewarded appropriately.
 
That's sad.

I do not have the time nor intestinal fortitude to grind like I did for my monk. Of course, I say that now and will probably do the opposite. Coffeeeeeeeeeeeeee, I need you!
 
Harkamus said:
That's sad.

I do not have the time nor intestinal fortitude to grind like I did for my monk. Of course, I say that now and will probably do the opposite. Coffeeeeeeeeeeeeee, I need you!
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From how it has been described, you might not need to grind out increasingly humongous amounts of exp just to attain points.

When you attain a point you'll be able to invest in a number of categories to customize your character. Nobody really knows if there will be categories that require more than single-point investments or what the extent of the categories will even be, but it sure sounds more satisfying than just grinding out levels for MF/GF.
 
Aix. said:
From how it has been described, you might not need to grind out increasingly humongous amounts of exp just to attain points.

When you attain a point you'll be able to invest in a number of categories to customize your character. Nobody really knows if there will be categories that require more than single-point investments or what the extent of the categories will even be, but it sure sounds more satisfying than just grinding out levels for MF/GF.
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But, but, I must reach 100% critical hit chance!
 
From what I read, you add up the paragon levels from all your toons.

So if you have a 100 monk, a 20 wizard, and a 5 barb, you'll have 125 points.

What I'm not sure yet is if you get those 125 points to distribute among those toons, or if you get 125 points per toon to distribute.
 
TwistedAegis said:
From what I read, you add up the paragon levels from all your toons.

So if you have a 100 monk, a 20 wizard, and a 5 barb, you'll have 125 points.

What I'm not sure yet is if you get those 125 points to distribute among those toons, or if you get 125 points per toon to distribute.
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I read this too, or interpreted it as such. I believe it's 125 to spread across your toons, not 125 per toon. That would be sick and OP.
 
Harkamus said:
I read this too, or interpreted it as such. I believe it's 125 to spread across your toons, not 125 per toon. That would be sick and OP.
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Well someone before mentioned badass points, which really wouldn't be a bad system for D3 to steal. You earn points across all characters, benefits aren't capped but have diminishing returns, and the benefits are shared across all characters.
 
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