The Auction House will play a major role in Diablo III's economy.
By allowing players to perform transactions with both real money (facilitated by PayPal) and in-game gold, the Auction House will serve to spur the game's virtual economy with prices set by players, rather than the developers. This is in contrast to Team Fortress 2's "MannConomy," in which prices are largely based on Valve's in-store pricing scheme.
When the auction house was first introduced in August, many would-be players voiced their dismay and their doubt. I retorted with an article, written largely in support of the the new system.
However, information about the auction house's functionality remained sparse, at least until BlizzCon last weekend.
"Our goal with all of our games is to ensure players have a highly enjoyable, rewarding, and secure experience," said Blizzard of the service. "Acquiring items has always been an important part of the Diablo series, but the previous games have not had a robust, centralized system for facilitating trades, and as a result players have turned to inconvenient and potentially unsafe alternatives, such as third-party real-money-trading organizations"
Blizzard further explained that services for extra-game transactions would have been facilitated by third parties, had they not opted to create their own trading system.
"Many of the transactions between players and these organizations led to a poor player experience and countless customer-service issues involving scams and item/account theft, to name a few. To that end, we wanted to create a convenient, powerful, and fully integrated tool to meet the demand of players who wished to purchase or sell items for real-world currency, and who would likely have turned to a less-secure third-party service for this convenience."
The studio went into great detail to elucidate how exactly the system would function for players.
"Players will be able to make purchases in the currency-based auction house using a registered form of payment attached to their Battle.net account. As with other popular online-purchase services, players will also have the option to charge up their Battle.net account with a balance of funds that can be drawn from for purchases of any digital product available through Battle.net. When players sell an item in the currency-based auction house, the proceeds of the sale are deposited into their Battle.net account."
Furthermore, Blizzard put players' fears to rest that the system would be anything but optional.
"Fans still concerned about using the currency-based auction house can rest easy knowing that the feature is completely optional. After all, the main mode of acquiring awesome items and equipment is still by playing the Diablo III’s core adventure. Besides, there will be no shortage of opportunities to trade with friends and use the full-featured gold-based auction house. Considering that every single item from the most basic of salvaged components to absolutely epic weapons and armor can be traded, bought, and sold, Diablo III will likely keep players busy with the sheer joy that comes with acquiring and managing loot.
“We’ve always tailored our business models to match what we’ve felt would be most appropriate and effective for each game and in each region, and that’s the case with Diablo III as well. The item-based nature of Diablo gameplay has always lent itself to an active trade-based ecosystem.”
