Diablo III's Auction House Has Now Officially Shut Down

[black_knight1337]

It's a shame the AH got made a scapegoat for the old design issues with the loot system. At least it shows Blizzard put their customers first, contrary to what people claim.

In addition, playing blizzard games now is a real hassle, especially if you need to travel for work like I do. The locked my account because I tried to access it from a hotel IP. Tried to unlock it, took picture of the disc, game box and cd-key and send it to them and no words. Tried their website to unlock the account with the cdkey and it doesn't work.

Really? I was in a similar situation a while back and within 10 minutes of me contacting them I had my account back.

-Snip-

Loot tables? All that really achieved was forcing people to farm the same content over and over in hopes of getting the item they wanted. Personally, I prefer Diablo 3's method of farm whatever content you want and you'll still be rewarded but I can see why that could be appealing to some people.

Outside of that though, it's always been just good old RNG. If anything, there's less of it in Diablo 3 thanks to the number of systems in place to control it.

2) Blizzard let my account get hacked one too many times. And before you or anyone else, tries to pull the "Well, stop looking at porn/scams/durr hurr IR so fun-E" line, I'm a computer security specialist by trade. It's my bloody JOB to fix and prevent this shit, including the social engineering aspect.

The failure could have only come on their end, and sure enough it was. A cursory search on the net will reveal many incidents of Blizzard's shit getting broken into. Contrary to what some folks say, Blizzard isn't infallible, and they made themselves a HUGE target with this Bnet business. It was inevitably going to happen.
(and Blizzard is by no means the only major gaming company to get hacked; it's happened to bigger, like Sony. The lesson is to never assume Big and Rich = Secure)

3) The second time it was hacked was right on the heels of a fresh format and install (read: I didn't even have Starcraft 2 installed, so even if a keylogger or root somehow hooked into my system, it couldn't get my credentials in the first place) but that isn't point.

Going to need a source on that. Had a bit of a look myself and haven't found any official statements saying that any of their security breaches have been enough to compromise an account. Only ones I could find explicitly state "this information alone is NOT enough for anyone to gain access to Battle.net accounts" which means the accounts are still secure.

For how Diablo III should have worked see Torchlight II, a game that didn't explode because you could play it both offline and online.

So the right way to do it is to have no hack prevention whatsoever for a game which is part of a genre that is multiplayer focused?

 

[Atmos Duality]

Loot tables? All that really achieved was forcing people to farm the same content over and over in hopes of getting the item they wanted. Personally, I prefer Diablo 3's method of farm whatever content you want and you'll still be rewarded but I can see why that could be appealing to some people.

From what I heard, they had to adjust those tables considerably from launch.
It was bad; very bad. Where some folks were spending several dozen hours doing nothing but grinding and getting 1 or 2 items.

Outside of that though, it's always been just good old RNG. If anything, there's less of it in Diablo 3 thanks to the number of systems in place to control it.

If you say so.

Going to need a source on that. Had a bit of a look myself and haven't found any official statements saying that any of their security breaches have been enough to compromise an account. Only ones I could find explicitly state "this information alone is NOT enough for anyone to gain access to Battle.net accounts" which means the accounts are still secure.

The "official" source for the July 2011 hack is gone, unfortunately, and that's when my account was compromised.
I can throw up some forum posts on the event, but that's just as good as my word, so I'll leave it at that.

Choose not to believe me if you want, that's fair.
But I'm not touching anything that requires Bnet 2.0 again.

 

[Kameburger]

What a tragedy this game is. How long before they patch it to get rid of the online requirement? I hope they release a Diablo 4 and try to pretend this game never happened. Instead though, I think Blizzard is trying to forget everything that made them a cool company to begin with. I still don't understand their merger with Activision... What made that happen and why did Activision get the better half of the deal? Was WoW really not that profitable? If they did retain autonomy in the deal why did they become complete douche bags? Was it through osmosis? If I sit next to a douchy person will I too become douchy? So many questions and the answers keep disappointing...

 

[Joos]

Great to hear that it is finally the game it was meant to be. This means I just might pick up the expansion after all, but I will probably kill off my old action house based characters and start fresh.

It's a damned shame that it had to take so long for Blizzard to realise the error of their ways, but good on them for actually admitting to their faults instead of pridefully sticking to their misconceptions.

 

[Kahani]

My biggest concern is, still, them having a real trading system in the game, because we just went from one extreme of the total inability to self-sustain characters to the complete cut-off from others outside of playing with them.

This is my concern as well. Having the entire loot system designed around the existence of the auction was a problem, but the existence of the auction house itself was not. As long as it's possible to play the game without using it, there's no reason not to have it. And that's been possible since fairly soon after release - I've never used the auction house, but I've beaten Inferno with more than one character. Loot 2.0, where you can actually find unique and set items rather than just gear that is good enough for inferno, makes things even better for those of us who don't want to use the AH, but it still doesn't give a sensible reason for shutting it down entirely. If some people want to trade for items they haven't found themselves, why shouldn't they be able to?

 

[Aeshi]

My biggest concern is, still, them having a real trading system in the game, because we just went from one extreme of the total inability to self-sustain characters to the complete cut-off from others outside of playing with them.

This is my concern as well. Having the entire loot system designed around the existence of the auction was a problem, but the existence of the auction house itself was not. As long as it's possible to play the game without using it, there's no reason not to have it. And that's been possible since fairly soon after release - I've never used the auction house, but I've beaten Inferno with more than one character. Loot 2.0, where you can actually find unique and set items rather than just gear that is good enough for inferno, makes things even better for those of us who don't want to use the AH, but it still doesn't give a sensible reason for shutting it down entirely. If some people want to trade for items they haven't found themselves, why shouldn't they be able to?

Well you can still trade, because nothing says "Convenience/Progress/Fun" like having to drag yourself to a trade server, see if anyone there is actually selling something you want, working out how many gems/runes/whatever each thing is worth (because I doubt ANYONE will actually use Gold as currency now) repeat for each thing you want to buy[footnote](as opposed to just bringing up a list of items, clicking the one you want and clicking "buy/bid")[/footnote] all because a few whiners can't tolerate the idea that someone out there has better gear than them.

Wonder how long it'll be until "Loot 3.0" or something removes gear altogether.

 

[Kahani]

Well you can still trade

Except that you actually can't - gold and legendary items are now account bound (possibly crafted items as well, can't remember), so all you'd be able to do is swap rares in some kind of barter system. This is why it really confuses me - responding to some balance issues in the economy by deleting the economy entirely and physically preventing anyone from ever trading again just seems like an insane overreaction.

because nothing says "Convenience/Progress/Fun" like having to drag yourself to a trade server, see if anyone there is actually selling something you want, working out how many gems/runes/whatever each thing is worth (because I doubt ANYONE will actually use Gold as currency now) repeat for each thing you want to buy

Indeed. Path of Exile is often brought up in comparison to Diablo 3, but it has exactly this problem that trading is made just about as inconvenient as it's physically possible to be. Which is quite a big problem given that PoE is very much built around trading. I can't understand why anyone would be happy that D3 is going from a convenient, secure place for trading to as close to the opposite as they can manage.

 

[Aeshi]

Well you can still trade

Except that you actually can't - gold and legendary items are now account bound (possibly crafted items as well, can't remember), so all you'd be able to do is swap rares in some kind of barter system. This is why it really confuses me - responding to some balance issues in the economy by deleting the economy entirely and physically preventing anyone from ever trading again just seems like an insane overreaction.

Wow, seriously?

So they've just gone and made the game ENTIRELY dependent on dumb luck now (because we don't want those people who play the most getting the best stuff now do we?)

 

[Kahani]

Wow, seriously?

So they've just gone and made the game ENTIRELY dependent on dumb luck now (because we don't want those people who play the most getting the best stuff now do we?)

Yep. You do find a lot more legendary items than before, but if you happen to want a specific one you're pretty much shit out of luck.