Schadenfreude is great when it targets major corporations/IPs.

[Brian]

Right?

RIGHT!?

...okay, maybe not completely.  But it is somewhat vindicating/validating to run into things like this:

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/03/28/diablo-3-director-jay-wilson-auction-houses-really-hurt-game/

So let's make an ongoing thread for this sort of thing.

[Dracos]

The thing I get from that thread though was: He was wrong.

It's not just the auction house (though that's why many of us didn't play), but the poor item system overall.  Not that auction house's don't provide problems, but instead of providing a steam release for "This item is annoying for me personally to get, so I'll use the auction house over playing" it was a complete release for 'all items are annoying to get, and so I'll constantly drop my shit off at the house and buy stuff I actually need there'.

Players generally want to play the game.  It's true that having a full running auction house matters, but if the lesson taken away from here is "Having an auction house at all makes your game suck", then he wasn't watching as lots of games succeed with having internal auction houses, and D3 would've been even more terrible without it providing a way for acquiring suvivable stuff.

[Jason_Miao]

I've never played D3, so am just going off what's been said in the article.

He thought ... that only a small percentage of players would use it and that the price of items would limit how many were listed and sold.

Why would someone ever think this?  Is there some sort of mechanic that makes selling things lossy (e.g, items decay slowly over time), or some other tradeoff regarding selling things?

Also, who the hell implements a networked market that they don't expect many people to use?  I could see someone doing that in the late 90s, when that whole Internet thingy was new.  Today, that's moronic...especially if it's the only market available.  Was Blizzard unable to donate a bit of cash to an economics professor's research as a consulting fee or something?

While a lot of the buzz around the game attacked the real money Auction House, "gold does much more damage than the other one does," according to Wilson, because more players use it and prices fluctuate much more.

Unregulated markets for high demand goods are prone to swing.  That happens in plenty of games with player-player sales systems and it happens in real life; why was D3 supposed to be different?    And isn't this goal contradictory to what they thought was the expected behaviour?  If you're trying to lower prices of necessary items (which is presumably why a swinging prices are considered a bad thing - because a spike in price of Necessary Consumable #8 means no one is able to adventure), having lots of people sell is good.  OTOH, if the game is a economic simulator, then swinging prices is good, since that's how you make money.

This article seems like it can be condensed into "Who could have known that when we had people interact using liquid assets, that we'd get an economy?!  Well, we'll solve this, just you wait and see."  *shakes fists at capitalist pigs*

[Kt3]

This just proves that Jay Wilson really doesn't understand the industry he works in.

He's pinning the blame on the AH when it really has nothing to do with people disliking Diablo 3 - it just facilitated trading easier, and really probably was the only reason it's still alive now.

I mean, heaven knows that Diablo 3 (D3) doesn't have much replayability at all.  They took all sorts of concepts from WoW and built D3 to be the same way - as if it were an MMO and you weren't supposed to reroll constantly.

There are all sorts of problems with Diablo 3, but the Auction House was not one of them.  People would have traded regardless of an AH system, especially with outside systems of trading already in place from Diablo 2.  The only thing that probably would've been impacted is the availability of low-level gear - and that's even a footnote.  Most people don't really care about low-level gear.

But alas, Jay Wilson believes that 'if only we could turn off the Auction House' then things would be fixed.

[Grahf]

Well, this isn't exactly surprising....

[Brian]

Yeah, but it's been pointed out before that's kind of not the best target.

I mean, you'd think the banks responsible for our economic issues would have been good nominees for that, not a company that produces leisure products and has angered consumers of them.

Not to take this too far and start a discussion we don't really want, but one of those has made gamers angry.  One of them has left people homeless and destroyed lives.

In the face of that, I can't actually take that award seriously, even when EA 'won' it again a year later.

[Merc]

Dorkly agrees with you, Brian, or at least pokes fun at the award with the same points: http://www.dorkly.com/article/51363/eas-reponse-to-being-named-the-worst-company-in-america

It'd probably have been more believable if the Consumerist had categories for the type of service/product companies provide, and EA won for video game category, but yeah, definitely hard to take seriously given other should-be contenders.

[Grahf]

True, it does come across heavily as a case of "first world problems", although I thought that the actual response that EA did which pinned some of the blame on them being pro-LGBT was pretty scummy.

Perhaps next year The Consumerist will create different categories.

[Grahf]

I felt that this thread may be the best fit for this news:

Sega and Gearbox have been slapped with a class action suit over Aliens: Colonial Marines

I kind of doubt that there will be any huge results from this, but it would be nice to see something positive come of it. I mean, on the one hand I know that it's not the first or last time that such things will happen with games, but this is the first time in my memory that anyone's been sued over it.

[Brian]

Really?  I can't help but feel that the grounds for the lawsuit are an excuse, and the actual reasoning is that people are upset that the game isn't very good.

[Grahf]

People are already starting to really question the validity of the case. It seems to weigh heavily upon the idea that this example is somehow fundamentally different from every other time that the final product has been different from a demo. If this does end up going to court and doesn't just get dismissed or settled then it would be an uphill battle to prove that from what I've gathered.

Honestly, I'm not too happy that this suit is happening. Part of me says good, but only a small part. The larger part says that this is a pointless waste of time for the most part. And if something impossible happened and there was actually a victory for the plaintiffs, well, what then? Does anyone who puts out a demo that's even slightly different from the finished product get sued? So much for those disclaimers that what's being seen isn't indicative of the final experience.

It's all a great big mess, and I don't know how it's going to be cleaned up. I also almost don't want to know.

[Brian]

Well, the real point is that it's Class Action.  So it doesn't matter what the court actually decides, the outcome is that both parties involved lose.  The only people who have any chance of 'winning' are the lawyers.

[Halbarad]

Because it's hard to resist piling on...
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/193513/Zynga_laying_off_520_staff_shuttering_bicoastal_offices__Report.php

[Dracos]

That spurred a discussion here on how many folks had ignored or turned down Zynga over the years, namingly to avoid working at a company that did what Zynga does.