Quote:
Originally Posted by Regorium
I disagree with everything you've said here.
First, the RMAH shutting down between expansions is the best time to do it, and is not a slap in the face at all. Consider that any money you've spent at the RMAH would've been useless anyways with the release of the expac. Blizzard understood that while a small minority of players love looking for deals on the AH/playing the AH game, the vast majority of people prefer finding stuff in game. The removal of the AH and buffing of drop rates was probably the best thing that ever happened to the game.
The only people these changes benefit from are the people that don't have jobs? Are you kidding me? I played ~1 hour a day back near release. I never had enough gold to actually buy anything decent on the AH. I never found anything that would let me survive in inferno as a witch doctor. My DPS when I finally quit was approximately 20,000 and that was after spending what little gold I had on upgrades. I never found a single upgrade personally.
Now? I played the same 1 hour a day, and I'm already up to 50,000 dps, and can actually play through torment 1 and progress through the game. Frankly, considering you have 460k dps buffed with enough specific gear to use a completely broken and nearly exploitative build (lifesteal), it's pretty clear you are the person that played 20 hours a day.
Funny though, the 20 hour a day player is still going to benefit from these changes - with the fact that things are BoA, as mentioned it's extremely hard to complete sets. The top players will be able to farm for these sets, and be far better than casuals like me, who will have a mish-mash of legendaries and rares, but at least I can actually play the game and have fun, rather than using 6/9 blue items, all of which were purchased off the AH.
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You've missed the whole point of my rant. It's not a matter of
when they are shutting the AH its the fact that they
are shutting the AH. Blizzard started with a game design / philosophy that allowed those players with a PayPal account or credit card to buy top end gear. They have now arbitrarily removed that ability a year and half or whatever into deployment. I guess you think its ok for the game designer to significantly degrade gear that was paid for with actual money (not game gold) over and above the cost of the base game. I do not think its ok.
Not sure what 'broken and exploitative build' means. If the gear has the attributes you use them. It's not like life steal is cheating or some how illegitimate. Pretty much the only way a monk (or any toon, really) survived at the higher levels is with life steal. Now they've arbitrarily changed the philosophy, nerfed life steal and emphasized life on hit making my (expensive) gear far less effective.
As for the 20 hours a day jab, its because I have a limited number of hours to play online that I chose to use the real money auction house to get gear that allowed me to compete at a high level with very good sets and legendary gear. Doesn't seem like a difficult concept to me.
The fact that I'm in a small minority (glad to know you work at Blizzard and know these things as fact) should be immaterial. Fact is players like me poured significantly more revenue into Blizzards bottom line via the real money AH than players that chose to just farm or go the game gold route and that should count for something. Again, this doesn't seem like a difficult concept to me.