This wouldn’t be an issue if we were comparing, say PoE to Diablo, but these are both supposed to be Diablo games. I think the issue here is that it’s games within the same franchise that are so drastically different, like if we look at the difference between D2 and D3 it’s massive, they’re completely different games that have basically no connection except the lore.ĭ2 is slower paced, more methodical, while D3 is all about that moment to moment smashing. With today's internet landscape, this will never again be the case for any even remotely popular game. If you need to put effort in buying and selling items, the balance is way different: Just farming more yourself, just playing the game becomes more attractive than sitting in lobbies waiting for a potential trade partner. And inconvenient trading being available is a whole different issue than convenient trading. And without any real support (specific UI to find people willing to trade, a marketplace, etc) being available, trading was not convenient. That left in-game as the only expected way for people to trade. So third party trading sites weren't a huge issue - at least not while the game's economy was still being tuned. Online marketplaces were far from ubiquitous, and any sort of online transactions would've been seen as at least somewhat fishy by the majority of people. So almost entirely getting rid of trading was the only decent way to salvage the situation.ĭ2's design comes from a different era of the internet. Only removing the AH would've just paved the way for third party trading sites to take its place. It was never properly tested in the context of end-game progression and ended up going against what the designers wanted the play experience to be. Though that means compromising on (preferrably) the "efficient trading" design goal.Īnd that's why the AH and basically trading as a whole was removed. Wyatt agreed that this is indeed a cursed problem, but there are ways around it. You just cannot have both, so you need to compromise on one of your design goals. The issue is so fundamental that tweaking the numbers won't help. "There was nothing they could have done to tune this" is the more controversial follow-up claim, but I'm inclined to agree. And that fundamentally goes against a rich loot experience. Then the items themselves stop mattering, only their value does. So I can regard each item I find as just equivalent to its currency value. It claims that the two fantasies are fundamentally incompatible because efficient trading means that I can easily turn any item into currency. The talk brings up the example of D3's auction house at around 19:03 and identifies "Rich loot experience" with "efficient trading" as such a cursed problem. In short, a cursed problem arises when two game design goals are fundamentally opposed in practice. Game design has so-called "cursed problems", detailed in this GDC talk. I asked him about whether having an AH in a loot-focused game like Diablo was even possible without breaking the game, as others have likened it to a "cursed problem" before: The truth is closer to "D3's tuning drove players to the AH" or "The accessibility of the AH bypassed the normal reward loop". The game was tested and tuned without the AH being in use. Last year, Wyatt Cheng (Patch Lead for D3) posted a lengthy-ish Twitter thread on the matter of vanilla D3 supposedly being designed around the AH: Last updated at 14:00:17 UTC Weekly Help Desk RAGE Loot Thread Trade Thread
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