Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details

I don't know how they're going to manage this with the money-laundering/fraud angle. This makes Epic Boots of the Whale into a transfer medium for money between virtually anonymous endpoints, including internationally. (Long story short: You can run an auction which is honest or you can run an auction which is anonymous, but you cannot do both at the same time. Virtually any information flow from the system to any participant in the auction compromises the anonymity, since the attacker has <i>perfect knowledge of the state of the system from both ends of the trade.</i>)<p>That is guaranteed to draw heavy adversarial attention from both the bad guys and the good guys.<p>Business-wise, even Blizzard is going to eventually bow to reality and realize that INSERT ... INTO ITEMS; is the most profitable line of code any game company can ever write. They've experimented a few times in WoW with making folks pay for e.g. cosmetic mount improvements. Eventually they're going to realize that their core audience pays hundreds but values their gamerhood at (conservatively) thousands, and start monetizing that gap. After doing so, they'll be able to treat the base product as "Free 2 Play", assuming they think America has enough bandwidth to play their games without needing the assist from a truck of DVDs shipped to every Best Buy and Walmart.

It will be interesting to see how they get around (anti-)gambling laws, at least here in Germany. The moment you offer real money for winning in luck-based games (as opposed to skill-based ones) like Diablo3, you may run afoul of the state monopoly for lottery and related games.<p>A former employer once commissioned a flash game with a western setting which included a virtual casino with several games of chance. He had to shelve the idea of offering people to cash out and the game was delayed for a long time (if I remember correctly, it was turned into a game where you could buy stuff for your character, but there was no longer a way to transfer your winnings into real money accounts)

This will be interesting.<p>Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game.<p>Ah... Fond memories of duping items in the original Diablo game -- Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, Godly Plate of the Whale, King's Sword of Haste...<p>=]

Step 1: Make getting good items so frustratingly repetitive that players start paying other people for getting those. Step 2: Instead of trying to fix that part of the game decide to monetize on this?<p>Talk about game designers selling out badly ...

Hasn't blizzard been previously quite aggressive about how game breaking player driven cash economies are - i.e. gold selling and the such? But now they think it's a fine idea as long as they're getting a real world cash fee? Seems to suggest they never saw it as game breaking as much as revenue stealing.

Blizzard, strangely enough, is probably in the perfect position to start a successful virtual currency.<p>In fact, they might just do it by accident.

I wonder if there's going to be a cap on how much you can trade/earn.<p>What's stopping this from becoming a full-time occupation for someone?

For me the huge news here is that they're making Diablo 3. I'm so out of the loop when it comes to games.

From one view I understand at least some of the reasons they are doing this.<p>1) Money. D3 is free to play so monetizing non-subscription aspects makes sense.<p>2) People <i>will</i> buy in game items for real money so bringing that out of the dark underground makes sense.<p>However it still seems contrary to the gameplay, and would make finding some very rare item less special (unless you were going to sell it that is.)<p>On the bright side, hardcore mode will not have this, so I think overall it is acceptable.

I fear this might make the argument for taxing virtual goods stronger. There have been some real money systems (livegamer) out there but never on such a large expected release title.

I'll be paying close attention to if this trend catches on. Blizzard is often a trailblazer in features it introduces (example: Exclamation Mark = New Quest, Question Mark = Completed Quest; Talent Trees).

There are 2 absolutely bad side effects to this:<p>- You must be always online, no offline mode at all. /// - Mods are expressly forbidden, no mods at all.

What a joke. No wonder this game is taking so long to release. Creating a global marketplace like this is a serious development effort. This isn't a game anymore.