Auction House to shut down March 14, 2014

When we initially designed and implemented the auction houses, the driving goal was to provide a convenient and secure system for trades. But as we’ve mentioned on different occasions, it became increasingly clear that despite the benefits of the AH system and the fact that many players around the world use it, it ultimately undermines Diablo’s core game play: kill monsters to get cool loot. With that in mind, we want to let everyone know that we’ve decided to remove the gold and real-money auction house system from Diablo III.

We feel that this move along with the Loot 2.0 system being developed concurrently with Reaper of Souls™ will result in a much more rewarding game experience for our players. 

We’re working out the details of how the auction house system will be shut down, but we wanted to share the news as soon as we made the decision in order to give everyone as much advance notice as possible. Please note that the shutdown will occur on March 18, 2014. We will keep everyone informed as we work through this process.

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Surprising?  Not very.  Too many were playing the auction houses more than the game itself.  While it did help to facilitate “trading”, it’s ease of making the best items available, naturally had an impact on the RNG algorithm when it came to the QUALITY level of drops.  This doesn’t excuse the fact though that their core systems resulted in the lackluster itemization which is being subjected to the RNG factor of mostly poor quality rolls (i.e. the AH’s themselves are not the root cause issue behind Diablo III’s game play problems).

But I already wrote previously about how it’s not easy to just simply rip out and redo those underlying systems at this stage and so, the AH’s have to go in order to not go through this same short circuiting of the entire loot hunting aspect of the game.

Question is, what will they do about trading in general?  Without restricting the trading of the higher end tier of loot, there will always be a faction who will use the RMT route via 3rd party sites to get the best gear.  The development team in the past has acknowledged the fact that some do place a value on their items (and have thus provided avenues for these folks to do just exactly that).  Some also enjoy the trading aspect of the game.  How do they plan to reconcile these differing demographics?  Myself, I rarely engaged in trading nor placed values on my items.

Whichever way, there is going to be some very polarizing opinions.  Myself, while Diablo III is part of the “Diablo” franchise, it’s really at a point where it can’t be tied/weighed down by its past legacy.  The first two games were made in a different time by a completely different team of developers (with differing philosophies).  Thus it’s my belief that not all players who heavily played those first two games, will agree with whatever directions the current team ends up deciding.  I’ve been more than critical about some of the design decisions/philosophies of the development team; but I also am not so one dimensional where I can’t keep an open mind to see how the execution goes on a forward looking basis.

Time will tell….