In most people’s eyes when it comes to gaming Blizzard can do no wrong. And sure, in other peoples eyes, everything Blizzard does is work of the wort people in the industry. Just like with the RealID fiasco that was almost 1 year ago to the month, Blizzard has made HUGE waves with one of their feature announcements. This time, instead of a WoW feature a Diablo 3 feature is causing all the stir.

This week Blizz has announced that D3 will have an auction house. Sure, no prob. Oh did I mention this auction house would have a real world money component? Yup, that’s right, not only will there be a regular auction house with items listed for the usual gold of the D3 world, but in fact you will be able to buy items for REAL WORLD CASH from the auction house as well. It seems that Blizz is taking it upon themselves to combat gold farmers directly with their highly anticipated title.

Let me back up a bit and talk about the history of the storied franchise, and why this would have been thought of to be done by Blizz. Since there has been online games with any sort of currency and/or leveling there have been people trying to make money on selling in game currency and “power leveling” services. Basically, people trying to profit off of others laziness and lack of time. Everyone wants instant gratification so hey why not make a buck off of them. Unfortunately things like this can kill the balance of power even when done in a semi-“legit” fashion. Not to mention the scumbags who offer these services generally steal information of those who use the already illegal enterprises and steal more money as well. Furthermore to get even richer these farmers will use key-loggers and other nefarious ways to steal credit card numbers and log ins from people who don’t even use their services just to get more capitol to run these schemes and to get ahead without doing any real work in life… but I digress. So where does Blizzard and Diablo fit into all of this? Ok well one of the biggest draws of this franchise in history has been the ever constant longing of the player for MORE LOOT, and just one more boss kill to see what drops! These set items and possibility of purples and blue items to be had kept the player coming back for more. It was the original carrot-on-a-stick game. And with all of this comes the desire to trade items which were amazing items but ones which your character could not use for gold or items you could use. The act of trading so much itself became the real game by the time people had beaten Diablo 2 so many times that they lost count. This trading became so abundant that people went to ebay to sell goods/items to others and in some cases whole characters. Yet, as stated above sooo many of these people (if not all) who sold on ebay were scumbags and would pull scams to keep you from your goods and or services you paid for. So now we have both people who scammed others out of money and or items and also people who played the game so much to get items to sell to other people who wanted them to keep the cycle alive. The gold farmers and scammers found a good home in D2, and ever since Blizz has sought out a way to limit them and what they can make, and even keep them from causing so much havoc to the legit Diablo and WoW player.

Enter Diablo 3 and the real world money and gold auction houses. In essence Blizz has gone from trying to combat gold farmers to making everyone one. It’s kinda like legalizing gold farming in one way. In game you will be able to access the auction house (AH) from anywhere in game. You will be able to use the gold only AH or the real money AH. The good about this is if you do not want to participate at all, you can play the game by yourself and never touch the AH or only touch the in game gold AH. No one is forcing you. Also by making the game ONLINE ONLY they are trying to police hackers and modders so that no one can steal, duplicate, or defraud the system. I see what they are doing with the online part of this but the idea of having to be online at ALL times to play this game is one of the biggest parts of this I hate the most. I don’t always have Internet access where I want to play and further I might want to play on airplanes or hotels where access might not be available. Who is Blizz to say I cannot play a game I have paid for? Well they are apparently god as always but that’s for a different discussion.

Also Blizz has stated for the record that they have “no plans” to list any items ever in their AH making it completely player driven. So both the items on there and economy will be entirely player driven, which to me makes this a much easier pill to swallow. I would never play a game with real players (outside of friends only) in which someone could buy items directly from a cash shop, provided by the developer, in which they could instantly be the best in game without playing at all. It’s not fun to me and I don’t like the imbalance it brings. Yet, if someone wants to buy that +10000 strength sword of ass-kicking for 20$ from Skippy down the road from the auction house I kinda have no problem with that. I know it sounds contradictory, but hey in my twisted mind it seems just fine with me. I am happy they will be policing the game with no hacks, dupes or stealing. So if someone wants to make a few bucks or buy that item for a few bucks it’s ok. I don’t have to play with or against them anyway if I don’t want. The other thing that makes it right is I can make the same 20$ if I want also. There is nothing stopping me from playing the hell out of the game and acquiring money, crafting items, runes, gems etc and playing the AH game. Hell, way back in vanilla wow I made hundreds to thousands of gold playing the AH game and crafting/transmuting for people when Arcanite transmutes would be worth 300 gold and  you could only do it every 3 days.

The Rake. —> Like in poker at casinos, and like the AH in WoW, the house will be getting their cut of the real world pie. So every time you list something you will be giving Blizz a small fee (one exception to that I will be getting to in a min) and every time you sell an item they will take their cut as well. Oh and did I mention that when you go to withdraw money from battle.net you will be losing some of it as well? I do suspect the latter is Blizz way of taking “taxes” out of winnings. I cannot imagine the legal headache all this is causing their lawyers, and how much documentation and double checking with the IRS they are doing. Not to mention doing the same in the tons of countries they will be releasing the game in as well.

Blizz has said each account will be given a few free listings of items upon starting your acct in which they won’t take any money out for listing items. I think this is a good idea myself. It gives the casual person the ability to list and win a few items to build a sort of “bank-roll” to begin your trading career. Then they will have some money to use for listing all the rest of their items later. This lets those money shy people (or heck even kids) get started with nothing down and build a nice cash empire. Granted I am assuming that in order to even play the market you will have to have a CC on file with battle.net or they will just use the one you have in billing just to be able to access it. This little freebie listing while a good thing, also means that for the first few weeks (to months) of the games release we will still likely see things listed at crazy marked up rates just to see who might make mistake clicking on an item they thought was 1$ when in fact it was 100$. Once all those freebies are used up the AH should settle a bit for a while. It’s not going to be like the WoW AH where we see those listing constantly b/c with everyone having to have a legit copy of the game and hopefully no trial acct access to the real money AH, it should police itself very well. Will it still be there? Prolly. But not to the extent we see it now in WoW.

The thing I wonder about is the saturation of the AH after a while. Since there (reportedly) isn’t going to be soulbound items anything that is bought can later be re-sold. So simple logic + supply and demand says after a few months (at most) there is going to be a glut of the same items up on the AH. So I am guessing that if you are going to want to make some money either play a ton early or list items while the the iron is hot.

So I have a few parting shots or GeekJock Theories if you will….

–I think this is a bit of a test for the fan/consumer base. Blizz has some of the hardest cord rabid fans out there. Between the 11 million still playing WoW and the umpteen million Starcraft groupies the thing that is for sure is the majority of them love Diablo. Blizz knows stuff like this won’t deter them from playing the game but they still want to see how this goes. And as easy as I think it will go over I think there is a bigger picture. The big picture here is I think this whole thing is an experiment. The next gen MMO Blizz has in the pipeline (codename: Titan) has already been mentioned as being heavily social media based and undoubtedly, Blizz is trying to knock down even more walls and conquer the rest of the universe with it. So if they can get even more people on board with a game that has in game money component to it then the sky is the limit to the amount of money they will rake in. It could dwarf that of what WoW is making them currently and what D3 will make them. This is of course my speculation.

— More speculation—> Diablo is done. Yup, it’s finished. Sure they are prolly doing their whole “polishing it up” thing to make it completely ready. Also they need to do the whole stress test for the millions of people who will flood battle.net, but I still think the game is done. The big hold up? This whole real money thing is the big hold up. They are still likely programming and getting all their ducks in a row as to how to legally grab more money and let other people make more money off of this real money AH thing.

—My personal thing... I think I will give the whole real money AH thing a try. Don’t read that wrong. I don’t play these things competitively and have no plans to PVP, but I think a smart person, especially early, could make some cash on it all. I am going to play the crap out of D3 when it’s released (especially if it’s released on my week off) and I could very well rack up some decent items with some lucky drops. Even if I only make a small chunk of change, I could very well supplement my WoW habit a bit. Hey who knows Blizz might let us draw off of our credit in D3 to pay our month WoW fee. Likely even be able to do it rake free with no % taken out for themselves, since they are getting it all anyway.

So, NO the sky isn’t falling, and all is ok. Like I mentioned above it has pissed me off more that they will make us be online at all times (and making us wait more months for the game) then having a real money AH. Anyone who doesn’t like it, can not use it. People who want to use it can use it, plain and simple.

It all goes back to my same thing I say about the whole SWTOR thing. We don’t care anymore about things in the game. We have seen a ton of screen shots, and seen in game footage. WE DON’T CARE…. just release it already. We know we love it, we know we want it AND WE WANT IT NOW! Oh and as a guy who owns a decent amount of Blizz stock, hey Blizz I would like a 4Q release to see some of us stockholders happy.

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