AnointedSword wrote on May 1, 2012, 21:21:
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The argument about not paying money for pixels is getting old as well. You pay real money to play pixels, don't you?
I'm thinking that this is one of the goofiest statements of belief I've ever heard...;) I don't think that arguments urging people not to become fools will ever get old. But that's just me, and I do realize that as a comparative proportion of society, the "fool quotient" has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years.
It's remarkable this idiotic idea is even being discussed let alone implemented. Is Blizzard trying to ruin the launch of Diablo III with this kind of off game-topic buzz? Maybe, though, the real situation is that the game is pretty darn bad--and Blizzard knows it--and anything goes in the Diablo III game experience that serves the purpose of helping people forget about the how supremely rotten the game itself actually is. Is this the old "Dazzle 'Em with B***Sh**!" ploy with a new coat of paint? Heh...;) Sure looks like it, Blizzard!
Traditionally, within a computer game, players may buy and sell
virtual items for virtual money if the game is the type that provides it and if the players wish to spend time doing it. It's been that way like, forever...;) Mentally healthy people can enjoy fiction to the utmost without getting it hopelessly confused with real life in the slightest. It's the real nutters who read a Superman comic book one too many times and then get killed trying to fly off a bridge because they had come to believe that not only was Superman real, but that *they* were, in fact, Superman himself. Likewise, only real nutters would pay real money, over and above the price of the game, for virtual items that do not exist as real objects in the real world--and only have an existence as collections of pixels on the 2d screens of Diablo III (Yes I know it is a "3d" game--
and I don't mean the horrible psuedo-3d glasses effect!--but still, even today we are all constrained to 2d monitors.)
Next thing you know, some people will actually be buying programs that sell
virtual iPhones for
real $50 prices that are "fully operational" on-screen via a mouse and keyboard or *shudder* an xBox controller or GAAA_A_A_A!-a Touch Screen "that lets you touch the virtual touch-screen iPhone you now proudly own!" (Cue the men with the butterfly nets! Action! Roll'em!)
You can spend hours of blissful joy having fake cell-phone conversations with fictitious people from all over the world whose voices and syntax and languages and accents have been very cleverly compiled into recordings by dozens of skilled voice actors! Via a touch screen you "can hold the virtual iPhone in your virtual hand"--just like a real iPhone! With your fingertips you can mash the colorful fake buttons on the screen and your virtual iPhone will "go online" or use "Google Maps" (using very clever pre-compiled animations, of course, since your 4g LTE virtual iPhone network is virtual, too), or you can manipulate your virtual iPhone to make lots of spiffy tech-sounding noises and flash beautiful colored lights--
just like the real iPhone does! Yea, baby! What an awesome virtual deal for just $50 real dollars and NO DATA CAPS and NO MONTHLY FEES!! (But that's only because, of course, the "virtual iPhone simulator" is just a virtual object with virtual functionality that doesn't really do anything at all in the real world--except of course separating you from your real $50.)
Back to Blizzard. Blizzard *says* it is going to have TWO, count 'em, two, "Auction Houses" inside the Diablo III game. One of them will sell fake game items for real money; the other one will sell fake game items for fake, in-game virtual money (gold, etc.) The unstable nutballs will quickly migrate to the Auction House selling fake items for real money, and the mentally healthy Diablo III players will do as they always do when playing games like Diablo III--they will buy and sell virtual game items in the in-game stores that deal only in virtual money, or they will collect their gold, buy and sell their fake game items as it suits them, and then they will either participate in the "virtual items for virtual money Auction house," or they will skip it altogether and just *play the game* as it was *originally* intended to be played...;)
And, no, AnointedSore, (sp?) when people buy computer games they are *not* paying for collections of dumb, pixelated virtual objects of all kinds that allow the purchaser to do *nothing* with them except look at them on a computer screen and rotate them and fake-use them, etc. That's *the* most dumbed-down definition of a computer game I think I've ever heard...;) Games like that would sell about as well as the fake iPhone simulator I describe above, and be about as much fun, too.
What people are buying when they buy a virtual computer game of some kind, AnointedSpore, with *real* money, is an interactive *story* of some kind--with a plot, a beginning, an end; a story with fictional characters, hopefully some depth, and hopefully a lot of entertainment along the way. Or else they are buying a "frag-everything" FPS. Buying a computer game with real money is not too different from buying a book or a movie with real money--except the computer game (if it's decent) is probably a lot more entertaining and a lot better buy for the buck in that you get many more hours of entertainment out of it...;)
If you can think of a single computer game ever made which does nothing except auction off virtual (fake!, as in not only do these objects do nothing in the real world, they don't even *exist* in the real world!) items for *real money* (and real money, of course, is both functional and it exists in the real world)? Maybe there has been a game like that in the past--but I've been gaming for 26 years and I've never heard of it if it exists--which tells me that if it existed at all it was not popular enough to rise above background noise. And I can understand why.
Back to Blizzard again. Why does Diablo 3 need two player auction houses, one of whom will attempt to peddle virtual *Diablo 3* objects for real money, money that Blizzard is planning to take for itself to the tune of 15% +; while the other is strictly virtual Diablo 3 goods for virtual money, of which Blizzard bothers, for some reason, to take a *virtual 15% cut*?
But that's not the real question that begs asking--it isn't a question of "Why two auction houses?"--It's a question of "Why even One?" auction house of any kind is needed in Blizzard's Diablo 3? When I think of Diablo 3, as I have been doing off and on now for awhile, this is a concept (player auction houses) that has never crossed my mind before reading this announcement today.
Then there's the "Global Play" stuff, too--again, which doesn't interest me at all when I think of Diablo 3. I hope I'm wrong, but these announcements seem like very rushed efforts to inject more "content" into a game that Blizzard thinks is too short, too shallow, and generally below expectations--just in order to try and keep people interested longer and playing longer.
I just finished the FAQ, and the truly goofiest statement Blizzard makes in all of this is that "lucky" players are going to be able to buy virtual gold in the game with *real* money--at an "exchange rate" which fluctuates according to some kind of scale that apparently the players at the fake-goods-for-real-money auction house are going to regulate.
According to Blizzard, all of this is happening because Diablo has
always been chiefly been about accumulating in-game goods. Gee, and here I was thinking *SINGLE-PLAYER* like the Diablo's of old and that *THE EVIL IS BACK* meaning that there was some kind of good vs. evil *story* going on here, which unfolds as the player progresses through the game. But Blizzard says I must be wrong about that--because Blizzard says it's like this:
The item-based nature of Diablo gameplay has always lent itself to an active trade-based ecosystem, and a significant part of this trade has been conducted through unsecure third-party organizations. And to think I played Diablo I & II for years and enjoyed them quite a bit, especially D2, and never once heard of or used an "unsecure third-party organization" for anything at all--most especially for the truly idiotic adventure of buying virtual Diablo goods for real money.
I think this game will likely disappoint me in a very big way--but I can still hope otherwise. We'll see. This looks so much like a Herculean cash grab by Blizzard that the resulting whiteout is giving me a splitting headache.
This comment was edited on May 2, 2012, 02:48.
It is well known that I cannot err--and so, if you should happen across an error in anything I have written you can be absolutely sure that *I* did not write it!...;)