![]() Nearly every combat sequence would reward players with piles of loot, but rarely was any of it any good. Part of what made the Auction House such a reliable go-to for the best loot was how difficult finding good loot in the game world was. It's unlikely that the concept will make a comeback in Diablo 4. The Auction House was removed alongside the release of the game's only expansion, Reaper of Souls, in 2014. They realized that it was breaking the primary gameplay loop of Diablo 3, and did away with both the real-money and gold Auction Houses, a decision which reportedly took them a mere 20 minutes to arrive at. Thankfully, Blizzard learned early on that the Auction House wasn't functioning as they'd hoped. This had a devastating effect on Diablo 3's endgame, eliminating the drive to hunt for loot. No matter how good a piece of loot was, players could always find better loot at auction. Second, the Auction House made the hunt for in-game loot virtually inconsequential. This led to people accusing the developers of intentionally decreasing the quality of loot drops in orderto encourage players to buy their loot instead. They would take a cut of every transaction for themselves. Firstly, Blizzard allowed players to spend real money on loot and gold (an early example of microtransactions). ![]() There were two major issues with the implementation of this idea. RELATED: Best Western RPGs If You Love Grinding In doing so, they could eliminate fraud, scammers, and profiteering hackers. The idea behind The Auction House was that instead of those exchanges being run through a black market, Blizzard could build a better market and regulate it themselves. This allowed questionable third parties to swoop in, gather as much quality loot as they could, and sell it at absurdly high prices to unsuspecting adventurers. ![]() Diablo 2 had seen the rise of a flourishing black market as players were prepared to pay real money for the game's highest-quality and most powerful items. The Auction House, at a conceptual level, was a good idea. Hopefully, with better sales projections helping them anticipate server populations, Blizzard can avoid such an issue with Diablo 4. It didn't take Blizzard that long to resolve the issue, but by then, it had been sent through the internet spin cycle and was circulating as a meme that doubled as a direct criticism of the game. What does "Error 37" mean? How busy are the servers, and why did that prevent players from logging in? How long did they need to wait before trying again? These questions simply hung in the air as more and more people were faced with the same message. The most frustrating part about this error message was how obtuse it was. For many early adopters, trying to launch the game was met with this message: "The servers are busy at this time. Its regular appearances prevented them from logging into - and therefore playing - Diablo 3. The now legendary Error 37 crawled out of the muck right alongside Diablo 3's launch, becoming a meme while simultaneously frustrating thousands of players crazy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |