How Diablo III's Endgame Failed
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 3048
Here's a snip:
I wrote in the last issue of PC Gamer UK about my battle with Diablo 3'²s repair costs, which were hiked massively after launch. Chris and I broke our equipment in the middle of a co-op session on Inferno and didn't have the cash to repair it. We could run the final level on a lower difficulty to grind gold, a boring prospect given our characters' strength, or buy gold with pounds on the real money auction house. It's the sort of choice I'd expect to face in a bad free to play game, but here it was waiting at the end of Diablo.
Chris has barely played since then. I took the Charlie Brown option. I put ten quid into the real money auction house and bought 100,000 gold (about three repairs at Inferno level) for 27p.
27 pennies. Hardly devastating, I know. I didn't weep over the Mars Bar I could've bought with that money, and it got me back into the game. The feeling you get when you put down money for a microtransaction is important, however. It shouldn't make you feel as though you've been duped by an arbitrary number system. It shouldn't leave you on your back on the football field, staring up at a ball that, you're starting to suspect, is completely unreachable.
The auction house is all-consuming at high levels in Diablo 3. Drop rates have been modified upwards extensively since launch and the Paragon levels added in a recent patch lets players increase drop rates by 3% with every ding. Nonetheless, I can't remember the last time a usable item dropped for my level 60 Barbarian. The odds that I'll discover anything that I can directly equip seem absurdly small. At Inferno level, gear is everything. You're as tough as the armour you're wearing. To get precisely what you'll need, the auction house is the only viable option.
