Diablo III links today, DRM, real money AH, etc.

[RTM]

There is another way to handle this, and that is the old ladder wipe (still in use in D2 today). Then the value of those items, as supply is again extremely rare, shoots back up at the beginning of a new ladder season. No idea if there are any such plans. It may not jive well with the 10 character limit.

They addressed this to some extent in an interview at the latest press event (click the spoilers partway down to expand the actual interview):

Q: As far as keeping the economy not stagnant and still exciting, one thing I notice about D2 is once I had my items, they never degraded, I was pretty much good to go; I never really needed to upgrade. I see that in a player-driven economy as kind of a big problem, because eventually prices will taper off and at some point, it’s not worth even putting my item on the AH because everyone has one. That leads to a lot of pressure, I think, on you guys having to create a lot of items and expansion sort of content so there’s new stuff. What is the plan for that?

A: So the plan at release really comes back to the crafting system again. A lot of the crafting system is focused on pulling items out of the economy, so certainly the most highly-valued items people aren’t going to salvage, but everything slightly below that they are, which is going to drive a lot of items out of the economy. The enhancing system is actually one of the…basically our enhancing system kind of works like enchanting from WoW, but it has a random value to what you’re getting. So you input the enchantment, and let’s say it’s somewhere between 80-100 attack that it’s gonna give you. So if you roll 83, you could roll that again and you have a chance of getting a better number. You won’t get a lower one, and it might say “aww, you didn’t get any better.” But you can try over and over again and you need to essentially recycle items to do that. Eventually you’ll get to perfect, but you’ll really have to pull out a lot of items. And at that level, you’re really talking about rares and legendaries that you’re actually going to have to be melting to be able to do this. So we do have some systems in. Even so, there is going to hit a saturation point and what will we do about that? We have a bunch of ideas on how to deal with that, most of them do revolve around extending the item database at some point. Whatever we do, we’ll try to make sure that the player base has a lot of forecasting, like they will know long before we do anything what we’re going to do so that they can prepare. We don’t want people to go on the AH and spend basically $100 and then us change the item database the next day. We want them to know, in 3 months we’re changing the database “OK, well that gives me time to plan and think about what I want to do.” So we may not…it’s still up in the air. But it’s one of those things where we really want to see what happens to the economy and to a certain degree, we don’t know because we’ve never done something like this before.