07-05-2012, 02:30 PM
(07-05-2012, 04:06 AM)ViralSpiral Wrote: Where they screwed up on this was twofold: 1) Instead of making AH/RMAH simply an easier way to manage trading, they built the entire game on reliance of the system, and then forced everyone online to where they always had AH/RMAH as an option so that they wouldn't have to balance drops for people who wanted to do silly things like one pass full clear. They could always defend the crappy drops by saying "That's what the AH is for, use it."
It's fair to say that people feel forced to use the AH, but all the conspiracies about it being designed for the AH are getting old. The idea was that you were supposed to spend months of farming before beating Inferno. More time than the game has been out even. When Elric complained about no progress after three weeks, that's "working as intended." I'll bet the Blizzard test teams were also sharing drops at least, so that's slightly better progress than doing it solo or in public games. But they were clear they did not balance against a simulated auction house. (Then again, randomly doubling difficulty and not testing it indicates they didn't balance against anything.)
Blizzard both severely underestimated people's patience as well as the sheer convenience and power of the AH. They should have put in some checks or limits to mitigate it's power, and in fact they had considered BoE for a good while. But these should be chalked up to design mistakes and not some nefarious plot to force people into an RMAH that wasn't even up at release. It should also be noted that to my knowledge, Blizzard has never defended crappy drops with "use the AH", the official line is that it should be optional. (regardless of the truth of the matter)