Some gamers have been outraged at Blizzard’s decision to put an auction house accessible to Diablo 3 players that will require real money. The main issues mostly turn around these points:

• Cheapening the experience by allowing players to buy their way to the top
• Destroying the regular auction house because people will obviously favor real money over item trades
• Blizzard making money from it

All valid points, but here’s why they don’t matter.

Players would trade items for real money either way

People were already buying and selling items for real money in Diablo 2. There’s absolutely no doubt that it would be the case with Diablo 3. So now, instead of going to a shady website with tons of spam and malware, you will be able to exchange money for items through a secure website. Blizzard is not fighting the issue anymore, instead they’re embracing it and controlling the transactions to make sure no one gets scammed (in or out of the game). Some people argue that since Blizzard is sanctioning it, players that would never have used those other websites, will now do. I say that’s a good thing because players will now be able to do what they wanted all along.

No one is forced to use it

The real money auction house is one way to trade items, the other way is through the regular (in-game) gold auction house. No one will be forced to use it and with the listing fees, people will have to think twice before putting an item up for trade. Even if Blizzard offers a couple of free listings, once those are used, the regular auction house will be used again. Also, if you sell items through the real-money auction house, you won’t have the currency to buy items in the regular auction house, forcing you to buy using real money. Either way, the choice is yours only and if you don’t like it, don’t use it.

Blizzard will have an incentive to keep supporting the game

With the standard pay once model, Blizzard ends up supporting 5-10 year old games that people are not buying anymore. I don’t have any numbers but selling a couple hundred or thousand copies for $10-15 per month does not cover a lot of the expenses related to supporting an online game such as Diablo. Blizzard is known for supporting its games for a very long time and with a model that gives Blizzard quite a lot of money all the time, it has all the reasons to make sure as many players as possible keep playing for a long time. World of Warcraft has seen an impressive amount of updates for just such reasons, the more people keep playing (and paying), the more money Blizzard makes, this isn’t true for Diablo 2 once most people have bought the game.

Blizzard listens to its users

Fortunately, Blizzard backed down from the idea due to the users’ reactions. However, the goal behind Blizzard’s move was to make users accountable for their comments, hoping that it would reduce spam and trolling, a worthy goal. Currently, any player can just create a new account or character on WoW and post anything they want with it, no one will ever know who they really are. This goal can still be achieved without compromising the users’ privacy.

The solution

The solution is to limit access to the main forums only to users that have played a certain number of hours with the account (lets say 5 hours). That way, only serious players will be able to talk in the forums and they won’t be affected by the throwaway accounts used for spam. They could still be affected by trolls (regular players posting crap), but Blizzard is also introducing a voting system so those posts will be weeded out in time. Also, if a player goes too far, Blizzard can just ban the account and the player will need to restart from scratch.

Of course, you want to let newcomers discuss in the forums, so Blizzard would need to provide a beginner’s forums that any user could use. I guess this would be mostly used by people having issues with the game because most of the interesting discussions would be located in the main restricted forums.

Users would keep their anonymity and the spam and trolling in the forums would be reduced, the best of both worlds.