DiabloFans

Seven. Days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHrod2skYPo

I really miss the old D2 commercial lol... but it always bothered me that they never showed any gameplay footage.

That is an elite Plague Carrier sir, not a Carrion Bat

shamelessly stonlen from Reddit comments

Just a bit of detail on the gold buying aspect of the RMAH - it only gives you one listing per amount you request. But notice from the following screenshots that the Price per Unit goes up as I request more. This is because it starts by finding the best deal for you, moves up until it meets your requested amount - and then the quote is based on the average price of those listing all aggregated together. I imagine when this goes live the Price per Unit will be a lot more stable since the supply with be much larger, but it's still interesting to see that it's taking care of the bargain hunting for you.

Sorry for the wall of images:

One thing is certain: you won't get any new stat increases or skills from leveling, so to tackle Inferno difficulty gear is going to have to play a bigger role. There's an inherent added challenge to this because now you need even better gear to compensate for the lack of skills. Will that come from Inferno drops or will they just curve down the level range of the monsters.

Quote from CrusaderGT

You probably missed it in the article but there will be unique items only found in inferno so there's a good possibility that these items will be much greater but not a giant leap from the gears found in Hell, stat wise And the same thing goes visually. Exciting stuff indeed.

I was hoping so

They mentioned nicer drops, but I wonder if that is still going to follow the linear progression of stats we will expect from lvl 1-60 or if indeed it has to be accelerated to compensate for the lack of new skills after max level.

Quote from CherubDown »

No, the demo was nothing compared to what a real beta should be.

I know it wasn't I was there; my theory is that they will present the Beta product as a demo at Blizzcon 2011 to assist in gathering more data.

So does this mean that anyone who participates in the Diablo demo at Blizzcon 2011 will inevitably be contributing to beta testing? I recall they allowed players to provide feedback at the end of the demo based on their play experience. It would be a great opportunity for them to give the beta cycle a little boost, assuming the demo is something resembling the beta product.

"Video cannot be viewed on mobile" /sadface

Home Stretch™

Well I think it's really going to come down the to match-making. In EVE for example, players are allowed to place Buy Orders, which effectively in the Diablo 3 sense would be the equivalent of saying "hey I'm a Wizard; I'm looking for this type of staff". Which then on the auction house would be visible by sellers, and search/match enhanced by whatever Blizzard implements.

Tantalizing news indeed. My confidence is renewed that Blizzard will do a good job on the trading system, which is by no means a trivial task.

I think we're going to see all the amenities of a traditional auction house (such as in WoW), but with the ability to barter facilitated in the same interface. That's pretty much the hint I got from the article - they want to preserve the bartering feel of Diablo II. Either they will have a Bnet interface or there will be a more immersive thing, like a persistent game or NPC you can access in-game to pull up the auction house.

I'm not sure how they're going to tie in bartering, but I was imaging something along the lines of being able to message or PM the seller right from the auction house to indicate interest. This happened a lot in WoW from my experience, especially when players could not afford those Epic BoE's but had a ton of farmed inventory they were willing to trade.

So as the article suggests, you have a scenario where two players each have something the other one really needs - a perfect match. It's these cases where bartering has an economic advantage over the auction house because neither player needs to liquidate their items in order to purchase them; that is, they avoid the loss of selling them for gold, so they can in turn get gold to buy the item. Big assumption here though is there is no inefficiency in trying to find that "perfect match". Which is exactly what I'm very curious to see what Blizzard will do as far as the match finding goes.

Join channel dfans if you're on USEast!

Decided to roll a char for the heck of it; USEast, HC