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Again, Travis Day DID NOT SPEARHEAD loot 2.0. This has nothing to do with "fan glasses". In fact, many fans hailed Travis and said "Travis for D3 game director", "Travis is the only one who understands us" when he made the blue posts. Now you're saying "Travis is the one responsible for loot 2.0.". Both statements were/are completely wrong (there was also a CM post saying that Travis only communicated what was discussed internally much much earlier.)

Travis Day is not the one who single-handedly initiated and implemented loot 2.0.The entire Diablo dev team started working on the expansion early on. Just because Travis was the one who made a few blue posts that we on the outside saw as the first mentioning of loot 2.0 does not mean that it was his idea.

Name calling is not needed. What is needed is to understand how development works. Don't shoot the messenger. Don't shoot the individual worker. It's a development *team*. Every design decision in Diablo 3 is backed up by multiple people. Just stop saying "they're out of touch" or whatever.

Seriously, if your thinking would be that of the majority of people, we wouldn't have any communication with the developers anymore. You realize that developers are human beings and not some kind of Borg collective? You will always have a single person saying things, but no developer ever said "oh, I thought it would be cool to implement a weapon like this, so I went ahead and did it". It's always "we thought it would be cool to do X"; if they have an idea they throw it into one of the meetings and discuss it before implementing.

Besides, if *you* disagree with the current development direction, then that's your problem, but many people like where the game is going, and by saying "out of touch" you're implying that the game developers are making a game that you don't like. Many people do like it, however. "Get over it". Sorry.

Why do I defend BoA? Because I think it's for the best of the game. And unlike other people, I think there's not even an alternative to "reduce" the amount of BoA. My guess is that Blizzard came to that same conclusion and shut down the trading forums for exactly that reason.

An alternative that many people (including myself!) suggested was to allow clan trading, i.e., instead of giving an item to your group only, it becomes accessible to all clan members who were in the clan at the moment when it dropped. I've stepped away from that idea as well. Clan trading, friends list trading, a cherry-picked list of up to 20 people who are eligible for trading - all those are features that sound nice for us, the players, but are even more so features the "gold farmers" are waiting for. Third party sites already exist, and they still have a thriving business, despite the shackles of BoA; there are many drawbacks, however, and it's a risky business for the customer as well (there was a thread recently about that, can't find it). Basically... if you have a bit of sanity left, stay out of it. If clan trading or anything like that would make a comeback, third party sites would simply create their own AH (as a website) and sell "clan spots" in combination with a guaranteed item drop. A clan "run" by only 10-20 bots - and those still exist - could guarantee you any item in a relatively short amount of time.

Blizzard can't control these third party sites, that's fairly obvious. They also will never be able to completely get rid of bots. It's like the "virus vs anti-virus" war - if you talk to any senior developer from the big anti-virus software companies they'll tell you that this is a war that can never be won. They can try to react faster to new developments, and Blizzard could try to have more frequent banwaves and more sophisticated bot detection algorithms, but in the end a bot that purely simulates player behavior, is freshly released and/or only used by a limited number of people is almost impossible to detect. However: as long as BoA is around and as limited as it is, bots don't affect most players. We know that there are shady gold/item/service selling sites around (they frequently spam these forums, but thankfully most of it is caught by the spam detection or reported quickly so that we can delete it fast enough), but their effect is nowhere near as big as in D3V. And this brings me to the most important point...

BoA absolutely worked in making bots and gold-selling sites basically ineffective.

When the plans for "unlimited paragon" were released, many people said that the top of all rankings would be occupied by bots only. Well, the #1 paragon player is streaming 24/7 so he's not a bit; I know many people in the top 5000 paragon, DPS, or other rankings and they're not botting. Hell, even I'm relatively high up in some rankings and as far as I'm aware, I've never botted either. What's more important is that those people I just mentioned not only have not botted themselves, they also did not use any third party services like buying items or whatever. The only "cheesy game mechanic" that allows you to get better gear and bypass playing yourself is Rift it Forward; if you're high paragon you get thousands of rifts for free. But again, those players have put in hundreds of hours already to get that paragon which allows them to "exploit" RiF. It's nowhere like the AH in D3V which allowed you to create a new account, go to the AH, and buy all gear to be MP10 ready. With RoS this is just not gonna happen, at least not on a similar scale.

So... why is this important? Why do I care if people can "buy their way to the top"?

If you go back to my previous point, the top 5000, those matter for game design. Right now most of those (certainly not all, just to make that clear) deserve to be there, it was their own hard work of many hundreds of hours. If you'd allow any way of bypassing content to get there, i.e., open up trading so that a very efficient clan could get 100 people to get BiS gear due to better gear distribution, this effect would quickly magnify. Gearing characters would not be a matter of how much time you personally played, but with how many and how active players you would be in the clan. You can say I'm speculating here, but honestly, after all we've seen from the days of the AH - how much are people willing to pay for even decent gear, let alone those BiS items that got traded for thousands of dollars - this business would thrive for sure. The money you can make in this business by far outweighs the risk of getting banned (just look at the 100k dollars thread next door). Now, I don't care about either sides; if people want to earn or burn money in this game it shouldn't affect me. Unfortunately, it does. The game's drop rate would have to be adjusted - just like for the AH.

That is why I defend BoA.

Well, one of the reasons. I also completely agree with ruksak on that it's nicer to find items myself. A clan mate told me the other day that shortly I went offline he started playing and found a second Wand of Woh. With clan trading, I would finally have that damn weapon now. But I'm not even mad, I actually want to find that weapon myself. I think the second big issue in this thread is that BoA implicitly leads to a different game experience, and that's not for everyone. It's not the one that shaggy likes, it's not the one that any of the people enjoy who liked the auction house or D3V in general, it's not the one that anyone who participated in public trading in D2 likes.

Since the release of RoS, I played well more (probably even twice as much) as I did in all of D3V, and the reason was the auction house. You could buy everything for very little money, perfecting your character was just about getting one more stat or increased that stat on a trifecta item. Finding an item did not have this sense of accomplishment as in "nice item, let me switch to skill X to try out how it works" or "yay, I found an upgrade" but it was rather like "hooray, I just found a 150 million gold Nat Ring". Despite all the shortcomings in itemization 2.0, the "few" game-changing legendaries, it still kinda works. I am still looking for items that let me change to a certain playstyle: a Velvet Camaral to try out lightning, a Wand of Woh to play the build I'm most looking forward to, a Slanderer so that I can try the Istvan's Paired Blades set on my monk in 2.1. And that's after playing for hundreds and hundreds of hours.

For me personally this is just the core essence of Diablo. Unlike what other people have said, trading was never an essential part in Diablo for me (and as we have figured out in many previous discussions, it wasn't for the majority of D2 players either). I think D3V and the AH "spoiled" many people - especially millions of new players - with an experience that was not what Blizzard intended; that the main source of items was trading rather than playing. They sought to provide us with a way to give away few items (hence the 10 auction limit, delays, and 15% fee) but they never predicted that it would be used to that extent and turn into the *one* way to gear your character. It's no surprise that most D3V players are not coming back to RoS: it's not for everyone. But Diablo was never a game meant for everyone. Casuals and hardcore gamers, PvE and PvP enthusiasts, RPG/lore fans and action-focused hack'n'slay players - it is impossible to make one game that fits everyone's needs. Diablo is no different. The auction house took it to one extreme, we're now seeing a different one, but it is a necessary evil in this day and age, and it works for many players. Not all, but many.

And in the end, I'd just like to quote Don Vu (in this video, about 29 minutes in):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOlWo6Up_ic

"BoA is here to stay".