User:Czar/drafts/Diablo III Auction House

The 2012 action role-playing game Diablo III launched with a real-money auction house, in which players could buy and sell character equipment in exchange for in-game or real-world money. The auction house was later removed from the game.

Development
The auction house was first announced in 2011 in the lead up to Diablo III 2012 release.

The Diablo III development team built the auction house as a security measure to address item duplication hacks that affected the in-game economy of its predecessor. The team's solution was to control the market so that hackers would not. According to Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson, the auction house's ability to make money was secondary, as the team expected any profits to be meager. THe development team did not readily share these security reasons during the auction house's controversy so as not to entice hackers with a challenge.

launch

Response and removal
Critics of the auction house portrayed the feature as a greedy mechanism that would make players "pay to win" Diablo III endgame.

Ars Technica wrote that the auction house had become an "unwritten requirement" to advance in the endgame with better character items once the character had reached its maximum level. "The drops I found in game, even after more than 100 hours of play time," wrote the journalist, "haven't even started to approach the level of equipment I could quickly and effortlessly acquire with a bit of gold."

gold dupe bug

In September 2013, Blizzard announced that the Diablo III Auction House would be shut down. Game Director Josh Mosqueira said that the feature had "short-circuited the core reward loop", as players came to use the auction house as their primary means of finding exceptional endgame items rather than playing the game itself. He said they had intended it to be a supplemental place to trade items. The decision to close the auction house came as the team redesigned its core reward loop to incentivize gameplay in preparatior for the game's expansion pack, Reaper of Souls. These changes, known as "Loot 2.0", which increased the number of items dropped and bound the item's rarest items to the player's account, restricting their ability to be traded after a play session. These changes further incentivized multiplayer play in Diablo endgame.

The team's decision to remove the feature was hampered by internal legal concern over whether a feature prominently advertised on its packaging as a selling point could be removed from the game. Blizzard ultimately decided to remove it and risk a lawsuit.

Both the gold and real-money auction houses closed in March 2014 with the release of the Diablo III: Reaper of Souls expansion. Fans largely supported the change, with its focus on playing the game itself rather than the meta-game of following auctions.

Citing auction house's unpopularity, the game's lead designer later estimated that the auction house had made less than $15 million, a fraction of what Blizzard's World of Warcraft games made.