Blizzard defends itself on the RMAH controversy – Video Games Update
Blizzard denies that the Real Money Auction House (RMAH) in Diablo 3 affects the Item Drop rates in the game and claims that there is no truth behind the Item Drop ‘conspiracy theory’.
Fans were both excited and worried when Blizzard announced the RMAH for Diablo 3, where gamers will be able to auction the loot items they found in-game for real money. An interesting concept allowing micro transactions amongst gamers but Blizzard announced
that it will be taking a 15 percent cut off every transaction.
There was even more concern for the fans when it was announced that Diablo 3 will feature a Digital Rights management lock (DRM) which will require constant connection to the internet for the game to work. Then some rumours started to spread that Blizzard
was modifying the Item drop rate of the game to decrease the drop rate or to ‘nerf’ the items that were dropped.
This will give Blizzard the monopoly over the RMAH as they, being the developers, can just create better items than those that gamers are likely to get from drops.
“The drop rates were tuned for a player who would never use the Auction House. For the majority of internal development, we didn't have an Auction House, and we all played using our own drops only. I've personally leveled multiple characters from 1 to 60
internally before the game came out using only drops that I found -- we all did,” claimed lead designer Wyatt Cheng on Reddit. However, this is just admission of guilt as the RMAH is linked with the game, plus there is no offline mode.
So why would Blizzard need to fix drop rates for players who don’t use the RMAH since it’s completely integrated into the single player mode even though the use of RMAH is optional.
Blizzard is doing something wrong as the stats show that the game’s user count is dropping fast, since out of the 6 million gamers who purchased this game, there are only about seven thousand left still playing. Since there is no expansion or DLC planned
for Diablo 3 at the moment, Blizzard might even lose the few players left to the blockbuster games coming out this holiday season.
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