Apparently they are shutting down the Diablo 3 auction houses on March 18, 2014. That seems like plenty of notice, and probably gives us a clue as to when we might be seeing the expansion. I don't mean I expect the expansion on that date, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the beta for the expansion right around then.
I felt a little bit like the auction house ruined the game. While a tiny, tiny percentage of players went on the forums to complain about massive inflation of prices in gear, the rest of us saw such incredible deflation that what was worth a million gold a few months ago was work 10k now if anyone was even bothering to sell it. I've said before that I thought that by far the most efficient way to advance your character was to just log out. That's disheartening even if you don't care about competition, even if you just wanted to kill some dudes and take their stuff. After all, the game's updates are all crafted around people who are playing at a level that you will be at for sure in a couple of months but that you can't get to any faster except by playing eight to ten hour days.
I decided to play the game in a way that the auction house was irrelevant and so that it wouldn't ruin my game. At the same time I went on the auction house and bought good enough stuff for my first level 60 character to do Inferno on Monster Power four or five so that I could do the infernal machine questline. Ultimately I never did the infernal machine and I have only gotten through two characters with random abilities. Diablo 3's appeal is fairly limited at this stage.
So I'm not sure I agree with closing the auction house. Why not just let people who want to play that way play that way and let people who want to play without it play without it? I guess it's partly because there is no way to tell one from the other so in open games you can play with an auction house monster when you would rather play with people who play your way. Maybe it's also because the best possible way to play the game is just to run the auction house and never kill anything. It might be because the ship has sailed for anyone joining the game and making items rare enough that you can't buy them dirt cheap on auction means that they are so rare that anyone who starts playing now can literally never acquire one. Basically with the auction house in the game they just can't help themselves - they have to build the game around it.
Still I'm looking forward to the expansion. A little disappointed there is only one new class, but I bet they are planning more than one expansion. Basically Blizzard hooked me.
Let me know if you ever do want to do the infernal machine thing. It's been a while since I did it, but I seem to recall doing it on MP10 when I did do it, so doing it at a much lower level just to do it should be viable.
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