Thread: Bartermen or Businessmen?

I'm 100% for the auction house.

I'm find with an auction house up to the point that you can get an item without having to be in-game for the actual transfer of the item. If there is an in-game way to list the items you have for trade, people can do a search for stats or item name, and can find someone who has what they are looking for that's great.

Also most of the time in D2 people knew exactly what they wanted for an item, they wouldn't make trades like "This great item for bunch of mediocre items", they just wanted whatever the currency was at the time (be in SOJ's, HR's, etc) so they could easily trade for something else they wanted. This is about the most player interaction you are you going to get in D3 as well because now the currency will just be gold (or whatever they will call it)

What would be bad is if someone who happens to have a huge amount of gold, buying up all of one item (perhaps not the hardest to find item, but still by no means easy), for the sake of reducing the supply and increasing the price of it, and instantly having it in their inventory once they buy from the auction house. Now this may or may not be possible, but the fact remains that if you had to spend the 1-2 minutes joining a game and completing the trade it would be much harder to do this then if the items were instantly in your inventory when the auction ended or you to just use buy it now (or whatever the non ebay reference is).

Also, as was brought up in the article, getting rid of the spam of people trying to find/sell and item is a good thing. I know in Guild Wars, they added a channel specifically for trading, but people would use the main chat to spam. This is annoying because these people either didn't know there was a trade channel (or didn't realize they weren't using it), or were just completely disregarding the fact that they should only trade in the trade channel in order to get more people to see what they were trading (which imo makes them a) idiots for not realizing if people chose to enable a filter on the trade channel they don't want to trade and/or b) scum of the earth, lower then scammer's and greifers)...

Anyway.. If they implement what I think is a good in-game trade system I think people will use both that and websites to try to get their trading done.

Bartering is MUCH better. I loved the way I would sit around and get a good deal from someone for a nice item, then go trade that to another player in another trade game back in the good old days on Diablo II.

While the AH makes it much better, it takes away the 'trade' feel - which suits WoW, since it's a MMO and there is much to do, unlike in Diablo II, where trading is a real part of the end-game content, really.

Diablo II's end-game content was trading, pvp and MFing, while WoW has so much more. That being said, I think Diablo III will offer more, but still, for end-game won't have as WoW. If you take away the barter trading aspect of the game it will take away from the limited end-game content the game will most probably have.