Trion Worlds has announced that the recently implemented auction house in Defiance is being removed, citing an inability to fix server issues that the update brought about. Players will no longer be able to place auctions on the exchange beginning today (July 25th) and the feature as a whole will be completely removed within a few weeks.
As you know, we’ve been working hard to review and implement fixes. However, several challenges remain that must be resolved for the sake of the game, which include preventing players from using third party programs to inject currency into the game, maintaining a stable game environment, and fixing any issues that prevent players from logging in to the game. Removing the Exchange helps solve all of these challenges.
There are no plans to bring back the exchange in the future.
Allods Online has introduced quite an interesting money sink: Coupons! In a recent post titled Wind of Changes: Closer Look at Pure Soul, the team at gPotato details the new class change coupons. These coupons allow players to change their class, not to mention their gear, race, and appearance, with the click of a button. The catch? The coupons are placed on the auction house once per week, and only one coupon per class is available each week. How much do you really want to change your class? As Jerry Mcguire would say, show me the money!
Join the auction, and keep bidding until you have beaten all competitors! The precious coupon will be yours! Use it and you will be able to obtain a Core Morpher related to the chosen class. Players from the subscription server will receive it via in-game mail, whereas players from the Free-to-play server will acquire the Core Morpher in the Item Shop by redeeming the coupon they won from the Auction House.
Ding dong, the witch is dead. Ever since the idea was first revealed by Blizzard, the auction house in Diablo III has been readily panned by players for undermining the core gameplay of killing a load of things to amass a load of stuff. In a surprise announcement, Blizzard has announced that the auction houses, both real money and the fake kind, will be shut down on March 18th, 2014.
When we initially designed and implemented the auction houses, the driving goal was to provide a convenient and secure system for trades. But as we’ve mentioned on different occasions, it became increasingly clear that despite the benefits of the AH system and the fact that many players around the world use it, it ultimately undermines Diablo’s core game play: kill monsters to get cool loot. With that in mind, we want to let everyone know that we’ve decided to remove the gold and real-money auction house system from Diablo III.
The update will go hand in hand with the Loot 2.0 system coming with the first Diablo III expansion.
Ding dong, the witch is dead. Ever since the idea was first revealed by Blizzard, the auction house in Diablo III has been readily panned by players for undermining the core gameplay of killing a load of things to amass a load of stuff. In a surprise announcement, Blizzard has announced that the auction houses, both real money and the fake kind, will be shut down on March 18th, 2014.
When we initially designed and implemented the auction houses, the driving goal was to provide a convenient and secure system for trades. But as we’ve mentioned on different occasions, it became increasingly clear that despite the benefits of the AH system and the fact that many players around the world use it, it ultimately undermines Diablo’s core game play: kill monsters to get cool loot. With that in mind, we want to let everyone know that we’ve decided to remove the gold and real-money auction house system from Diablo III.
The update will go hand in hand with the Loot 2.0 system coming with the first Diablo III expansion.
Last time we checked in with Perfect World over the Neverwinter auction house exploit, the company was pretty determined to keep the possibility of a rollback secluded only to those accounts that were affected by this weekend’s brou ha ha. At one point the company must have determined that character-specific rollbacks were not on the cards, as Neverwinter has performed a rollback to early Saturday morning.
We took the Neverwinter OBT down for emergency maintenance, found the bug, corrected it and tested it. In order to fix the damage this exploit caused to the in-game economy, we implemented a necessary rollback of our servers to 5:20 AM PDT the morning of May 19, 2013. This means that characters have been reverted to the state they were in at that time, pre-exploit damage. That includes items, level, experience, etc.
All Zen exchanged after this time (whether spent or traded on the auction house) will be returned to its original owner. There is apparently an issue with returning astral diamonds which PWE is still working on. The Foundry was not affected by the rollback, so players who created levels or made changes after the rollback time will be happy to see that their work was not reversed. Characters created during that period will be lost, unfortunately. It appears that Perfect World is working on a package for players to thank them for being patient during this period.
As far as complaints that the bug existed long before this weekend, going further back into earlier beta tests, Perfect World will be checking logs and removing accounts that were already using the exploit in open beta.
We are performing additional log searches and investigations to ensure that the appropriate actions are taken against any accounts that performed the exploit before the rollback window. Exploits that were performed prior to our rollback window make up a fraction of a percent of total impact, so we will be dealing with those issues selectively as not to cause greater impact on those legitimate testers.
Back in July, I talked about how players can get access to Hellgate Global’s Act 3 ticket and Tokyo expansion without paying a dime by paying for the tickets on the in-game auction house. At the time, the tickets only cost a few hundred thousand palladium. In September, I updated the post with another update: The prices for act 3 tickets amounted to around 450,000 palladium, with the Tokyo ticket around half of that.
I checked in on the ticket prices, and not only have prices skyrocketed, the amount of available tickets has gone down to just a few choices. I checked the auction house at 7:30pm on February 1st and found only one Act 3 ticket on sale and a handful of Tokyo expansion tickets on sale. At these prices, it might be easier to just throw down the seven dollars in real cash to buy the tickets from the cash shop.
I'm legally required to remind you to game responsibly.
Here at MMO Fallout, I try to offer my help to companies more in the form of business decisions, rather than what I might feel that the game needs. I only play a handful of MMOs, and honestly am not the best person to go to in order to find out what your game needs tweaking. Sure, I know that All Points Bulletin needs better shooting and driving, and I know that Blizzard needs to severely crack down on mobile authenticators being used as a free way to manipulate stolen accounts, but I couldn’t tell you how the latest expansion affected drop rates in Lineage 2, or how players in Guild Wars might react if a certain update was implemented.
Absolutely Brilliant! is a new category devoted to people clearly smarter than myself. In this section, I highlight ideas that, even if the company the game is directed at won’t take notice, other companies with similar models could definitely benefit from grabbing up this person’s idea.
Final Fantasy XIV goes into open beta soon, and the closed beta members are throwing suggestions left and right. Our first idea comes from MMORPG.com user ProfRed, who has an idea to make the market system a lot more streamlined. Seeing as how Square Enix is not gracing Final Fantasy XIV with an auction house (at least not for now), players are trying to find new ways to make the retainer system (a character who sits in market areas selling your items for you) as easy to use as possible. Rather than just a simple search engine, ProfRed (or The Professor, as I’ve taken to calling him) suggested:
“They simply need to add a way to browse items in one of the market wards. Say search for an item and it lists what market wards it exists in. Not even prices just where. Something akin to standing at the entrance and yelling, “I NEED A PINK MAGE HAT OF DOOM”, and vendors yelling back, “GET IT HERE!!!”.
Personal trade/merchanting is a great thing. I am sick of MMO’s making everything easy mode and catering to the anti social.”
Having a system like this would be a little shaky at the start, having to type the name of the item out exactly, but if Square Enix would implement this, such a system would do wonders more than some of the other suggestions (holding up signs, descriptions above names, etc), be less cumbersome if only the player speaking could see the feedback, and would remove the prospect of walking through a thousand retainers looking for your pink mage hat of doom, the idea of which sends me back to my years of playing games like ROSE Online, and the myriad of other free Korean games, most of which featured some form of private shop.
So that’s episode 1 of Absolutely Brilliant! For the record, I won’t be accepting direct submissions by email to this category, but if you see someone’s idea on a forum feel free to link me to it, either here or through my email. Special thanks to ProfRed, and all of the people who will eventually spite me for indirectly associating them with this webiste.
File this one under “how is this in improvement?” I don’t normally talk about game’s individual updates, but the upcoming patch to Warhammer Online, 1.3.6, is revamping the UI of the auction house to better fit the searching needs of the game’s players. As a result of this upgrade, all auctions are standardized to 48 hours, and Mythic has decided to remove the option of bidding on items, opting for a buyout only approach.
According to the WAR Herald, the options being removed are due to lack of popularity, so I won’t question that aspect. I do have to question how removing the aspects altogether, rather than allowing the few who do utilize them, can be an improvement. It is possible, of course, that the new infrastructure of the auction house required some of the options to be removed, but aside from a technical limitation point of view, I don’t believe there is much Mythic can say to convince me “no, this is for your own good.” I feel like I’m talking to the Apple of MMOs.
Personally in the grand majority of MMOs that I have played where an auction house exists, I’ve found myself setting up a tried and true method of selling my wares: start low, set a high buyout amount, and start gathering data on how well the items sell for. On World of Warcraft, this method has become a godsend in selling stacks of cloth and has allowed me to make a substantial amount of gold doing what is essentially a side-job.
Runescape is one of the few MMOs I can think of that only features a buyout option, although the Grand Exchange isn’t billed as an Auction House, and the system of buying and selling is 100% anonymous.
I have a feeling Mythic might offer their players some clarification, and hopefully if enough people ask for it bidding might be returned to the game.
File this one under “how is this in improvement?” I don’t normally talk about game’s individual updates, but the upcoming patch to Warhammer Online, 1.3.6, is revamping the UI of the auction house to better fit the searching needs of the game’s players. As a result of this upgrade, all auctions are standardized to 48 hours, and Mythic has decided to remove the option of bidding on items, opting for a buyout only approach.
According to the WAR Herald, the options being removed are due to lack of popularity, so I won’t question that aspect. I do have to question how removing the aspects altogether, rather than allowing the few who do utilize them, can be an improvement. It is possible, of course, that the new infrastructure of the auction house required some of the options to be removed, but aside from a technical limitation point of view, I don’t believe there is much Mythic can say to convince me “no, this is for your own good.” I feel like I’m talking to the Apple of MMOs.
Personally in the grand majority of MMOs that I have played where an auction house exists, I’ve found myself setting up a tried and true method of selling my wares: start low, set a high buyout amount, and start gathering data on how well the items sell for. On World of Warcraft, this method has become a godsend in selling stacks of cloth and has allowed me to make a substantial amount of gold doing what is essentially a side-job.
Runescape is one of the few MMOs I can think of that only features a buyout option, although the Grand Exchange isn’t billed as an Auction House, and the system of buying and selling is 100% anonymous.
I have a feeling Mythic might offer their players some clarification, and hopefully if enough people ask for it bidding might be returned to the game.
Aion is one of the few MMOs to incorporate private shops in addition to an Auction House. Players are able to set up shop wherever they go, allowing their character to set up a little table for other player to browse. Current Aion players that I talked to on the subject prefer the private shops to the auction house, noting that in the auction house there are “too many instances of players doing everything to undercut each other in price.” Setting up a shop also removes the automatic logout feature for players who are away from keyboard.
MMO Fallout 