Friday, May 4, 2012

Diablo III Real Money/Currency Auction House: An Opinion

The most intriguing thing about Diablo 3 for me now is not the characters or even whether it has a good gameplay mechanic or not, but the feature of real money auction house which basically Blizzard's way to monetize player's trading legally while attempted to shut down the dreaded illegal Real Money Trading of a game. Basically as the name said: You trade virtual goods with real money currencies

The plan was revealed about a year ago on Blizzcon, and finalized some days ago, you can read the full disclosure here, short version: Blizzard will take some of your money, it's 15% from the price of equipment and @ 1.50$ for materials, gems, and other stackable commodities. If you want to transfer your earnings from battle.net balance to your bank/paypal account Blizz will take 15% from the total amount transferred

These ones below are purely my thought:

So if I have a stack (20) ex: iron ore (or any other crafting materials, I never played Diablo 3 and D3DB doesn't have any craft database up yet), sell it for $1 each, I'll get $20, blizz will take 15% of it so that's left me with $17, then I transferred everything to my PP account, Blizz take another swag of 15%, left me with $14.45, listing fees only deducted from the amount of my sold items and when my mats doesn't sell the listing fees will be returned to me.

I have $14.45 enough to cover my internet bill, or pay other subs, or I might left them on my battle.net balance so I can resub to WoW (UPDATE: apparently you can't buy subs with your battle.net balance since it's not listed here, thanks for samII to point it on Tobold's) imagine if I have rare longsword of something and I sold them for like $50, blizz will only take 1.00 from it and I left with about $41.225 when transferred, I can buy any X360 games!!!

and all I do, is play Diablo III!!! Of course this one is just a theory, but in my opinion Blizzard has just opened a virtually endless watering hole in which everyone can sell those waters, my line of work is mainly trading and I understand the law of supply and demand, but in this one the supplies are nearly endless so the price will become undercutting race between players because all you need is to have enough to pay the listing fees and when it didn't sold it'll be returned to you with the fees, in 48 hours, in just a short time you can arrange anything you want to sell or buy again, at those time you probably already acquired a legendary helmet because you're such an awesome player which you probably can sold at $100, probably...

But of course in my experience everything that involves a massive amount of money is always targeted, Blizzard needs to strengthen account security to prevent notorious hackers trying to get their hand on REAL money on battle.net balance, while in game adept Auction House Players will tried to control supply and demand with undercutting and overpricing. And yeah, players will always tried to exploit and circumvent any bugs and condition they've met, botters for example probably will rampage around while Diablo III is not a true MMORPG but it'll affect the amount of supplies, demands will become tricky since we already have stigmas that players who brought everything with real money currencies are considered exploiter and have instant gratification mentality, but in this one the instant gratification mentality is probably will be the best buyers =))

May 15th and three months after will be the test of this monetized system of Blizzard, will they gain profits or the system will be endlessly exploited and circumvented that it'll hurt Blizzard and the players themselves? Time will tell again I guess

Me? Oh no, I won't be playing it, beside having a stone age notebook the dungeon crawler genre kinda rubs me the wrong way, of course if I have the time on my hand (which is not) I'll buy it and roll a monk (or witch doctor), beside It'll be nostalgic too meet Tyrael again :)

Yeah, he's probably will still be faceless

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Gundam Age Third Look: I want to cry now, can I?

Gundam Age act III, okay for all of you who doesn't realize it until now: This anime has become creepier and incompatible with my brain parts, and also an insult to the gundam franchise, this is a reminder for all of you movie makers: You CAN'T take Band of Brothers and tone down the level of violence so it'll be suitable for kids, Gundam is a story about war, about kids killing other kids or adults, you CAN'T TONE DOWN that!! and if the franchise really wants to sell more toys to kids please let me remind you that kids in Japan is a non existant entity. And the amount of teenage nerds that bought Gundam toy models is even bigger than the population in my city anyway


Because if there are kids in Japan, they'll start building weapons of mass destruction

Ok, so in the end of Act two the dark lord Flit Asuno and his force-less apprentice son Asemu set up a trap to lure the Earth spies for the Vagan, which apparently the president of Earth itself, so Darth Asuno captured him, executed him and the rest of his senate accomplice and start the dark reign of Earth under the military rules and strict martial law, turning the Earth itself into a training grounds for the new Sith generation.
Yeah...

I lied, apparently the citizen of earth are okay with those execution and live happily ever after, which is weird because in my head the battle between the V and the Earthers are becoming more and more 1980s cold war-like, except both parties endlessly launched giant robots to space and blow up planets and space stations, it's extremy unfathomable that Sith Emperor Asuno brainwashed the entire Earth citizen to hate Vagans while on the other side the prophetic leader of Vagans brainwashed the entire Martians to think Earth is their rights to take, it's like watching the entire international conflict on World War 1 fused itself into a giant ball of polarized opinion

I don't have any good picture to describe this but this one come close

So, let's continue, after Asemu and the most screen time girl have coitus (legally of course, they're married anyway) they have a son called Kio, apparently dark lord Asuno isn't finished on his quest to eradicate all communists.... i mean Vagans so he brought his grandson a combat simulation which apparently a Gundam cockpit simulator, so yeah little cute Kio has been trained to kill Vagans since he was five.

His parents will be so proud

After that the story goes on, Kio got a transformer big Gundam called Age 3 and start blasting away Vagans with ease, and that's that.

yes, that's all, the end, now let me cry.