With the release of Diablo 3, Blizzard made a big mistake that they had to correct years later.
The release of Diablo 4 is only a few weeks away, and the president of Blizzard, Mike Ybarra, has even announced the exact time for the release of the action RPG.
After the open beta received a lot of praise but also harsh criticism, the question arises: How well will the release of Diablo 4 go?
We remember the release of its predecessor, Diablo 3, and look back at a big mistake Blizzard made back then. A mistake whose absence can ensure that Diablo 4 has a significantly better start.
The auction house tarnished the core gameplay of Diablo
What was that mistake? When Diablo 3 was released in May 2012, it featured an auction house. In this auction house, you could buy and sell found items for the in-game currency “gold” or for real money. Blizzard itself took a cut of the money paid in transactions between players.
The problem with the auction house, however, was that a Diablo player’s goal is usually to farm better gear. The principle of the auction house contradicted the core gameplay of Diablo – fighting monsters and collecting loot:
- You didn’t have to run dungeons for days to find a specific piece of equipment. You could just buy it.
- Afterwards, one completed the endgame content a few more times and then the game lost its charm.
- There was no longer a goal to be achieved because you couldn’t find loot that was better than the purchased gear.
This is also described by the Reddit user skylights1 in a comment from 4 years ago:
The ‘real money auction house’ turned ‘vanilla Diablo 3’ into an auction house simulator with an ARPG side game. It was no longer a game that you played for hours to get better and complete increasingly difficult content. Instead, it became a game where the goal was to collect the best loot to auction it off in the auction house. If you were lucky, you could earn enough money in the auction house to make your money back for the game and then buy a better game.
skylights1 via Reddit
Players stopped with Diablo 3 after spending money in the auction house
What do Diablo players say about the auction house? How accurate skylights1’s description was can be seen from the stories of various players. The Reddit user SeiriusPolaris wrote, for example, a year ago that three of his friends stopped playing Diablo 3 after buying gear in the auction house (via Reddit). Another user says on Reddit:
I had a friend who joined and spent 100 dollars on gold and items to go from a level 1 barbarian to level 60 in just a few hours, with everything he could ever wish for… We ran a few things, he played for about 2 more days and said he saw no point in playing anymore.
About 1.5 years after the release of Diablo 3, Blizzard realized that the auction house was not a good idea and announced its shutdown. In March 2014, just under 2 years after the release of Diablo 3, the auction house was closed.
With Diablo 4, Blizzard wants to return to the core gameplay of the series, avoid past mistakes, and focus on defeating monsters and collecting loot.
Therefore, Diablo 4 should also not feel like an MMO despite the shared world, where players need healers or tanks in their ranks to defeat a boss. It should again be about farming the best gear and dealing massive damage like the best damage dealers.
