|
Regarding Mods, I love mods, I play them all the time (Paradox games get a lot of their product life due to player made mods and tweaks). However in some games they're not as appropriate. In particular large scale multiplayer games like Diablo 2 and 3. In a game like Diablo 2 it's important for all the players to be playing by the same "rules" otherwise it would be unfair if some players had modded copies.
What Blizzard are intending is to integrate the online and offline portions of Diablo 3, and I think this is actually a good way to go. Single player Diablo 3 will be richer for being able to trade your loot. I think the offline/online integration of SC2 also worked quite well.
As an RPG, Diablo, I think, works best as a pseudo MMO. And that's how I think it should be arranged.
If you really want a modded diabloesque game I'm sure there's other engines you can look at. It's getting easier and easier for independent games to get made outside of mods.
As for RMAH, I look forward to selling my excess equipment to fools who are willing to pay real money for it. The real meat of trading has always been barter, and that's not going to change. Though being able to auction for gold and then use the gold immediately might be useful.
Blizzard can keep the value of gold in D3 relatively consistent if it's tied to some usefull service ingame (EG trading gold for experience or something). That way if the value of gold gets too low people will switch to buying the other stuff taking gold out of the system until it's more valuable again.
|