Sometimes I remember the D3 Real Money AH and am struck by how awe inspiring it was as a project. Design, implementation, legal, global currencies and fraud. The impact to game drops obviously wasn’t cool, but outside of that... It’s just incredible it was pulled off at all.
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It wasn’t tuned to maximize profits so much as tuned to the existence of a huge cache of items on an AH. If everyone playing can freely trade and sell everything then you have to greatly reduce items coming into the economy to avoid saturation and ruining character progression.
And Diablo 3 sold very well. Didn’t need AH money. I think not having ongoing content was probably more of a factor that the team wasn’t set up to support that and was probably trying to reconcile that vs. working on other projects. (guessing)
