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Gold
,→The Economy
There are two types of economy in most RPGs; gold (used to buy items and services from NPCs) and items (what players really want). Diablo 2's economy had no real connection between these two, since gold became largely useless for high level characters and no amount of gold was ever acceptable in trade for a high end item. The Diablo III developers are working to keep these two halves of the economy interwoven, by making gold much less common, and by requiring considerable amounts of it for essential item creation and upgrade purposes.
Blizzard is aware that the D2 economy was fairly nonfunctional and unbalanced, and they do not wish to repeat that with Diablo III. Lessons learned from the past 10+ years of virtual economies, and from managing a functional economy in WoW, are being applied to D3's economy from the ground up. [[Bashiok]] has posted about their intentions in the past:[http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=23766989069&sid=3000&pageNo=2#34]
[[Bashiok]] has posted about their intentions to create a viable economy that's not influenced by 3rd party trading sites or gold sellers.[][http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=23766989069&sid=3000&pageNo=2#34] <blue>All of the issues that exist in Diablo II that essentially force people to use these kinds of sites in order to establish a base economy and help concentrate the playerbase to a centralized trading location will all be completely unnecessary when we achieve our economic and trade goals with Diablo III. ...We've always said we intend to have some type of in-game auction house feature. That alone would remove almost all desire to alt+tab and trade outside of the game. People use these sites because they centralize the trading community, and they establish a base currency. If there's no reason for people to leave the game, then they won't. It's as simple as that. ...Some arbitrary currency on some forum that no one buying Diablo III will have heard of except a small number of hardcore Diablo II players does not 'a heck of a beast' make. Can you give me numbers for how many actual people are playing Diablo II and using that site? Because I can guarantee you they will be outnumbered 100 to 1 (at least) when the game releases. So if they can each convince 100+ people to alt+tab and use a weird forum system to trade instead of what's right there and available to them in-game, then sure. But good luck. There will always be fringe RMT sites, and there will always be a tiny number of people looking for game-to-game trades, but to say that something like this will have a hold on the entire economy for game with a stable currency and auction house-type system is highly illogical. ...We're designing a stable economy, we have the knowledge and experience to do so. We have people in-house with doctorates and degrees in statistics and economic analysis and all the know how to pull it off. I think we'll be ok.</blue>
