After experiencing Diablo 4, I found that Blizzard has not intentionally made Diablo 4 pay to win. There’s nothing of a cash shot that allows you to spend real money on player power like Diablo Immortal for example. However, they have with the design of itemization of a game encouraged more third-party real money transactions of items. Let me explain how and why this could be a potential problem with Diablo 4 going forward.
Now, with every online game, there are going to be third-party websites where you can pay real money for items in the game or some kind of win trading like Arena, Diablo 4 Gold or leveling boosts. It’s an unavoidable fact. But you don’t want to make a game where this kind of activity will thrive.
Let’s take World of WarCraft for example, you can’t just get the best weapon in the game, put it in your bag and sell it for real money to any other player, like you would sell a Counter-Strike knife or a weapon skin. And this is because loot is bind on pickle. Once you’ve picked it up, you can’t trade it for anyone apart from the little two-hour window to trade it with people in your raid group.
Speaking of trading, the best loot in Diablo 4 is privately tradeable. You may feel incredible. Aren’t legendaries the best loot? Aren’t legendaries untradeable? You would be wrong to think so. While technically legendaries aren’t the best loot, they are very important, as the production of a lot of best loot is inseparable from legendaries.
Firstly, we have rare Diablo 4 items. They are yellow and can have a total of five affixes. Affixes are essentially stats like how in World of WarCraft you get critical rating and haste rating.
Then, we have legendaries that also have five affixes but also have a legendary effect. These legendary effects are more powerful than the other affixes, so they give legendary items the potential to be more powerful than rare items because of an extra juicy effects. It’s like a cherry on the top of the cake. Now, legendaries cannot be traded, but rare items can be traded.
Now, we get into the problem. The Oculus is a new crafter in the game who can destroy your legendary item, but allows you to keep the effects in your codex of power to essentially apply to another legendary or rare item lighter. These effects will replace the legendary effects on the gear piece, so we can have two legendary affixes at once. This means it doesn’t matter whether you put this legendary affix on a rare item or a legendary item. They will just be as good as each other.
So, the optimal strategy is obviously going to help you get the best rare item with the best five affixes that you want to optimize your class and your build and then apply the legendary effects that you want to this rare item to essentially craft your own legendary item. Here, I want to emphasize again: rare items are, in fact, tradable.
Game item traders or whatever profession is called are probably salivating right now at a potential profit that they can make in Diablo 4 alongside the websites like Traderie. Because imagine if in an MMO like World of WarCraft, you could just trade the best in slot loot that drops from Mythic raids or in Classic WoW, imagine someone just selling best loot like Trinkets, Commerce Trail or Flare of the Heavens.
Obviously, the GDKP scene does allow this to happen, but you actually have to be there to defeat the boss to see the loot and you can only trade it within two hours. Imagine, if I could just get the best loot in the game and even trade it, if any player in the game for cheap Diablo 4 Gold or real money whenever I wanted, and this is going to be a reality unless they make any changes in Diablo 4. It’s really one of my biggest concerns because the game has been designed in a way to encourage third-party transactions. The community could potentially make this game pay to win.
It’ll be much worse if Blizzard provided this themselves like they do in Diablo Immortal. Only a small percentage of a player base will probably engage in third-party transactions. But it will be enough to affect the game for everyone else. Obviously, we can criticize Blizzard for making the game pay to win because we haven’t done it quite on the level of Diablo Immortal. But they are so more encouraging pay to win through a back door with their game design decisions and hopefully, it’s just a little of an oversight and there’s going to be a change to this.
Personally, I think that best in slot gear shouldn’t be tradable and I think if you’re going to have loot tradable in a game, it should only be in your group’s party for a short period of time, especially only if both players were there when the gear piece dropped. Because, obviously, if you’re playing the game of a friend and a good piece of gear drops for him and not you, you could just trade it.
But I really just don’t think that you should be able to trade the gear piece with people who were not there. They could also introduce another quality of gear higher than legendary to discourage people from selling in-game gear for real money on third-party websites. You should have to earn the gear in an RPG game. It’s what an RPG funny enough is all about. It’s why I love RPG so much: the adventure of progressing your character rather than just being able to get loot through an easier method or your credit card. Of course, the promotion of the character requires the support of a large amount of Diablo 4 Gold for sale.
That’s just my humble opinion. Anyway, you may like more gear boost systems in your games. But I feel like this just cheapens the progression element of a game. I understand that loot in Diablo games is very random. And it can be very frustrating having to farm your best since a lot of affixes on a particular gear piece and just being able to trade the gear with someone else removes a lot of a frustration that comes with farming gear.
Also Read: Why Supports Will Play A Huge Role In The Meta For Diablo 4?
Having said that, I still feel that there are ways around the irritating elements of these games. We all know that we are free to choose which legendary affixes we want to reapply to another piece of equipment. Then why not increase the types of applicable affixes? Why aren’t players allowed to customize their gear more? That way, they don’t have to farm the same boss over and over to get the perfect loot they want.
