It was never properly tested in the context of end-game progression and ended up going against what the designers wanted the play experience to be. Though that means compromising on (preferrably) the "efficient trading" design goal.Īnd that's why the AH and basically trading as a whole was removed. Wyatt agreed that this is indeed a cursed problem, but there are ways around it. You just cannot have both, so you need to compromise on one of your design goals. The issue is so fundamental that tweaking the numbers won't help. "There was nothing they could have done to tune this" is the more controversial follow-up claim, but I'm inclined to agree. And that fundamentally goes against a rich loot experience. Then the items themselves stop mattering, only their value does. So I can regard each item I find as just equivalent to its currency value.
It claims that the two fantasies are fundamentally incompatible because efficient trading means that I can easily turn any item into currency. The talk brings up the example of D3's auction house at around 19:03 and identifies "Rich loot experience" with "efficient trading" as such a cursed problem. In short, a cursed problem arises when two game design goals are fundamentally opposed in practice. Game design has so-called "cursed problems", detailed in this GDC talk.
I asked him about whether having an AH in a loot-focused game like Diablo was even possible without breaking the game, as others have likened it to a "cursed problem" before: The truth is closer to "D3's tuning drove players to the AH" or "The accessibility of the AH bypassed the normal reward loop". The game was tested and tuned without the AH being in use. Last year, Wyatt Cheng (Patch Lead for D3) posted a lengthy-ish Twitter thread on the matter of vanilla D3 supposedly being designed around the AH: Last updated at 14:00:17 UTC Weekly Help Desk RAGE Loot Thread Trade Thread
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