D3 Developers: Items Could Be Upgraded and Become Non-Tradeable

Diablo III items could be upgradeable and would become non-tradeable in the process, in one possible future item change discussed by Diablo III Game Designer Travis Day. He talked about this idea in an exclusive interview with Diablo Somepage, along with Game Director Josh Mosqueira and Lead Designer Kevin Martens. They also talked about the constant work to balance Diablo III skills, why they want players killing elites more than bosses, and other topics.

Read on for part 3, the final installment of our interview with the Diablo III developers. See Part 1 and Part 2 for the previous news from the interview, and the full transcript for all the details from the developers.


One idea that the developers like, when thinking about the future of Diablo III items, is a system where an item's power could be increased and then the item is longer tradeable. According to developer Travis Day, "We've definitely been exploring ways in which players could alter or modify their items, and certainly one of the things that comes up is that doing this has a very tangible cost, so potentially making it something that you can't trade again. That has been an idea we've explored, and I think generally view positively." This would bring to the softcore economy some of the same type of item sink that is found in the hardcore side, but without the full loss of characters and all items at once. "We think that that makes the option of taking something and removing it from the economy in that way, a more positive experience as opposed to a negative experience. So you feel like you can't trade it, but the item is even more awesome," he said.

If those sort of changes are added, they will likely happen in the Diablo III itemization revamp. As detailed in Part 2 of our interview, that overhaul to items is still very far down the road, and won't be done by BlizzCon 2013 in November.


Another area where wealth is taken out of the economy is via "gold sinks", any method where gold is removed entirely from the Diablo III economy. More gold sinks may be added at any time, and aren't necessarily tied to the itemization revamp, Day said. "The gold sink stuff is definitely something we try to stay on top of as much as we can. To some extent the economy is constantly inflating, just by virtue of more gold coming in than going out. We try to help normalize that as much as possible. If we see that there's an enormous influx of gold, and players don't have anything compelling to do with their gold, we try to come up with cool things for them to do. I don't think those are necessarily some things we would just throw in all at once, I don't think there's a master plan to make gold amazingly important," he said.

Day emphasized the idea of having enough interesting and useful ways for players to use their in-game gold, to keep it flowing back out of the economy. The most recent additions to help with this were the Marquise gems and Archon account-bound crafted armor, that were added in Patch 1.0.7. Day noted, "It's just helping to provide players with outlets for their gold that they feel good about. And more outlets for that gold is always better, so that will probably be something that over time we will just continue adding more and more things, to give players more options for what they do with their in-game gold."


The primary method of gold being pulled from the economy right now is with the 15% cut of gold that is taken from any item sold in the Gold Auction House. The maximum price for an item sold on the Gold Auction House is 2 billion gold. The developers would like to raise that limit, but it is not an easy change. Day said, "It's something we want to do, unfortunately it's not a spreadsheet value that we can add a couple of zeros to. It's a matter of the way the data is stored in our database, so it's not a trivial problem to fix. I will say that we would like to, but have no immediate plans to resolve that or change that." As seen in the gold dupe bug that came up initially with the small changes made in the Real Money Auction House in Patch 1.0.8, this is certainly an area where any changes have to be made very carefully.


One big area always under improvement are the balance and power of Diablo III skills. Day said the developers are in an "ongoing fight" to try to bring enough diversity in skills, that players have multiple options for the skills they use on their characters. A common example of very narrow choices are the Most Popular Barbarian Builds, which overwhelming favor builds based on Whirlwind and Sprint. "I'd say our goal is always to allow players the freedom to choose to play their character how they want, and for other people to not make them feel bad about it. Because as soon as there's the community involved, your choice to not use Whirlwind gets called into question. Making the other playstyles more varied also helps the game in general feel different; you can mix up your gameplay experience from day to day if you choose," Day said.

The primary work so far with skill changes have been to increase the power of the skills that are not very popular, Day noted. "Trying to find the skills that are the least used is usually our focus. In that case, instead of taking the good things and taking them away, our approach has generally been taking the things that don't get much love, and trying to make them more compelling choices. The numbers that we've seen as a result of the patches, like 1.04 and 1.05, etcetera, we've seen a lot of change. The Demon Hunter and the Witch Doctor, for example, have really really good skill distribution; they see lots of diversity. The flip side of the coin is the Barb and the Wizard, who see very little."

Some skills just seem destined to be difficult to balance. Given how out of balance Sprint - Run Like the Wind and Energy Twister - Wicked Wind are, Day joked that it must be something with the type of skill itself. "I've said repeatedly, at this point, we suck with anything that's a tornado; basically, if it's a tornado, it's probably broken," he laughed.


A player in Diablo III will often find the elite monsters more difficult than the big bosses. That's an intentional design, said Lead Designer Kevin Martens. "Why you fight bosses versus why you fight elites, has sort of a different balance than previous Diablo games did. Bosses aren't so much about the challenge in D3 vanilla, as they are about the celebration or the story moment that you have defeated another Lord of Hell. That is different than other games, certainly other games we make right now and other games we've made in the past. That's sort of deliberate; whereas the challenge generally comes in with the elite monsters, which are intended to often be harder than the bosses," he said.

As noted in Part 1 of our interview, Martens said that the improvements made to the boss fights in the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Diablo III, might end up making their way back to the PC versions. The designers are also looking to use that experience in revisiting the bosses for the console, to design even more interesting boss fights for future Diablo III content. Martens said, "Certainly new bosses that we make in the future, we're going to try to learn from what we did with those ones, and make them better."

For now, there won't be any patch changes to encourage players to kill the Diablo III bosses more often. "I don't think we'll do any like quick, short-term things, in a patch to just give them a stack of Nephalem Valor or something like that. You're not rewarded in such a way to require you to go kill them very often anyway. It is still better to kill the elites and rares," Martens said.


This has been the third and final installment of our recent interview with the Diablo III developers. See Part 1 and Part 2 for the previous info from the interview. See the full transcript for all the details from the developers.

Our thanks to Josh Mosqueira, Travis Day, and Kevin Martens for participating in the interview, and a special thanks to Lylirra for organizing and running it!