I actually think that Diablo 3 kind of ruined this for everyone even though it wasn't a blockchain game. The real world auction house was going to be a revolutionary thing and then it fell so flat that it became a laughing stock. I think that turned a lot of people off to the play to earn sort of stuff. Then when blockchain games came along they were already so jaded, plus they had their biases against crypto in general that it was a non starter for most people. I agree though, most of the games suck. I'd love to see some kind of Diablo game that uses blockchain. Most blockchain games are just glorified faucets with a snazzier front end (sometimes not even that).
funny that you mention this because I was giving advice for D3 to one of the lead developers at Blizzard.
I told him they absolutely had to create bind on equip items and he was like "nah we're not gonna do that".
So, like I said, all the best items were found and the entire system became a hyperinflationary joke.
I was pretty mad he didn't take my advice on a couple of things.
D3 also had one of the worst filters for searching for needed items...
and seemed to personally benefit coders who could tap into the API and sort out the data themselves.
The amount of Blizzard devs exploiting their own system was high.
On top of all the other bad actors.
Wow, that's pretty crazy. I played a lot of D3 after they got rid of the AH. I just recently started playing Path of Exile 2 and that has been interesting. It's sad that so many insiders were manipulating things, but I guess what else is new right!?
What I remember from that situation was that good items were selling in the auction house for hundreds of dollars and everyone was able to get at least excellent equipment easily with the ingame currency.
To balance the overabundance of godly equipment in the auction house they reduced the drop rates significantly. The consequence was that the game was no longer fun to play from a loot standpoint, you could go on an entire gaming session of a couple of hours and only find crap.
I have a vague idea of loot farms taking over and by the sheer number of hours played, they were basically the ones providing the best items everyone else was buying. The AH as it was along with the other rules about ownership the game had in place was turning the game into something ugly and distorted that wasn't a source of fun for most players anymore.
Once the auction house was shutdown I remember suddenly I was getting a ton of legendaries and set pieces and all kinds of good stuff every few minutes.
Yeah, it was very poorly implemented. It happened so quickly too. I remember I barely had time to play and then they were changing things, so I guess they took care of it quick, but It was just a bad roll out from the start.