Some interesting new information from Bashiok.

A player asked about the possibility of the RMAH being used to buy and re-sell items from the Gold Auction House of other regions.

For example, you "lock-in" your RMAH to NA, your primary characters are on the NA servers, but you create a new character in the EU servers, buy items from their Gold Auction House, and then put up for sale on the Real Money Auction House (which is US-based.)

Bashiok made it very clear that this is not possible:

Characters are still region based. Just like Diablo II. You could log in to USWest, or USEast, or Europe, or Asia, but you had different characters on each. There's no possibility of trading between regions.

He also went on to say:

Each region is compartmentalized. Character's on one region cannot play with characters on another region. Similarly, each region has its own gold and currency-based auction houses. Only characters on a region can use that region's auction houses (and of course a restriction from the currency-based if it's not your home region).

Here is the original source of all of these citations, although the top link is probably your best source now because Blizzard has gone through and deleted many of Bashiok's (and user's) posts regarding the Korea/RMAH Gambling delay being the primary reason for the D3 global launch.

What Bashiok (Community Manager) wrote, though, directly contradicts with what Robert Bridenbecker (VP of Online Technologies) said in an interview. More details about that interview here and here.

Robert said that you're locked into your own RMAH, but you can still access the Gold Auction Houses of whatever region you're logged in to (even if it's not your own). When you pull up the RMAH window, while logged into another region, you only see the RMAH from your home country.

"If you say you're from the US, we're going to treat you like you're a US player and wherever you connect in the world, we will enforce you as a US player. If you say you're from Korea, the same thing applies."

Bashiok, however, is saying that if you login to other realms you can only use their Gold Auction Houses. Which means you can only pull up your RMAH menu while on your home region, and it simple won't be an available feature if you're logged into another region.

So, which one is it?

NA Beta Key contest has just been announced. I was hoping that this one would release all of the beta keys during the month of December, but apparently the Sweepstakes ends on January 23, 2012.

So this is a rather negative setback. It means that beta testing will most likely continue through February and I'm no longer hopeful for a release date during that time. Moving to late March now.. at least.

This news (and established timeframe) comes right after the weekend of Blizzard's major delay in the Korean GRB meetings. As you recall, they cancelled their Dec 21 meeting and postponed to a later day. Blizzard has 7 days to provide the missing information. It's 12AM SK time right now, and the original meeting of the GRB that would have given an answer would have been made in about 8-9 hours from now. :)

More stalling for time. I would LOVE to see what they submitted to the GRB. (I'm thinking it was just the game manual, a 6 page phamplet, and photos of gameplay.)

I've updated the "Just A Random Guess" post with the new timeline.

A couple days ago, I also updated the "Important Notices" page. And, I got rid of the "Content Submission" page. I also might get rid of the FAQs one too.. there's no point in keeping it around.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, I was thinking about potential character sales on the RMAH (something Blizzard is planning.)

You can login to any regional server to create a player, but your region-locked Real Money Auction House will follow you anywhere you go right? What if, when you bought a character, it was purchased on the server that you were currently logged into? So you could buy US-based characters while on a UK-server and that's where the character goes. :)

Players could use this for transferring their "toons" between regional servers.. for a cost of course. This leads me to believe that pricing for character purchases will be much higher than items and gold. For example, $10-$20 for a character purchase since it will act as the Character Transfer service as well.

I'm switching gears here for a moment, because I really wanted to talk about Mists of Pandaria and one potentially significant upcoming change.

Two months before Cataclysm came out, TOD made a post about Cataclysm "Repeating the Past". His idea was trying to make items from Classic Dungeons (and the Dungeons themselves) useful or novel again, and in general, to get players using older dungeons again because they were practically empty with the introduction of new expansion packs. After all, it's a shame that all of that immense work had went into designing the art and media, only to be abandoned at the onset of the next expansion pack release.

"With scaled gear, you can still have the same old equipment look (with or without a slightly different name) but with different stats scaled for the player. They've already been doing this experimentation with heirlooms, so it shouldn't be that hard to do it with old instance drops."

Remarkably (maybe even suspiciously) clairvoyant of the new Transmogrification system, wouldn't you say? That post is also relevant for another issue.

Transmogrification is one of Blizzard's latest attempt to get players revisiting classic dungeons, and to bring in diversity and novelty once again to the game. But Mists of Pandaria will also be introducing (maybe) a new fix to correct the power creep issues and to make all older items, dungeons and quests viable and even fun again.

Blizzard is calling this "The Great Item Squish (or Not) of Pandaria". It's an older post and you've probably read it already.

All of the discussions I've seen about this potential update is "Me me me. How does this effect me?" They want to talk about it's impact and how it affects players. No one is talking about WHY they're doing it. Even Ghostcrawler never fully explained why they're doing it.. only that "because the numbers are too big" and that "users might not like it."

So, what are the real reasons then? We know that the change must be financially motivated.. so what are the reasons from a business perspective? That's what I want to talk about. :)

A Quick Recap

Blizzard wants to fix the power creep issue through two "options":

Option 1

The first option was Ghostcrawler's "Mega Damage solution". It basically means following the same route they've already been taking, but to change the appearance of the big numbers because they take up too much space on the screen.

In regards to these "big numbers", Ghostcrawler wrote;

"Now there are some very real computational limitations. PCs just can’t quickly perform math on very large numbers, so we’d have to solve all of those problems as well."

I hope no one actually bought this. He's talking about "big numbers" like 150,000 instead of 20,000. We're not talking about calculating monster prime numbers that are 2^32,123,456-1 digits long. It sounds like an old man trying to describe these new fancy com-pu-ter ma-chines. :)

None of this really matters though. He kept this part of his post really short, exaggerated the issue, and tried to shrug the whole thing off as a ridiculous "alternative option". This means that he has no intention of even considering this and the team has already set their sights on the Item Squish option.

This is like when you go to your parents and ask them for something ridiculously overpriced, so that when they say no, you can "reluctantly settle" for what you really wanted in the first place.

The "Mega Damage solution" is not really a serious option.

Option 2

This is the Item Squish. I trust that you already understand what they're planning on doing.

Basically, they're going to take gear stats and "even everything out" so that it's a consistent power growth from Vanilla all the way to Mists of Pandaria without any major "bursts" in item power. The term "Green is the new Purple" will no longer apply to future expansion packs.

They want to make growth rates more like this:

Fig. 5. Item level vs. character level before and after ‘squish’. Brown = vanilla. Green = BC. Blue = LK. Red = Cat
And, of course, users are split on this potential update. Mostly because players will feel as though it's a major nerf.

But, it's not just the players and their items getting the "nerf", mobs and bosses will also be adjusted accordingly. You'll still be healing and damaging at the same percentiles as normal, but you'll just see smaller numbers on the screen.

However, they will be making it so that soloing old content will be much harder, but you'll receive viable awards based on the difficulty level. Because there will be a marginal difference between level 85 and 90, you can still run CATA dungeons (and even WOTLK dungeons) for gear that can be used in level 90 encounters.

Everything in the game will be changed relatively, and they want the entire game back to how it was with "expansions" within Vanilla (ie, major content updates like dungeon additions).

Understanding The Problem

I think it's a very good idea for the Item Squish, and it's something they should have done a long time ago. They probably started to realize the implications by late mid-late WOTLK.. it definitely wasn't during TBC. :)

What it comes down to is a problem of content consumption versus our need for growth.

Blizzard spent a lot of time building dungeons, raids, instances, and scripted events. During Vanilla, most players on average had visited all of the dungeons/raids and rather frequently. They consumed the content slowly, at the pace the Blizzard preferred.

Once TBC rolled out (and follow up expansion packs), there was no more need to visit old dungeons, and they would just skip ahead to end game content. Older dungeons didn't need to be visited anymore, especially with players carrying you through pre-raid or end game content. Dungeons, raids, and capital cities became ghost towns. (Something that wasn't a good impression for new players, which is why they made capital cities central quest hubs again.)

Since players grew faster than they could consume content, Blizzard was (is) always under increased pressure to produce new content for us.

And, there's a finite limit to the amount of content they can provide for us before it just become recycled garbage. Everything needs to be slowed down, from player growth to player consumption to content creation to creative process and resources.

It was really fun in the beginning, but they burned through so many ideas (i.e. dungeon designs, art, audio effects, encounters, mobs and bosses) that they're now realizing that they need to start saving up this content for future use and not allow it to be consumed so quickly.

There's also the issue of creative burnout, something also experienced in the music and book industry. The video game industry is not immune from writer's block. If things move too quickly, and they don't keep filling up their "creativity pool" (for future expansion packs and games), then their games start getting repetitive or boring, and they have to resort to common world objects for creative inspiration, like using every kind of animal as a race, mob or boss. I can't remember.. did they already do a Cow Boss, Lobster Boss, Bird Boss, Snake Boss, Tiger Boss, or Panther Boss? :)

More to come..