In retrospect, I suppose it should have said Daeity "Runes" Everything instead. :)

You know, it's funny.. I was just in the midst of preparing a post about the non-refundable listing fees and how Blizzard would probably play with different free listings per week (I knew that 3 wasn't going to cut it, but I figured they might experiment with 5 or 10 for various reasons). There's no point in discussing those reasons now, since I've had to scrap everything.

Blizzard just announced a MASSIVE change to the RMAH system. They've finally wised up and have removed the Listing Fee!

As you know, for several months, I've been saying that the existence of the Listing Fee turns the RMAH into a gambling metagame, but the removal of the Listing Fee would make item selling risk free and thus remove the main gambling aspect from the RMAH. Blizzard echoed the same: "This has the main advantage of allowing players to try to sell their items risk-free."

Here's the full posting in all it's glory:

In the near future, we'll be implementing several changes to the posting limits and fees related to the beta version of the Diablo III auction house. Here’s a quick summary of what’s in store:

* Listing fee is being removed.
* Transaction fee is being increased to 1.25 Beta Bucks.
* Minimum listing price is being raised to 1.50 Beta Bucks.
* You will be limited to 10 active auctions per auction house.

With the removal of the listing fee, players will no longer need to worry about whether they’re going to run out of free listings for the week. In addition, introducing a limit on the number of active auctions means players won’t feel as though they should be trying to sell everything they find, potentially flooding the auction house with unwanted items. Under this new system, players will only pay an auction house fee if and when an item actually sells. This has the main advantage of allowing players to try to sell their items risk-free. In addition, because the transaction fee is already baked into the price when an item is listed (as part of the minimum listing price), it’s no longer possible to be in a situation where you don’t have enough Battle.net Balance to list an item, forcing you to have to charge up your Balance just to attempt a sale. We think this will be a much cleaner process for selling items and will ultimately lead to a better experience when using the currency-based auction house.

This new active-auction limit will also apply to the gold-based auction house. Because gold can be sold on the currency-based auction house, we need to ensure there are limitations on the gold auction house as well; otherwise, a player might be tempted to sell everything for gold and then sell that gold on the currency-based auction house, which isn’t supportive of the kind of thriving item-driven market we’re trying to foster. In addition, for the first time in the beta test, we're planning to have both the gold- and currency-based auction houses active at the same time when these changes go live. Of course, one of our main goals in making these changes to the beta is to test how they’ll work out, and we look forward to hearing your feedback once you have a chance to try them.

The average user won't recognize the importance of this strategic move. The Listing Fee for Blizzard was really important and a huge financial decision. The decision to remove it was equally critical. The decision to remove it would be something that they have been discussing and legally researching for weeks or months.

Blizzard would have made more money (a killing) from the lost sales then they ever could from successful sales. Billions of transactions.. and they would have profited every time an item was undercut or unsold. The number of successful sales will always be vastly smaller than the amount of unsold items.

You really have to wonder why they removed this, considering it's vast importance. The only explanation Kaivax had to give was that it "removed the risk" for the players. But, financially, this was a bad move for Blizzard, meaning that there had to have been other reasons that could offset "the bad." This wasn't a light decision in any way, and the only possible reason Blizzard had for making these changes was because of the gambling nature and potential legal exposure.

In my discussions with various organizations voicing my concerns about gambling within Diablo, some of them mentioned that they would be following up with Blizzard with questions.

We have all suspected that the long delays might have had something to do with the Battle.net Balance integration or the RMAH. Perhaps, the development and finance teams have been in long discussions with their internal legal departments? And now, a major change in policy is needed to avoid future legal entanglements.

I think we might finally have some answers to their long delays. And, this also opens up the opportunity to finally get the RMAH re-instated in South Korea.

This has been a huge success; it's a change I have been advocating for a long time now. I'm really excited and pleased about this announcement. :)

Another long comment turning into a post..

So, yesterday I was talking about creating a new website that praises Blizzard, something that could easily become an "Authorized Fansite". A reader mentioned a Brazil fansite that already did something like this and the administrator became a CM.

Everything on the site was taken directly from the Blizzard site and simply translated. Other than that, the only other bells and whistles were links to external sites and a basic forum. It ended up being a very popular site in Brazil.

Much like D3Sanc, there's a good lesson to be learned from that site. You can have a popular site (that Blizzard approves) simply by re-posting and translating. If you can translate well enough, and there aren't any other large fansites specifically for that language, you could make one yourself and just re-post from Blizzard and other Authorized Fansites. You don't even need to live in the region, you only need the translation skills.

The primary translations that Blizzard is looking for are Spanish (español and castellano), Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, German, and French. Each of these already have a large fansite, but some regions don't really have any competition. The other thing is to keep your eyes on are upcoming translations (like what they did with Brazil recently).. it's something you would want to jump on quickly.

The thing is, too, is that this was just a WoW specific fansite. It got me thinking.. I wonder how successful a simplified universal language site that covers all Blizzard games would do.

It's something that wouldn't require external translation apps (like Babel or Google Translate) since the average user isn't even aware of them. Instead, you would convert all of Blizzard's posts into a more simplified version first, and then translate it.

• Take all of Blizzard's posts, cut out the filler, dumb it down, and just deliver the message in a very simplified manner.

• Convert it into a style that's extremely friendly with translator apps.

• Once you have the simplified version, use your own tools to translate it into as many different languages as possible, and post that on the front page.

• Re-post all of Blizzard's official announcements, their blue forum posts, and Twitter feeds (or more specifically, just the important ones.) Do this for all 3 franchises.

• When the text is simplified, you know it's something that can be easily translated even if you don't have the skill to properly translate it yourself.

In the end, each message would be very short and really just deliver the meat of every message.. but in most languages. (Sort of like a multilingual Blizzard Twitter site.)

Given that we have some many readers here from multiple backgrounds, is this at all possible? Or would dumbing down something be taken as an insult, or not be of any interest?

Take the Battle.tag announcement as an example.

It's a pretty hefty post, but what if you were to dumb it down into something like this:

Blizzard announces new BattleTag service. It is a nickname what will identify you in all Battle.net games and the forums. It is similar to Real ID. It provides a new way to manage your profile, chat with friends, and form groups. You can reserve a BattleTag name now.

It will be put into the next Diablo 3 beta patch. In the future it will be put into other Blizzard games like World of Warcraft and Starcraft.

More details will be released in several weeks.

And then you convert THAT into multiple translations. There would also be linking of course, but I could see a translation problem with special words (like BattleTag) or names (like if you were describing D3 skill names.)

Do you think a site could get away with something like this? It's almost like a BlizzardKids.com website, but available in all languages. Changing everything Blizzard says into an easily readable and straight-to-the-point format? And because of this, it makes it much easier to translate into other languages with little difficulty.

To test this out, take the example I created above, and use Google translate to convert it into a non-English translation and see how it looks.

After the big Fansite Beta Key Giveaway post by Bashiok went live, it was quickly announced on other gaming fan sites.

There was even a post on Diablo.incgamers.com, but it suddenly vanished shortly after going live:

Remember that question Bashiok had in twitter a while ago? The one where he asked you where you went for your Diablo 3 news? Well, it seems to have had some significance to the Fansite Giveaways they’re now holding on other sites.

It's gone now, but they had a special emphasis on "other sites". :)

In the past, fan sites were provided beta keys by Blizzard, but incgamers.com was mysteriously absent from the list. The Ghetto actually talked about why this was the case a couple weeks back, and I was waiting for an opportunity to make a post about it myself. I think this is a good opportunity.

The reason they didn't get any beta keys at the time, being as huge as they are, is because incgamers.com isn't exactly favored by Blizzard these days. Sixen (Blizzard appointed MVP) explains it best when he publicly and unprofessionally ridiculed incgamers.com for being permanently blacklisted by Blizzard.

At the time of his obviously joyful comment, he was the Site Administrator of incgamers.com's main competitor. I'm positive there was no loss of sleep over Blizzard's decision.

Remember when Bashiok had that Twitter contest where users were asked to submit their favorite sites? Apparently, the incgamers.com team were actually expecting something negative to happen.

Pretty sure Bashiok and the PR team have the word "incgamers" auto-delete. Lol.

What does he have against incgamers? He deleted my tweet from replies btw.

He deleted everybody's that says incgamers. Either PR has access to his account, or he deleted it himself. Probably the former, though. It wouldn't surprise me if there is a PR hootsuite account that has all BLizzard guys' accounts tapped in.

Rushster, the Site Admin explained the issue as being related to their old SC site:

This is not correct. They didn't want to include us because of something that happened on our old StarCraft site with a news post by a new staff member whose first language was not English and he used the word 'Exploit' instead of 'Bug'. They wanted it changed so we did. Blizzard also started to ask we change the way we write about StarCraft 2 and stop being so critical (even though they were not critical unless it was justified and had merit).

This site has never done anything wrong and we thought it best not to change the way we write about Blizzard games because that would not be beneficial to the readership, and fans of Diablo are very important to us as we are all massive fans too :)

It's definitely concerning that Blizzard tells gaming fansites and blogs what to write. The same sort of problem has happened many times with gaming reviews in the past.

I have been told by an anonymous user that the team from incgamers.com aren't even invited to any of the press events or Blizzcons anymore, and if they go, they're either hidden or they were possibly blacklisted as "normal visitors" (since no one ever sees them at the events.)

They also went on to explain how Blizzard is very strict about questions and you need to stick to their own script. If you ask questions that deviate from their rules, they're told "question time is over." In one particular case, the individual who asked the wrong question was not invited back to followup Blizzcons. It sounds like Blizzard PR is very controlling over every aspect of events, fansites, and information.. and it was quite scary to hear.

How To Get On Blizzard's Good Side (and Get Beta Keys)

Thanks to Bashiok's post, we now know which blogs are "preferred" or "Authorized Fansites" for Blizzard (BlizzPlanet, D3DB, D3Sanc, DiabloFans, Force Strategy Gaming) and which ones aren't.

You can see a tremendous difference in their blog posts too. DiabloFans, for example, just re-posts the official news announcements directly from Blizzard.. no original thought, no questions, only following orders. Diablo.incgamers.com, on the other hand, might be critical or snarky and post interesting topics that DFans and the other sites would never dare write about.

It's interesting to see that D3Sanc managed to obtain 400 beta keys. If you're familiar with the site, you'll know that they're very small and have very little traffic. It's a well designed site, don't get me wrong, but the forum has been sitting on like 1 thread and 4 total replies for several months now (19 total members). They don't have a lot of traffic, but they are a "Blizzard preferred" site.

A couple weeks ago, I knew they were going to get beta keys, but I didn't think they would get so many due to their smaller size. If you wanted to make a "preferred site" yourself, get beta keys, and be invited to press events, D3Sanc is the perfect model that you need to emulate.

You only need to stick to a short list of rules: only post Blizzard's official announcements, keep everything positive and supporting Blizzard, control forum posts, and moderate every facet of the website so that Blizzard is only painted in a positive light.

Remember when D3Sanc heavily modified and edited an old Bashiok Battle.net Forum post to make it positive? This is the sort of stuff you should be doing if you want a successful website, even if you don't agree with it yourself.

If you really want to get on Blizzard's good side, take it beyond typical propaganda sites like Diablofans, and turn it into a crazy fanatical "Dear Leader" style website. You need to GLORIFY Blizzard is every decision they make, retroactively edit all of your old posts if they can cause any negative harm, stick to the company line, only post official announcements, put all of the employees high up on pedestals, and brag about how great the team is. Defend them every chance you get, and talk about how Bashiok is just misunderstood but he's truly an amazing person. He donated one of his kidneys to a dying kitten, that sort of stuff.. it will get you a lot of blue brownie points.

This is how you get a successful website and get special treatment. Doing it this way might even get you access to exclusive press events and information. If you ever wanted to do this, you could even run two simultaneous websites. Your main "Worship Blizzard" blog, but then you can anonymously run a smaller blog or unofficial site that's more critical (using exclusive information obtained from your official site.)

Luckily, I have already had beta access for several months now and the topics I discuss don't require any special treatment or exclusive information from Blizzard. :)

The thought of a propaganda website really interests me though.. I would go totally overboard with it, and I think most fanboys would believe it's legit.

* UPDATE:

Incgamers.com should be handed beta keys given the size of their fanbase and it would be pretty foolish for Blizzard to leave them excluded in such a massive and public giveaway. Bashiok has stated that they have only passed out keys for NA, and EU is still to come. Even though half the other sites are NA/EU fansites, just like Incgamers, you could still consider Incgamers a "UK fansite".

So, there's still a chance they'll get keys. And we'll see for ourselves how flexible Blizzard's blacklist is.

I think incgamers.com wasn't expecting any keys, though, given the post that suddenly disappeared from the front page and their past experiences. :)