A special guest joins us as Adam Kozlowski (aka Captain Luddite) throws his snozzberry into the fray as we talk about such geek news as Stewart’s Paycheck, the evolution of Nessie, Berg’s Blame Game (part 2), Transylmania, This Old Earth, 80’s Jeff’s Secret, Guardians of the Inflatable Furniture, Ant Man Moves, Willy Wonka and the Tasteless Joke, Metal Men, Barbarella’s boob tube, 3DS XL WTF BBQ, Comic Shop Heroes, and the Big List Continues. So get excited to do the backstroke and prepare for a Geek Shock!
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Torgo, like myself and many other friends who play Diablo 3, will not be putting any of my own money into the Diablo Real Money Auction House (the AH). We are also not opposed to selling items on the AH and using the in-game money to buy other items or cash out (less the 15% Blizzard takes, and that’s fair).
However, I believe we all draw the line at putting our own real money into the system for items. Spending in-game earned money is okay, but crossing that line where we dump our real money into it seems wrong. Yet, for anyone to have earned any money whatsoever in the AH, SOMEone had to be the first investor.
What I’d like to know is how much actual money is floating around in the economy, what percentage of people invested real money, and how much on average do people deposit?
I can sort of understand the reason why people would deposit real-world funds into online games. What’s your time worth? If it takes a few hours to grind out enough money to buy a sweet piece of armor, why not pay for it instead and save yourself that time? If you make, say, 20 dollars an hour at your job and you go home and play Diablo for 5 hours, that’s 5 hours of your precious free time, which, to me, is worth 100 dollars of time. Whereas, I could just pay about 5 dollars in real cash and get that piece of armor, saving myself 95 dollars worth of time that I could be using to farm better equipment in harder levels of Diablo, or unlocking achievements, or bragging about my phat g3ar, or just doing something else productive, like drinking.
That said, I still can’t cross the line to depositing money into the AH. If I had more disposable income, maybe. For purposes of full disclosure, I have no problem spending 300k of in game gold to buy a slightly better piece of armor (as I just did last night), so that I can achieve my end game goal: have the best weapons and armor so that I can farm the very best equipment for sale on the real money auction house and make diablo 3 a money maker. A pipe dream, i know, but it’s my free time to waste.
also, paul is gay.