A step in the right, or wrong, direction?

Something that has been active internally with Blizzard for a long time now has just gone into Beta: Remote Auction House access via the web or an iPhone, iTouch or iPad.

For those few soles that never experienced World of Warcraft, the Auction House is just what you would expect: a central place for players to buy and sell goods between one another. The catch: many people play ‘the auction house game‘, buying low and selling high, following supply-and-demand trends. Some players that get very good at this then take their in-game gold, and sell it for actual real world dollars on sites like eBay and other game exchange services.

The magic circle of gaming has been broken around the edges for several years now, but it seemed to be on the fringe, something that was actively frowned upon and many times banned by publishers. While Blizzard still maintains that buying and selling of virtual goods for real money is against their Terms of Service, this move will increase the level of real money transactions for a time. Besides, allowing people to access the virtual world from outside the virtual world kind of breaks the magic circle anyway, right?

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4 Responses to A step in the right, or wrong, direction?

  1. Bartman says:

    Yep, it’s interesting to see the trend in those areas of virtual worlds. I feel like designers are starting to make tradeoffs, exchanging deeper levels of immersion (IE: trying to keep the magic circle in-tact) for better usability or cleaner interactions with the software. The whole random dungeon finder in WoW is a great example. It appears blizzard decided to move away from fantasy, more towards convenience and usability. Looking at the timeline for this mechanic:
    1. Had to walk to any dungeon (unless a warlock in the party to summon)
    2. Summoning stones implemented, requires 2 people to summon others
    3. Dungeon finder implemented, allowing people to automatically teleport inside of the dungeon once a group is formed.

    No fiction exists to explain, within the confines of the world, option 3. But it sure is convenient!

  2. Bartman says:

    Yep, it’s interesting to see the trend in those areas of virtual worlds. I feel like designers are starting to make tradeoffs, exchanging deeper levels of immersion (IE: trying to keep the magic circle in-tact) for better usability or cleaner interactions with the software. The whole random dungeon finder in WoW is a great example. It appears blizzard decided to move away from fantasy, more towards convenience and usability. Looking at the timeline for this mechanic:
    1. Had to walk to any dungeon (unless a warlock in the party to summon)
    2. Summoning stones implemented, requires 2 people to summon others
    3. Dungeon finder implemented, allowing people to automatically teleport inside of the dungeon once a group is formed.

    No fiction exists to explain, within the confines of the world, option 3. But it sure is convenient!

  3. Deg says:

    I’ve pondered such things when dealing with Myst Online: Uru Live. At some point we hope users will be able to contribute Ages (levels) to the game. Should that be a process of submitting a zip file to a web site outside of the game or submitting a zip file to a “Age librarian” inside of the game? A dialog box inside of the game would definitely break the immersion, but there should be an ingame analog to such a major action.

  4. Deg says:

    I’ve pondered such things when dealing with Myst Online: Uru Live. At some point we hope users will be able to contribute Ages (levels) to the game. Should that be a process of submitting a zip file to a web site outside of the game or submitting a zip file to a “Age librarian” inside of the game? A dialog box inside of the game would definitely break the immersion, but there should be an ingame analog to such a major action.

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