AH ruined the game for me, not even RMAH, i never used it.
i was having alot of fun, finding constant upgrades. interesting items i could use. eventually i decided to look at the AH. against my original intentions when going into the game. i found gear on there that was amazing. perfect gear. hundreds of identical items with perfect stat rolls. for EXTREMELY CHEAP. i bought them all. decked my character and became extremely fucking bored with the game. i didn't see a gear upgrade for a very very very long period of time. completely ruined the game for me, it should have never been added.
maybe it would of worked if the amount of perfect roll items on the auction house was alot lower but the only way to solve that is to make it almost impossible for a good roll item to drop. which is another problem in itself.
I had the same problem... First I played a long time on hardcore without problems, but after a while I had to grind a lot for upgrading my weapon to progress further... Later I bought more and more from it with my gold because it was cheap as f*ck.
The problem is that higher leveled chars pick up good items for lower levels and sell them. Since they see more good items for lower levels than the lower levels themselves, they feed them with comparable low gold costs (because high level chars flood the market).
I would put a minimum gold cost on each item depending on the item's value. These gold costs won't go to the seller, instead they are removed from the game. Now you will waste much more money if you keep using the auction house. I think that people would buy less and less items on the auction house because it's a real investment then.
You could compare it to gambling in Diablo 2. You spend a lot of gold for a great upgrade. The difference with the auction house is that you can chose what you want...
Trading directly with players ingame might be a lot cheaper then... and that's the form of trade that was existing in D2 and didn't ruin the game...
The lazy/cheat mode would just cost a lot more money.
Blizzard scaled the game pretty well with the gold amount throughout the game. So the endgame gold income isn't superduper much higher than the lower level gold income. This means that you won't receive a huge interest from your investment in a short time. So, you wouldn't be able to boost yourself through the levels with that.
I had the same problem... First I played a long time on hardcore without problems, but after a while I had to grind a lot for upgrading my weapon to progress further... Later I bought more and more from it with my gold because it was cheap as f*ck.
The problem is that higher leveled chars pick up good items for lower levels and sell them. Since they see more good items for lower levels than the lower levels themselves, they feed them with comparable low gold costs (because high level chars flood the market).
I would put a minimum gold cost on each item depending on the item's value. These gold costs won't go to the seller, instead they are removed from the game. Now you will waste much more money if you keep using the auction house. I think that people would buy less and less items on the auction house because it's a real investment then.
You could compare it to gambling in Diablo 2. You spend a lot of gold for a great upgrade. The difference with the auction house is that you can chose what you want...
Trading directly with players ingame might be a lot cheaper then... and that's the form of trade that was existing in D2 and didn't ruin the game...
The lazy/cheat mode would just cost a lot more money.
Blizzard scaled the game pretty well with the gold amount throughout the game. So the endgame gold income isn't superduper much higher than the lower level gold income. This means that you won't receive a huge interest from your investment in a short time. So, you wouldn't be able to boost yourself through the levels with that.