Diablo 3: A Barter System Intro
Jul 23rd, 2008 by tyson
With the fairly recent news that Diablo 3 is coming (Diablo III, Diablo 3?) I became really excited. To me the series is one of those that will go down as one of the all time best. While I don’t prefer it to Heroes of Might & Magic II or III, nor Ultima, nor Deus Ex, it is right up there at the very top of the 2nd tier of games I’ve ever liked. You see, it created an addictive experience almost better than anything else out there… but it didn’t quite capture the emotional experience that some of my other favorites did, for me at least.
What makes this exciting beyond the great and I’m sure totally different gameplay between the classes, is two things. Definitely the items. I mean, that’s where the addiction is… well, where it mainly is. Diablo games have really revolutionized loot. The entire gameplay addiction is based on it. And I am stoked and impatient to see what those new prefixes and suffixes and loot types and item slots are.
The other addiction for me, and you won’t find this surprising given where I’m writing this, is that I’d often just log on to Battle.net to accumulate wealth. Not play the game, but play people. There’s a certain streetwise attitude you need to take within the free barter system in order to get wealth. And I think some of that I took with me into Everquest or World of Warcraft when I deal with people to negotiate for items and wealth.
It was Diablo and Diablo II that first got me addicted to acquiring money or items in a game with others. So I’m wondering… will Diablo 3 ditch the barter system in favor of an auction house like World of Warcraft? Will it have both? Sure, in World of Warcraft there’s the trade channel and that can be profitable, but it’s nothing like what you find in Diablo II where the only method of trade is hawking your wares in public at breakneck speed.
Well, I have no answer for that. But in the chance that D3 will keep or enhance the barter system, here’s a brief primer.
A barter system is one in which players trade items (or gold) for other items. The base currency is often not gold but some other value, like gems, bottlecaps (hey there Fallout), or Stones of Jordan. Ah, the SOJ. I haven’t visited Diablo II in quite awhile, but when last I was there, it was the Stone of Jordan, the “unique” ring that was the basis for all major transactions.
If you had a good weapon and wanted to sell it, you’d type in some cool ascii text attention grabber like:
//–~~GREAT WEAPON OF FIERY WRATH~~–// only 2 SOJ!
And then you’d watch it scroll down almost faster than you could read it. So you’d copy ctrl-c and paste it ctrl-v, and when a page or so scrolled down, you’d send it out again for a bit. Sound exciting yet? Well, that in itself wasn’t. The exciting part was actually bartering with people about what you had, what they had and what kind of deal you could end up with. In a barter system, usually both people are satisfied and it isn’t so much the customer and proprietor rather than two mutually satisfied traders. The best part was that after an hour in the trade channel, if you were good, your character was significantly upgraded from what they had before. And that is the beauty. In WoW, everything sells for gold (well most everything), while in Diablo, you could actually directly get better items with your loot without having first to exchange it for gold.
I’ll be talking about how to trade in a barter system, about what happened to my Amazon character and why I quit the game cold turkey for more than 6 months in a future post. See you next time.

