Diablo III: Time Wasted is Money Earned

image from thehive

                A problem with any successful MMO is the dread you experience after typing “/played”.  That’s hours - who am I kidding - weeks, months you’ll never get back.  Ideally, you had fun and it was all worthwhile.  But thinking about all the grinding and crafting and queuing, you can’t help but contemplate the utter meaninglessness of it, especially with a new expansion on the horizon as a reminder that all our purples will soon be outclassed by greens.  Thankfully, Blizzard is providing its own timely alternative to WoW, which may go a long way towards combating this problem. 

                Diablo III, overall, will not be a surprise to anyone.  Even if you haven’t been lucky enough to get your hands on the beta, you know what you’re getting – you will click, you will conquer, and the demon-slaying areas of your brain will hum pleasantly.  It will be a good time.  But beyond the escape from trade chat granted by a single player campaign, or a return to (somewhat) less complex suite of skills and stats, the symptoms of MMO grind might be relieved more so by the introduction of the real money auction house.

                When a person expends their time on an activity, there are two possible presumptions – the activity is either pleasurable enough itself to be worth doing or there is some reward for the unpleasantness involved that compensates.  Run the same dungeon enough times and you start to wonder whether you’re meeting either of those criteria.  But the introduction of a way to earn real money through the course of typical gameplay could be a huge step to conquering the fatigue associated with the less novel portions of gaming.  When games start to feel like work, we question the whole activity – getting paid for our efforts may provide just enough motivation to keep us going until we find something engaging again.  Even if your exploits only shake out to, say, a quarter an hour for your evening click-fest, it feels like something could be extracted from your efforts, and that might be enough to assuage the guilt of screwing around when you could be, I don’t know, working a second job at the QwikStop.

Diablo III has a release window of Feb/March 2012, if we all just clap our hands and believe.  According to Amazon, the standard version will be $60 and the collector's edition will be $100 and *totally sweet*.