When Blizzard announced the auction house feature in Diablo 3, we guess it would be safe to say that there were at least two sets of gamers – one that did not mind the auction house and actually welcomed it, and the other that felt that this would detract from the fun that comes with grinding levels and farming for hours to land that super-legendary piece of armor or weapon. Unsurprisingly it seems that even within Blizzard, not everyone was a fan of the auction house and Diablo and Diablo 2’s lead designer, Stieg Hedlund, felt that it had a detrimental effect on the game.
Speaking to PCGamer, Hedlund was quoted as saying, “I think it had detrimental effects on gameplay throughout […] They did want to reserve a certain tier of loot for the auction house, and therefore it wasn’t dropping in the game with the kind of frequency that people were looking for it.” Despite that, Hedlund also expressed his understanding of why Blizzard implemented the feature in the first place, which according to him was more like a reward to the game developers who put in a lot of effort and time into creating the game.
This is not the first time we’ve heard criticism of the auction house as former game director, Jay Wilson, had previously expressed how he thought the auction house had hurt the game.