Allow Account Trading. Only.
There’s a far easier solution to “trading games” that avoids the design baggage of item-level liquidity (and the forever-same problems crypto keeps re-discovering): allow players to trade accounts.
Diablo III’s Auction House remains the cleanest case study. I went deeper on this in Sense & Nonsense in Blockchain Gaming: Autarky No More!.
Blizzard was explicit about what it was trying to solve from Diablo II:
- Reduce fraud and third-party RMT
- Create safer price discovery for players
- Smooth progression by helping players find upgrades they could not reasonably farm themselves
All three goals were rational, and they actually succeeded. 50% of players regularly engaged with the auction house (!), with some players bringing in enough to supplement full-time incomes. Jay Wilson (Diablo’s game director) explained that the auction house performed as intended to combat account fraud in “Shout at the Devil: The Making of Diablo III”.
Given all this, why kill the auction houses? Blizzard didn’t want to sell progression, among other issues.
Crypto has been running the same experiment, loudly and expensively. When assets are individually liquid, players behave like labor. Bots arrive, and low-wage grinding dominates because countries like the Philippines can offer grinding wages that exceed local employment opportunities.
Account trading achieves all three original Diablo goals with none of the design baggage:
- Fraud drops because transactions are rare and high-friction, while still being possible
- Fairness improves because value is bundled with time invested
- Progression remains intact because power cannot be surgically extracted from its context. The “journey” remains intact, rather than value being parceled out.
It’s simple to implement and effective at preventing unintended consequences while still achieving many of the objectives that trading was invented to achieve in the first place.
More games should consider it.