The GamerSushi Show, Ep 33: Crafting Stars

Look at that, two weeks in a row. My, we are on something of a streak. In fact, you might even say that we are streaking. Just throwing that out there.

In this edition of the podcast, Jeff and Anthony acted like divas and stormed off the set, leaving myself, Nick and Mitch to discuss things all by our lonesome. We basically used this time to talk about all the things we can’t normally talk about with those two bozos around, which really means we spend a good chunk of time talking about StarCraft 2. It gets… fairly in depth at a couple of points, so hopefully you like that kind of thing. I know I do.

We also took the three-man opportunity to play a game we’ve never been able to play before on the podcast – a real-time edition of GameCop Versus LameCop, with each of us swapping roles as we see fit. I think the results are particularly entertaining, and hopefully you do, too. You will either love it or turn the podcast off and throw it from your window.

**Also a big shout out to Temp0, who’s song, “All I do is Stim” we stole for the outro this week. Check him out on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Soundcloud.**

So, check it out. Rate a thing. And enjoy. Continue reading The GamerSushi Show, Ep 33: Crafting Stars

Diablo 3 Brings in an Auction House that Uses Real Money, Requires Constant Internet Connection

diablo 3 auction house internet connection

One thing that’s guaranteed to make headlines is a video game developer making a few design choices on the PC that get people up in arms. After continually raising eyebrows back during the lead-up to StarCraft 2, Blizzard invited a few games journalists down to Irvine, California to sample some of Diablo 3. While I’m certain they came away with the excellent taste of RPG/brawler in their mouths, a couple bits of news might have left a sour taste.

Diablo 3 will feature an in-game auction house where players can exchange real money for items or receive cash for selling theirs. As a kick-back for running the service, Blizzard will take a little off the top (like Valve and the community TF2 items), but the seller will still see some payouts in the end. In addition to Blizzard taking their cuts, an un-announced third party will be handling the transaction and taking their piece of the pie as well.

Blizzard sees this as an extension of the trading system in Diablo 2 where the best items would get filtered around by the players on Battle.net. While the auction system will be closely regulated by Blizzard and there are several safeguards in place to prevent abuse, this seems like quite the gamble to be taking with Diablo 3.

Speaking of gambles, Blizzard also announced at the same event that Diablo 3 will require a constant Internet connection, even if you want to play all by your lonesome. The constant connection will be used to authenticate your character with Blizz’s servers and prevent piracy, auction house fraud and other sorts of nastiness. Another part of the reasoning was that Blizzard thought that people wouldn’t appreciate maxing out a character in single-player and starting over from scratch if they wanted to try Battle.net.

That’s quite the pair of head-scratchers right there, if you don’t mind me saying so. Blizzard is always trying to push the envelope in these terms, so this might not be the weirdest things we hear pre-release. What do you guys think about this news? Does this affect your perception of Diablo 3? Oh, and there will also never, ever be mods. So there’s that.

Source – PC Gamer and PC Gamer