10 Ambitious Gameplay Ideas That Broke Everything

Diablo III introduced a whole new feature to the franchise - the auction house, whereby players could buy, sell, and exchange items with other players, both for in-game currency and real-world money.

In theory this was an intriguing idea, to combat risky third-party item selling and ensure everything was transacted within the safe boundaries of the game itself.

However, the auction house ended up breaking the core Diablo gameplay as fans knew it, effectively encouraging players to just obtain items with cold, hard cash in a manner perilously close to pay-to-win.

Given that Diablo has always been about the loot grind, the auction house basically de-incentivised the game's entire central loop, enough that even original game director Jay Wilson admitted it was a mistake less than a year after Diablo III's release. Yikes.

And even when the prospect of shutting the auction houses down was floated, this created another massive headache for Blizzard, considering how intricately they were woven into the core gameplay, and the potential legal action their removal invited from litigious players.

All the same, the auction houses were finally removed in March 2014, a little shy of two years after the game was released and, let's be honest, by which time most players had long since moved on.

Thankfully, at least, the recently released Diablo IV didn't repeat the same mistake, keeping the auction house rightfully dead and buried.