When Diablo IV came out first its economy felt hopelessly broken. Progressively better but mostly useless gear was incredibly expensive to buy during the main campaign, while gold was so tangential to the end-game grind that players quickly amassed a Scrooge McDuck-like fortune with nothing really useful for to spend it. No longer.
The Season 4 update changed all that and made the players so poor. Blizzard is in emergency mode, seeing if Sanctuary needs any QE to keep its economy moving. For example, while the Loot Reborn overhaul made aspects permanent unlocks, applying them to new gear can still cost a lot on top of the usual fees associated with repairs and rerolling items in Occultist. But the biggest culprit is the post-campaign refinement, a new system for slowly leveling up stats on a piece of gear.
Only available at world level 4, each new rank costs additional crafting resources and a ton of gold. While the first few levels will only run a few hundred thousand, gold costs quickly rise into the millions, especially if you’re aiming for a fully mastered set of gear in every gear slot. And because of the RNG involved, hardcore players will often find themselves resetting and starting over, which alone costs 5 million gold. This created a huge hurdle as players farmed the new Pit of the Artificer fast boss mode for crafting materials only to find themselves short on gold.
“As we continue to review the gold economy, there is one change we felt we needed to make right away,” Associate Game Director Joseph Piepiora tweeted during the weekend. An up-to-date patch “drastically reduced” the cost of converting Masterworking material to ease the stress on players’ pocketbooks post-game. It was a huge nerf. The highest price of 6 million gold dropped to only 60,000. The players were relieved, but it was still not enough.
“Gold costs are too high!” wrote one player on Diablo IV subreddit today. “I got equipment, beautiful equipment with bigger attachments. They are sitting in my stash. I need to scroll through the stats from them. I need to redo the power of the aspect. I have to master them. There just isn’t enough gold for it all. However, not everyone is on board with the golden nerves. More casual players are enjoying the currency’s renewed importance. “Your items are on their way, you shouldn’t get there overnight.” wrote one.
One major source of frustration surrounding gold is the fact that its cultivation is so uneven. The most effective way to build up your bank account is by grinding Whisper Caches, which players dislike because it doesn’t involve quickly crushing hordes of demons. Helltides, which do involve quickly crushing hordes of demons, can net you a lot of gold if you sell all the gear dropped during them, but they’re still a noticeably slower gold farm overall. As a single player recently placed it“[the] the problem is not the gold grinding but the gold grinding game cycle.
The Master Gold Rush has recently seen a surge in the prices of real money to purchase the in-game currency through online transactions. Right now you can get about 1 billion gold for about $25. That’s almost a sevenfold increase from what gold was selling for right before Season 4 went live. Some players have used this as proof of this Diablo IVThe current gold economy is still in a state, while others argue that the progressive design of the action role-playing game should not be affected by the illegal activities of high-end players.
Despite the recent massive gold spending, it seems like Blizzard is still looking for other ways to give players a break. “The team made a change this weekend, but we may be pushing some additional levers on this and a few other items on the mat that players have flagged for us,” Global Community Manager Adam Fletcher wrote on the Blizzard forum yesterday. Several players immediately perked up, though not everyone is on board with more tinkering. “Please don’t make any more gold changes,” one player replied. “Woooooooooooooooooooooooo turn all the levers!” wrote another. “The season of Levers Reborn baby!”
