I just realized that patch 1.0.7 is effectively introducing micro-transactions. Every Marquise Gem you craft costs you 20 MM Gold and 3 Radiant Star Gems - let's say a total of 80 million Gold. Since you can never trade that gem, you've lost all real money value it had - 80 MM Gold at $0.25/Million Gold RMAH = 20 USD! And the crazy part is that you've just paid no one $20 to rent that Gem for as long as you play the game. Blizzard didn't take it. Another player didn't take it. It's just ... gone. Don't forget that you can't resell any gear you've put it into so that's real money that's gone now, too.

Can you imagine what would happen if Blizzard sold Account Bound Marquise gems for $20? People would completely and totally flip out, but that's effectively what they're doing. The same applies to the new crafting recipes. Each amulet including reagents costs about 200k Gold to craft. Blizzard could never get away with offering players 20 Account-Bound Unidentified Amulets for 1 USD, but that's what's happening.

Wow, this is crazy. Money going to nowhere. I don't remember that from econ class.

I'm no longer interested in crafting Marquise Gems.

It's a gold sink, people have asked for that for a long time. I think the costs in PTR are kinda high, but we'll see if that is what it is when 1.07 actually comes out. Likewise with the crafting amulets, people have been complaining that crafting is useless and brimstones just continue to accumulate and slide down in value. We should be seeing some more of that stuff get used up now.

Personally I don't see myself having any of these Marquise gems. I can't spare that amount of gold, there are plenty of other upgrades that are a better bang for my buck for quite a while. I only have one Radiant Star gem anyway, I can't afford to deck out my characters in all radiant stars right now.

I think these new gems are for the uber-players who have billions of gold worth of gear already and have nothing else to sink their gold into for a tiny bit more gain. In other words, the 1%., aka. not me.

Posted by Artishir at 01/22/2013 01:34 PM

Posted by ecocd at 01/22/2013 12:52 PM

Don't forget that you can't resell any gear you've put it into so that's real money that's gone now, too.

@ecocd Did you mean that when you put the gems in gear it makes it BoA? Because Lylirra posted on the official forums saying it was bug. So that will probably be fixed before the patch is out.

Here is the post Lylirra made

That didn't make any sense whatsoever so I'm glad it's a bug. Thanks for the link! I hope they rescale all ruby damage so I don't have to go all the way up to Marquise to see the benefit of the bonus +min/max damage.

Posted by theoryzero at 01/22/2013 01:08 PM

I think these new gems are for the uber-players who have billions of gold worth of gear already and have nothing else to sink their gold into for a tiny bit more gain. In other words, the 1%., aka. not me.

On the PTR, the Ruby bonuses are unchanged up to the Marquise level. The Radiant Star Ruby is still +30 min /+30 max or whatever. The Marquise Ruby is +150 min /+150 max. The rest of them are effectively vanity items which is an acceptable usage of micro-transactions, in my opinion. The Radiant Star vs. Marquise difference in Rubies has an enormous practical impact on the game in that the Radiant Star Ruby is worthless (in weapons) and the Marquise Ruby is legitimately impactful.

If the Radiant Star Ruby gets bumped to +135 Min/+135 Max then I'm cool with Marquise Gems. No ruby scaling and I'm pretty angry.

Posted by ecocd at 01/22/2013 01:52 PM

If the Radiant Star Ruby gets bumped to +135 Min/+135 Max then I'm cool with Marquise Gems. No ruby scaling and I'm pretty angry.

Sure, makes sense to me given the talk that they wanted to make it so emeralds in weapons isn't the only option. I would expect them to rework the Ruby scaling based on all that talk of making them more appealing.