Hell finally breaks loose

Yep, in case you haven't heard, Diablo 3 is out. Old news. Let the madness begin.

I was never a huge Diablo fan. Running similar, randomly generated and rather claustrophobic maps, praying to the RNG gods all day long was never my idea of having fun. Still, for whatever reason, I've been hooked. I got it for free with my annual pass, so i figured "what the hell." It's hell indeed. The amount of time I've been spending in front of my computer since Diablo came out is really starting to bother me. It reminds me of that time when I used to raid and farm in WoW, when smashing keys for 12-15 hours used to be a usual daily routine for me. This time, it's Diablo 3 and instead of my keyboard, my poor Logitech MX518 is screaming for help.



I don't like contracts and commitments. I thought nice and hard before signing up for Annual Pass. The math is simple. One year meant an approx. €150/ $180 commitment to Blizzard. Diablo was not going to come out for another 6 months (it ended up being 7). A new copy of Diablo would have cost me €60 which equals about 4.5 months of that yearly commitment. In theory, this means that WoW and Diablo only had to overlap for a month and a half in order for me to break even. Now that Diablo is out, I am aware that I will play WoW a lot longer than that. Diablo is initially addictive, but I will get tired of it long before my Annual Pass expires.
With everything I presented, you can see why signing up back when Blizzard announced the Annual Pass in October made sense to me. Signing up for it in April, however, would have been a fail.

Source: WoWuction.com

I don't think even Blizzard could have predicted how popular it was going to be. Over 1 million people had subscribed by February 2012. While Mists of Pandaria beta access that came with it did sound interesting, I am certain that most of annual pass subscribers did it to get Diablo 3 for free, having the same math as me in mind.

It came as no surprise that the WoW economy was heavily affected by the Diablo 3 release on May 15th. When 1 million active WoW players leave for another game, common sense suggests that there would be a huge dip in the size of the economy and numbers from WoWuction.com prove that. The total EU AH value of 2.5B gold from May 13th dropped to 1.8B gold on May 22nd. That is almost 30% of total AH values.

That is a lot more than 1 million WoW players.


Stay tuned, because in the next post, which is coming very soon, I will explain how my time spent playing Diablo actually helped me boost my WoW gold making.