Blizzard Targeting Inflation in Upcoming Patches
Posted 22 January 2012 by Azzure

In the previous news post covering the new systems changes post by Jay Wilson I briefly mentioned that Blizzard are dramatically nerfing Common drops (white items) to have virtually no sell=value and no longer salvagable, as they don’t want players to pick them up at all after the beginning of the game. They are simply just “trash items” that drop quite commonly to make more rarer items more pronounced. Which is exactly how it was in Diablo 2, and in my opinion is a very good change. The side-effect of this (and likely the main reasoning behind this change) is that gold and scraps will now be much scarcer and less easily obtainable in Diablo 3. It seems Blizzard are now going even further, Bashiok tweeted this earlier today:

	Blizzard Quote:
	Will there be any legendary items in the beta in patch 10? I don’t think so. And less magical items actually. We’re rebalancing some item distribution rates.

Before these changes, one of my concerns with gold in Diablo 3 was how accessible it was to farm. You would literally just need to run around killing easy packs of monsters and grabbing everything that dropped. Super-easy accessible gold-farming devalues gold quite a lot – because the very act of playing the game spawns very large sums of gold, and isn’t at the mercy of steep drop %’s, like good items are.

I think this is a very good step in making Gold more valuable in Diablo 3. Yes gold still drops virtually all the time, but at least now the item-vendoring / scrap-manufacturing part of it is significantly reduced, which overall is a pretty big reduction in gold-income. Especially if it is indeed true that gold-drops don’t scale as much as everyone expects in higher difficulties.