Blizzard Shutting Down Diablo III's Auction House

Blizzard has recently announced their intentions of closing down Diablo III's Auction House on March 18, 2014. The Auction House was a unique feature of the game, allowing players to sell the best loot of the game for real money. Blizzard says the decision to close down the Auction House is in preparation for the next Diablo III expansion, Reaper of Souls.

Along with Reaper of Souls will be a new looting system called Loot 2.0. This new system features a new game mode called Loot Run which guarantees special item drops at the end. Also, dropped items will be more relevant to your character's class. There will be less item drops, but when items do drop they will be better quality. Legendary items will drop more frequently and the drops will start at lower levels. Also, there will be the introduction of bind on account and bind on equip items.

Because of these new upgrades to the looting system, the Auction House will be pretty much irrelevant. The point of the Diablo series is to kill as many monsters as you can and pick up cool loot, the auction house defeats the purpose of gameplay since you can use your own money to purchase the best items in the game.

You can view the original blog post from Blizzard's official Diablo III blog here.

Steam Announces Family Sharing Plan

In a big F-you to Microsoft, Steam has recently announced the new feature added to it's digital gaming service - the family sharing plan. You can "share" games on the cloud to 10 designated friends. They can play the games whenever you want, as long as you aren't already playing them. The downside, of course, is that you will not be able to share DLC, which belongs to the original owner of the game.

However, the good outweighs the bad. Sharing your games with friends is a great way to try out games you are unsure about before you spend money on them. Also, it's a good way for indie games to get good exposure and to boost sales.

Microsoft seems to be the originator of the idea. When the XBox One was announced last May, the only decent feature of the console was the family sharing plan. Because of wide public dissent of the majority of XBox One features, however, the good and the bad features were nixed from the console. Perhaps this sparked Valve's interest so the plan could be implemented on Steam.

The sharing plan is currently in closed beta, but will be available to all Steam members soon.