Interesting that you bring that up because the D3 RMAH was... kind of my idea :D
It was around that time that I was pitching so many ideas to my friend that worked at Blizzard and a lot of my ideas were implemented (So many Starcraft 2 ideas).
I begged and pleaded for them to make all items in D3 BIND ON EQUIP and my friend was like nah we don't like that. It created item hyperinflation. Once a good item enters the economy it will literally never leave because it will just be resold over and over and over again.
There was also clear and blatant corruption in the background. The search functionality in the AH was trash so devs that could tap into the backend and search it with custom algorithms made an absolute killing until the entire thing blew up.
I never really played the Starcraft games, but I played most of the other ones from Blizzard. I was always more into Command and Conquer for that kind of gameplay. That is pretty cool that you had a hand in all of that.
I sound like a crazy person when I say this but like half of the changes from SC1 to SC2 were my idea lol. I really wanted to see SC2 but he was like, "how would we change it enough to be a new game" and I was just listing stuff off for literal days. It was so surreal when the game came out because it felt like I had somehow spoken it into existence. Of course I didn't have anything to do with the storyline, single-player campaign, world-building, and stuff like that.
I'm pretty sure my friend pitched them all as his idea and leveraged his career a bit, which is fine obviously, as the ideas were worthless without someone to pitch and implement them. He's been retired for a while now... wonder how he's doin.
We also talked about D3 a lot (making custom resource pools like League of Legends / WOW did) and I even pitched the pilot idea for Overwatch (an upgraded version of Team Fortress with custom heroes).
Haha, yeah, that's a pretty big brag for some stranger on the Internet! :) Still pretty cool though, the specific details make it more than believable for me.
yeah i was going to start listing them but refrained
there might even be evidence that it happened on some long-lost archive server
I remember I sent him an email with one of the ideas: "it would be really cool if there was an upgrade for something like a zergling to move while burrowed". So he emails me back and says, "they didn't like that idea". Fair enough. Game comes out and TWO units can move while burrowed. I was like lol wtf. Did it need to be someone else's idea after denying the first pitch? Was my friend bullshitting me? I have no idea haha.
Haha, it's funny how stuff like that happens isn't it? Like I said, I don't feel like you would take the time to create that level of detail if you were just making it up, so you have totally convinced me!
Sometimes I actually feel like I'm gaslighting myself because it was so long ago.
Did I actually come up with all those ideas?
I'm looking through my email right now... there is actually a little bit of evidence there lol.
Nice, also how cool that you got a Hearthstone Beta key!