Diablo 3 Making Gold

   So it has almost been two weeks since the launch of Diablo 3 and the only thing i can tell you about the game if you are not playing it is to go and get it. Ok now that my persuasion has worked on you, and you have the game, it is time to tell you why this game is awesome and how you can be awesome in it by being a successful economy driven goblin. If you haven't heard anything about Diablo 3 you might want to check the three introduction posts i did before the launch of the game to get a general idea on what to expect.

   First place that i want to start would be the auction house. If you watched the video you get the general idea on what to expect, and how to navigate through the auction house. If by chance you are one of those people that doesn't like to watch videos i will try and sum it up for you as well. 

   When you go to the Auction House you need to know what you are looking for. Now even though this might sound like a stupid thing to say or even think because if you went to the auction house you wanted to get something anyways, it is not because the way the D3 auction house works unlike other games is that it will require a greater deal of information on what exactly you want to buy in order to give you a list of those items.

   First off, as you can see on the image is that you will need to chose a template of a sort on which class you want to look for. ( so it knows if you prefer INT,DEX or STR) Then after you have chosen the given class you need to choose an item you want to buy, be it armor or weapon.

   Now that you have chosen what you want to buy you want to define which affixes are found on that item. As you can see you can define an item with up to three affixes. Another important thing to help you with sorting out is to define a numerical value to your affix search ( adding a number in the little red square next to the name ) that will sort the items that have the minimum of that amount of that given affix. And last but not least, you want to put a price you are willing to pay for your item unless you want to get items that are all in the millions of gold range.

   So if you have done everything right you will find an item that has the affixes that you want, is within your price range and is generally a good upgrade to your character.

   After finishing up with reading about the auction house, lets take a quick look at how exactly we can use the auction house to make some gold without having to do much work.

   As you can see on the video here, one of the easiest way to get some profit is by doing the same exact thing that we have all done in WoW, where we sold vendor pets and vendor items. Well in D3 there really isn't much need for pets of any sort but vendor items are still a big YES.

   In general you can sell pretty much any piece of gear that you can find from the vendors that has decent stats, but the best luck i have had has been with selling the trinkets. When i say trinkets i mean rings and amulets that the vendors in each town sell.

   One thing you need to remember is that the vendors have a wide variety of items that they sell, and it is very rare to find him selling the same item twice, so if you see something that is worth it you better buy it and if you are pretty sure that it is a good item you better buy a nice stock of it as well.

   So after you have bought up a stock, next step would be to define a price and start selling all those rings/amulets that you bought up.

   The right way to defining a price for your items would be to start off with a lower price ( in my case i started off with 29950) and if you notice the items are selling and selling fast you gradually increase it up a notch ( got mine to around 45k). Now take into account that i bought all of these rings for around 7k and you will end up with profits that are in the 20-35k per ring sold.

   Ok since you are still reading i will give you one last tip on how to make gold, and mind you this one might be the BEST obvious thing out there that 90% of the people aren't doing, or simply haven't seen that it is there.

   This great little thing i am talking about is D3's very own trade channel. First things first, in order to get to the trade channel you need to press that cog like button in the corner of your chat screen and from there to access either the Trade or the General chat.

   I am still not sure as to how exactly it places people in channels, it might be by difficulty or localization, but that really isn't that important, what is important is that you have a place where you can advertise your items and hopefully get a sale done with someone that might be interested in buying a piece of gear that you would otherwise vendor or salvage.

   This little thing is almost one of the best things that you can use in your selling arsenal when your auction house slots are all filled up and you still have items that you want to sell. And on top of this you can mix it up with the vendor strategy and advertise vendor items for a price. As an example, if a vendor is selling an item for 8000g you advertise that item on trade or general for 40k and see if someone bites, if they do you just scored 32k profit as there will be no AH fee of 15% deducted from this transaction.

   One last thing you might want to know about D3 though. After you are finished with Hell and you step into Inferno, don't be mad if you get one shot by mobs as that is what the design of Inferno is. In order to progress you will have to deal with the gear check and kiting ability check in  order to progress with the game. There will be moments when you start freaking out, and even making up new cuss words and that will all be normal. Then just remember one thing, the auction house has what you need in order for you to be able to progress further in the game and all you need is gold. So if you thought that you were good in the economy in MMO's now would be a great opportunity to actually prove that and really rock the auction house and deck out your character.

   That is all for now, and i am hoping you people liked this post and that it gave you some ideas on how to work up the auction house, and how to make some gold even if you don't have the time to really sit down and go kill monsters and demons.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Making Gold With A Friend

   It's been a while since my last post, but in my defense it was Diablo 3 fault but non the less i am back again today with another post on how to monetize in WoW. Usually every time i cover a certain subject it revolves around the reader needing to have that particular profession, and hopefully have the patterns or materials needed to craft that item, well today we are going to take a look at how to use your friends/guildies to help you out when you don't have the aptitude for a certain profession.

   I will further explain as to how exactly does this work for the given market that is of interest for this particular post, and that is the WOTLK gems market.

   First of all why did i choose this market ? Well i did this on a different server then my own where i have millions to throw at the AH and not be afraid to loose them, so i needed something that i could control to a degree and something that i had experience with. The WOTLK gems are the bread and butter for all the twinks in the 62-80 bracket as well as the people that are leveling, and if you take into account that 80% of the people that have JC now didn't play in WOTLK or for some reason respeced and lost their WOTLK gems you end up on a market that is usually controlled by very few people or if you are lucky no one at all. 

   So now that you have chosen the market that you want to go into, it's time to get down to asking your friends or guild members to see if they have the ability to cut those gems. Don't be amazed if you find someone that has all the cuts of WOTLK and Cataclysm and claims that he can't make money from Jewelcrafting, those are the best kinds of people that you can encounter because they did the dailies not to make gold but simply because they were there.

   If you are unfamiliar with the WOTLK gem market you might want to check out one of my older posts that covered that particular theme, but if you are you will know that this market can be a bit of a volatile sort, so before you jump in head strong just scope out the competition, and the availability of the raw gems that is up on the auction house.

    So provided you have found a friend to help you out with the cutting of the gems, you checked out the prices and competition and they were in your comfort zone, the last thing you need to do is define the prices. In the previous post i explained that i i had priced my gems at 95g for the rare ones and 195g for the epic ones, but after i wrote that post i kinda changed my prices and added an extra 100 to those so the prices are 195/295g for the rare/epic cuts and they are still selling like hot cakes. So like the image here explains your server might be a lot different from the one i play on, but by following the simple supply/demand chart you can come up with a price that is just right for you.

   For this market you want to check out the prices of the red gems first, and when it comes to rare red gems you want to see if you can find someone to craft Brilliant Scarlet Ruby simply because crafting it would require one to be exalted with the Kirin Tor to obtain the pattern and that is kind of rare nowadays.

   Another thing before i go though, if you do decide to use a friend to do your cuts, or what ever it is that you want to sell, make sure that you give him some kind of a reward. In my case it was 10% of the profits that i made which was a pretty heft sum for him seeing as how he cut about 200 gems for me, and i managed to move half of them in the first 3 days. 

   I gave you this Jewelcrafting example because i have the most experience with this market but you can use your friend's help with pretty much any market that you want to jump into but don't have a character that can craft those items, and just to name a few PvP Armors ( Plate, Cloth, Leather, Mail ), Glyphs, Pots, Pets and pretty much everything you can think of that would sell, because remember WoW is a community game, and if you can't use the community to make gold then what good is the community.

   That's all for now and like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

   

The Black Market Auctions ... BRING IT ON !!!

   So it finally happen, Blizzard took the first step towards combating inflation that will come with MoP. Most of you have already read on MMO-Champion a bit about the coming new feature called Black Market Auctions.

    First thing  that we need to understand is how exactly this black market is going to work.

   From what we know so far, there will be a kind of an auction house that will offer limited supply items that are of worth. These items will include mounts, recipes, pets and pretty much anything that is rare and valuable. Now the catch here is that only NPC will "post" auctions on the black market, and there isn't going to be any buyout price so the only way to obtain an item would be through the bidding process.

   One of the most important things mentioned about the black market is the fact that it says that different servers will get different auctions posted on them. Now just imagine on your server you see the Spectral Tiger on auction starting at 10k, it would be a safe assumption that within an hour it's price will be driven to 200k and by the time Its time is up it will probably get to the "normal" moving price. That would be the usual scenario we can expect to see, but and this is a bit BUT, what if you are playing on a low population server that doesn't have all that many people with millions of gold to spend and you see a rare mount that is expiring at odd hours like 3am or 4am, well in that case with a ordinary alarm clock you might be able to pick up a very expensive mount or pet or anything else for that matter.

   Now the problem is that we still don't know enough about the Black Market to be sure on what to expect, but i know one thing for sure, if they put in BoE Mounts, or let you cage the pets you get from the Black Market and sell it as a caged pet then this Black Market might be one of the best playgrounds for any gold loving goblin out there.

   Another great thing about this market is that is going to be a great gold sink. A while back i made a post about gold makers and how we are a kind of a gold sink  but that was just half way true as even though we pile up large sums of gold and keep it out of circulation, in reality we do invest part of that gold back in the economy. Well the black market is going to be a True gold sink as anything that is spent there will be removed from the economy. What this means is that instead of people having 10-100k or much, much more then that like some they will want to obtain those shiny items from the Black Market and will pour their gold into it, and in return what this would mean is that the casual buyer will have a smaller pot of gold and the prices of goods will have to adapt to that, and ultimately we will see lower prices then what we were expecting with the increased inflation.

   As of now i will leave it at this, a simple introduction post, but as we get more information and hopefully get the information that BoE items are going to appear there we can then take a more detailed approach to the Black Market and how to use it to our advantage. Until then  keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Twinking Profits

   One of the most profitable market to dabble in has always been the twinking market. The reason behind this is fairly simple, it is a market that is selling the best possible items for a given level to a character that simply wants to be the best in PvP at that given bracket. Well for the duration of the last two expansions i have been silently racking up quite a bit of profit from selling a given item, and today i am spilling the beans.

   I won't get into making this a very long post as unlike the usual topic that i like to cover in my posts, today i will cover just a given item. This item that i am talking about is Hard Khorium Band and as you can see it is a ring that just happens to be BiS for Agi users.

   The reason why this is a very good market is that if you are able to craft the given item you can monopolize on it as it is a niche market that very few to none suppliers are looking at. There is a tricky part to this though, in order for one to be able to craft this item you would need to obtain two patterns, the first one is for the actual Hard Khorium Band and the second one would require a miner so you would be able to Smelt Hardened Khorium. 

   Now you know how to make the item and how to smelt the given materials, so the next step in selling the item would be to define the means on how to sell the item. There are two ways you can go about this, the first one is to put it up on the AH and wait for people that know what they are looking for to buy it, and the second way is to actively advertise it as a BiS item. The second way has a much higher selling chance but at the same time you will be opening up your niche market to the competition. I will leave it up to you to decide the course you want to take, but if you are going for the second option make sure that in your barking advertisement macro you put the spotlight on the fact that the ring is BiS for Twinks, and that if they want to be the best they need to get it. ( Just make sure your macro is catchy, informative and borderline cheesy )

   And last but not least, if no one is holding this market you will have the chance to set the price to your liking. The going price for this item has been moving from 1k in TBC, then 3-5k in WOTLK and nowadays it can be sold for up to 10k as people don't mind paying the price if you can make them think that they are paying for THE BEST item they can get for their character.

   So to sum it up before i finish up, you will need a character that has Jewelcrafting and Mining (ideally), you will need to have the two patterns that both drop in Sunwell and you need to know that you will be marketing your item to Rogues, Shamans and Hunters that are twinking in the 70's PvP bracket. So by knowing all this and hopefully having these patterns you can make a decent profit if you decide to hold that market.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Making Gold With Fishing

   We are at a interesting point in the natural course of WoW as a game. We are waiting for MoP to be ironed out so we can all jump in and take our dose of Panda lovin'. Well until that happens we have a choice, either play PvP, PvE or prepare for MoP by filling up your coffers with gold. I am one of those people that chose the last option, and today we are going to take a closer look at how to achieve that by using a secondary profession that everyone can use, namely fishing.

   Previously i have mentioned that you can make gold with fishing by fishing the savory delight fish, well today we are going to take another look but this time we are going to look at a different place to do so.

   Every month the Darkmoon Faire rolls in and makes it's quests, and island available for everyone to go to. Well quests and pets and mini games aside, the darkmoon faire offers one of the best opportunities to make gold by simply fishing it out.

   To make that more clear you will only need to have a fishing pole, and fishing skill to be able to use the fishing profession. Seeing as how you are going to be fishing in fish pools your skill in fishing wont be an issue as you will always be catching fish as long as you are tossing your floater in the fishing pond. 

   Now as we said you will be catching fish in pools, and the names of those pools is Shipwrecked Debris and the "fish" that you will be catching is Sealed Crate.    

   

   As you can see on the map, the place is swarming with spawning zones so finding the fishing spots wont be an issue. A word of advice though, if you are going for the most northern pools it would be wise to get some water walking pots to help expedite things.

   So now that you know where to find the crates let's take a look at what you can get from it, and why this is a good thing to do. The Crate is the same as the one you get from using the Treasure Finding Potion but the different thing is that you won't have to kill anything and you will always get 1-2 drops per fishing pool, and on top of that you have a chance to get Heavy Savage Leather and Darkmoon Firewater as well as a ample amount of Embersilk Cloth and every possible pot and volatile that is available in the game. 

   If you are interested in how much you can make by doing this i will give you my rough statistic for 1h session.

I got 23 stacks of Embersilk Cloth, 7 stacks of Heavy Savage Leather, 67 Darkmoon Firewater, 60 pots (different kinds), 8 stacks of Ore ( Elementium, Obsidium and Pyrite ) 9 stacks of herbs (different kind),  140 volatiles (mixed kind) and a bunch of "trash lower level food". Take these numbers compare them to your auction prices and you will see that the profit is a very sweet number.

   If you are still not sure if you want to do this let me tell you one last little detail. While fishing in all of these pools you have a chance to obtain a very rare mount, the Sea Turtle as well as a extremely rare companion the Sea Pony. So there you are, if you are not into fishing for profit maybe you will be interested into catching the rare pet as well as the rare mount.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Diablo 3 Preparation Part 3

   Here we are for the third and last part of these mini D3 preparation posts. In the Part 1 and Part 2 of the posts we had peek at what to expect in the fees section, and we saw a bit about how the auction house is going to work. Well today we are going to take a look at the crafting portion of the game, the affixes and a general idea of what to expect for the first month that the game is going to be out.

THE CRAFTING ASPECT

   Crafting is going to be a big part of the Diablo 3 economy, and a very important aspect that will make the game all that more exciting.

   Just like in any game that has a crafting system, it need to have some sort of different levels and skill you must master in order to be able to craft the most powerful items and weapons. Well in D3 this system is kinda similar to that, but with a bit of an added twist.

   

   Namely if you want to level up your crafters, or artisans as they are called, you will need to fork out gold. Every time you pay an artisan some gold he will progress further more into his craft and gain an additional item that he will be able to craft for you. With each payment that you give the artisan, he learns a more powerful item and a higher level item for that matter. After a certain amount of payments have been given the artisan he will "level up" which will be easy to notice as his store will change it's appearance into a more advanced building.

   Lets say that you managed to get all the gold needed to level your artisans and you feel you have mastered that artisan, well this is where that twist i mentioned earlier comes in. The game has extra world drop patterns that you can collect from killing monsters, or purchase from the Auction House (RMAH or GAH). 

   So here you are, you have leveled your artisan a bit, you have made some gold and now you want to craft some items, so what do you do ? Well crafting takes a bit more then a leveled artisan and some patterns, you will need materials in order to be able to craft items. The way you obtain these materials is by salvaging items with magic properties in them, it's the WoW's equivalent of disenchanting. So now that you have the leveled artisan, you have the materials to craft with all you will need is some gold to pay the artisan to craft your item (yeah he's like that, you pay him so he can expand his store and then he turns around and charges you) and you will have your item. 

   One last thing i want to explain about the crafting system before i skip over to the next thing. When crafting items in D3 you will never know what you are going to get. What i mean with this is that the affixes ( the magical bonuses ) are always going to be different, and it will all boil down to your luck at getting a piece of gear with awesome affixes.

THE AFFIXES

   

   The affixes, or the stats that can appear on items in D3 are quite a bit. To make it easier to understand it would be ok to divide them into two categories, affixes for combat and affixes for "farming". As you can see on the image above, there are affixes like +Pysical and Elemental ( cold, fire, etc.) resistance, thorns ( returned damage ), movement speed etc. There is no need to name them all as you can see them from the picture and get the idea.

   What i want to explain about the affixes is why i said you can divide them into two categories. Well the first category is the combat oriented buyers, they will always be on the lookout for pieces of gear that will have +Primary Stat and +Damage on it, at the same time the other category of buyers will focus on +magic find and +gold drop. 

   One thing that is kinda important that i haven't mentioned until now and it is about affixes is that while being in a group the +magic and +gold find are shared with the group. So if you have a group of 4 people and one of them has gear that is all +magic find, at the same time the second person has +gold find gear on then the remaining two even if they don't have any magic/gold finding gear on they will get that bonus from their friends. So as you can see it will be very profitable, and that much more interesting to play with your friends rather then play on your own.

HOW TO PROFIT FROM ALL OF THIS

   So we saw how everything works in the AH, we saw what the affixes do, we saw how the artisans work and now for the end i am going to give you a few free tips on how to take all of these informations and use them to get some profit.

   As i mentioned before the RMAH is going to be delayed for about a week, what this means for us is that we are going to have about a week to earn some gold that we can put on the RMAH and profit off the huge demand there's going to be for gold in the first month while everyone is starting out.

   The best way to use that initial one week wait would be to have fun and actually play the game. After you have played for a while you are bound to pickup a few rare items on your carnage. What you need to do is define if that item is Combat or Farming item and price it correctly. In the beginning you will have a much better luck selling +magic/gold items as people will not understand that a +100% magic drop doesn't mean you get a magic item from every kill, but rather if that mob has a 1% chance to drop a magic item with your +100% Magic drop increase that same mob will have a 2% chance to drop an item. So to sum it up with these stats, it is going to be a very profitable to sell the +M/G drop items, and when pricing them check the Auction House so you get an idea on how much it is going to be worth it and either put it up at that price or undercut for a very small amount, and if there isn't any up there put it up for 80% of the gold you made that day.

   One of the best things that you want to profit off is going to be selling the weapons. To clarify, a weapon with higher DPS would be superior to any gear that offers +stats on anything pretty much damage wise. So it's a fact that weapon DPS is king when it comes to racking in high prices on the GAH or RMAH. At the same time if you get a weapon that has +Magic Find/Gold Drop then you can market that weapon to the "farmers" as well, so that weapon would be even more valuable.

   And last tip i leave you with that made me a ton of gold in the Beta would be the vendors. Just like you can profit off the vendors in WoW by buying and reselling patterns and items on the AH, you can do the same in D3 but instead of patterns you would buy out gear, rings to be more precise. There is a vendor that sells these rings but he is a bit in the background so many of the people usually don't see him when they are out and about killing monsters and raiding dungeons. I sold quite a bit of those items and i am sure that they will sell just as good when the game goes live.

   For now that is all that you should need to know to get you started and prepared for the release of D3 and if there is anything else that you would like to know just put it in the comment. If you would like to know anything else about D3 and how it is going to work, again put it in the comment and i will try to do my best to answer any questions that i have the answer to.

   This was the Third part of the mini Diablo 3 preparation category, you can find the Part 1 and Part 2 in the Diablo 3 category. Anyways i hope you guys enjoyed reading this as much as i enjoyed writing it, so have fun and i'll see you in Diablo 3.

   

Diablo 3 Preparation Part 2

   In the previous post i went over the basics that you need to know if you want to play Diablo 3. Today we are going to take a more detailed look at Diablo 3 economy, and more importantly going to take a look at how to use some of the ideas to make some gold, but first we are going to take a closer look at the Auction House.

DETAILED LOOK AT THE DIABLO AUCTION HOUSE FEES

   First thing you need to understand about how D3's auction house is going to function is to understand the fees you will be paying to Blizzard. They made a system where they will allow the common player to be able to make real money by playing the game, but at the same time they implemented their fee on every single transaction as well.

   As you can see on this table here, on every single transaction that you do on the RMAH Blizzard will charge you depending on what you are selling, if you are selling a weapon or armor you will have to pay 1$ fee to Blizzard, while at the same time you will be paying 15% fee on commodity items ( crafting materials and gold ). So knowing this you end up with prices having a bit of a weird threshold as 0c profit is basically 1$, which in return means that you have to sell your items at prices above that.

   Now i mentioned that you will be able to make real money, and you can if you have a Paypal account associated with your account but there is going to be one more thing you need to know if you decide to take this route. Blizzard has a double dip effect if you choose to take the money out instead of putting it in your Blizzard account. What this means is that if you sold that item for 10$, Blizzard will take their initial 1$ and then on top of that they will take an additional 15% before your cash is transferred into your Paypal. So to make it more clear, you sold an item for 10$ and after the fees that Blizzard has in place if you deposit that amount in your Blizzard account you will get 9$ but if you decide to get it to your PayPal account you will actually get 7.65$ Another way of looking at this is like Blizzard being the big brother and he wants his 30% taxes.

   Ok now that we got the boring financial jibber-jabber out of the way lets take a look at how we are actually going to be using the Auction house in game.

AUCTION HOUSE PLAY STYLE

   Like i mentioned in the Part 1 of the Diablo 3 posts the D3 auction house is going to be kind of limited as you will only be able to post 10 auctions per auction type ( RMAH and GAH ), so you can only have 20 auctions up at any given time. By knowing this fact we actually are facing a rather unique challenge where we will need to do a selective posting, as you really don't want to spend your 10 AH slots for items that are worth low to nothing when you could have made some serious gold by placing the right items. In the next Part 3 of this series i will cover the affixes in D3 so you will get the idea of how much a given item is worth.

   One of the most important things that will make you money from the D3 AH is the all so known bidding system. You see even though you are going to have 10/10 slots to post your items, there will be no limit on the amount of items you can bid on. A while back i made a post about bidding in WoW but if you read that one and then you log onto Diablo 3 AH you will see that the same principal still holds. This is going to be especially profitable during the first month or so when people are just starting out and they don't know how to price their commodities. A perfect example for this would be what was happening on the Beta. When you would go through a Skeleton King kill you usually end up with a rare ( yellow colored ) item that had some good stats on it. Now people that played it for the first time they would go and kill the SK, then if that item wasn't for their class they would put it on the AH, and depending on how much gold they have at that moment they use that as a reference, and that is how there were rare items on the AH for 500-2000g. Now at that time you usually get about 1000g from killing all those monsters and looting all those chests, but what i did was bid on those items and pick them up for as low as 300g and then turn around and relist them for 15-40k depending on the affixes they have.

   One of the things worth mentioning is that when you go for an item using the bid system you have a option that will let you put down your bid, but at the same time you will set up a threshold for bidding. What this means is that you want to bid on an item and you put down 100g for it, but you want to make sure you get it even if the price goes up to 300g. So by setting your threshold at 300g, if someone undercuts your 100g your bid will go on above his if he is still under your 300g threshold. So more or less it's like you are there bidding even though you are away.

   So in this installment we covered the fees you should expect to see on the RMAH, covered a bit about the auction house and the bidding system. Up until now we've looked at how things will work in D3, but in the last Part 3 i will cover all the bases for affixes, crafting and dungeon running so those will actually be about direct ways to make gold. But until the next post i leave you with what we have here.

   For the full post check out Part 1  Part 2  Part 3 of the Diablo 3 preparation post.

Diablo 3 Preparation Part 1

   In the previous month i had made a voting poll asking you, the readers what are your plans regarding Diablo 3, and whether you will be playing the game or not. Well the poll didn't surprise me much as it showed a more or less a 70% of the population that is playing WoW will be dipping into the Diablo 3 franchise as well, and on top of this you will get the old Diablo fans that will be flocking in to the game.

   So this meant only one thing, i could have gone on and made a new blog about Diablo and it's economy, but seeing as how my free time is getting on the slim side i decided to throw in a few posts in which i will explain some of the tricks and ideas i got from playing in the beta, and hopefully help out anyone that is starting out to make some gold, but on top of that if they play their cards right they can earn some real money as well. So without further delays let me get down to the basics.

THE CLASSES

   Diablo 3 will have 5 different characters for you to choose from. The Wizard, The Witch Doctor, The Demon Hunter, The Barbarian and The Monk. All of these characters have their own specific game play style, but i won't get into how they play out as that really doesn't make any difference when it comes to making gold in the game. Well the real reason for mentioning this is because i want you to know what you will be choosing from the start up. What i mean by this is that the characters in D3 will be defined by the main attribute it will be using on it's gear, be it Strength, Dexterity or Intelligence and last Vitality.

   The reason why this is important is because the way the attributes work for different classes, Strength is what Barbarians will want, Dexterity is the sweet spot for the Monk and Demon Hunter while the Intelligence is what  the Witch Doctor and Wizard will want on their gear. So with this fact you might figure out that the demand for the Strength gear is going to be lower opposed to the other gear because only the Barbarians will want it, so if you happen to choose a Barbarian as your main character expect to find cheaper items for you on the AH and all the other gear you acquire while hacking and slashing that has DEX and INT on it you will have a broader buyer pool to sell it to.

THE ARTISANS

   In the start of the Beta for D3 there were 3 artisans, The Blacksmith, The Jeweler and The Mystic, but a few patches ago the Mystic got sacked so for game launch we got left with only two of them. The way the artisans work in D3 is you need to find them, then do a quest for them and then they agree to help you out, for a fee of course. Well in the Beta we saw the Blacksmith, and what he was capable of, and in the next post i will get into more of a detail on how to use him to make a hefty profit early on in the game.

   For now there is one thing you should know about the artisans, they will require gold to craft things for you , and they will require even more gold to level them up, so they are going to be the gold sink that everyone is going to have to drop in a lot of gold into to be able to level them up. What this means for us is that the demand for gold on the RMAH ( Real Money Auction House ) is going to be a lot higher in the first month or so when people are starting out, so if you have any intent on making cash from D3 you might want to get on this market early on, but then again i will cover this in the next post as i want to keep this more of a informational orientation post.

   As for the Jeweler, no one can tell you nothing because no one managed to see him because the Beta only allowed you to go up to level 13 and see about 1/3 of Act I, and the Jeweler comes later on in the game, so everything there is to know out there about him is simply data mined information, and information from Blizzard's site.

THE AUCTION HOUSE

   The Auction House in D3 is probably the most innovative feature in this game. Now what i mean is, D3 is taking a whole new approach in the gaming industry where they are offering the chance to sell your virtual goods for real cash, and all of that is legal and can't get you banned. 

   To everyone that has been playing WoW the layout of the Auction House should be pretty recognizable. There is only one thing though that is going to be rather unique about it, and that is the amount of auctions you can have up at any given time, and that is ten auctions on the GMAH and ten on the RMAH. Blizzard decided to take up this route as they wanted to make sure they keep the auction spamming at a minimum, and lets be honest it might be a bit on the low side but if this didn't happen can you imagine the amount of crap you would have to scroll through to find an item you like if everyone could post 100 items or even more, it will literally crash the servers from the overload.

   Another thing is that unlike WoW that had EU, US and Asia side servers,  and all of them had servers with their own separate auction houses, D3 is going to be on a Global scale and the only way the RMAH is going to separate people is by the currency they use to pay for the goods. What this means is the Auction House is going to be hectic and very fast. Just to compare it with WoW's AH, if you post all your auctions you might get 2-20 min of being the top dog depending on the server you are on, well in D3 you might be the top dog for about 5-20 sec, but then again that might be the time it takes for you to sell your item as the buying crowd is going to be a lot higher as well.

   In the next post i will give you a few ideas on how to take advantage of the Auction House, and how to make some gold by doing the oldest trick in the book, but for now i will leave it at this.

   Ok so this was the Intro into the D3 world, in the next post i will focus more on the how to make some gold and how to take advantage of the Auction House and earn some profit.

   For the full post check out Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 of the Diablo 3 preparation post.