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.