How to Get the Most Out of the Diablo III Auction House
For the first time, a game has included a way for its players to earn real money by selling their digital gear on the auction house for real money. If you have been playing the game for some time, you will be familiar with the auction house concept. Games like World of Warcraft, Rift, Guild Wars, and just about every other MMORPGS (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) have been using the auction house system for years to allow players to buy, sell, and trade items and materials. among them. Blizzard’s previous game with an auction house, World of Warcraft, ended up having a problem with gold farmers creating bot grinds and farming lots of gold to sell for real money outside of websites. This third-party gold buying process not only destroyed the economy of players who followed the rules, but also took away the achievements of players who actually spent time collecting their fortunes.
Blizzard’s approach to avoiding this problem with Diablo III was to include a real-money auction house where players can buy and sell items for real-world money. There’s even an option to buy gold in-game, legally, which means third-party gold farmers will be forced to sell their currency through the provided Diablo III system or have to compete with lower, fluctuating prices in the game. system. This also gives Blizzard a way to make money from the game beyond the $60 it costs to buy it. In my opinion, it will also bring people back to the game to play in hopes of selling an item or two for $250 and earning a paycheck from Blizzard. People who withdraw their Blizzard accounts can choose to do so through PayPal, but Blizzard will charge them a 15% tax. Some people are upset about this tax, but if that wasn’t the case, the number of transactions going from a Blizzard account to a bank account would be enough to crash the servers.
So how do you make money at the auction house? You can spend hours and hours farming the game for great items and sell them for prices that will move quickly. This is definitely workable and the only overhead you have is the time required to get those big drops. However, for some of us we want the quick and easy approach, and for that I highly recommend learning how to become a “Daily Devil Trader”. At the time of this writing, there is still no set price for gold on the auction house. However, you will eventually be able to quickly and easily see the real money price of 100,000 gold. This will be the basis of your profit system. Whether you need to create a spreadsheet or download a pre-built one from the web.
The next step is simply to find some items that you know are selling for a good amount. So what you will do is, taking into account the real money conversion rate, look for those items on both the gold and real money auction houses. You are looking for items that will sell for more than what you paid for them at the opposing auction house. For example, if you find a rare ring that sells for $15 on the real money auction house and then check the gold auction house and see that the same ring sells for a minimum of 1.5 million gold, then could have the potential to earn money. Take a look at your gold to currency conversion rate that you already verified. If 1.5 million gold is worth more than $15, then you are making a profit buying that ring and selling it for the gold. You could easily turn around and sell the gold you made for real currency. You need to be aware of tax rates both for selling an item on the gold auction house and cashing in on it!
Another way to profit from the auction house is by criticizing auctions that are set without a purchase price. Many players are looking for the quick and easy solution to not reading hundreds of auction pages without a set purchase price. You can often find mediocre to excellent items selling for well below their value. I have found items on the gold auction house that sell for a starting bid of 500 gold and no one bids until the last minute. It’s easy to attack these auctions and then post them at a more appropriate price that will still sell fast. I always price my items so they sell fast instead of chasing the highest prices. It’s more rewarding and I can sell more items quickly this way instead of having 10 items on my auction list that just sit there and force me out of the buying and selling game until space is freed up.
It can be quite easy to make a profit on the auction house given enough time and patience. Take care and happy auctions!
