So with this auction house system being implemented by blizzard instead of 3rd parties, it pretty much guarantees items will be VERY CHEAP. Unlike wow Diablo loot drops for all players, so i fully expect the AH to be full with every possible items and through an excess of supply, CHEAP as hell. I don't expect any "legendary" items to be worth more than a dollar or two on the AH since its very likely that if the drop rates are near what they were before, everyone who completes the game in inferno will have run into a plethora of these items.

I am not planning on using real money but it looks like i won't be making any either :(. Any predictions for the D3 economy?

Oh, D3 topic, yay! :D

I think you're right about things being cheap. The main reason for it will probably be the crazy amounts of farmers hoping to make money vs only a few people willing to spend money on gear. Having said that, with the randomized item stats, there may be some items that have perfect stats rolled onto them. It's very possible only a few of the strongest items in the game will be rolled like that, those items will most likely go for 100$ or up. I'm with you on not wanting to put money in, and not expecting to be able to make much money :)

I think there will still be a market since there is so much variance on item stats. Each item has 2-5 stats with at least a 20 point variance, plus 1-4 random attributes out of a set of who knows how many that will also have a 20-100 point variance. Given all these factors, the chance of obtaining a "perfect" Legendary or Set item is going be, at best, one-in-a-million. More likely we're looking at one-in-a-billion items with all the possible variables which I could easily see selling for large amounts of real money.

/players 8

MAGIC HAMMERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

I can has £ now?

@StarvingGamer:

Well i'm not crystal clear on the customization you can do, but i'm pretty sure even if you don't pick up the right item, you can maximize the stats yourself.

@Neferon:

I don't think ANYTHING will be worth more than 10bucks a year into the game. I mean come on, everyone is farming for everyone, its not like wow where it takes 40 people to kill one boss who has a small % chance of dropping an item. In diablo 3, EVERY MONSTER can drop the item, in other words, EVERY INFERNO(the max level difficulty) player will be getting massive amounts of drops, its very hard to envision a scenario where items don't become very cheap, unless inferno mode turns out to be REALLY hard and 90% of players can't handle it, but i seriously doubt that's the case.

@StarvingGamer said:

I think there will still be a market since there is so much variance on item stats. Each item has 2-5 stats with at least a 20 point variance, plus 1-4 random attributes out of a set of who knows how many that will also have a 20-100 point variance. Given all these factors, the chance of obtaining a "perfect" Legendary or Set item is going be, at best, one-in-a-million. More likely we're looking at one-in-a-billion items with all the possible variables which I could easily see selling for large amounts of real money.

Yep, I agree. Some people unterestimate the temptation.. there are guys out there who spent hundreds of dollars buying Diablo 2 gold and even more to complete their perfect set for one class. If the game is a success Blizzard will make a crazy amount of money with that auction house as well.

@gamefreak9:

It's not so much about what content you can handle, but the chance you will ever get a certain drop. Lets do a simple, inaccurate calculation, just to show my point :P

Lets say that the best barbarian weapon is some sort of 2 handed rare with 6 different properties taken from a pool of 30. Now, the min-maxers will have already figured out what the best possible combination is of properties this weapon could have. The chance of getting the correct properties alone would be 6/30 * 5/29 * 4/28 * 3/27 * 2/26 * 1/25 = 0,000168 % whenever that particular rare weapon drops. But that's only right -kind- of properties, we want them all maxed. I'll just grab a random number out of the air and for the sake of argument say that the chance of a property being maxed is 1/20. That's 1/20 ^ 6 = 0,0000015625 % whenever we get that rare weapon with the perfect properties to drop. We multiply the two numbers.... and we get the grand number of... 0,0000000000002625 % chance. Or a chance of 1 in 38 trillion every time we find a rare of the highest tier of the particular weapon. That means that if you would play diablo 3 for your entire life, live to a 100 years of age, become so incredibly good that you find that rare weapon every second of your time playing, and never do anything else. You chances of finding this item, EVER, would be still be less than 0,0083 % ;)

Needless to say almost every single barbarian would like to get their hands on this weapon, and it is very unlikely to even ever drop. I think that item might go for more than 10$.

There must be 1 crazy rich bastard out there somewhere ;)

@gamefreak9: Nope, you won't have any control over the randomized stats and attributes assigned to an item. The only thing you can effect is the enhancement you get from your enchanter by repeatedly having the enhancement applied until you get the maximum value.

@Neferon:

are you sure the properties can all be maxed out? i was under the impression that the different emphasis would be passed to different attributes randomly...

@gamefreak9:

Pretty sure. That's how they did it in Diablo 2 and I don't see a reason why they would have changed it.

For example: Messerschmidt's Reaver, which is likely to become one of the most sought-after 2h weapons for its incredibly high damage, has a total of 17,550 variations off of its base stats alone. It also receives 1 random property which can be ANY property that can be assigned to a 2h melee weapon. Assuming a conservative 30 potential properties, with a conservative maximum variation range of 5, we're already at a total of 2,632,500 possible item variations. Let's assume one Legendary drop per hour of boss grinding at Inferno difficulty, and 100 total legendary items available across all item types. That means for every 100 hours of grinding amongst all players, one Messershmidt's Reaver will drop. This means that for every 263,325,000 hours of Diablo III played at Inferno level by item grinders, ONE perfect Messerschmidt's Reaver will drop. I can definitely see this sort of item going for well over $1,000 at LEAST.

@StarvingGamer said:

That means for every 100 hours of grinding amongst all players, one Messershmidt's Reaver will drop.

You realize that means that 20k reavers will drop every day if there's like a million players dedicating 2hours a day? Now multiply that by 1 365, and see how much supply there will be. I bet people will even stop posting things because there will be so much supply.

@gamefreak9: That's just a conservative guess based on pure speculation. There very well could be 500 legendary items with a drop of one every 6 hours of item grinding for all we know. Keep in mind that efficient item grinding is an activity that very few players will dedicate their time to. It's true though, there probably will be plenty of Messerchsmidt's Reaver available on the AH for cheap. I'm not talking about them though. I'm talking about the conservative guess 1/263,325,000 perfect Reavers that will only drop 1/130 days even if we actually have the ridiculous number of 1 million players item grinding for 2 hours a day. And again, I'm fairly certain that all of my theoretical numbers are extremely conservative. A perfect Reaver could EASILY be a 1/1,000,000,000 drop which means 1 every 500 days. Tell me an item of that rarity won't be able to sell for a decent chunk of real money.

Can I necro this thread?

This stuff is crazy interesting. I imagine that gold will suffer from inflation pretty hard. I've heard people suggesting that they're going to spend the first week grinding gold, then selling it when the RMAH opens. After a few weeks of the RMAH being open, gold should have devalued to the point where you can buy back a lot more gold with the money you got a few weeks earlier. That doesn't sound like my idea of fun but it certainly sounds interesting.

Blizzard have talked a lot about item life-cycles but I've not properly looked in to what they mean. Obviously with everyone creating loot and gold constantly you'd imagine that the price of everything will constantly drop so how will the RMAH work after a few months? Will it just be those incredibly rare weapons that still fetch a few dollars whereas everything else is mere cents.

@Panpipe: It seems like it would be really hard to make an investment like that with Blizzard taking 15% for each transaction and another 15% when you convert the gold back into real money. Of course you can save a little bit of cash if you spend your earnings in the Blizzard store so maybe Starcraft II keys will become its own currency?

I just want to see the story about a guy making money by buying gold off the RMAH, using that gold to buy items from the gold AH and then selling those items on the RMAH.

Its still way too early to make calculations about the higher tier of items though. Even if you have 1million people playing actively in a region (which is a pretty high number tbh), the percentage of those people who can reliably farm Inferno is a lot smaller. People buying Inferno items so that they can clear it themselves is a possible high profit market.

All in all its really interesting. Let's just hope there's no day 1 item duping or gold hacks.

@StealthRaptor said:

@Panpipe: It seems like it would be really hard to make an investment like that with Blizzard taking 15% for each transaction and another 15% when you convert the gold back into real money. Of course you can save a little bit of cash if you spend your earnings in the Blizzard store so maybe Starcraft II keys will become its own currency?

15% really is a ridiculously large fee. Sounds like the only money you'll make off the RMAH is from super rare stuff.

Is there a charge on the vanilla AH?

They've said Inferno is super hard as in the in house team couldn't finish it. If it is actually that hard I doubt there will be many that get there that fast.

@Panpipe said:

Is there a charge on the vanilla AH?

If I remember correctly from the beta there's a small fee for putting things up, but it was very insubstantial. If you want more details on the fees, here's the Gamespot article: http://www.gamespot.com/news/diablo-iii-auction-house-fees-global-play-revealed-6374435

i pretty much lost ALL interest in D3 once they announced an auction house.

why? because it pretty much makes the game pointless. in D2 it was a loot ladder. you did runs to get more gear. it created a really weird community that prolonged the life of the game significantly. takes the mystery and suspense out of it. "am i gonna get what ive been trying for?" instead you'll be thinking "maybe i'll get something i can sell so i can buy the thing i actually want" thats so bland.

never has one small feature of a game, killed it so completely for me.

@Clonedzero said:

i pretty much lost ALL interest in D3 once they announced an auction house.

why? because it pretty much makes the game pointless. in D2 it was a loot ladder. you did runs to get more gear. it created a really weird community that prolonged the life of the game significantly. takes the mystery and suspense out of it. "am i gonna get what ive been trying for?" instead you'll be thinking "maybe i'll get something i can sell so i can buy the thing i actually want" thats so bland.

never has one small feature of a game, killed it so completely for me.

your not very coherent. Instead of doing countless runs and not getting any drops that you would like. You now have the option of not making your runs pointless. This is really just a side effect of gold not being pointless anymore like it was in D2. Being able to use Gold to buy stuff just makes your rewards more liquid so that you have more control, and even if you don't want to use the AH you can use your smith to destroy the item that dropped and roll an item you actually might want.

Just think about it.

@gamefreak9: oh i know. but D2, the randomness of drops. chasing that dragon down so you can finish your set. hunting down that item you really want. that was a huge part of the game, for myself and for everyone i knew who played back then. its what kept us playing. being able to just buy the items we want would have effectively killed all desire to play the game.

diablo has ALWAYS been about the loot. once you take that motivation away of wanting to get that elusive item you really want, it becomes a really boring clickfest of a game. the gameplay has always been bland and not very much fun. its that drive forward to get better stuff is what kept everyone playing. without that, whats the point?

I am going to go out on a limb and say that Blizzard has probably thought this out more than you have.

@Clonedzero said:

i pretty much lost ALL interest in D3 once they announced an auction house.

why? because it pretty much makes the game pointless. in D2 it was a loot ladder. you did runs to get more gear. it created a really weird community that prolonged the life of the game significantly. takes the mystery and suspense out of it. "am i gonna get what ive been trying for?" instead you'll be thinking "maybe i'll get something i can sell so i can buy the thing i actually want" thats so bland.

never has one small feature of a game, killed it so completely for me.

I can see what you mean, but that's partly artificial length. Personally I think it's the opposite of pointless. Now, when you go do that boss on Inferno or whatever, you'll at least come back with something useful. If you get some sort of legendary weapon that you will never use, you can sell it for gold and invest that in upgrading gems or perhaps buying a better weapon that you will use. Also, it's not like you'll find the best weapon on the auction house and then just get it. First of all, you have to be able to afford the weapon that you want - it could be pretty darn pricy - oh no, looks like you're going to go grind a bunch to be able to afford it. Secondly, given how ridiculously small the chances of finding the best weapon for your particular character are, there's almost always going to be a hunt for a weapon that's slightly better than the one you have.

You're also free to ignore the AH and play exactly how you would have in D2.

@TentPole said:

I am going to go out on a limb and say that Blizzard has probably thought this out more than you have.

this

@Clonedzero said:

@gamefreak9: oh i know. but D2, the randomness of drops. chasing that dragon down so you can finish your set. hunting down that item you really want. that was a huge part of the game, for myself and for everyone i knew who played back then. its what kept us playing. being able to just buy the items we want would have effectively killed all desire to play the game.

diablo has ALWAYS been about the loot. once you take that motivation away of wanting to get that elusive item you really want, it becomes a really boring clickfest of a game. the gameplay has always been bland and not very much fun. its that drive forward to get better stuff is what kept everyone playing. without that, whats the point?

You can still be chasing the items you want but instead of not making progress your going to be making progress. If the item you want is rare enough chances are you can't afford it, so you can keep farming for it to drop or if you farm enough times you can accumualte enough wealth to buy it. Your still working hard to get that item, its just that now your making measurable progress!

The game is more about loot than ever b4 so i have no idea what your on about. The loot now is actually much more significant than b4 since spells scale with weopon damage.

Also, I'm so fucking pumped for this game. So much so that I kept trying to install after I pre bought it, and started raging that it wouldn't finish. Diablo apparently makes me forego logic it seems. =\