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With the recent big news of the Diablo 3 auction houses closing down, I figured I'd reminisce and post a (b)log of my interaction with the auction houses. When I first heard of the RMAH, I thought it was great idea. A safe way to sell in-game stuff and have a hobby pay for itself. I had previously had experience selling online gaming accounts and currencies in my time playing AC2, FFXI, and WoW. I had even spent money on TCG loot in WoW for vanity mounts, so am not against buying stuff outside a game.
TL;DR + Show Spoiler +![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/2uNvDaHl.png) End Result of the RMAH experience: $6.83/hr
Patch 1.02 +$391.41
This was the patch when the RMAH came online. My very first item I sold when the RMAH came online was actually a Skycutter - for $2. At the time the big news was the massive nerf to Increase Attack Speed items by 50%, and I was very keen on selling all the ias items I had at the time before the patch 1.03 hit. I was stuck on Act 3 at the time, and figured I'd cash out. This was my "crown jewel" at the time, a reward from pot farming in Act 4: + Show Spoiler +
Notice the 17% ias? Well that screenshot was taken in 1.02. I had 1 week to sell it before 1.03 went live, and had to settle for less than $250: + Show Spoiler + I ended up selling around half my gear - a bunch of rare and some garbage legendaries. (low % string of ears, helm of command, stormshield).
Patch 1.03 +$1,407.32
So the massive IAS nerf hit, and I was back to farming Act 1. This was when I considered flipping for the first time, since I had only decided to sell stuff for paypal after my battlenet balance had already capped out at $250, so needed some way to convert balance to paypal. 1.03 was when I began the systematic scanning and flipping of 1d12 auctions and price differential between GAH and RMAH. I concentrated on a few specific items to know the market - String of ears, Blackthrone's medal, Stormshields, vile wards, Nat's Mark, and rare weapons. Many folks would list items for far less than they were worth back then, with several times I would buy an item on GAH for 100k, and flip it for paypal: + Show Spoiler + Diablo was still hard at the time, so funny sales like this would show up: + Show Spoiler +
Patch 1.04 +$1,272.90
This was the magic Paragon patch with improved legendaries. Near the end of 1.03 after I had defeated Inferno Diablo, I started leveling Wiz, Barb, and DH, and I was debating changing my main class from Monk to DH; but after datamined nerf to caltrops proc coefficient, my tanky DH was DoA and I began the journey to Plvl 100 monk-stylez. It was around this time I was looking for quick farming routes and discovered an obsure video of a Monk using tailwind. I quickly bought loads of spirit regen gear for cheap, and widened my flipping checklist to the new legendaries. I believe my happiest moment was finding my first 1.04 set item ever: a Nat's Embrace + Show Spoiler +.
Patch 1.05 +$937.91
With the introduction of Monster Power and Infernal Machines, I actually spent quite a bit of time playing instead of camping the AH like a good flipper, plus decided to use some sellable gear to compete in MP7+ clears. I started for focus on flipping Monk gears since I could test them out and use them a few times, and even found a monk upgrade twice! + Show Spoiler +
Patch 1.06 +$186.10
Bleh patch? I don't remember and had to look up the date it went live. Gave up on several markets by now, and got lazy and only watched Shenlong's for a while. It's amazing what folks will pay for a sub par ugly looking fist with a socket!
Patch 1.07 +$707.25
Brawling! Woo! Tried to play the PvP flipping market and ended up with terrible margins. Only mildly successful flips involved zero dogs.
Patch 1.08 +$2,359.96
Ahh the infamous gold duping patch. When the stack size increased from 1 to 10 but only allowed for 2,147,483,648 gold to be removed (or something). I didn't have the bank to do it myself thankfully, but worked the gem markets the instant I saw their value skyrocket. Started patch 1.08 with 4 radiants and 200m gold, and ended with approximately 10b gold before the servers went down. After a long hiatus of gold duper banning, and auctionhouseless farming, I was online near the exact moment the RMAH came back online friday night and was able to put my 1b x10 stacks of gold at the front of what I assume was a massive gold selling queue. With the old stack size of 1b temporarily restored and a week of pent up auction house demand, someone richer than me bought all my gold at $250/b + Show Spoiler +![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/SsI1lukl.png) x10
I only recently came back to grind a few paragon levels on the Demon Hunter when I heard the expansion would combine all accumulated exp, but then lost interest actually playing and just troll the forums. Don't even have enough gold to consume the demonic essences I have, as I'm currently sporting ~$150 balance and 11m gold with no desire to flip or convert to paypal. Got to buy the expansion and Titan somehow right?
Final Tally
Can't say if I would have played D3 for as long as I did if it wasn't for the RMAH, as my short time losing interest in Torchlight 2 after playthrough#1 tells me anything. I'm the type of player that needs the constant carrot of MMO-type progression that I feel the RMAH was a substitute for. Ahh well, it's demise cuts both ways for me, as I may not bother to play the expansion nearly as long as I would have otherwise. I certainly don't play console games or shooters for more than a month - and D3 seems to be headed towards console direction. I used RMAH funds to even buy a collector's edition which netted me an extra standard edition key to put up even more auctions with. Never did that in the 8 years I played WoW.
Monk: 857 hours
Demon Hunter: 104 hours
Rest: ~100 hours
Total Hours Wasted: ~1064
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0SaN6T4l.jpg)
(I like the time played by class result!)
End Result of the RMAH experience: $6.83/hr
 
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A lot of money made! Shame it's less than minimum wage at the end =P
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United States43974 Posts
Wow, that's awesome! It's really too bad that the RMAH became broken and had to be taken down, although I haven't played D3 in a long time. Well done on making money! I wonder who's made the most money from D3/ how much they made.
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On September 19 2013 11:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
Wow, that's awesome! It's really too bad that the RMAH became broken and had to be taken down, although I haven't played D3 in a long time. Well done on making money! I wonder who's made the most money from D3/ how much they made.
Someone sold an echoing fury with absurd rolls for 7500 euro.
I think it's safe to say people have made a lot of money off this game.
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What is the ratio of your time spent playing the market vs time spent playing the game?
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Wow its astonishing how much work and skill can go into using the auction house (at least as I see it perhaps a bit superficially), but it only comes out to $6 an hour. Thank god, I thought I was missing out on some get rich quick scheme 
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Sad to see the blizzard would remove equality from the game. What are you supposed to do when someone has a better item? Seems unfair. Hopefully they'll implement a mechanic that would allow people to have equal damage to those that spent more time getting better loot.
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United States2496 Posts
does the time spent by class include flipping the auction house or is it only in game?
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TLADT24920 Posts
That's quite a bit of cash you made. I know friends of mine were busy selling and such but I doubt any of them got even close to how much you made lol.
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Does Blizzard make money from the AH? Transaction fees? If so why would they remove a source of revenue?
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holy shit, no wonder why I see some people playing diablo 3 without any expression in netcafe.
they just want to grind hard for items to sell @@
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On September 19 2013 16:02 ETisME wrote:
holy shit, no wonder why I see some people playing diablo 3 without any expression in netcafe.
they just want to grind hard for items to sell @@
It's hard to imagine Blizzard didn't forsee that they'd cause people to become gold farmers if they supported a way to make money in the game.
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On September 19 2013 15:53 obesechicken13 wrote:
Does Blizzard make money from the AH? Transaction fees? If so why would they remove a source of revenue?
They take a percentage on all sales.
They are probably removing it because it ruins the game and they realized the can't make it fun with it in there. I assume their profit was marginal as well.
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On September 19 2013 15:53 obesechicken13 wrote:
Does Blizzard make money from the AH? Transaction fees? If so why would they remove a source of revenue?
The D3 lead said in a video that they are removing the auction houses from the game because they believe it destroys the integrity of the game; basically it allows you to not have to grind to find the perfect items. But, I doubt that is the real reason because the GAH made it so that people couldn't get scammed and didn't have to use 3rd party websites to trade items. I think they just don't want us to know what the real reason is (maybe something to do with PayPal for the RMAH? -- Don't have any speculations about the GAH removal).
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On September 19 2013 11:41 Chairman Ray wrote:
A lot of money made! Shame it's less than minimum wage at the end =P
Hah yea, but that's way more than the big fat -$30 I made off 2000 hours of counterstrike, or the -years- playing WoW!
On September 19 2013 13:30 Terranist wrote:
does the time spent by class include flipping the auction house or is it only in game?
Probably only in-game. The final time-spent ratio is definitely lower.
On September 19 2013 13:22 Sotoshi wrote:
Sad to see the blizzard would remove equality from the game. What are you supposed to do when someone has a better item? Seems unfair. Hopefully they'll implement a mechanic that would allow people to have equal damage to those that spent more time getting better loot.
Yea, I never understood why some items were bought at all. Looking back now at some rare I sold boggles my mind. But that was the thing, I was never ranked on diabloprogress for anything. I never broke 200k dps on my Monk or soloed any MP10 ubers, or the like. My enjoyment out of the game was very much RMAH related, which I guess is the point of shutting down the AHs. If they can pull off having playing the game the best source of items - even so much as targetting drops based on which skills you use and which items you already have in your inventory, that would be awesome.
On September 19 2013 15:53 obesechicken13 wrote:
Does Blizzard make money from the AH? Transaction fees? If so why would they remove a source of revenue?
Blizzard takes a 15% cut of any paypal sale as a transaction fee, then paypal takes 15% cut of that as a transfer fee. I will assume Blizzard get a pre-negotiated small cut of the 2nd 15% as well. Selling items for Blizzard balance is only a $1 fee, or 15% for commodities. (which is why I capped balance first in 1.02) The data shown is after fees (csv file export from paypal), so who knows how much profit Blizzard generated from the RMAH as a whole. Obviously not enough to justify keeping it up while sacrificing gameplay and eventually playerbase.
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On September 19 2013 18:03 Burrfoot wrote:
Blizzard takes a 15% cut of any paypal sale as a transaction fee, then paypal takes 15% cut of that as a transfer fee. I will assume Blizzard get a pre-negotiated small cut of the 2nd 15% as well. Selling items for Blizzard balance is only a $1 fee, or 15% for commodities. (which is why I capped balance first in 1.02) The data shown is after fees (csv file export from paypal), so who knows how much profit Blizzard generated from the RMAH as a whole. Obviously not enough to justify keeping it up while sacrificing gameplay and eventually playerbase.
Wow that's quite a rake 15% * 15% -> almost 28%...
Considering you are one of many(personally I know one) who traded in large, Blizzard must have made millions...
Good read.
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The double 15% is only for commodities sold thru PayPal. Actual items like weapons have a $1 fee only and then 15% transfer fee so it wasn't quite as bad, but limited the low end sales.
Even after all that I was always too risk averse to flip anything for $250, or ever needed or even liked a site like d2jsp.
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Yeah it is crazy that people who played this made so much. IDK why blizzard is shutting it down. Sure it could be tweeked better but I feel like blizzard thought process is retarded.
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On September 20 2013 00:08 HeeroFX wrote:
Yeah it is crazy that people who played this made so much. IDK why blizzard is shutting it down. Sure it could be tweeked better but I feel like blizzard thought process is retarded.
Because overwhelming feedback and evidence shows that the AH completely ruins everything that made Diablo 3 a Diablo game. The vast majority of people just farmed for gold and then bought everything off the AH (or just bought it with real money). The AH removed the core of any Diablo game; killing shit for loot. It was a horrific mechanic that was intensely criticized from the moment they announced the feature.
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Dun dun dun. Thank you for making this post and it proves everything I said about the AH. Silly me for not jumping in on my friend's business venture for D2. He paid for his college and bought a condo with the money he made. Way better than minimum wage and heck, he hardly had to do shit with all the bots they had.
On September 20 2013 05:03 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2013 00:08 HeeroFX wrote:
Yeah it is crazy that people who played this made so much. IDK why blizzard is shutting it down. Sure it could be tweeked better but I feel like blizzard thought process is retarded. Because overwhelming feedback and evidence shows that the AH completely ruins everything that made Diablo 3 a Diablo game. The vast majority of people just farmed for gold and then bought everything off the AH (or just bought it with real money). The AH removed the core of any Diablo game; killing shit for loot. It was a horrific mechanic that was intensely criticized from the moment they announced the feature.
Ding ding ding. They wanted to take away from the guy's who knew how to make a profit of such activities and let's face it. Gold selling/botting happens in every game. You cannot stop it.
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