Diablo 3 Auction House

With the upcoming release of the third Diablo installment – Diablo III – Blizzard has decided to introduce for the first time in the series an Auction House. The Auction House isn’t a novelty to the gaming industry and not even for Diablo. Even if Blizzard never officially supported item trading through a platform of this kind, lots of third party websites harvested the potential of the item trading business in the game and made good money by selling or buying top-quality items to the players that had the gold or, more importantly, the cash to buy them. Nowadays, Real Money Trading, or RMT, is a fact in the gaming world and also in the Diablo universe. It seems that the game developing company, Blizzard, finally decided to take the bull by the horns and drag it into their own yard.

What is the Diablo III Auction House exactly and why it stirs so many arguments?

The Auction House is an in game mechanism, a trading system that allows players to buy or sell among each other in game items (weapons, armors, gems, crafting materials, dyes, runestones, tomes and pages) or even characters in a very easy and convenient way. The only way the user can connect to the auction house is only through Battle.net. The user will also be bound to its specific region (U.S. or EU): even if one can play on both regions, the trading in the Auction House will only be possible with players from the same region the player is from. Blizzard vouches that this trading system will be run solely by players, saying that the company will not perform any trading operations.

The Diablo III Auction House branches into 2 main parts:

The classic Auction House (AH)

that will handle all transactions using in-game gold earned by playing the game;

Real Money Trading Auction House (RMT-AH)

that will need real currency – dollars, euros, etc. – to perform any sort of transactions that were noted above. RMT will be conducted only with authorized payment methods (like PayPal, with whom Blizzard associated with) or from funds that have been previously added the owner’s Battle.net account. This way, Blizzard intends to avoid all the in-game spamming and the unsafe payment methods that were used in the past by Diablo fans, like giving sensitive credit card information to third party websites that would handle the transactions between players. After a successful sale, the player will be able to keep the earned money in the Battle.net account for further Blizzard-related transactions or choose to Cash Out using a PayPal account. This also means that players can earn real money for selling items in the AH, transforming the RMT Auction House in a realistic digitized trading market with a great potential to make some people very rich.

Official Blizzard statement: Acquiring epic new gear for your characters has always been a big part of the Diablo experience. Because of this, players have found a number of different ways to trade and otherwise obtain items both within and outside of the game. Many of these methods were inconvenient and either tedious (for example, repeatedly advertising for a desired trade in Battle.net chat channels and waiting for responses) or unsafe (e.g., giving credit card information to third-party trading sites). With Diablo III, we’re introducing a powerful auction house system that will provide a safe, fun, and easy-to-use way for players to buy and sell the loot they find in the game, such as weapons, armor, and runestones. Two different versions of the auction house will be available in Diablo III: one based on in-game gold, which players acquire through their adventures, and one based on real-world currency.

Of course, at every transaction made with real currency, Blizzard will take its cut of the deal. It will firstly take a fixed fee for listing the item in the AH, which will be charged regardless the item is sold or not. This method is presumably instated by the company to avoid the cluttering of the AH with low-quality items and avoid mass-posting. A second fixed fee will be charged if the item is successfully sold. To kickstart the AH, a limited number of item listings per account won’t be charged. The full details are not yet public, though.

The only zone the RMT-AH is restricted is for the Hardcore characters. When dying in Hardcore mode, the character stays dead. So Blizzard wants to avoid the unpleasant event in which someone who has invested a lot of real money in items dies and won’t be able to recuperate the investment.

Among the big advantages the AH has to offer, besides the secure payment methods, great item sorting options and overall good accessibility is the option to resale the bought items when no longer needed, after a cooldown period that will start from the moment the item is bought. It hasn’t been decided on the cooldown period yet, but it should be somewhere in the lines of 3 days to 1 week. In the accessibility department, being able to sell items directly from the shared stash is a well thought addition.

Conclusion

The Diablo III Auction House comes to aid players in their pursuit of a pleasurable gaming experience, and also offers a secure environment that eliminates the various scamming and information theft that has appeared with third party Diablo item trading. Despite this, the ardent discussions about whether Blizzard made a good decision to officially support RMT are present everywhere on the gaming oriented boards. Some of the main concerns are the mandatory permanent connection to the internet while playing the game, the lack of mods support, mods being banned to avoid hacking or gold farmers that might take over the market. All of these issues are present and potentially game breaking. We will have to see how Blizzard will manage and if the charged fees will affect the prices and the item availability in the market.

The introduction of this type of trading system will probably revolutionize the gaming industry, with more and more games and companies that will arguably implement this in their own business plan. Call it another “Blizzard template”, like the many other this company made along the successful years working in the gaming industry.

Diablo 3 Auction House Guide

The Auction House is an in-game mechanism that allows Diablo III players to perform various item and character transactions between them. The Auction House comes in two versions:

Classic AH, where the used currency is in-game gold

RMT (Real Money Trade) AH, where real currency is used: dollars, euros, etc.

This trading system offers numerous benefits, among them being transaction security; greater accessibility to a wider range of items even if the seller is offline and the possibility to earn real money that can be transferred to your PayPal account.

Auction House Button

The Auction House can be accessed at any point from various sources: Battle.net menu, game menu, the lobby or in game.

Search Window

A few restrictions apply that should be noted:

The player is bound to the appropriate region when using the AH: even if one can play both on the U.S. and EU servers, transactions can be made only with players from own region.

Also, characters in Hardcore mode are restricted to use the RMT AH in order to avoid losing all the bought items when dying, since dying in Hardcore mode is permanent. Hardcore characters will only be allowed to use the in-game gold auction house.

INTERFACE

The interface is an intuitive one, the search function being highly customizable to suit one’s need.

After selecting the character, the items are listed by categories. Additionally, preferred stats can be imputed from a list to narrow down the search, showing only items that have certain stats or attributes. A total of 6 optional stats can be specified.
SELLING AN ITEM

The selling window is straightforward and offers all the necessary information to post a successful auction. After selecting the item that you want to sell, input the starting price – this is the price the bidding starts from. Optionally, you can also a buyout price. The buyout option will be explained further down the guide.

Regarding the RMT-AH, there player has two options: have the Battle.net account manage the money, called e-balance, and just be able to use it in the Blizzard store or link a PayPal account that will allow to convert the e-balance into real money that will be cashed out.

While performing a sale, certain fees have to be paid to Blizzard: First, a fixed posting fee that will be automatically subtracted from your Battle.net or PayPal account. This fee will be subtracted regardless the item is sold or not. If the item is sold, a second fee from the sale will be taken. Although Blizzard hasn’t made the fee amounts public, the company says that the fees will be very low.

The posting fee was instated so item flooding could be avoided. Item flooding consists of a player posting very low quality items in the AH, thus flooding it and making the searching process tedious and frustrating. This sort of fee also acts like a gold sink and prevents inflation.

BIDDING and BUYOUT

This process doesn’t differ at all from all the other auction houses present in other games, like World of Warcraft for example. After finding the desired item, one can bid for it and wait for the auction time to expire. The highest bid will win the item and it will automatically transfer in the stash. Be aware when bidding that other players might outbid you and get that nice sword you’ve been searching for. So don’t forget to check back often to see the status of the auction.

If you don’t like waiting and what that item “NAO!” the buyout option is for you. Choosing to buyout the item, you will automatically pay the buyout price and the item will instantly be transferred to the character’s stash. Congratulations, the item is now yours.

AUCTION ITEMS STORAGE

All the items purchased through the Auction House will be stored in the Shared Stash. While trying to sell an item, the player can select items either from the Shared Stash or from the inventory of any created character. When posted for sale, the item disappears from the stash/inventory and it’s transferred to the auction house system. If sold, it will disappear from the account completely. The Shared Stash has a limited number of slots but can be expanded using only in-game gold.

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

When using auction houses, especially one who use RMT (Real Money Trading) it is important to know some customer support guidelines. Here are some important notes:

The AH is an automated system. If a player purchases an item and doesn’t appear in the stash, please refer to customer support for help.

Items altered by future patches. This point is made pretty clear by Blizzard: maintaining game balance is a high priority. Some items might get altered in future patches and Blizzard won’t make any refunds or give any accommodations.

After purchase, you are solely responsible for your item. If you accidentally destroy it, it’s gone forever. Also botting and cheating or any form of ToS breaking is punishable.

Since its announcement back in August 2011, the Real Money Trading Auction House, or the RMT-AH, stirred lots of controversies in the gaming world and especially among the Diablo series fans. This bold choice made by Blizzard drew with it lots of other mandatory changes to the game that made lots of people upset. But this didn’t hinder the gaming company to go forth with the plan and improve it during the beta. How the RMT Auction House looks now? Let’s see…

The AH will function the same as the in-game gold one. The user will be able to search, purchase and / or sell items, runestones, gold, books and even characters. There are some additions and restriction the RMT AH has thought, and these features will be explained in detail below.

Since the game is connected to the Battle.net platform, the AH is obviously managed by the same system. To access the Auction House, there are several locations the players can connect from: Battle.net, or from the client, the AH being accessible either from the lobby or from in-game. This makes for great accessibility and enables the player to buy sell or just track the AH on the fly.

Several restrictions were set in to avoid certain unwanted situations. In regards to this, the Hardcore characters will not be able to use this AH, being restricted to a Hardcore-only gold AH. The reason behind this is that upon death, Hardcore characters cannot be revived, thus losing all the items in their inventory. For someone who invested lots of cash in gearing up his favorite character, losing everything would be a real turndown, to say the least.

The introduction of the real currency forced the developers to also take some anti-hacking measures that upset some people. First of all, the game will require a permanent internet connection to play. The client will only have the necessary data to play the game and the Battle.net servers will contain all the character and item data. This way, hacking or modifying data will be a lot harder (if not impossible if you consider that hacking Blizzard servers and not getting caught is very, very hard). It will also hinder pirates to crack the game, the only viable solution being the emulation software like WoW private servers have. This news wasn’t taken lightly by the players, an expected reaction though, since Diablo III isn’t the first game that uses this method. Ubisoft tried this anti-pirating DRM with Assassin’s Creed, but without having the solid motives Diablo III has and with the massive backlash from the public, they pulled it. It won’t be the case in Diablo III, since Blizzard’s long years of managing WoW have thought them enough to provide a lean experience for the players. Nevertheless, the lack of LAN will still be reproached to them by some old-school players or bad ISP clients.

Second, no modding allowed. Blizzard specified in numerous occasions that the they will not support and kind of game client modding in order to avoid unwanted hacking and client injections that may compromise the AH. The hacker could illegally obtain certain items and post them in the RMT AH, something that is inacceptable. The “no modding” rule upset many Diablo fans that were used with this type of game additions in the other Diablo games.

In regards to regionalizing the AH, the RMT will behave the same as the normal AH: the user will be restricted to trade items only with users from the same region he/she belongs to. So if you are, for example, from the US, you will be able to play along with EU players, but won’t be able to buy or sell items to them.

Real Money Transactions

The way the money is being handled is of great importance, so in Blizzard’s pursue to provide a clean and secure environment, the company partnered with PayPal to handle the money transactions between the Battle.net accounts and customer credit cards. A foreseeable move, since PayPal is the best money transaction managing website that is used by millions all over the world.

This whole transaction system isn’t free though, so Blizzard will have a cut. The taxing system has two components:

A fixed fee will be subtracted from the account when an item will be posted in the AH, regardless if the item is sold or not. The reasoning behind this is to avoid item-flooding. Item flooding is when players post junk items in the AH, making the searching process a tedious and frustrating one. By getting a fee for every item post, this will force the players to think twice before giving money away. It works pretty well in WoW; it should have no problems in Diablo III. The second fee that is to be subtracted from the account will be if the item is sold, the fee being taken from the sale price.

I’ve sold an item, where does my money go?

The transactions can be handled in two ways. The first one is Battle.net, which will transfer the earnings in an e-balance account. This account restricts to owner to use the cash only in the Blizzard store. If you want to get those hard earned dollars in your bank account, you will need to link a PayPal account to your Battle.net one. This way, you will be able to cash out all earnings to the PayPal account and from there use them as you see fit.

UI

The UI developers built a very accessible interface, offering the user a multitude of options to search for a desired item. After selecting the type of item you want to search for, you can narrow down the search selecting certain stats the item should have. Up to a total of 6 custom stats can be inputted to custom tailor your item search and find the exact item with the exact stats you need it to have. This system makes for a solid search system but with also great potential to be improved to answer the necessities of the users. The BID and BUYOUT functions are present, and have the classic functions: you either bid for an item and wait for the auction time to expire or buyout the item and it will immediately transferred to your Stash. You will also be able to track all the bids and transactions made.