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[PA Comic] Wednesday, June 27, 2012 - Absolutely Not
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Posts
I stopped playing Diablo 3 after two or three days and didn't look much at the AH, but can you sell things after you've started using them or does it bind when used and you can only sell items you pick up and bring straight to auction?
No gear in Diablo binds.
[Nitpickmode] Except the Collector's Edition items. These are account bound [/Nitpickmode]. But yeah everything which drops can be given away, used, lend, sold as you want.
So the story ends, he's got two axes, and can freely sell either of them. Thought the punchline would be "Aw, man, I spent $300 and it turns out I didn't have to!" but he can just turn around, put it back on the AH, and get at least most of that money back? Unless he overpaid and there aren't other buyers who'd go for that much.
Yeah, this is the joke. The time he spent searching the AH for an awesome item could have been spent farming for an even better item. Sure he could turn around and put it back on the AH, but that's not the point being made.
Oh there's lots of gear flooding the auction houses.
There's also a ton of gear that you'll find in game with useless stats.
At the moment, the vast majority of drops are crap but a tiny proportion are awesome and those get sold on the AH, for a lot of money. The problem is those items will never disappear, they can be resold when you outgrow them. And more and better items will eventually drop. So the prices will drop and drop across the board. Eventually awesome items will be so cheap that the game will be trivially easy - difficulty is fixed. Except for patches.
The only restriction on the free market at the moment is that you can only sell 10 things at once, which prevents middlemen from buying & selling items en masse but it doesn't solve the basic problem.
Introducing bind-on-equip would solve the problem but people would hate it. If a cool item dropped, you couldn't even try it out if you wanted to sell it. You would be an item miner not a player.
However what they could do is to say that any item can only be sold once. The finder can use it, then sell it whenever they want, but the buyer can only sell it to the vendors.
Forgive my ignorance.
kingworkscreative.com
kingworkscreative.blogspot.com
Don't forget that Blizzard is taking (minimum) a 15% cut of each sale. So Axe Man here could recoup some of his loss, or sell the better one for even more, but Blizz gets paid no matter what he does.
bzzt, wrong
Blizzard takes a dollar. It's PayPal that takes 15%, should you choose to use that payout method.
Path of Exile: snowcrash7
MTG Arena: Snow_Crash#34179
Battle.net: Snowcrash#1873
AFAIK, converting your money from BlizzBucks(TM) to actual cash is a 15% cut, no matter how you do it. Only way around that is to buy more Diablo III gear on the RMAH or buy something from Blizzard directly (i.e. Heart of the Swarm).
It's hard to even come up with a parallel example from other games. Yes, the RMAH is just like any other pay to play system, you can easily purchase a win if you have deep enough pockets and a corresponding lack of brains. But buying stuff on the in-game gold auction house, it's like having other thousands of other people who are your personal Pindle-bots on steroids. You're basically trading your time for theirs and the exchange is almost trivial.
I know that Wilson & Co. were vehemently against item binding, but goddamn, this game will be a virtual ghost town within a year because there will be nothing left to get or earn for most players.
I like buying from the AH, I hate trying to sell all my almost-adequate junk. RMAH? Never gonna touch it.
Or you could just have items degrade over time.
As for the needed item sink, I'm betting it's going to come from the blacksmith in later patches/expansions.
My bet: Overpowered account bound gear that can only be crafted and takes a crap load of materials (from all difficulties) to even get a chance at. Thus, everything on the AH becomes desirable, if only for the chance to break it down into components to get the really cool crafted stuff.
Sincerely, The Joke Overanalyzer.
You see they are monetizing the synergies of... I don't know either.
Yes, I am well aware it was the joke and point.
That said, I thought there was a $100 limit on accounts for the RMAH? Furthermore, I thought listing items cost the auctioner to give up a percentage of the asking price?
From
http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-auction-house-functionality#q17 So there's no upper limit on how much something can sell for, since the balance can exceed $250, just with additional restrictions imposed on the account.
For a detailed listing of fees, check here:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/game/guide/items/auction-house#fees
Blizzard takes a dollar for every item sale, and a 15% cut if you "cash out" by transferring your funds to Paypal. Paypal does not get a 15% cut for holding your money.
The people that built WoW? Yea, I'm thinking they've heard the term a few times...
http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-auction-house-functionality#q12 Paypal typically charges around 3% for receiving money from auctions or other types of sales:
https://cms.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=marketing_us/fees
I'm sure Paypal does get a taste, but I believe that section refers to additional fees that Paypal may charge:
http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-auction-house-general-information#q10