The real money auction house doesn’t seem to be up yet, I got a message that they hope to get it up and running in two weeks. Kudos to Blizzard for at first blocking my access to the real money AH by default due to parental controls. Back when parental controls were the only way to keep your Battle.net account from automatically using RealID, I had pretended to be my own parent to guarantee my privacy. So if you actually have a child with a Battle.net account and Diablo III, you will be happy to know that by default your child doesn’t have access to the real money AH until you deliberately give him access via the parental control web page.
But the gold auction house already gives us a glimpse of what the real money AH will be like. Some people were deluded enough to believe that their experience in the beta AH would somehow translate onto the live servers. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Very few people use beta auction houses, and beta AH prices tend to be extremely high. On the live servers people quickly realized that there is no such thing as bind on equip in Diablo III. Every item you find or buy, you can sell back on the AH later, even those that you used and replaced by something better. That means that each players every day is producing a constant stream of blue and better gear to feed into the economy, far more than there could possibly be demand for. Thus prices are quickly converging towards rock bottom. The gold you collect in an hour buys you a complete set of the best possible blue gear for your level for every slot. The value of blue gear is so low, that it won’t even be traded on the real money AH, being worth much less than the minimum price.
Now of course I can imagine people buying epic and legendary gear for real money. But right now there isn’t much incentive to do so. A complete set of the best blue gear for your class and level for every slot already makes you twice as powerful as if you used only the gear you find yourself. And you can get through the game perfectly well with the gear you find yourself, so even the blue equipment is already being a bit overgeared. Maybe the real money AH doesn’t open because it would be of no use whatsoever before people played through the game once and started playing through a second time on higher difficulty. But my prediction is still that there is no serious money to be made by playing Diablo III and trading on the real money AH.
