D3 AH – Making the Sale?

Not likely.

For one thing, as of Tuesday night, I have some 20+ items in auction limbo. They were sitting there, ready to be sent to my stash and now they are gone. (They showed up Wednesday morning.)

So what’s selling all about in D3?

A bunch of insanity.

There’s a 10 item limit. Surprisingly, this doesn’t *really* bother me. (And I post 300-600 at a time in WoW when I’m in full swing.)

Yes, it’s annoying. Yes, it means that I’m wasting space in my stash waiting for spots to clear in my sale roster.

When I’m browsing to buy something, I already have to contend with a lot of crap auctions. Can you imagine how many more there might be if it weren’t for this limit?

Besides, rumor has it that the serious players are just buying extra copies of D3 to get more auction space. More power to them.

I’ll admit, I’m not making boatloads of gold in the AH.

Matter of fact, I’m not making ANY right now because I’m Error 37 and the AH probably isn’t up anyways. (Not like I’ve ever needed to buy GEMS or anything!!! /cry)

But when the AH is cooperating, I’m clearing auctions at a decent clip.

Once I settled on a system, I found items moved decently fast and I didn’t feel bad about my potential losses.

So what’s my system?

It works off 2 points:

1 – People like to buy stuff NOW and I want to sell stuff NOW. (Yeah, I outleveled the gloves I bid on and found a better drop. WTS gloves PST.)

I always use a buyout price. The faster people have the option to buy, the sooner I can pick up that gold and drop another item in its place. (I noticed after publishing yesterday’s piece, almost every auction now has a buyout. Cosmic super-conscious hive mind at work!)

Originally I was overpricing items, just hoping for a lucky bite, but I realized those 10 slots are too valuable compared to the number of drops I get. My inventory just isn’t big enough to handle it and 48 hours feels like FOREVER when you can’t cancel an auction past 5 minutes.

If I played more sporadically, it wouldn’t be so bad. But my stash fills up, my mules are loaded, and I still want to crush more hordes of hell.

2 – Unless it’s an incredibly uber item, it’s not worth my time to figure out what the market will bear for it.

Let’s face it. The D3 AH is a mess, and I’m not talking interface issues. That was yesterday.

I’m talking about the sheer volume of items someone has to pick from – most without being direct upgrades. When you’re weighing the difference 2% stun versus 1.3% knockback… but this one has 2 more points of vitality… but this one over here has physical damage resist… ooooh! Sockets! The deciding factor is probably going to be price.

I have no delusions about selling epic items to epic players. I’m looking to clear mediocre items to players that either don’t know what they want/need, players that can’t afford the awesome loot, or even goblins that have the time/inclination to learn the market.

I want to be smashing demons, not researching what items are hot for what builds.

Not only that, but there’s been some chatter speculating the future of gear prices. Without soulbinding or some other method of forcing items out of the game, as more people play, there are going to be more items. And as magic find gear becomes the norm for farming, there will be even more on top of that.

Yes, some pieces will be vendored and some salvaged. But many will find their way to the AH – in increasing numbers. As numbers increase… c’mon, we all took basic economics at some point… that’s right, prices are not going to be very high for most items.

To me, making gold in the AH is about making more profit there than if I had just turned it over to the friendly fence in my current port of call.

So I put items up with a bid of twice the vendor value and a buyout of twice that value. Roughly.

Easy math. Fast posting. Auctions clearing quickly. (And sometimes I even get to see that gold…)

I’m not making a fortune, but it’s enough to keep me logging in (or trying to) and shaking my fist at the breaking news of “the auction house is still down.”