Diablo 3 Auction House Money Making - Back Into the Grind

When Diablo 3 released I was ready to try to recreate my usual gold earning routine that I most recently used with some success on the auction house market in Star Wars: The Old Republic, which you can read about in my articles about making money in SWTOR.

All for me! All for me!

Now was the time to get into the gritty world of Diablo 3 and make some gold in the auction house, diving into the buffet of great money making deals with all the enthusiasm of a starving Frenchman at an all you can eat frog legs buffet.

Of course the real cherry on top of the pile of steaming hot frog legs (that's a thing, right?), is that Diablo 3 gives you a chance to turn all that sweet sweet virtual gold into some real life digital coin, through the use of the real money auction house (RMAH).
So not only do you get the chance to cackle like a madman as you rake in those fictional pieces of yellow coinage, you also get to earn a little cash from playing a game!

Well, if that is not the best offer since low priced buffets then I don't know what is.

But of course the big question is, now that I've had a chance to take part in this feast of buying low and selling high that is the Diablo 3 experience, have I actually been any good at it?

Well, both yes and no I would say.

Firstly I am happy to report that I was lucky enough to be one of those people that got to take advantage of the mad dash that was the opening of the RMAH, where prices were completely out of whack and no one really had any idea of what was a reasonable price for anything.

This meant that I was able to sell a moderately good set amulet for the ludicrous amount of 100 Euro (before Blizzard's and Paypal's cut).

"Pay 5-10 times too much for your item? Don't mind if I do!"

I had paid about 2 million gold for this particular peace of gear, and with the price of gold from "shady" sites at the time being anywhere between 5-10 Euro, whoever bought this amulet basically paid at least 5 times too much for it.

Sadly I have not been able to repeat that lone success story, and for the moment I'm sitting at 10 Euro in my Battle.Net account balance, with no further Paypal sales.

On the gold side I've managed to become moderately wealthy, building up a nice little pile of gold that has just recently tipped past the 20 million mark.

"Whee, I'm moderately rich! I can rent anything I want!" - Homer Simpson

Now I know that 20 million gold is not very impressive at all in the grander scale of the Diablo 3 economy.
I've seen crafters with several hundred million gold in their engorged bank account, but I also know there are plenty of people out there that are struggling just to scrape in a few million, so I'm fairly satisfied with where I am at right now.

I must confess to still being somewhat in a learning stage of item flipping in Diablo 3 (buying cheap items and selling them high).
There are some reliable items that always sell and are easy to compare (notably gold find +25 and magic find +20 items) and here it's really easy to spot an item that has been put up for "too low" a price and flip it with a profit to yourself.

Many of these "easy to spot" profit opportunities have been found by the community so it's getting progressively harder to grab the good deals in these markets, meaning I'm constantly trying to find new niche markets where I can make good profit.

The really interesting moment is going to come when Blizzard finally opens up the doors for selling your gold in the RMAH and I find out if my 20 mil gold actually amount to any meaningful amount of money, or if these seemingly delicious and nutritious frog legs turn out to be full of useless gristle and fat, leaving me filled with regret and smelling of garlic.




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