As I relayed to you guys in my Latest Diablo 3 Auction House Info post Blizzard have updated their auction house guide. It was down for a while but popped up at approximately 17:30 BST (British Summer Time) May 1st. It contains some very interesting information and I recommend you guys check it out. In particular you might want to read the ‘Payment Methods’ section:
Payment Methods
A variety of methods are available to buy and sell items in the real-money auction house:
BATTLE.NET BALANCE: Your Battle.net Balance is a value stored in your Battle.net account. In addition to bidding on Diablo III auctions, your balance can be used to buy select Blizzard Entertainment digital products directly through Battle.net. See the Battle.net Balance FAQ for more information.
Battle.net Balance is available to buy and sell items in the following real-money auction houses:
The Americas: USD, MXN, AUD, BRL, CLP, ARS
Europe: EUR, GBP, RUBPAYPAL: In certain regions, you can link your Battle.net account to a PayPal account and use it to buy items and receive proceeds from auctions (a 15% transfer fee applies to the latter).PayPal is available as a method to buy and sell items only in the following real-money auction houses:
The Americas: USD, MXN, AUD
Europe: EUR, GBPCREDIT CARDS (PURCHASES ONLY): You can also use a variety of major credit cards you’ve entered as payment methods in Battle.net Account Management to make auction house purchases.For more information on accepted payment methods in your region, see the FAQ.
Read the FAQs too, there’s a wealth of information in there. Here’s a summary of the overall changes that have come out the past few days (mostly from my reading of the FAQs but also some additional sources which are linked):
- Items such as armor and weapons have a $1 fee when sold (check the general FAQ for region specific transaction fees).
- Commodities such as gems, materials and gold have a 15% fee when sold.
- The cash out fee (to Paypal) is 15%. (Source - also not all countries in a region will get a cash out service regional FAQ).
- RMAH will not open with launch but roughly a week later.
- An Item cannot be bought via buyout OR bid for over $250. (Source)
- No character sales to begin with.
- If your Battle.net Balance exceeds a limit (100 euro or regional equivalent), you’ll have to attach an authenticator (I recommend doing this anyway).
- You have to sign up for the Mobile Alerts service to use PayPal to buy or sell items in the Diablo 3 RMAH (or just to cash out – I also recommend this anyway).
I’ve recommended a few things at the bottom which, depending on how you use the auction house, perhaps aren’t necessary. However the fact that your account can be used to create cash and move cash around is going to be the next, major, online scam.
Keep your accounts secure guys. If you’ve played World of Warcraft and maybe had your account compromised or felt that the news of compromised accounts was on the increase you’ll know what I mean. My prediction is “we ain’t seen nothing yet”.
Ray
{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
What are your thoughts on the price ceiling? I’m thinking since there is one, that is basically how we can determine the value of items, roughly. A perfectly rolled item could be at the 250, or it couldn’t. Do you think we will see an enormous amount of items selling for 250?
Yeah, definitely, a 250 ceiling could well be the point from which all pricing flows downward. Of course it depends on the maturity of the market. What’s worth $250 at the debut of the RMAH certainly won’t be worth it in 2, 3 or 6 months time.
I don’t think we’ll see an enormous amount of the same item selling for 250 – unless the demand is unreal. But all the pieces of a full legendary set, that are rare enough, it’s possible alright.
Hi Ray – Just so I’m clear on this, it appears that in order to use the RMAH for actual real money, we’ll have to link to a paypal account. Why? Our battle.net balance enables cash in, but not cash out, so using a battle.net balance is more like using a ‘Blizzard Gift Card’. In order to do so, we’ll be paying a 15% “cash out to PayPal” fee. If you’re selling Gold, for instance, that will mean: (a) an initial transaction fee of 15%, as well as (b) a cash out fee of 15%. That will mean that we’ll have to pay a 27.25% fee (on your gold’s list price) for any gold sale transaction (or 15% * (item list price – $1) + $1 for items). Can’t say this makes me a happy camper. What are your thoughts on this? It makes the Gold to Cash arbitrage much less appealing when your gold/cash margin has to be almost 30% to cover the spread. Just something to think about…
It’s a higher fee than we’d like ideally. But there are ways round taking a 27.25% cash out fee on a commodity (gold) RMAH sale.
Lots of stuff there and so far so good but I dont like the idea of this:
) say a minimum of 2 times. Is that 4 messages im paying for? making my profits ingame even lower…
You have to sign up for the Mobile Alerts service to use PayPal to buy or sell items in the Diablo 3 RMAH
Will that cost me money on my mobile everytime they send me a message? how often im I gonna get notified, for example I change my password twice a month and I expect to take money from the RMAH to paypal (not sure because I dont know if I will fail or be rich
After the taxed ingame and for taking out monay to Paypal profit it quite minimal but if you add on mobile costs…. I dont know if I like the idea of it been obligatory
I don’t think there’s a charge for the mobile service – I’ve signed up to it myself and I can’t say I’ve noticed any charges on my bill when they send me a message.
What I haven’t researched yet – and what’s quite interesting – is whether it’s 1 mobile number per battle.net account. Meaning multiple accounts to bypass the 10 per AH limit would need multiple phones.
I’m not sure that’s a massive deal – there’s ways round that.
yes you need a different mobile for each account
Just as well you only need the mobile to cash out and not to trade in general… Though that’d create problems with using the RMAH in secondary or tertiary accounts (hard/impossible to find the exact auctions you want to use to transfer funds and in addition – more fees).
Is the cost of multiple game copies + cost of multiple phones (cheap phones mind) + time spent trading and learning each region/currency based AH you want to work in equal to a profit or a loss?
Something to ponder in the coming weeks.
This chart is also very interesting to me: http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-realmoney-auction-house-regional-access#americas
It seems to indicate (and popular community opinion indicates we at the very least need some Blizz clarification) that American accounts will have access to 5 “currency based” auction houses total and European a maximum of 3 (most often just 1 or 2).
Now I’m not sure how this works and if it’s, in fact, meant to signify multiple Gold auction houses.
I will have to ponder this further. Even if the balance mixes into one and you can only ‘cash out’ on your home AH, access to 5 versus 3 is significant (but of course population and activity dependant).
In fact it’s not multiple GAH’s because there is one of those per region. It’s multiple RMAH’s. At this point it looks like the Americas region has access to up to 5 of 6 (based on your location) and EU is a maximum of 2 of 3.
Interesting.
As far as I know, $250 is not the max you can potential sell an item for. Since Blizzard said the GAH buyout cap is 100,000,000,000 there is a lot of room to work with. If 100 billion gold is worth more than $250 (which should be the case for awhile) then all you need to do is put an item on GAH for a high amount and then sell off the gold $250 at a time.
This should work for at least a few months. Once the market fills up with more and more loot/gold the prices will drop. This involves just a bit more time/work but totally worth it if someone is willing to buy something for twice the cap. Even the 15% fee from GAH is nothing.
Any thoughts? I’m not 100% on this especially since we haven’t seen the price of gold yet, but even at 10mil gold per $1, we could still potential sell an item for thousands of real money.
Is it 100 billion? I’ve my head stuck in a few things and many of my notes (both digital and paper) on the AH have become scattered by some desert wind. I know it was a lot of gold but maybe 100 million is nearer the mark.
Reason I ask is that gold is sold by chunks of a 1,000 and you can’t sell for less than a cent/penny/centime (unless it’s a weaker currency which will be less by way of the exhange rate).
So a penny per thousand gold equates to 10 of your currency of choice for 1 million gold. At that rate (given the lowest gold can plummet unless Blizzard make it a 10,000 chunk or more) 100 billion gold is 1 million (read in Doctor Evil voice) real currency.
That seems excessive given their current RMAH cap. However, given you can’t convert that gold to cash in one lump ($250 cap on your b.net balance) maybe it’s not an issue?
At the same time your example stands if 100,000,000 is the gold auction house buyout cap – that would be $1,000 (very lowest rate) max which is quite a respectable ‘max cap’ per ‘perfect rolled item’.
Tl;dr – If it’s 100 billion GAH cap then you can (at the very lowest rate of gold) sell for the equivalent of $1,000,000. If it’s 100 million GAH cap then you can (at the very lowest rate of gold) still sell for the equivalent of $1,000. This is dependant on what Blizzard set a single unit of gold as.
PS please correct me, anyone, if I’m wrong anywhere with these numbers – the amount of 0′s I was counting was amusing but confusing and I’m doing some other number crunching elsewhere.
Yes 1 million was the number I had come up with. What it means is should have an amazing item worth over 2k, you can sell it for gold, and then sell the gold.
Of course in doing so you lose 70% of what you would have made as you get an addition 15% fee for selling on the GAH, and then selling the gold you get hit with the 15% commodity fee instead of the $1 item fee.
It’s annoying, but it beats the $250 cap, and I pretty much refuse to use a 3rd party site. Really though, the truth is I can only hope I have the problem of the $250 sell cap being too low.
As an Economics graduate, and someone who is looking to make a bit of cash from one of my favorite games, I see great ideas and fatal flaws in this idea. I have seen it a lot recently. The GAH will allow one to sell items for more value than the RMAH, if you choose to portion out the gold. While this may be true initially, or at any given point in time, the actual economics of the community will prevent this from happening.
Eventually, and very early on, gold will have a certain dollar worth. The two auction houses are linked imperatively. Essentially we have to assume that the “best” item in game is worth $250 USD. So if said item sells for “X” amount of gold, we have our exchange rate.
There will be many ways to make money in the game, but most of what I have in mind is exploiting market oversights, or negligence. I do not believe at all that there will be an ability to make money selling items for more gold value than individual dollar value. Basic economics dictates that the two will be linked. Even if you believe (as I do) that there are certain people that will only pay with in game gold vs. cash, what is a believable markup? Maybe 15% at the high end?
In essence, I think we already have our “end game” gold to dollar values set. Max gold per transaction= Max $ per transaction. I hope I’m wrong, but I wouldn’t see so many people trying to play the gold auction house vs. the RMAH that this becomes reality. If we want to make money on the game we’re going to have to find faster ways to find items/gold, or find better ways of manipulating the market
From the AH FAQ:
In the gold-based auction house, the minimum you can list an item for is 100 gold, and the maximum is 100,000,000,000 gold.
Storing wealth and going above the RMAH cap in a roundabout fashion isn’t going to be difficult then. It is though, a little risky (depending on what happens to gold).
Scroll down this FAQ and it’ll show 100,000,000,000 buyout cap for GAH. I’m interested to see how this all works out. Seems like you’ll get hit with 15% GAH, 15% RMAH and then 15% cash out.
http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-auction-house-functionality
Carrying on from my response to Roden above –
Perhaps this is Blizzard’s plan. It keeps the wealth in their system, their economy… but avoids certain restrictions on their side (obviously, we’re more restricted as a result).
The RMAH cap is, no doubt, as low as it is in order to avoid certain legal requirements – if you could store $1,000,000 in your b.net account Blizz would not doubt need to meet some additional financial regulations.
At the same time leaving things like that would just be restricting the earnings Blizzard make from their RMAH.
So the gold cap is set mighty high.
Wealth is flowing through Blizzard’s system but not triggering any real world checks with governments and financial authorities. When it flows out in dribs and drabs (we’re forced to) it’s taxed the same as if it left as a lump sum – 15% Paypal cash out fee.
What do you think? I think a new blog post might be brewing.
I agree. This cap indicates that they want to keep the GAH as the main engine of the ingame economy and treat RMAH as an addition – even though their income comes only from RMAH. I think the RMAH will work like the fuel of this engine since this is the only point where real money comes in and moves out of the game and eventually transform to gold. But this is just a theory we will see how it really works after the launch.
Hi guys,
I’m a Brit and am currently compiling a spread sheet that calculates the profit margins for items and commodities when sold at various prices and exported to paypal. However, as a Brit I will also have access to the € RMAH. The markets will be much larger and inflation is generally higher over on the continent so I may also use the € RMAH sometimes too, if there is more profit.
However, I have a question for anyone who uses paypal frequently and trades in both £ and €. Is it more economical to convert your amassed € currency in paypal to £ using their conversion feature or can you just export it to your British bank account? If the latter is the case presumably it works out cheaper because there will be less charges (ie. just a little charge on top like when you draw out cash abroad).
I’m currently doing the spreadsheet like this:
Sale price
Profit (£) if item
Profit (£) if commodity
Profit (€) if item and converted profit (£)
Profit (€) if commodity and converted profit (£)
I am also teaching myself basic programming so would like to write a programme that works all of this out for you, which I will make available here if people want it.
Any help with my questions would be great thanks!
That’s a good question Matt, I’ve yet to acquaint myself fully with the intricacies of paypal.
I think, so long as we can mix our stash and proceeds from each RMAH there is no reason not to use both – you get 20 auctions instead of 10.
At the same time, I’m still not sure that this is what Blizzard mean as it would be a little unfair for the American market to have access to 5 RMAH’s next to our max of 2. I know ‘unfair’ seldom has much to do with it, but can they risk a large portion of Europe registering new accounts and stating they’re American? Maybe they can or don’t mind.
If you get in touch via email when ready, I can talk to you more about making your finished program available
@Matt
Hi, I’m from Bulgaria and I just registered for the first time in PayPal.According to the site I don’t have options to convert € into Bulgarian LEV, however I asked my bank about this feature, and they said that PayPal sends the currency into my bank account where it’s automaticly converted into Bulgarian LEV by the bank’s current course.PayPal doesn’t know what currency is your bank’s account main currency. I’m using VISA by the way. I hope this helps you
The auction caps have to be in place for financial regulation – to prevent money laundering etc. I’m not sure yet whether the real money caps ($250 per item) will damage the economy. I know for my own experiment – making a living playing Diablo 3 – I’ll be trying to make use of all my available auction listings.
It’s quite an experiment!