Be advised that when you purchase a new stash tab, it only unlocks the first chunk of slots. You've still got to pay the 10k or whatever it is to unlock each additional row of slots. The third stash tab will set you back 200k.

Wonder why they limited it to 3 tabs? There's clearly room for more. Maybe it'll be an expansion thing.

Why charge gold when there's real money to be made!

It's actually kind of fun to try and apply economic principles to Blizzard's auction house. I mean, gold is being generated constantly, and I'm not sure there is a sufficient drain on it. The 15% transaction fee on the AH serves to suck some of it out, and equipment repairs eats a piece, as does crafting, but I think on the whole we're observing inflationary pressure on gold.

It's exciting to think how translating that to dollars will impact it. IE, if there's a mental threshold for an immaterial amount of real money (ie. a person stops thinking about value comparison at $1 or under), could you actually effect a translation rate between gold and dollars that highly overvalues gold? And will that lead to even more inflation on the value of in-game currency?

I'm looking forward to seeing this thing work. Or break. However it turns out.

Can't you sell Gold in the RMAH? That will be super interesting to see, especially with goldfarmers and stuff. But also what will skew things is that (I believe?) there's a $250 cap on items sold in the RMAH. Up around yesterday it seemed that the conversion from Gold to Money was running about 1 million Gold for $20. But there have already been things that have sold on the AH for what would be the equivalent of approaching $1000 in real money with that conversion. So if that's the case I wonder if we're going to have this weird squeeze where anything super crazy winds up being sold outside of Blizzard due to the $ cap, which will just leave this weird middle ground on the RMAH. Also I'm inclined to say that the value of Gold -> Money will probably drop pretty hard as well.

I expect it to be a total clusterfuck but interesting to watch.

Yeah, you can sell gold for real money. However people are still going to 3rd party sites to buy gold. Sadly, they think it's ok to do that since gold is sold in the RMAH and then get upset when they get "hacked".

I guess I'd need to start farming massive amounts of gold if I plan on making any kind of money from the RMAH, which even after Blizzards 30% cut (15% transaction and 15% processing for funds going into paypal and not Battle.net Fund) won't be a whole hell of a lot.

Got the bow on the right for 20k on the Auction House:

http://i.imgur.com/1ae1B.png

FUCK YES AUCTION HOUSE

http://i.imgur.com/z5YWO.gif

People may just wind up using the gold auction house to trade high value items while pulling real money profit from selling the gold. IE. the RMAH becomes a gold exchange, with all the gold profits from a gold auction house sale being funneled back into the RMAH for conversion to cash.

Based on the faq on how commodities work though, it seems like it could be highly speculative. Hell, you could wind up being some sort of meta character class. The only way you play Diablo is speculating on the real-world currency value of gold.

In before the 5th tab (if there ever will be one) will be half-mil. Gotta sell that Legendary item for a quick buck!

I figured they would just charge you two bucks to unlock a tab and 50 a row from there.

Hit the Butcher on Hell last night, oof.

Holy FUCK:

http://i.imgur.com/3I1I7.png

Behold the power of gold.

Apparently that's buffed, unbuffed his DPS is around 100k. Still pretty crazy.

Additional Spam:
Blizzard on Patch notes for 1.03 (later this month), sounds like they are addressing a lot of the big complaints: Patch 1.0.3 Design Preview - Diablo III

Yeah, I'm looking forward to 1.0.3 to hit. I imagine there are some nerfs or fixes to farming methods that they're not mentioning yet, but I'd be fine with that so long as Inferno becomes less dumb. Trying to group up past Act I is just terribly unfriendly.

Holy goddamn fuck, I take back everything bad I've ever said about this game. Found this in Act 1 with Inferno off the elite mob that spawns in Lacoris' (sp?) mansion.

http://i.imgur.com/wWZnl.png

Literally God Tier for my DH, cheapest comparable on the AH right now is 20 million. Garr also got a few good drops to buff him up a bit, need to get the guy some good stuff for Inferno. I still can't do Act 2 for shit though, need way more money for gear.

I just beat Butcher on Nightmare. I still have a lot of farming to do for better gear it seems. :(

The only counter to Andariel's Visage is the fact that it looks atrocious and that legendary items can't be dyed.

Good find, anyway. The 3 legendaries I've found have all been butt. It figures I wouldn't have the luck to find anything good in Inferno.

Owing to general frustration over how balls pushing through Inferno is, I've started mucking about with other classes. So far, I've got a DH just starting out in Hell and a Monk that's nearly done with Normal. I've also given Barb a brief whirl, though strangely I have no real interest in playing the Witch Doctor. The class felt really underwhelming in beta, but maybe things have changed since then. Oh well.

You guys heard about them crazy gold dupes and stealing going around lately?

EDIT: Whoops, I thought this post would merge with the one above. My bad.

Yeah, so that's a weird thing that blew up overnight. As far as I can tell this is the sequence of events:

-Supposedly a Gold dupe of some kind had been known since day 1 of the game, but very few people knew about it.

-A day or two ago on the Asian servers an item dupe became known. I'm not exactly sure on the timeframes if this has already been completed or not, but they wound up hotfixing and they stated that it was specific to the Asian servers. Where it gets unclear is they also went in and deleted all of the duplicated items as well as the original used to do so. This seems fine, but then some people also reported it was a completed 24 hour rollback, but I've seen conflicting information on that.

-It became known at least a couple of days ago that the AH timer is based on Clientside time (which is fucking hilarious, really?) so people were able to advance the clock on their PC to pull down auctions prematurely basically. At this time aside from being cancel auctions early, this had no other effect.

-Last night everything blew up; supposedly a Gold dupe made the rounds having something to do with working with a friend on cancelling auctions early, and this could also cause legitimate players to somehow lose the money they had placed bids on. This was followed by a ton of screenshots/videos of people having billions of Gold, etc.

Where this becomes a gray area is that it seems like no one will outright confirm that they've done it and it works. It's apparently super easy to edit the amount of Gold it shows that you have, BUT doing that does not actually give you the gold, just a hex edit basically. It seems like some people on GAF tried it and it didn't work, and it apparently also partially blew up because on Kripp's stream (one of the biggest players who streams all the time trying to clear HC Inferno) said that they did it and it worked. Then one of the Blizzard CM people (Bashiok) posted saying that they're looking into it, but that the gold dupe doesn't work, it's just people posting photoshops and hex edit videos as mentioned above. He said that he was wactching Kripp's stream and told him to do it. Kripp backpedaled and said that he didn't actually do it, but that a friend did and it worked.

Then there's now the conspiracy theory that it DOES exist, because Bashiok also posted that there was no hotfix rolled out last night to address that or anything, but they had to have put out a hotfix last night because late last night you are now asked if you want to be dumped into General chat or not when you login. He also said that he appreciates "the belief that server lag is secret hotfixes" which has now introduced the hilarious "lagspike hotfix" terminology.

So I dunno, it seems like there maaay be something going on, but if so seems like it's not nearly as significant as it's being made out to be. As long as we don't get a rollback and I lose that helmet kinda whatever. Also supposedly the RMAH is launching today after the maintenance which is going to be hilarious.

Edit: Well they started rolling out bans and suspensions on EU, so that's a good sign.

They're patching this morning. When I first tried to get on it said they had maintenance scheduled from 5-8 PDT, but then when I just tried logging on at 8:15 it said it's scheduled to be back up at 11 PDT.

I was all hoping to finally start Nightmare since I just got there the other day. :(

Yeah, Tuesday is usually the maintenance day. I wouldn't expect it to be up at 11 PDT either.

Also it looks like the US server dupe thing was an epic 4chan troll whaaaaaaat: So we all just got trolled by 4chan.. - Forums - Diablo III

tl;dr version:

We're starting to approach Eve Online levels of meta shit here.

Bleh, didn't know they had the servers down every Tuesday. That's just a little annoying since Tuesday morning is one of the main times I can play. =\

Yup, Tuesday is my day off during the week, and I live on the East coast so I usually can't play most of the day. It sucks. I believe it's also the WoW Maintenance day as well.

Gargle my grundle you spoogechugger.

You haven't even been on D3 in like a week, blow me!

Additional Spam:
RMAH is up, prices are hilariously all over the place as expected, but there is STUPID shit selling for $200-250 (cap is $250). High roll Stormshields are going for that which is expected, but sorry-ass stuff is going for way too much money, even middling shit is randomly going for $20-30. Good times. I did just score the bow below on the right for 100k; had 1 day 12 hours left to go, I'm assuming he left a zero off:

http://i.imgur.com/qkaSH.png

That's a pretty big upgrade for me, that damage increase there is without Sharpshooter, so my base damage without Sharpshooter is up to 36k now.