What gives?? As I type this, gem prices are around $2.00-$2.50, yet the GAH lists them at 15-26m... What the hell??? Is this time to re-up on cheap radiants? or is there some speculation pushing RMAH prices lower and radiants are about to lose their gold value with the new patch?

*Edit: I just read the post by ecocd "True RMAH Gold price" and that pretty much explains the reason for the recent decreases in Gem prices. Still, if anyone wants to comment about whether this is good or bad for the average player/auction house flipper, please do.

Also, does anyone know when the last time Blizzard did a big banwave? Just wondering if another large one is probably overdue...

I'd say it's pretty straightforward: there's no floor on gold, but there's a floor on USD. Honestly, I wouldn't feel confident about speculating on anything at this point. The game is nearly a year old, has been plagued by a ton of issues, and to really put the nail in the coffin: it's just not much fun anymore. At least I don't have fun playing anymore.

I think the majority of people still doing anything with the game are somewhere between selling off their gear for USD, occasionally flipping odds and ends, and throwing a few random runs in here and there. I think there's a very tiny population who are still playing the game seriously. I think there's an even smaller population spending real USD on upgrades.

So yeah, to evaluate the current value of gold at $.25/million is kind of a joke. I'd say it's not even close. It was near that value several months ago when the game was still somewhat relevant. It rose like what, 2 or 3 cents RIGHT AFTER the patch?

So basically, I would only buy gems (or actually stuff in general) as an investment towards your character. If you still play the game, if you want to be top dog in "brawling", if you have a ton of money and you just want to show off, then buy stuff now. Otherwise, I'd say no. Too much pain, not enough.....

But you should do whatever is fun. Besides work, there's not much else to do.

The banwaves kind of work, but don't really work. From the perspective of inflation, the only new supply of Gold is Gold dropped by monsters so all we need to focus on is Gold pickup, not mass sales from Legendaries, etc. Based on some input from forum members here, a very conservative estimate would be 12 million Gold / day from a bot. I wouldn't be surprised if a tuned Gold bot could pick up 50% more than that, but we'll stick with 12 million.

It would take no more than 72 hours for a bot farm to have their bots back up to near peak efficiency so we don't really need to take that into account in the discussion of whether Gold bots make a difference over the long term. Chinese Gold farmers would have to go through U.S. intermediaries, because ones needs NA bank account to cash out. Let's say they conservatively have to take a 40% cut below market price dealing with middlemen. They could get legit license keys from Russia or whatever for $40 give or take.

When Gold was at, say, $1 / 1 million, a Goldbot could earn $12 / day or about $7 / day after middlemen cut. It takes 6 days at peak efficiency to earn back their money on the license form Gold pickup alone. It's trivial to have them pick up each (useful) Legendary they find so their earning rate is much higher. Blizzard isn't going to run banwaves every 2 weeks.

Right now, they've repaid their licenses a dozen times over so they'll run every bot they currently have as long as the bots earn more than they cost in electricity. It's strange to think about, but the price floor for D3 Gold is theoretically tied directly to the price of electricity in China. The difference after a banwave is that they have to make a capital expenditure estimate whether they want to restart the farm.

Gold is around $0.10 / 1 million which means the Gold farmers are getting a paltry $0.06 / 1 million Gold so they're earning a miniscule $0.72 / day from Gold pickup. Obviously, they'd be making more than that including Legendaries that would sell, but the point is that it's going to take a lot longer now to earn back the money a license costs. So long, in fact, that they wouldn't bother restarting it.

It's fair to say that a banwave would indeed reduce the number of farmers. Blizzard won't get rid of all of them, though, so there will still be some bots operating. There is a minimum $ / Gold price at which point it makes sense to restart a farm. It sure ain't $0.10 / 1 million.

The 64 million Gold question is the price level the combined gold pickup of the active fanbase and the 'survivors' of the banwave will maintain. If the price were $0.25 / 1 million Gold, I would say the ban wouldn't make a difference, because the Gold farmers would be back in 72 hours. At this point, I think they would do a lot of good and I hope it happens.

I hear where you guys are coming from, Blizzard sure did screw over Diablo fans everywhere, and yeah it sucks that so many people are moving on to other games. Still I have hope this game because everyone got a taste of what it's like to be able to change their long nights farming gold/legendaries into real money, and even though most of the experience was manipulated well by the greedy bastards at Blizzard I have enjoyed flipping items and riding commodity waves up and down. At the end of the day, Blizz is still one of the best if not the best video game producer out there.

The fact that gold is going lower does point at some good things on the horizon imo.

First of all, it is a disincentive to gold hoarding. I'm going out on a limb saying this, but since most of the gold out there is farmed by botters in the first place I think players are finally feeling the effects of illegal practices such as duping and botting because now all that electronic value they've accumulated and hoarded over the past year is dwindling into nothing. Now, if your gold is actually floating around in the game in the form of gear on your character, crafting mats, or items up on the auction house, then for the most part you're gonna be safe from the rapid gold devaluation going on at the moment. Keeping the economy fluid is important if a Diablo game is ever going to be fun again, and hoarding is a bad thing, especially since most of that gold is from cheap, illegal labor.

Secondly, I think this is gonna spur many people to take a break from the game... simply because the game is broken right now... Breaks are a healthy part of life, but more importantly I think that this will give many of the players who couldn't afford to buy really good items before a chance to take over the player base for a while. Imo D3 has been plagued with a few groups of super rich players who are able to control the auction house just by power of money, and that's not what the game should be about. Maybe with a different player base and a more even playing field (cheap but good items) we can look forward to skill overcoming buying power in terms of how much fun players have at the end of the day, however I am really talking about the future, if Blizz ever comes around to focus on Diablo PVP.

At the same time the professional botting crews begin to devote their resources to other games because it's not really profitable. Go back to wow you damn botters!

On a side note, does anyone notice that pickup radius gear sells like crazy after a banwave? Even though it's usually cheap stuff (1-10m) it goes really fast... But it is still rare to find awesome +pickup radius items..

@Dacflem, GF rings at least 15% sell extremely quickly for a solid day after a banwave and tail off slowly to 20+% GF over the next few days. If you find an NPC selling them, even the blue ones go for a 100% premium over NPC price that first day. I've never had any GF amulets to try it, but I suspect anything above 35% would sell immediately after banwave and tail off into the 42-43% market.

As I suggest, above, though, I think there will be far fewer botters that come back after the next banwave so they might not go for all that much.

I think that this will give many of the players who couldn't afford to buy really good items before a chance to take over the player base for a while.

There are two sides to this coin. The gold price of a lot of really good items is definitely coming down even as the USD / Gold exchange decreases. This means all of the items are more affordable. On the other hand, the drops a 'poor' player finds will never sell. Someone who started now would be restricted primarily to Gold pickup and vendor prices for using the AH. A 3 million Gold pair of Nat's boots is a helluva a purchase when you pick up 250k Gold / hr. If you already have a pile of Gold or you're willing to invest real money, the market is very buyer friendly compared to what it was 3 weeks ago. Good luck working your way up from nothing.

Imo D3 has been plagued with a few groups of super rich players who are able to control the auction house just by power of money...

Are you talking about the upper end or something? It seems like even a wealthy group of players would have a difficult time cornering the market on low-to-mid CC Stormcrows. They might have a better chance with the trifecta ring market, for instance, but there are still a lot of players out there even now. Definitely fewer players, but they're still there.

It's nice for players that have some blizz balance. You can pretty much kit out a character for $10 with top end gems to boot.

However don't count that you'll be able to re-sell those same items for what you got them for or make any profit. It looks like we're in a downward slide for the time being... which is good for actual players of the game which I'm all in support of despite doing well from RMAH sales myself, I still care most about players.

It would be nice if Blizzard could somehow stop Diablo 3 from this "downward spiral" in item value and gold prices. I saw a question in the Ask the Developers thread about having some sort of item sink where you destroy good items to enchant/craft other items. Since there are just more and more items being added to the bloated D3 economy every day, this would be an interesting solution to the problem. However, such a fix is unlikely and would probably take a long time to implement. I'm just hoping that since Blizzard earns money for every RMAH sale that it will be in their best interest to keep the economy alive so some kind of fix may be on the horizon. Or maybe, we will just have to wait until the next expansion for a more health Diablo economy.

On the other hand, of course, is the actual player (not flipper) experience. And looking at it from a player's perspective, I hope they implement some system to incentivize self found play - and perhaps some new content like a random infinite dungeon or something to make the gameplay feel fresh again.

Posted by arpger at 03/12/2013 08:58 AM

On the other hand, of course, is the actual player (not flipper) experience. And looking at it from a player's perspective, I hope they implement some system to incentivize self found play - and perhaps some new content like a random infinite dungeon or something to make the gameplay feel fresh again.

I think they've done this to an extent with the patches since release, NV gives you more XP & better MF etc. Before crafting in 1.0.7 farming felt like a frustrating chore where you were hoping against hope for a leg to drop, and then for it to be a leg that someone actually uses and THEN roll decent stats. Near improbable. You were basically just farming for an item you could sell on AH - cause it's so very unlikely what'll drop will actually be an improvement for your current character.

Now at least you can create crafting materials and from all those legs/rares and take them to the blacksmith/jeweller and use them to try craft something and with a predefined base stat. Definitely good for players.

Posted by ninjax at 03/12/2013 09:25 AM

Now at least you can create crafting materials and from all those legs/rares and take them to the blacksmith/jeweller and use them to try craft something and with a predefined base stat. Definitely good for players.

But the crafting is still impacted by the AH. I don't know about you, but I acquire DEs faster than the Gold it takes to craft them into anything. If they really meant the crafting system to favor player-find equipment rather than primarily a Gold Sink With Benefits, they wouldn't have the Gold cost so high on those - or any - crafts.

Don't get me wrong, I love the 1.0.7 crafting, but it's much more focused on "Gold Sink" than "Player Benefit."

Do keep in mind that this is likely calibrated for a Paragon 100 character, instead of just every character.

Having max gf and mf really does make a difference for self found items, crafting and gold.

And the difficulty level of getting a paragon 100 is nearly zero. It's more the commitment level and time than difficulty.

I choose reject @nuhertz 's reality in favor of mine in which Blizzard makes every change with me in mind, personally.