Diablo III Press Event – Diablo III Auction House: Gold and Dollar Transactions

This new Diablo III Auction House is totally going to cause a stir and a schism among fans who no doubt will flood several forum communities with debates. Blizzard Entertainment introduces an Auction House where you can buy items for gold or for real life dollars. The Auction House allows you to switch between both monetary options.

This is going to severe certain sites’ practices, and empower the players with a secure transaction environment straight from within the Diablo III game. Fraud is null. Blizzard Entertainment will likely charge a fixed fee per transaction. If you think about it, this is a win-win scenario where the player gets the best benefit in comparison with the third-party market who at times rips players off, and fraud is inevitable. This Diablo III auction house rivals eBay in many ways minus the shipping. A+ to Blizzard on this.

Auction House Bidding Currency

The Auction House is divided in four sections by clicking the following buttons: Search, Bid, Sell, Completed.

There are four categories on the left tab: Equipment, Characters, Gems, Crafting & Dyes, Tomes & Pages and Gold.

Under the bid section, as shown in this screenshot, the window is divided in two: Outbid Items and Currently Winning Bids.

Both display important Auction House info: Item (Helm, Weapon, etc), item level, current bid, your bid, buyout, and time remaining (down to minutes, yay!).

The upper-right shows the Balance (in this screenshot $50.00). At the bottom-right are two buttons: Bid and Buyout.

Auction House Bidding Gold

Apparently you can toggle between gold or dollar currency by clicking the balance window. The Auction House remembers which currency you toggled in the Outbid Items window and Currently Winning Bids window.

Auction House Completed (Gold)

When you click the “Completed” button you will seea list of items won, the auction log.

The left tab shows the item won (in this screenshot a Heavenly Axe of Virtue) and its 3D model, the amount you paid (buyout), and the date it was purchased.

Once you have won an item and it appears in this Items Won tab, you have two options via buttons: Send to Shared Stash (Yay!) and Sell Item. It seems you can’t sell an item you have won for 72 hours. After the timer is off, you can sell the item won. Might be an internal attempt to curb monopoly practices (you know those who buy everything cheap, then sell them very high to control the demand market.

The auction log has some welcome features such as a date range (from april 1, 2011) to (April 30, 2011). It has a filter and an Export button that allows you to save the entire log or filtered log for offline viewing.

The data provided in the Auction Log: Date, item, transaction and amount.

Auction House Search Equipment (Currency)

The Search button in the Auction House has some excellent features.

Search Equipment For
Item Type
Preferred Stats (Optional)

The “Search Equipment For” feature allows you to choose which of your 10 characters you wish to search equipment for (choose by dropdown). This dropdown shows the face of your character, character name, level and class.

The optional Preferred Stats section allows you to select which stats you wish the equipment you are searching to have. Here are some important info:

Strength
Lifesteal
Attack Speed
Precision
Critical Hit Damage
Life on Hit

In addition, when searching for equipment in the Auction House you can enable two boxes: Has Buyout and/or Unique Item. When any of these boxes are enabled, you can now also type the Max Buyout Price you which to pay and type the unique item name.

Once all the options for your search are finished click the Search button, and all results will be displayed on the right screen under “Recommended Items”.

The information seen in the Recommended Items section shows the item icon, item name, DPS amount, Precision amount, Lifesteal percent, bid amount (toggle between dollars or gold), Buyout price, and time left (I can’t stop pointing out it displays how many minutes are left — SO AWESOME)

Auction House Sell Auction (Currency)

As you can see in the Auction House Sell Auction page you can actually sell items for real life US dollars (or whichever is your country’s currency). The Diablo III auction house is similar to eBay, but much better.

You can select an item from your inventory and it opens up in the Sell Item window. Set the starting price in US dollars (or local currency) and the Buyout Price (optional). Click the Create Auction button to add it to the Auction House.

A nice thing you can see in this screenshot is that expired items remain in the Auction House. You can decide whether to cancel the auction or to repost the item into the Auction House. Very much like eBay allows you to do.

This feature is not present in World of Warcraft. Expired items are sent back into your mailbox in World of Warcraft, forcing you to manually gather all the expired items from the mailbox, then individually add them in the AH. Diablo III makes this experience easy cake.