Diablo 3 Auction House
The Auction House is a safe and fun environment where players can buy or trade epic gear for their characters.
It was implemented by Blizzard to ensure that players do not end up flooding the chat channels trying to look for a trade, or resort to unsafe third party methods where they give their credit card information to strangers.
There are two types of auction houses: one that trades in in-game gold, and another that trades using real world currency. Items being sold in the gold auction house will not be listed in the real money auction house and vice versa.
The auction houses are separated by game regions. There is a gold auction house for each of the Americas, Europe, and Asia game regions, and a real money auction house for each of the currency regions.
This means that items posted on the Asia gold auction house can be bought by anyone in the Asia game region, but not in Europe or the Americas. Likewise, items posted in the pound sterling currency auction house will not be available to regions trading in euros.
Please note that some regions do not have a real money auction house. However, these regions have a special gold auction house exclusive for Hardcore characters.
In order to use the auction house, players must leave the game and open the auction house interface from the character screen.
The interface will automatically recommend smart item purchases for the character, but players are also able to search for specific items they need based on the stats they prefer. There are two separate interfaces for the in-game gold and real money auction houses, so players may want to repeat their search criteria in either interface if they want to look through both.
Buying an item:
When buying an item, players will select it from the buy section then enter their bid.
There is a maximum amount that they can bid, giving other buyers a chance to top theirs.
As other buyers place their bids, the system will automatically place incremental bids on behalf of the player. If the player cannot wait for the bidding process to finish, or if they want to make sure that the item goes to them, they can just pay the buyout price if that option is available.
The purchased item will go to the inventory stash shared by all the player’s characters, and the balance will be deducted either from their in-game gold or their Battle.net balance for real money auctions.
Battle.net balance can be increased using PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover from the player’s Battle.net account.
Selling an item:
To sell an item, players must again leave the game and access the auction house from the character screen. Again, the in-game gold and real money auction houses have separate interfaces, so players must be aware which one they went to sell from. Diablo 3 Players will go to the sell section and choose the item to be sold from the character’s inventory or from their shared inventory stash. They will then enter a starting price, and a buyout price if they prefer.
Players can have up to 10 active auctions per auction house, and each auction lasts for 48 hours. If nobody buys the item within that time, it will go back to the player’s shared inventory stash. Otherwise, the proceeds will be added to the player’s in-game gold or their Battle.net balance for real money auctions. Some regions will also allow players to send the proceeds of their real money auctions to their PayPal accounts for a small transaction fee.
Please note that there will be a transaction fee for using the auction house, regardless of whether the item was sold or not. This is to ensure that players will only sell items that others will want to buy, instead of flooding the system with junk items.
In addition, there will be another transaction fee for items that are successfully sold. Blizzard is also planning to give a limited number of free auction transactions per account in the future.
The auction house will only be selling items that are found by players in game. Blizzard will not be generating items to be sold from the auction house.
Make sure you check out Blizzard’s guide to the Auction House here.
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