Diablo 3 is obviously not live yet, so we can only look through the lenses of beta testers and speculate how we can make gold and real money once the thing goes live. Instead, we use our past experience of making gold in other games and try to imagine how it will fit into the Diablo 3 world. The auction houses in Diablo 3 will be a lot different, but I do have some ideas of how we can make ‘easy gold’ right away without much effort, unfortunately the details are hard to guess, but here are some general ideas about how to see the auction house like a trader instead of a buyer.

The Invisible Auction House

The auction house is invisible. At least compared to World of Warcraft’s. When you search for an item you have to tell Blizzard how much of that item you want. It then calculates how much it will cost to get that many items for you. For instance, if I want to buy 100 Subtle Essence I just tell it I want 100 and it tells me what the price is. If someone is trying to sell 300 Subtle Essence for 300B (Beta Buck) it will tell me that I can buy 100 of those for 100B. It splits the posts automatically and matches buyers to sellers very similar to a regular exchange market.

Seeing the Market

Instead of seeing the market using an addon or just browsing auctions, we actually need to do numerous searches to figure out what’s actually going on. Start by searching the auction house for 1 unit of the item you want and take note of the price:

Continue to increase the quantity until you see the price per unit go up. You can jump by 100 increments or 10 increments. If the price per unit goes up then go back and only increase the quantity by half of what you did. Keep doing this until you can pinpoint the quantity that increases the price. For instance I searched for 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 and at 500 the price went up. So I checked 450 then 460 and at 460 the price went up. I went to 455, 456, 457, 458 and at 458 the price went up. This way I was able to see that there were 457 Subtle Essence for sale at 1.00 B a piece. After that, the next Subtle Essence was for sale for 5.58 B.

That’s a pretty big gap. It’s not likely we’ll see big gaps like that in the live game but realizing how the auction house works should help evaluate markets like this.

In this case, we could conceivably buyout 457 Subtle Essence and re-post them at 2, 3, 4 or even 5.00 B each. Even if only 100 of them sell at the elevated price we would make a MASSIVE profit. The ability to see the market is crucial if you are going to try to trade in D3. If you have problems understanding the incremental technique, imagin playing a game of guess the number with a friend. You keep going up until he says “nope, lower” and then you keep splitting the difference until you find it. Once you understand the method you can see the market in just a matter of seconds for any item you want. You can see what the gap is between prices and determine if you can simply buy and see the item for profit.

Like this shit? I already have dozens of subscribers who read and learn everyday. Join us and help yourself be profitable in Diablo 3. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, so grab a seat and stick around.

Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.