There is a ton of anticipation for the Real-Money Auction House. Players are gearing up and getting ready for the release of Diablo 3 and intend to hit the Diablo 3 economy with full force. Their main goal: make money. Do I think that Diablo 3 players will make more ‘money’ in Diablo 3 than they did in World of Warcraft? Nope, and here is why.

The Econony is Too Big

In World of Warcraft your realm’s economy had thousands of players on it. Depending on your realm’s size and demographics, you may have been one of only a few dozen Jewelcrafters with the latest design and it was even possible that you were the only one who was actively cutting and posting that design oni the AH.

On a larger auction house there may have been a dozen active Jewelcrafters but relatively speaking the economy was still very small. If you posted an auction, chances were that a competitor wouldn’t undercut you for 30-60 minutes at best. Of course this varies per market and realm but it’s important to note just how small your economy is.

In Diablo 3 the size of the auction house will be 100s of times larger! You won’t be able to corner markets or take advantage of rare recipes. Rare recipes will be rare for about as long as it took the top guilds to down Deathwing on Heroic difficulty.

Players will change their focus from these strategies to cycle-based arbitrage, where they will try to buy items in one period of time and sell them in another.

Players will try to take advantage of content that provides lots of rewards per time invested, selling those rewards to new players who want a head start.

Players will roll the dice on crafting gear with their artisan, enhancing and gemming them until they get the top of the line stuff and selling it.

These sorts of strategies will quickly become over exploited. Hundreds and thousands of us were able to own our markets in World of Warcraft. The competition in Diablo 3 will be fierce, cutting into our profit margins and creating a huge demand for new and secret yet to be exploited strategies.

Although, There Will be HUGE Rewards

In WoW, we didn’t make gold so that we could sell it. We made gold because we were passionate about dominating our gold based auction houses. In Diablo 3, the flood gates will be open for anyone who wants to organize highly-efficient groups of players to ‘farm’ high rewarding content (also known as gold farmers). We will be going toe to toe with gold farmers and botters in a way we’ve never experienced before.

This incentive is a double edged sword. While it will thwart the efforts of casuals it will glorify those of pros.k To have inside info on a market that gives you the competitive advantage, you will be able to leverage the size of the economy to make massive amounts of real money, and this is good. If you win you could win really, really big.

A Final Word of Warning

Players also will not have access to an arsenal of auction house improving addons like we did in WoW. One of our huge advantages over casuals was the ability to rapidly post auctions with APM, QA3 and now TSM. We won’t have auction house scanning tools like Auctioneer, Market Watcher or Auctionator.We will be, mostly, in the dark.

There are great out of game tools being developed now and I will be reviewing these within the weeks to come. These will certainly give us some advantage, but don’t count on making as much “money”, in general, as you did in World of Warcraft?

Think you’ll make more in D3? Let me know why in the comments below. I dare you.

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.