Well I think it's really going to come down the to match-making. In EVE for example, players are allowed to place Buy Orders, which effectively in the Diablo 3 sense would be the equivalent of saying "hey I'm a Wizard; I'm looking for this type of staff". Which then on the auction house would be visible by sellers, and search/match enhanced by whatever Blizzard implements.
Tantalizing news indeed. My confidence is renewed that Blizzard will do a good job on the trading system, which is by no means a trivial task.
I think we're going to see all the amenities of a traditional auction house (such as in WoW), but with the ability to barter facilitated in the same interface. That's pretty much the hint I got from the article - they want to preserve the bartering feel of Diablo II. Either they will have a Bnet interface or there will be a more immersive thing, like a persistent game or NPC you can access in-game to pull up the auction house.
I'm not sure how they're going to tie in bartering, but I was imaging something along the lines of being able to message or PM the seller right from the auction house to indicate interest. This happened a lot in WoW from my experience, especially when players could not afford those Epic BoE's but had a ton of farmed inventory they were willing to trade.
So as the article suggests, you have a scenario where two players each have something the other one really needs - a perfect match. It's these cases where bartering has an economic advantage over the auction house because neither player needs to liquidate their items in order to purchase them; that is, they avoid the loss of selling them for gold, so they can in turn get gold to buy the item. Big assumption here though is there is no inefficiency in trying to find that "perfect match". Which is exactly what I'm very curious to see what Blizzard will do as far as the match finding goes.
I think we're going to see all the amenities of a traditional auction house (such as in WoW), but with the ability to barter facilitated in the same interface. That's pretty much the hint I got from the article - they want to preserve the bartering feel of Diablo II. Either they will have a Bnet interface or there will be a more immersive thing, like a persistent game or NPC you can access in-game to pull up the auction house.
I'm not sure how they're going to tie in bartering, but I was imaging something along the lines of being able to message or PM the seller right from the auction house to indicate interest. This happened a lot in WoW from my experience, especially when players could not afford those Epic BoE's but had a ton of farmed inventory they were willing to trade.
So as the article suggests, you have a scenario where two players each have something the other one really needs - a perfect match. It's these cases where bartering has an economic advantage over the auction house because neither player needs to liquidate their items in order to purchase them; that is, they avoid the loss of selling them for gold, so they can in turn get gold to buy the item. Big assumption here though is there is no inefficiency in trying to find that "perfect match". Which is exactly what I'm very curious to see what Blizzard will do as far as the match finding goes.