Am I putting my items up for too much or is this economy just flat out broken?
Discuss.
Personally, I think it's broken as hell. A descent item barely sells for 1 mil while a godly item sells for 100-900 mil. There's no middle ground. Find that GODLY item or bust.
Worst thing Blizzard allowed was those first few weeks of gold farming + exploited boss farming in A4. Led to one of the worst economies I've ever seen in a game.
I see plenty of items that sell in the 5-25 million gold range.
Problem is I've never found an item worth more than 1 million, and since I didn't play very much the first month because of RL work, I fell behind early. Obviously as more items are found and gear becomes easier to get, prices keep dropping, and yes eventually only the best of the best will sell for anything substantial. There's no gear sinks!
This is why I switched to hardcore, where items keep a good value. Most people are going to die, and when they do items and gems are removed from the economy, keeping the supply down.
Price estimation is tough business. To save time, people would generally over-price their items, and as they don't sell they would lower the prices more and more until the item sells (or if they're stupid, might just leave it at the high price). Once an item is listed for a low enough price, it sells pretty fast.
Sure if you don't know the price you could just let people bid on it, but due to 36 hour auctions and general laziness and desire for instant gratification, most people don't engage in the bidding scene, and thus items that sell via bidding sell for lower prices than they could have been sold for with a proper buyout price. This, combined with the fact you can just try different buyout prices until the item sells, makes people not want to list items for bids as they want to get the most gold out of their items.
Since bid-able items are not common and items with proper buyouts disappear quickly, you end up seeing mostly items with both minimum bid and buyout prices much higher than what anyone in the world is willing to pay. It's not the economy that is messed up, it's just that those are the items that stay on the AH for you to see.
A good fix from Blizzard is to make bidding more user-friendly, so people don't have to play with the buyout price to sell their item for good value. This would be hard to do, though, as 2 hour auctions may hurt the seller twice - Once for losing competition due to less people seeing the item, and twice due to people not willing to wait 1-2 hours to see if they won the item. Therefore I'm not even sure there is a solution.
In any case, the only way for you, as a player, to deal with this: Either constantly scour the AH for good deals that just got listed (time-consuming but potentially extremely profitable), or just do 1 search every 24-36 hours for items that have a low enough current bid that are worth bidding on, and then wait for the last 5 seconds to place your bid on them. With bidding you will at most pay 5% more than what another person was already willing to pay, rather than an overpriced buyout price that absolutely nobody is willing to pay (as if someone was willing to pay it, the item would have sold and you would not have even seen it in your search).
If you have a problem selling, rather than buying, then still, understanding the above will help you understand why what you think is a good price to list your items at is actually overpriced.
This is always going to happen and it's no ones fault. Think about it; it's been months now and the majority of players have good gear. Not great, but at least good, to them. They are now at the pony where they want to spend very little for a slight upgrade, or spend a ton on that godly item that they won't have to upgrade for awhile.
The D3 economy isn't broken, it's evolved to a natural state, you just have to deal with it.
I rarely set buyouts anymore. For a godly item, I usually just set a low starting bid and let it go from there. It's also a good idea to set the auction sometime early in the morning (7-10 a.m.), that way it expires during prime time when most people are online.
I rarely set buyouts anymore. For a godly item, I usually just set a low starting bid and let it go from there. It's also a good idea to set the auction sometime early in the morning (7-10 a.m.), that way it expires during prime time when most people are online.
[...] since I didn't play very much the first month because of RL work, I fell behind early.
Didn't play the first four months (actually great when a game you've been waiting for for 5 years gets released immediately before you have to leave for a summer research internship).
Of course 1 month late vs. 4 months late is a difference, but I caught up on my friends in no time and I have about equal gear etc. now - there's so much money they spend and so much time they wasted in the beginning and it didn't give them any advantage. Besides a few paragon levels more, they have ~200 hours played more on their account but otherwise we're pretty much equal in terms of character progress.
On topic: it's just normal laws of economics. See wealth concentration, for example. I mentioned this in a previous topic but can't find it... works like this:
-Casual gamer with (below-)average gear and high-end gamer are playing Diablo 3. Since high-end gamer plays much more, has higher paragon level, higher damage, and maybe more efficient farm route (due to more experience etc.), he/she gets way more drops (let's say about 20 times more legendaries per week than casual gamer). This is not exaggerated; maths was done in another thread.
-Casual gamer will find badly rolled, worthless legendaries - and so will all the other casual gamers. They get nothing for it on the AH. High-end gamer will every now and then have an awesome lucky roll on one of his/her many legendaries - and sell it for lots of money.
-Money will be re-invested at some point, and since these gamers have both lots of money and high-end gear already, they're willing to pay several hundred million or even a billion if it's a definite best-in-slot item.
=> Result: the market for these top-items is a closed market between high-end gamers. The only ticket to enter it is time AND money or time AND luck. Even if casual gamers find a best-in-slot item or buy them for ridiculous amounts of money, it will not be enough, because a) it's only one slot, and if the rest of the gear is average it's not the same dps increase for them as it would be for the high-end gamer, b ) they still have 30-50 paragon levels to catch up to the high-end gamers, equal to 100-150 MF and c) unless one catches up completely in terms of dps/ehp with these players, the farm speed is much slower. But well... we have to live with that. It's just like in real life: the poor get poorer, the rich get richer ;-)
I rarely set buyouts anymore. For a godly item, I usually just set a low starting bid and let it go from there.
You should add that this is only a good idea if the item is at least "decent". If it's worth less than 1-2 million, it usually never works. People don't bookmark/sniper auctions in this range; they're just looking for buyout here. "I'd rather have the item for 1.2m than wait for 6 hours and get it for 700k". I've tried this many many times and some of these items got sold for the vendor sell value because only one person found them and placed a bit; many of the auctions timed out unsold. Once I put them back in with a few 100k buyout, they sold in no time.
I rarely set buyouts anymore. For a godly item, I usually just set a low starting bid and let it go from there.
You should add that this is only a good idea if the item is at least "decent". If it's worth less than 1-2 million, it usually never works. People don't bookmark/sniper auctions in this range; they're just looking for buyout here. "I'd rather have the item for 1.2m than wait for 6 hours and get it for 700k". I've tried this many many times and some of these items got sold for the vendor sell value because only one person found them and placed a bit; many of the auctions timed out unsold. Once I put them back in with a few 100k buyout, they sold in no time.
Oh yeah, of course, that goes without saying. As long as they have X amount of desirable stats, they will sell. Sometimes we end up selling things we think people want. I'm at the point where if something will likely sell for less than 2-5M, I usually just give the items away to random pubbies unless I have friends who would like to use them. But those are the items I sell with buyouts.
There is less demand for bid items than buyout items, period. Therefore, you can get more for an item if you set a proper buyout than if you let people bid on them.
Of course, if you still insist on letting people bid on your item, at least list it Friday or Saturday noon so that it ends Saturday or Sunday evening/night. But really, you can just get so much more for an item if you just play with the buyout until it sells due to the higher demand for items that you can just buy now.
I rarely set buyouts anymore. For a godly item, I usually just set a low starting bid and let it go from there. It's also a good idea to set the auction sometime early in the morning (7-10 a.m.), that way it expires during prime time when most people are online.
Yep, this is exactly what i do. I set a low price and let it ride... I let the buyers determine what an item is truly worth.
I rarely set buyouts anymore. For a godly item, I usually just set a low starting bid and let it go from there.
You should add that this is only a good idea if the item is at least "decent". If it's worth less than 1-2 million, it usually never works. People don't bookmark/sniper auctions in this range; they're just looking for buyout here. "I'd rather have the item for 1.2m than wait for 6 hours and get it for 700k". I've tried this many many times and some of these items got sold for the vendor sell value because only one person found them and placed a bit; many of the auctions timed out unsold. Once I put them back in with a few 100k buyout, they sold in no time.
Oh yeah, of course, that goes without saying. As long as they have X amount of desirable stats, they will sell. Sometimes we end up selling things we think people want. I'm at the point where if something will likely sell for less than 2-5M, I usually just give the items away to random pubbies unless I have friends who would like to use them. But those are the items I sell with buyouts.
Spoken like a true one percenter! lol
I kid but to be honest this is what it has become these days. There are folks like me who have hundreds of millions and can afford to ditch items that would run about 2 to 5 million on the AH but then you have the folks who would kill for that item. I find it nice to give the stuff away and just sell the godly items.
On the bidding note, I have seen items just tank that would have sold for millions. Personally I sold a Skorn for 3.5 mill the other day that could have easliy net 20 but was curious to how much it would go for if I just left it to the bidding. If I didn't have the gold I already do I would have felt a little butt hurt but that's how the cracker crumbles.
yea i haven't sold anything for almost 2 days now. Only way im ever selling decent items is by cutting the price by at least 30%
I thought I explained why that happens. You're not cutting the price by 30%, you're simply comparing your prices to stuff that are overpriced by more than 30%.
I rarely set buyouts anymore. For a godly item, I usually just set a low starting bid and let it go from there. It's also a good idea to set the auction sometime early in the morning (7-10 a.m.), that way it expires during prime time when most people are online.
Started doing this with an OffHand and a 2hander I found. Worked out surprisingly well. Be sure not to set the starting bid too low.
There is less demand for bid items than buyout items, period. Therefore, you can get more for an item if you set a proper buyout than if you let people bid on them.
Of course, if you still insist on letting people bid on your item, at least list it Friday or Saturday noon so that it ends Saturday or Sunday evening/night. But really, you can just get so much more for an item if you just play with the buyout until it sells due to the higher demand for items that you can just buy now.
while this is true in many cases... if u time ur bids to expire on weekends during peak hours you"ll get the most bang for your buck. i had 400 million saved pre 1.05 and geared out my barbarian with that gold in a week. i attempted to bid for most of the items but during peak hours ppl over paid on bids. people actually payed close to buyouts on 40+ million items which were over priced.
if u time ur bids to expire on weekends during peak hours you"ll get the most bang for your buck
While it is a good idea to make sure your auctions end during a weekend evening during peak hours, during those hours you could get even more by simply setting a proper buyout. Just like more people are bidding, more people are buying items out and thus you are more likely to have someone willing to pay the price you list the item for.
I think I usually have a pretty good idea after doing some ah searching for similar items what an item in the 10-100 mil range will sell for. I typically place the starting bid at what I expect people are willing to pay, and buyout 10-20 mil higher. When the auction expires, I will lower both starting bid and buyout by a few mil. For example, I will place something for 60m, 80m buyout, and when it expires, I will place it for 50m, 70m buyout.
Strange enough, very often the item will sell for buyout the second time I place it in the AH, even though the buyout is still higher than the starting bid from the first posting, where it returned unsold. I blame people willing to overpay if they can get the item immediately.
This is empirical demonstration of what I'm trying to say. You can simply get more by buyout than with bids. Keep in mind that re-listing the item often so it always shows as 1d11h/1d12h increases the chance for it to sell even further. I usually just slowly lower the buyout price every time the item is no longer 1d11, and by how much depends on how much I'm wiling to wait for it to sell (cheaper items waste too much of my time so I lower their prices faster).
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Discuss.
Personally, I think it's broken as hell. A descent item barely sells for 1 mil while a godly item sells for 100-900 mil. There's no middle ground. Find that GODLY item or bust.
Worst thing Blizzard allowed was those first few weeks of gold farming + exploited boss farming in A4. Led to one of the worst economies I've ever seen in a game.
Problem is I've never found an item worth more than 1 million, and since I didn't play very much the first month because of RL work, I fell behind early. Obviously as more items are found and gear becomes easier to get, prices keep dropping, and yes eventually only the best of the best will sell for anything substantial. There's no gear sinks!
This is why I switched to hardcore, where items keep a good value. Most people are going to die, and when they do items and gems are removed from the economy, keeping the supply down.
Sure if you don't know the price you could just let people bid on it, but due to 36 hour auctions and general laziness and desire for instant gratification, most people don't engage in the bidding scene, and thus items that sell via bidding sell for lower prices than they could have been sold for with a proper buyout price. This, combined with the fact you can just try different buyout prices until the item sells, makes people not want to list items for bids as they want to get the most gold out of their items.
Since bid-able items are not common and items with proper buyouts disappear quickly, you end up seeing mostly items with both minimum bid and buyout prices much higher than what anyone in the world is willing to pay. It's not the economy that is messed up, it's just that those are the items that stay on the AH for you to see.
A good fix from Blizzard is to make bidding more user-friendly, so people don't have to play with the buyout price to sell their item for good value. This would be hard to do, though, as 2 hour auctions may hurt the seller twice - Once for losing competition due to less people seeing the item, and twice due to people not willing to wait 1-2 hours to see if they won the item. Therefore I'm not even sure there is a solution.
In any case, the only way for you, as a player, to deal with this: Either constantly scour the AH for good deals that just got listed (time-consuming but potentially extremely profitable), or just do 1 search every 24-36 hours for items that have a low enough current bid that are worth bidding on, and then wait for the last 5 seconds to place your bid on them. With bidding you will at most pay 5% more than what another person was already willing to pay, rather than an overpriced buyout price that absolutely nobody is willing to pay (as if someone was willing to pay it, the item would have sold and you would not have even seen it in your search).
If you have a problem selling, rather than buying, then still, understanding the above will help you understand why what you think is a good price to list your items at is actually overpriced.
The D3 economy isn't broken, it's evolved to a natural state, you just have to deal with it.
Armory | YouTube | Twitter | Clan Site
great advice
Didn't play the first four months (actually great when a game you've been waiting for for 5 years gets released immediately before you have to leave for a summer research internship).
Of course 1 month late vs. 4 months late is a difference, but I caught up on my friends in no time and I have about equal gear etc. now - there's so much money they spend and so much time they wasted in the beginning and it didn't give them any advantage. Besides a few paragon levels more, they have ~200 hours played more on their account but otherwise we're pretty much equal in terms of character progress.
On topic: it's just normal laws of economics. See wealth concentration, for example. I mentioned this in a previous topic but can't find it... works like this:
-Casual gamer with (below-)average gear and high-end gamer are playing Diablo 3. Since high-end gamer plays much more, has higher paragon level, higher damage, and maybe more efficient farm route (due to more experience etc.), he/she gets way more drops (let's say about 20 times more legendaries per week than casual gamer). This is not exaggerated; maths was done in another thread.
-Casual gamer will find badly rolled, worthless legendaries - and so will all the other casual gamers. They get nothing for it on the AH. High-end gamer will every now and then have an awesome lucky roll on one of his/her many legendaries - and sell it for lots of money.
-Money will be re-invested at some point, and since these gamers have both lots of money and high-end gear already, they're willing to pay several hundred million or even a billion if it's a definite best-in-slot item.
=> Result: the market for these top-items is a closed market between high-end gamers. The only ticket to enter it is time AND money or time AND luck. Even if casual gamers find a best-in-slot item or buy them for ridiculous amounts of money, it will not be enough, because a) it's only one slot, and if the rest of the gear is average it's not the same dps increase for them as it would be for the high-end gamer, b ) they still have 30-50 paragon levels to catch up to the high-end gamers, equal to 100-150 MF and c) unless one catches up completely in terms of dps/ehp with these players, the farm speed is much slower. But well... we have to live with that. It's just like in real life: the poor get poorer, the rich get richer ;-)
You should add that this is only a good idea if the item is at least "decent". If it's worth less than 1-2 million, it usually never works. People don't bookmark/sniper auctions in this range; they're just looking for buyout here. "I'd rather have the item for 1.2m than wait for 6 hours and get it for 700k". I've tried this many many times and some of these items got sold for the vendor sell value because only one person found them and placed a bit; many of the auctions timed out unsold. Once I put them back in with a few 100k buyout, they sold in no time.
Oh yeah, of course, that goes without saying. As long as they have X amount of desirable stats, they will sell. Sometimes we end up selling things we think people want. I'm at the point where if something will likely sell for less than 2-5M, I usually just give the items away to random pubbies unless I have friends who would like to use them. But those are the items I sell with buyouts.
Armory | YouTube | Twitter | Clan Site
Of course, if you still insist on letting people bid on your item, at least list it Friday or Saturday noon so that it ends Saturday or Sunday evening/night. But really, you can just get so much more for an item if you just play with the buyout until it sells due to the higher demand for items that you can just buy now.
Yep, this is exactly what i do. I set a low price and let it ride... I let the buyers determine what an item is truly worth.
I kid but to be honest this is what it has become these days. There are folks like me who have hundreds of millions and can afford to ditch items that would run about 2 to 5 million on the AH but then you have the folks who would kill for that item. I find it nice to give the stuff away and just sell the godly items.
On the bidding note, I have seen items just tank that would have sold for millions. Personally I sold a Skorn for 3.5 mill the other day that could have easliy net 20 but was curious to how much it would go for if I just left it to the bidding. If I didn't have the gold I already do I would have felt a little butt hurt but that's how the cracker crumbles.
I thought I explained why that happens. You're not cutting the price by 30%, you're simply comparing your prices to stuff that are overpriced by more than 30%.
Started doing this with an OffHand and a 2hander I found. Worked out surprisingly well. Be sure not to set the starting bid too low.
while this is true in many cases... if u time ur bids to expire on weekends during peak hours you"ll get the most bang for your buck. i had 400 million saved pre 1.05 and geared out my barbarian with that gold in a week. i attempted to bid for most of the items but during peak hours ppl over paid on bids. people actually payed close to buyouts on 40+ million items which were over priced.
While it is a good idea to make sure your auctions end during a weekend evening during peak hours, during those hours you could get even more by simply setting a proper buyout. Just like more people are bidding, more people are buying items out and thus you are more likely to have someone willing to pay the price you list the item for.
This is empirical demonstration of what I'm trying to say. You can simply get more by buyout than with bids. Keep in mind that re-listing the item often so it always shows as 1d11h/1d12h increases the chance for it to sell even further. I usually just slowly lower the buyout price every time the item is no longer 1d11, and by how much depends on how much I'm wiling to wait for it to sell (cheaper items waste too much of my time so I lower their prices faster).