34 Million for an Amulet

I posted about a high quality amulet drop that I got about a month ago on an Act 1 Inferno run.  At the time, I thought that I had found an item worth hundreds of dollars.  Here's a screenshot of my godly amulet.

 

I did quite a bit of research and asked for some pricing help on the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forums and found that this amulet was indeed "worth" a lot of money/gold.  For over a month, I tried listing this amulet on the gold auction for anywhere from 100,000,000 gold to 300,000,000 gold.  I never got any bites, so I tried listing it on the RMAH for around $75 a few times.  Still no action.

Finally, I decided to lower my expectations and start listing it for a more reasonable price on the GAH.  I put it up a couple times for a 50,000,000 buy out and a 40,000,000 bid.  When I logged in today, I saw that it had sold!  Someone had placed a bid at the 40,000,000 price point and when the auction closed, I had 34,000,000 waiting for me in my inbox.

I immediately put 10,000,000 up on the RMAH to sell and will be using the rest to flip higher cost items like rings and amulets for bigger profit margins.  I want to have a decent stash of gold for when the new legendary items come out to buy and flip on the RMAH for a profit.

Keeping Inventory

With the Diablo 3 markets slowing down and thousands of players leaving the game every day, it's been difficult to justify spending time in the game playing the auction house.  I've been making a couple million gold a day consistently for the last few weeks and selling off a bit, but I've even had gold that did not sell on the RMAH.  What I'm telling myself now is that the hard work I'm putting in to raise my gold balance and keep in touch with the market will help make me a pile of money when they finally release the PVP patch...which apparently isn't going to be for a while.

Patch 1.0.4 will not have PVP as far as we know.  They just released that they will be addressing legendary items, class mechanics, magic find, and a few other things.  I don't think that this patch will fix the game, but it will bring a few players back to try out the new mechanics.  I'm going to keep a close eye on how Magic Find changes.  That might be a solid market to invest in as more players will want to try out Magic Find after the patch.

For right now, I'm doing my best to always keep 10 auctions up and have as many bids in to keep my inventory of items up there.  Looking for items to buy out and flip is simply not viable for my play style as when I'm playing the game, most other players are sleeping and not farming.  However, I've got a routine down of checking 7-10 different markets for cheap items to bid on every day.  I'm keeping an inventory of 30-50 items to resell at any time and logging in every morning and every evening to put items up.  Right now I'm spending around an hour a day placing bids and auctions (I haven't killed a demon in weeks).

 

For those of you out there trying to make money playing Diablo 3, stay strong and keep plugging away.  It is entirely possible to make extra money in this game over the long run, as long as you continue to adapt to the market.

Auctions Picking Back Up

As I'm sure that you've heard, Diablo 3 is broken.  Players are quitting the game left and right, which has made it difficult for people like me to make any kind of consistent money playing Diablo 3.  A smaller player pool means less players spending money on items.  If you look in the Diablo 3 "Blog-o-sphere" you'll find several "I'm quitting this game" posts on blogs and blogs that haven't been updated in weeks or months.  I've admittedly slowed down on my posts as I've been a little discouraged, but I've learned a few things this week that have renewed my making money vigor.

• Fewer players playing the game means fewer players farming high level content

I've noticed that prices in many of the markets that I check on a daily basis are either staying strong or even increasing.  Quality items are starting to become scarce as there are not as many people farming content and finding these items, but there are still players who want to purchase upgrades.  There are also less players utilizing a bidding strategy, meaning that I'm picking up items for less than 10K and selling them for well over 100K consistently.

• Players are not buying elite items, but they are willing to spend a few million for an upgrade

I still haven't sold my bad ass amulet that I keep listing for around 100 million.  I think that I'm going to save it for the PVP patch, where it might be worth a lot due to the high vitality and resist to all (if resist to all even factors in to PVP).  Anyway, now that I have a little more gold to play with, I'm finding that I can make a profit a million or so at a time buying amulets and rings for between 400K and 800K and re-selling them for 1 million to 3 million.  If I can do 10 of these a day where I'm making about 500K each, that's 5 million a day or $9 real money per day, which equates to $270 a month.  I could live with making an extra $270 a month on Diablo 3.

• People are still reading about Diablo 3

Although several Diablo 3 bloggers are showing decreases in traffic, we are all still getting some traffic to our sites.  Meaning that there are still people out there playing the game.  I know that quite a few gamers are looking forward to the release of Guild Wars II, which will be coming out in a few weeks.  I expect to see a lot of players stop playing Diablo 3 at that time, but that just means that the markets will change.  Players will come back to Diablo 3, especially when the PVP patch comes through.  There are always going to be opportunities to make money playing this game, it's just a matter of finding the right markets.