Beta Auction House Changes Incoming

In the near future, we'll be implementing several changes to the posting limits and fees related to the beta version of the Diablo III auction house. Here’s a quick summary of what’s in store:

Listing fee is being removed.

Transaction fee is being increased to 1.25 Beta Bucks.

Minimum listing price is being raised to 1.50 Beta Bucks.

You will be limited to 10 active auctions per auction house.
With the removal of the listing fee, players will no longer need to worry about whether they’re going to run out of free listings for the week. In addition, introducing a limit on the number of active auctions means players won’t feel as though they should be trying to sell everything they find, potentially flooding the auction house with unwanted items. Under this new system, players will only pay an auction house fee if and when an item actually sells. This has the main advantage of allowing players to try to sell their items risk-free. In addition, because the transaction fee is already baked into the price when an item is listed (as part of the minimum listing price), it’s no longer possible to be in a situation where you don’t have enough Battle.net Balance to list an item, forcing you to have to charge up your Balance just to attempt a sale. We think this will be a much cleaner process for selling items and will ultimately lead to a better experience when using the currency-based auction house.

This new active-auction limit will also apply to the gold-based auction house. Because gold can be sold on the currency-based auction house, we need to ensure there are limitations on the gold auction house as well; otherwise, a player might be tempted to sell everything for gold and then sell that gold on the currency-based auction house, which isn’t supportive of the kind of thriving item-driven market we’re trying to foster. In addition, for the first time in the beta test, we're planning to have both the gold- and currency-based auction houses active at the same time when these changes go live. Of course, one of our main goals in making these changes to the beta is to test how they’ll work out, and we look forward to hearing your feedback once you have a chance to try them.

Please be reminded that this is a system that we're testing, and we appreciate beta testers participating, and providing feedback.

The listing limit wont work for consumables.

One of the things with crafting is that at times you need only 1 or 2 of any individual item. Sellers often list items on the market in increments of 1 or 2 so as to both gain a price advantage over selling in bulk and also to fill the need.

If you limit the number of items any individual can place on the market at any given time, you will kill the consumable market. Everyone will be listing high priced finished products instead of filling the needs of crafters.

You can purchase portions of stacks of items on the Diablo III auction house. It's pretty cool. I can put up say 40 of X crafting mat, one person can buy 5 of them, another person can buy 1, another can buy 22, etc. etc.

The changes to the Beta Auction House that we're talking about here are not tied to Diablo III Beta patch 13. The two may not be going live at the same time.

Why do they need to limit it?

We think it's important the currency-based auction house maintain a high item quality level. If it becomes a perception, or even the truth that it's just full of a bunch of junk to wade through to find items worth buying, it will harm the success of the system. By telling people to stop, think, and more carefully choose what to sell we can ensure there's at least some thought going into it and not wholesale inventory-emptying. Previously the barrier was a listing fee, but for the aforementioned reasons we think the system works better with just a transaction fee, and so the limitation that makes you stop and judge what items you want to put up is enforced by a limitation on the number of items you can have up at any one time waiting to be bought.

You could put up 10 items of junk, but it's not in your interest to have up items that won't sell. It may take some people a little bit to figure out what other people are willing to buy, but the situation where someone is just trying to sell the same junk items over and over is far fetched.