Will we be rich using the Diablo 3 AH?

In short: no. Longer: good and frugal players will be able to pay their Blizzard subscriptions and earn a handful more $.

We made millions of gold in WoW. In Diablo 3 you can change gold into $. So we'll soon be rich! Many WoW-goblins people made this assumption. I'm here to tell it's not going to happen, for four reasons.

• Not all good players of WoW cared about gold. Actually most did not. Of course all good players care about having enough to repair, buy enchants, gems, consumables, maxed tradeskills. But after they got these, they stop making gold. When they go below their safety limit, they post some more auctions. So the dedicated AH goblins were facing mostly morons and slackers who were easy to separate from their gold. In Diablo 3 the gold is real money, so practically everyone will care to get more. Of course the M&S will still fail, but no good player will turn his back on a good opportunity.
• WoW economy is much more complicated. There are 926 tradeskill items, Diablo 3 will have about 30 (stuff that the cube gives). Diablo 3 will have 7 armor slots, WoW has 14. Most items are not class-specific, and there are only 5 classes, while WoW has 4 armor types and within the types there separations like agi leather / int leather. It's much easier to find an item that is needed by someone and no one produces it.
• Stats are good for all classes. Even if life leech/attack speed is superior for a barbarian than crit damage/attack power, no one would pay for an upgrade until the very top items of the top level (BiS hunting). Below top, the people will simply list for itemlevel and buy the cheapest.
• WoW has as many AHs as servers *2 for each faction. About 1000 AHs in EU and US, for 5M players. So you are competing with 5K players. Diablo 3 will have 2 AHs (normal and hardcore). If we assume just 1M players for US playing Diablo 3 normal, you'll competing with that 1M players. Good luck finding a niche!
• Legal goldselling. In WoW goldselling is illegal, so the professional farmers has to avoid the complicated tradeskill or investment related actions. No one levels up professions, buy 100K gold worth of stockpiles, or invest lot of human time just to be banned. Farmers are forced to short-term thinking as they can't be sure their char will be there tomorrow. So they rather stick to something that can be done by disposable/stolen accounts: bot farming. In Diablo2 they can do everything totally openly as long as they are using the marketplace of Blizzard. Of course most of them will be still be botter / sweatshop farmer, but the more intelligent ones will be allowed to level up professions to transmute the cheap raw materials into more expensive products. If it's profitable, they can also set up serious "daytrading" houses, where they scan the AH (for example via screenshot + character recognition software) and computers calculate which items worth buying and relisting for higher.

All these mean that the game economy will be near perfect and you'll be competing with professionals who has cheap labor and serious computational power. So in Diablo 3 you can't just buy item X, press a button and create item Y that costs 100G more. Or buy an underpriced item and list it higher (well, there will be morons listing low, but 100k others will jump on his auction). In a perfect market all actions will have the same G/work ratio. It doesn't mean equal G/hour as skill is still a limiting factor. Pressing a button doesn't have such, so it will be not profitable at all. The only production will come from direct farming. If you farm 2x more monsters, you get 2x more gold. However no one can beat bots in farming. Bots, even if much less effective than a player, can farm much more. Also, solo farming in Diablo 3 will be much less obvious than in WoW. If a WoW char does nothing but grind mobs, a filter will find it. In D3 practically everyone will do that, so a botter who is online 6 hours a day farming won't be any suspicious. This means that farmable items will have very little value.

To make  everything worse, Blizzard will take a nice AH cut. 5% AH cut isn't much when you have 40% profit. It is a disaster when you have 4% profit.

There is no money AH in hardcore mode, so no bot-free market for us.


PS: Don't miss tomorrow's post, without that, this post is misleading and incomplete.