Economy Guru's Rally! Guess the Opening Exchange rate. der=0>

[Azzure]

We will soon be launching a new pre-game-release website feature in which we will come to an educated consensus in this forum thread on what we predict the value of certain things will be in Diablo 3 at a certain time frame.

Everyone on the forums can contribute to this, providing their own reasoning and calculations on the subject. When a consensus is reached here, it will be published on a new page on the site that has all of our findings for all to see.

The first one we will look at is the Exchange rate between gold and $USD after the first day of release!

I'll submit my calculations first:

I predict that the average player on the first day will accumulate around 6000g per hour. From levels 1-9, Beta tells us that players make around 3000-5000g per hour. From levels 9-18, this should go up by roughly 30%. 18-27, this should hit around 60%.

So if each player makes 6000g per hour, how much do you think 1 hour of playtime is worth in real money? I'm thinking around $5 on the opening day. Possibly a lot less, depending on how weak the gold-sinks are at that level. (oversupply)

Demand is a big question mark on the first day. I predict that demand could possibly be very low on the first day, as the Artisan Gold-sinks don't come to full throttle until later in the game when your gear stabilizes.

Hence I'm going to guess that demand is half of supply. Therefore, going back to a very basic formula...
If 6000g = $5 with 1:1 supply and demand then:
6000g = $2.5 with half demand
$1 = 2400g

Submit your contributions below!

[FizzyBubbly]

If a typical gold farmer is making $250 a month in china that comes to $0.70 per hour. if I want to make 100% on my investment that's $1.40 for an hour worth of gold which i agree is probably around 6000g.

However i believe there will be 2 different running exchanges
1) the Blizzard RMAH rate
2) Gold selling site rate

Why? Paypal is a big problem for Chinese farmers but also with paypals listed fees ( 2.9% + $0.30) being what they are, people are going to try and pass these costs onto the consumer.

I would add this on every level of sale. My Estimates Are:
RMAH
6000g = 1.40 + .35 = $1.75
1000g = 0.23 + .35 = $0.58
And so on
(the 2.9% fee may add the cost slightly but i'm ignoring it for now)

The key to getting a good Deal in the RMAH is to buy in volume or else buying only $1 will get you 2785g (which is really 0.65 worth of GLD + .35fee)

However
Gold site prices will give a more even exchange.
6000g = $1.40
1000g = $0.23
4347g = $1

Now this is really a complete guess disguised behind some nice looking numbers

[trapt]

One thing to note with Paypal, the transaction fee is not applied on every transaction within the RMAH. It is applied when you cash out from your BNet account.

My guesstimate would be that gold will be cheaper than that since there won't be that much demand because people will be too busy going "OMG LOOK AT THEM SKELLIES FLYING AROUND!!!" and the income ramps up so quickly during the first playthrough.

[FizzyBubbly]

One thing to note with Paypal, the transaction fee is not applied on every transaction within the RMAH. It is applied when you cash out from your BNet account.

My guesstimate would be that gold will be cheaper than that since there won't be that much demand because people will be too busy going "OMG LOOK AT THEM SKELLIES FLYING AROUND!!!" and the income ramps up so quickly during the first playthrough.

It IS inherently applied within every transaction in the RHAM (that goes into paypal) because when you put up the item it asks "do you want it to go to paypal account or blizz bucks?" there is no cashing out of the b.net account, once you chose for the funds to go to b.net it can only be used for b.net.

[Neinball]

This is the point where your theories and experience go way over my head! But this is still going to be a very interesting thread to watch and follow. Brownie points for the winner?

[viledevil]

is there not a bottle filled with jellybeans we can guess at also? at least then we can make educated guesses based upon volume and jellybean size.

there are way too many unknowns imo for the price guesses to be more than random (within some sort of reasonable range...). that said in these sorts of situations the average of a bunch of guesses has surprising predictive value so i guess we have that...

[trapt]

It IS inherently applied within every transaction in the RHAM (that goes into paypal) because when you put up the item it asks "do you want it to go to paypal account or blizz bucks?" there is no cashing out of the b.net account, once you chose for the funds to go to b.net it can only be used for b.net.

Pretty sure that it won't shoot every single transaction to Paypal, it would be way too small transactions to process and Paypal won't want any of it. You have any source for this?

Also, I think that pages of training will be very expensive early on. Weapons and gold loots will always get better as the game goes on, but levelling your artisans for better crafted items requires basic pages of training. Tons of them.

[Bowzer]

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the exchange rate at the start of the game will be 10,000 gold = $1.00 USD.

After the first week, I predict 100,000 gold = $1.00 USD

Within a month 1,000,000 gold = $1.00 USD

After that it's anyone's guess, but I'm going to say 1,000,000,000 gold will be = $1.00 USD once people start getting settled into hell and inferno.

[FizzyBubbly]

Pretty sure that it won't shoot every single transaction to Paypal, it would be way too small transactions to process and Paypal won't want any of it. You have any source for this?

Also, I think that pages of training will be very expensive early on. Weapons and gold loots will always get better as the game goes on, but levelling your artisans for better crafted items requires basic pages of training. Tons of them.

Ok please do your homework before making replies to my posts, it's already general knowledge that in regards to the RHAM blizzard has you choose between the proceeds going to either your blizzard account or paypal and that there will be no direct transfer from blizz bucks to paypal. Also it's in this months Game Informer magazine article on D3 as well.

Now in regards to paypal, if you took the time to go to their site you would see that they charge a flat fee across all accounts when receiving payments which is 2.9%+$0.30 per transaction. So your assumption that they would not want to except micro transactions is simply wrong. If people send them 1 million $1 transactions a day that's $329,000 made a day in fees! Oh ya I'm sure they wouldn't want anything to do with that.

Please don't take the abruptness of my post as any offence, i just believe that comments in these forums should be held to a higher standard.

Anyway I do agree that the pages of training will go for a bunch


Let's try to keep this thread on topic guys

[Hubriss]

First of all, anyone who thinks gold is going to sell even remotely close to the hourly minimum wage is delusional.

Gold is going to be dirt cheap, even in the beginning. People won't spend money on gold for any of Normal because the difficulty will be easy enough for players serious enough to even consider it. Going on what the accumulation rate is looking at now, In the first week gold won't be more expensive than $1 for 200,000G.

For the first week and beyond, there will be so few people willing to put money into the system compared to the amount of people who will try to get money out, that people who do spend real money will be able to buy all the gold they will ever really need for $1, maybe $2.