Keep cool or cash in?

[viledevil]

d2 ladders are not a good comparison; no dupes / bots / game knowledge in d3 (at least at launch). we dont even know what what items to look for or where to look for them, let alone what builds will be successful (which will drive item demand)

i suggest that early sellers are fools - not only will they not be able to accurately value their items, for the most part selling a lot early will cripple their ability to find the real value items later on in the game.

[Magikarp]

I WILL PACK RAT EVERYTHING who actually knows whats going to be valuable and who knows if blizzard will change the stat of an item and it doesnt change all the ones that are already in inventory's / chests ETC

something i learned from D2

[galzohar]

I'm not saying it will saturate as fast as D2 ladder, just saying it will saturate eventually. How fast? We never know. But definitely saturate at some rate greater than zero! This means value will only drop. Of course it will take time for you to realize what the real value is, but the longer you take the lower that value will be. Selling faster is a risk, yes, and you must think carefully about the price you want to list the item for. But, if you want to sell it for maximum value, you must think quickly and sell as soon as you can, again as long as you know you're not messing up the price. If you sell for a correct value, *someone* will pay!

Besides, if you find something early, it's probably not all that rare anyway. Sell it before more rare items become common and your item becomes salvage-crap.

[Karpalo]

I still disagree with that "value will only drop" statement. The rarest items can be considered luxury items. Bugatti Veyron and VW Golf are both cars but they aren't part of the same market. When people have too much wealth and nothing to buy that will create a whole new market. As always increasing demand will raise the price, but the demand for luxury items is tied to the amount of excessive wealth which in turn doesn't appear from nowhere over night.

My prediction for the first year is that the so called more normal items will go down in price over time, where the exquisite BiS stuff keep climbing in value.

Filthy rich player can afford to value perfection much higher than his poor counterpart. For example take perf Anni or torch from D2. Bad ones were close to free, mediocre ones did cost something, but perfect one could go for 100 times the value of the mediocre one later on in the ladder. 100 times the value for pretty much cosmetic advantage.

[edistotiger]

So you buy the Diablo III at launch, you play and reach the endgame and woohoo, something really good drops for you. Now lets say it looks like a 30$ item on the RMAH, as it is when you look.

How will your item fare, 6 months away. It may increase many times in price. Like if you found a DII coldskiller with 45 life, at the start people didnīt want to pay premium, later on such an item was very costly. And it can be sold 6 months later for 150$. Only a few who will buy but they will pay.

Or it might be an item that looks very good, but into the game it has become more common, or is not the optimal item for a certain popular build. And it can be sold for 5$.

What will you be doing with your first valuable finds, when you know the market hasn't settled and prices haven't been determined yet.?

This won't happen because, unlike the value of runes in d2, the value of the USD (or Euro or what have you) will remain relatively stable. Your item is probably more likely to drop in real money value over time than it is to go up.

[Karpalo]

Another thing i find worth of hoarding is PvP gear. Based on those Blizzcon pvp videos D3 will have sandbox arena.

First rule of sandbox pvp is that death is the best CC. What that means is that the first thing any self respecting PvPer will do is that he will acquire durability. Considering that there are no real shield classes in PvE you can expect a surge in prices when it comes to shields that boost your health. As i see it every class will be using a shield as offhand in the arenas. As long the shield has % max health and any of the main attributes i suspect that it's price will go up notably when the PvP feature is added later on.

So thing to hoard: PvP gear. Trademarks of a good PvP gear are high durability and large quantity of the de-facto damage boosting attribute. PvPers invest in durability so their item budget doesn't allow them to invest heavily into damage multipliers. For example i bet that for WD or wiz the 2 most valued attributes would be health and int. Everything else comes secondary.

[edistotiger]

I still disagree with that "value will only drop" statement. The rarest items can be considered luxury items. Bugatti Veyron and VW Golf are both cars but they aren't part of the same market. When people have too much wealth and nothing to buy that will create a whole new market. As always increasing demand will raise the price, but the demand for luxury items is tied to the amount of excessive wealth which in turn doesn't appear from nowhere over night.

My prediction for the first year is that the so called more normal items will go down in price over time, where the exquisite BiS stuff keep climbing in value.

Filthy rich player can afford to value perfection much higher than his poor counterpart. For example take perf Anni or torch from D2. Bad ones were close to free, mediocre ones did cost something, but perfect one could go for 100 times the value of the mediocre one later on in the ladder. 100 times the value for pretty much cosmetic advantage.

While this is very likely to be true in terms of in-game gold, it is unlikely to happen in terms of real money. While players are building up hoards of gold and items in D3, their real-life bank accounts aren't likely to see such a boon.

When dealing with the value of items in terms of gold you really have two factors at play. 1) The value of the items, and 2) the value of gold. The value of an item in terms of gold can increase by either the actual value of the item increasing, or the value of gold decreasing.

Gold, and other in-game currencies, typically drop rapidly in value over time as more and more of it comes into circulation. Inflation is incredibly high in video game economies.

However, with the RMAH, we are dealing with largely-stable currencies like the Euro and the USD that aren't likely to fluctuate much. So the value of an item in terms if real money will primarily only change if the item actually gains or loses real value. Your PvP example is actually a good one, because that's a situation which is definitely likely to raise the real value of certain PvP-related items.

[Azzure]

Because the RMAH is such a new concept, and Diablo 3 is a new game, the best you can do at the beginning is to think to yourself "Logically, what items will gain value, and which will drop in value, and when?"

In my opinion the early-game crafting materials will probably not sell for much in general, because I think people will spend all of their gold on gear, and there is plenty of gold dropping for each player to purchase crafting materials in the GAH.

I think Hell crafting materials will be VERY popular when people first start to hit level 60, as people begin mastering their gear to survive in inferno. I think Hell materials will be the first "hot" commodities. And than after several months it will all be about Inferno.

[galzohar]

Both gold and items will inflate - The question is which will inflate faster. Real money, though, will not inflate, or at least not inflate nearly as much, because if it does we'll have much bigger things to worry about than the RMAH.

You could say that people need to gain in-game wealth in order to afford high-value items, but in reality they don't, since they can spend real money on it.

You'd have to be way ahead of the leveling curve in order for your super-awesome-super-rare items to not have any buyers to the point where you have to wait for demand (and therefore price) to go up. Anything less, and while demand might go up, so will the supply. Not to mention even if you're ahead of the curve, you're unlikely to find such items before enough people reach 60 for your items to have enough demand.

[Felix]

The selling early part many agree on, I donīt think (or hope) that it will be the case for all items. We also don't know what builds will be popular, and so a really good item for a certain build you don't want to trade for a decent item for another build. Turns out the decent item is worth twice as much on RMAH, cause it's the ofhand for the FotM build, more or less.

Another thing is; The Ladder.

The Ladder was what made Diablo II keep on trucking at the end of the day. And Diablo III will arguably also need a ladder, sooner or later. A Ladder system will completely pull the rug under the market, so there's another cath you must learn if you want to be a RMAH player.

A PvP system is also what makes some items extremely valuable. All these things I guess, will make any given items price fluctuate with the season you are playing. This will take a while to settle, and will be interesting to learn.