Out at Blizzard’s Irvine, California headquarters, AusGamers was taken through Diablo 3 in presentation form, prior to getting hands-on, where we were caught up to date on the game’s narrative, skills overhaul, Battle.net features and finally, on the team’s decision to implement one of the boldest player-empowering systems ever, with a real money auction house for items.

Over the next few days we’ll have a host of Diablo 3-specific features, including words from Game Director, Jay Wilson, a full hands-on preview and more, but today we’re focusing on the auction house, as it’s one of the most exciting features and stands as a testament to just how much Blizzard pays attention to their fans when they’re vocal enough about a topic or feature.

Like us, I bet you didn't see this one coming (though in hindsight it actually makes a lot of sense marrying both micro-transactions and gold-farming into a cohesive, player-driven component).



In this instance, Diablo II taught the team that people found a way to not only trade useful item drops to help fellow players, but to also make a bit of money on the side. In more recent times, this process has become known as Gold Farming, and rather than ignore, or fight the trend, Blizzard have embraced it for Diablo III, offering up active auction houses for items, split into currency regions where they, of course, take a slice of the pie, but you can freely sell items for real-world money to then pocket or use against your Battle.net account for purchases or usage with other Blizzard products and services.

So the basics are, it’s integrated into the game client which means you can trade completely within the game itself. You’ll be able to sell items, gold and components with auto-bidding or via instant buy-out (so if you’re familiar with the WoW auction house you’ll have a sense of how this works). Auto-bidding is a new addition though, that will allow you to set a certain price for specific items you’re chasing, which means you won’t always need to be online to participate in auctions.

Searching for items is a simplified and easy affair thanks to a lot of smart search functionality. Given the game works specifically off of a random item generator (so you never know what you’re going to get, you’ll be able to search for affixes and items integral to your chosen skills, class or load-outs for maximum customisation, and to really give the trading system robust purpose.

The game is going to require you to be always online for full access (more on this in a follow-up feature), but this will allow your auction house movements to be immediately linked across your entire account, and there’s an in-game “Stash” box where all your items bought or found will go, which you can then uitilise across any characters you have with your Battle.net account. It’s all instantaneous. Moreover, all transactions within the auction house are part of a secured item transfer system, meaning you no longer need to arrange to go into town and meet your buyer and drop his gear in front of him in a hope he picks it up before someone else does. All trades will also be conducted with anonymity (so you’re invisible during trades, essentially) to maintain the secure aspect of what Blizzard are attempting to do here.



All that said though, you don’t have to use the real money auction house, and it was revealed the team were also offering up a separate gold auction house, where you’ll use the game’s own currency to buy items. And for the Hardcore mode players out there, you won’t be able to use any items from the auction house in that mode.

Auction houses will be split into regional currency, though it is possible to participate in other regions, you’ll just cop the appropriate fees applied to conversion rates and the like.

As for how the money end of things works, there’ll be two different fees - a listing fee, and then a sale fee. Blizzard’s Rob Pardo mentioned that they weren’t ready to go into specifics just yet about what sort of dollar value you’d be looking at for both fees, but assured us they’re not looking to pinch your pennies, and that it would be a nominal figure for both and fixed, flat-rates, to boot. He did also mention though, that they were toying with the idea of allowing for a certain number of free listings per week as both an incentive to participate, and general loyalty reward, and again, just so you know Blizzard aren’t working to totally rake in all your cash.

Speaking of cash, cashing out of your earnings from the auction house can be done in two ways I touched on earlier. One is to simply roll your earnings into your Battle.net account balance, which will obviously net you the highest return, because the second option, which is to physically cash out, will likely set you back extra fees as Pardo revealed they’d be going with an unannounced third-party payment provide (such as PayPal, for example). He was quick to assert they were still working on the partner though, and couldn’t reveal any more other than they’re definitely using a third-party.



So that was essentially all we learnt about the system. AusGamers did ask how the regional pricing component works region to region, and would you be able to purchase cross-region, to which Blizzard’s Rob Bridenbecker, who is VP of Online Technologies, fielded us with a lengthy answer.

“So in Australia, for example, you’ll by default connect up to South East Asia but in the same vein that we did with StarCraft 2,” he told us. “[But] you’ll have the ability to participate with North America. And the way it’s going to work within currencies that are within a single region, [to] use Australia as another example, in South East Asia you’ll actually have the Australian dollar and then let’s say you have maybe the Sing dollar, or the US dollar, while in South East Asia you’ll actually have the ability to switch over into a different currency and participate, if you so choose. [But] the reason we don’t expect a lot of players to do that is that it exposes them to a lot of foreign transaction fees and whatnot, that’s why it was really important for us, for buying and selling, to list it in the player’s native currency. So if you’re playing in North America you’ll be able to participate in the US dollar Auction House with the aforementioned fees attached to it that are passed along from credit card providers.

In addition, your items... they’re segregated by the region that you play in, so for example if you have a character in North America, that is different than having a character in South East Asia or a character in Europe.”

As mentioned earlier, we’ll have more Diablo III goodness for you over the next few days, so be sure to stay tuned to AusGamers for more from the world of Sanctuary and demons.

Click here for more screens of the Auction House interface.