Like millions of other gamers around the world, I highly anticipated the release of Diablo III on May 15, 2012. Stocked with plenty of caffeine, my friends and I began clicking at 11:55 PM to log into the servers, more nervous than trying to get our hands on some Blizzcon tickets. Unlike million of other gamers that night, we were fortunate enough to log in and play when servers went up, avoiding the dreaded Error 37.
We didn’t sleep that night, or the day after, or the night after, or the following day… or basically for over 72 hours. We took breaks when the servers went down for maintenance, but other than that, we were hell bent on clearing as much of Diablo III as possible. Of course, once we hit the “Inferno wall,” the game became an entirely different animal. But by getting a jump on the competition for the most part the first night, I was able to feel the satisfaction of flipping items on a near-empty auction house. Purchasing items for 200,000 gold to sell it for 2,000,000 a day later was a thrill. Getting geared out to be one of the first groups to clear the Butcher in Inferno was a thrill. All in all, Diablo III was a satisfying gaming experience despite its many flaws. We welcomed the challenge of figuring out different builds and group comps to clear all of Inferno while many were struggling to just get past Act I. It was fun times, no matter what everyone else had to say.
Then the Diablo III Real Money Auction House (RMAH) went live. Hoarding some of the best item drops I was able to obtain from farming Inferno Whimsyshire meant real money. Then it happened: My first $250 sale, and it changed my outlook on gaming entirely. Suddenly Diablo III was paying me to play a video game. The concept is every gamer’s dream. Purchasing items on the gold auction house and flipping them on the RMAH was a thrill that no other game had offered me up to this point. Farming for the next best drop became an addiction and every rare or legendary that got id’ed just became dollar signs in my eyes.
Then my second $250 sale happened. This was no longer just a “fluke.” I started studying the economics of the Diablo III economy and finding quicker and better ways to do item flips. I watched markets, I crunched numbers, I had spreadsheets. I calculated how gems would convert to gold and then back to real money. I found ways to make a few bucks here, a few bucks there. Then my third $250 sale happened. No other game existed in my mind. Diablo III not only paid for itself, but almost gave a good return on the time invested. It had paid for my years of World of Warcraft subscriptions. My previous Blizzcon tickets. Blizzard Entertainment had essentially given me back all the money I had given it over the past decade.
Friends would contact me to price check items. I could glance at any identified rare and within seconds, know whether it was worth anything. I could even spit off ranges that an item would be worth without even checking the auction house. I had studied it that in depth.
Then I saw my Paypal account. It was almost $1,000. Sure it wasn’t some of the five-digit profit that other people had success stories of, but I also wasn’t investing the hours some of those other people were. Then things changed with the game, millions of people lost interest, myself included. $250 sales were far and between, but there was still a hook of gaming the system. There’s still money to be made I thought. But it wasn’t from the next best drop. You could no longer look forward to good drops in Diablo III, RNG had taken reign for a game that was so dependent on the thrill of finding the next great item.
So I stopped playing Diablo III, six months after its initial release. By then, I had collected over $1,500 in my Paypal account and still couldn’t believe it. Sure if you took the 1,000+ hours I had sunk into my characters and checked the pay per hour, it wasn’t worth it. But I enjoyed my time playing Diablo III and I got some money out of it.
But I couldn’t stop logging in just to take a peek at the auction house. Curiosity always got the better of me, and I’d spend 15 minutes each day taking a look at certain markets that I had taken over to flip for gold. I was listing horrendous legendaries for $1.25, or even recipes for $1.00. A sale here, a sale there. Those $0.25 and $0.85 transactions added up to get myself a shiny gem which would sell for over 20 million gold on the GAH. Between flipping gold find gear that farmers ate up and gems, I built my gold balance to several hundred million without killing a single mob. I simply unloaded really bad legendaries and recipes that were stockpiling in my stash.
Then gold became 10,000,000 a stack instead of 1,000,000. Well look at this, there’s no way recipes will continue to sell for $1.00 now right? I mean at some point in time, you could grab yourself 40,000,000 gold for a million. With that type of gold, you could buy every recipe in the game on the GAH. Nope, recipes are still selling. Gold farmers are still buying gold farming items. I returned to Diablo III each patch, building new characters with better gear with all the gold I had lying around. But never did the game itself captivate or hold my attention… just the idea of flipping items and making trivial amounts of cash.
But then something dawned on me. Other games didn’t feel the same. I tried Marvel Heroes, and while it was fun, it felt weird that I couldn’t look forward to selling my next drop for money. Even if it was just a $1.00. Path of Exile? No auction house? Games suddenly weren’t a satisfying experience for me since I knew there was no chance I could make real money off of it. Diablo III had ruined gaming for me.
It’s like getting paid once for doing something you already enjoy doing. It feels weird to do it again for free. The thought in your mind is always there: “But hey, that fine looking Diablo III paid me to play it. Why would I play you? What do you have to offer me? Good gameplay? That’s not money!”
It took months to revert myself back to playing games just for fun. But now, over a year since Diablo III has launched, I still find myself logging in and tossing recipes up on the RMAH and smiling when that email from Blizzard Entertainment hits my inbox. Eventually an expansion will come and back to the world of Diablo I’ll go. But this time around, I’ll have a full Battle.net account balance to outfit my character with all the shinies it could need.
And then the cycle will start all over again.
So for those still struggling to make some gold in Diablo III, here’s an image to give you an idea on what to do.
Note the time and date. This is after Blizzard put in its change to make the gold on the RMAH 50,000,000 a stack. And yes, your eyes are not fooling you. That is a recipe you can purchase in the game, from an NPC, for a mere 1,500,000 gold. Why would someone spend $1.00 for a recipe that costs 1,500,000 gold within the game? You’ve got me.
