Diablo 3‘s auction house has been having its ups and downs (quite literally), delaying the release quite a few weeks from the game’s launch 28 days ago. If in-game messages and other sources are to be believed, the real-money auction house should be available in NA, EU, and possibly other regions beginning today, June 12. Due to possible issues, the commodities auction house may not be usable at its launch, meaning that only equipment will be tradable. This unfortunately means that gold may not be tradable at first – and I believe it will be the best thing to trade.
Blizzard also recently updated its Terms of Service to include that you are required to have an authenticator in order to trade on the RMAH. The huge amount of new, unprotected Battle.net accounts have been commonly compromised with the huge popularity of the game and demand for gold and items, especially with the knowledge that you can cash out within the Terms of Service. Additionally, if your account ever gets compromised, you will have precisely one chance to secure your account with an authenticator – another compromise and you will be permanently barred from using the real-money auction house. If you don’t yet have an authenticator, you can get a free app for your iOS or Android device, or buy a stand-alone authenticator for $6.50 on the Blizzard Store in the US.
If you want to cash out to PayPal and not just to your Battle.net Balance, you may have to sign up for Battle.net SMS alerts in some regions – including the EU.
The RMAH brings the game closer to being “feature complete”, with many more major game changes still to come – including player versus player content.
While there have been some accusations of “duping”, they have gone largely unproven, with only an incident in Asia being addressed by blue posters in that region. Here is some auto-translated text of that blue post:
Blue Post in Asia Via Google Translate
First of all, we are deeply grateful to you for your patience waiting for the development team during this maintenance time in order to restore the service as a whole.
On June 10, our development team has found some error on the stored items in the database, these errors represent a very small part of the items can not be normal trading or selling. This error caused all less than 0.01% of the items have been copied, the majority of players and is not affected by this problem, but the database before removing these duplicated items, is unable to maintain stable. Therefore, we carried out the maintenance of the server, and perform the necessary operations to fix this problem. The development team is currently working to make the server able to resume service as soon as possible.
All original items and their reproductions will be removed from the database, follow-up, we will tell the exact time of maintenance completed, but currently estimated Server recovery services some time in the afternoon of June 11, 8 pm (Taiwan time).
We have also noted that part of the players during a short period of the game after the break and suffered back problems. This issue follow-up will be further instructions.
On NA and EU servers, some roll-backs have happened, and Blizzard has stated that they will soon start banning accounts for botting and other such behavior. Players have shown some weird client-side behavior with the auction house when changing their computer’s clock, but there are still no confirmed duping techniques.
It may be a bumpy ride, but I’m glad to see the RMAH rear its head. Check out my previous posts for some analysis on the economics of the auction house.