I think there will have to be a standing rule that they don't restore platinum to an account. It seems like a stack of 100 platinum would be even easier to deal with than having to find a buyer for a high end Zuni ring.

If this does happen, what speculation does anyone have as to how this will affect flipping/RMAH sales in general.

Posted by Baldy at 03/14/2013 11:45 PM

If this does happen, what speculation does anyone have as to how this will affect flipping/RMAH sales in general.

I'm not sure how it could have any impact. I guess there might be some people scared off without the ability to cash their gold in directly, but it seems like that would be a pretty small proportion. People serious about cashing out already appear relatively content to translate via gems, even if it is a bit clunky. All hell will break lose if/when even Radiant Star Gems drop below minimum auction level, but that's not going to happen for quite a while, if ever.

What wild - or not so wild - speculations did you have in mind as possible impacts?

I'm uncertain about RMAH, but it could potentially help sales of high-end items on the GAH. I mean, it is always a bit daunting for me to buy items in the 10 mil+ range on the GAH. Maybe, if people only had to pay a few platinum instead, they would be more likely to buy an item, even though they are still paying the same amount. If this does actually happen, hopefully the increased sales on the GAH wouldn't detract from RMAH sales.

I would assume Platinum is just a commodity item. There would be an in-game vendor that buys and sells 1 Platinum for 10,000,000 Gold or 50,000,000 Gold or 100,000,000 Gold. Whatever. Platinum would stack up to 100 or 500 or whatever.

In the AH, platinum is bought and sold if they were Gems. The GAH will still run on Gold. The platinum will just be a way to always be able to convert Gold into USD or EUR without having to constantly adjust the price floor on Gold.

Ahh, I see, that makes more sense. I wonder if Blizzard will have any in-game processes that utilize platinum and not just have it be used to make RMAH conversions easier. A recent blue post talked about having some sort of gambling or rerolling system. Obviously it would never seem worth it to gamble 10 mil for a single item, but it also seems strange that Blizzard would introduce platinum with the sole use of selling it on the Ah

RS Emeralds shot up today from 1.42 in the AM. to 2.50 currently...maybe the AH inflation is turning around

Interesting. I bought Gold at 0.065 USD / 1 mil this past weekend, because I felt that was pretty close to the bottom and I wanted to both gear up my WD and improve my Wizard's equipment. Based on the RMAH Tracker here, yesterday's price for gold was 0.079 USD / 1 mil which is back up to the 3/15/2013 level.

It looks like there's a consistent pattern that seems to be a dramatic dip over the weekend, small recovery Monday and a strong Tues-Thur. I guess we'll see what happens this Saturday and Sunday if we can hold at 0.08 USD / 1 mil. That would be a pretty strong indication that we've established at least a temporary equilibrium.

If the price hold relatively steady for 10-14 days, we might even see the RMAH sales pick up. There's not much reason to buy in the RMAH right now with the price of Gold dropping by the day. If that price stabilizes, then there wouldn't be any reason to hold onto the battle.net balance.

read on reddit there was a gem duping method that was fixed yesterday after the patch. That makes the most sense...cause gem prices for RS Emeralds had dropped to $1.40....and they started rising up sharply after the server maintenance yesterday.

Prices on GAH didn't seem to suffer that much however if there was duping? Not the sub 10M prices we had before... oh well maybe we're back into RMAH sales again!

Posted by nuhertz at 02/26/2013 12:19 PM

There is another possibility, oversupply of gems....

Duping?

I really enjoy resurrecting this statement....... :)

I guess duping seems more unlikely. You are right both Rmah and GAh would go down in price. This is all a bot runned economy. So such a sudden change in prices requires some justification. Otherwise it would be a gradual decline or incline in prices. Possible that with the new SMS system not all bot runners are able to post yet. I used RS emeralds to covert my Rmah money to gold when needed. I guess it will be best to hold on and see how the economy turns in the next few days.

Maybe just a coincidence but had 2 sales overnight. None since 15th March.

Good news everyone! Gold price stayed elevated throughout the weekend so I think we have evidence that we have stabilized at between 0.085-0.09 USD / 1 million. I'm feeling pretty cocky I timed the bottom of the market when I moved half of my balance out of the RMAH at 0.065 USD / 1 million to build my WD. I've had some pretty bad calls in this game, but that's one I actually got right.

I wouldn't be surprised to see RMAH sales pick up a little now that there's no strong motivation to sit on RMAH balance.

@echocd great call and thanks for posting it. I emptied 70% of my rmah balance via radiant emeralds (someone was unloading a ton at $1.40) last Tuesday. I had been watching this based on your OP a while back. In any event, thanks again! Great insight and info as usual.

On a side note, this weekend the sales on rmah seemed to be moving a lot better. I actually had 5, but none were big ticket items. They were all in the $5-$15 range.

Very slow for me, last sale 19th March and nothing over the weekend. I am in a bit of an odd market but don't want to invest in a new one and not have that sell either.

Ho hum :)

Back down to 0.080 USD / 1 MM. This happened even as Gem prices have increased by 100% over the past week. I'm pretty baffled by that. There are a few possibilities I can see:
1. A bot farm has shut down (or a banwave)
2. Duping exploit was eliminated
3. More players creating more demand

I think we can safely rule out (3) since I haven't see an enormous influx of players and no one on this forum has reported a notable increase in AH or RMAH velocity in the past week which is what we would expect to see with a larger player base.

If (1) were true, then we would expect to see the Gold price remain elevated even while the Gem prices increased in value since there would be a smaller supply of Gold coming into the economy. With the gold price coming back down to where it was a week ago, this isn't likely.

That leaves me with (2), the removal of a long-standing duping exploit as mentioned above. It seems to fit the market behavior we've seen.

There was still an existing backlog of Radiant Star gems so we didn't see a level shift in value overnight. Over time, however, the duped gem supply has dried up which is increasing the price of the Radiant Star gems. Since the Flawless Square Gem prices are directly related to the Radiant Star gem prices, it makes sense that we would see an increase on the low end.

The implication based on how much the price has jumped, however, is that this was a pretty large exploit that was being run by a small organized group that was releasing a steady stream of duped gems rather than a single crash as happened last year for a brief period.

Speaking of duping, Blizzard will be bringing the rollback policy it implemented in Asia to the European and American servers. This rollback policy basically makes it so that restored items are BoA and cannot be traded/sold on the auction house. Apparently, this method helped limit duping in Asia and it will be exciting to see if it helps on US/EU servers.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/8481098275#1

Orrrrr, you could look on the front page of DiabloHub... ;-)