![]() ![]() He was willing to sit there and win a bunch of bids. You’re doing better than me.’ Some of that was just his persistence. “But I was laughing - I’m like, ‘You should be teaching these guides, man. “Obviously, I was making more from helping people because of the sheer number,” he told me. There was one guy, however, who made more on the auction house than Antoni himself. Some people were able to invest the time and really learn it and make a couple hundred bucks a week.” “Making $40-$50 a week was probably the cap for most people. “I think I’d be a little scared of making a living because of the amount of time invested,” he said. It needed fine-tuning, and, like most things in the game, they rushed it.”Īntoni’s time selling on the auction house wasn’t profitable enough to replace work, but he wouldn’t want it any other way. I think they tried to have a solution that was a little too convoluted. It was so convoluted and difficult to search with unless you really knew what was going on. People couldn’t use the auction house properly to find the really good items. “The nature of Diablo III is that of a ridiculous number of worthless items and a small percentage of valuable ones. “The problem with the auction house was the interface,” he said. The auction house’s clunky interface didn’t help players looking to buy items for personal use, according to Antoni, but it did unwittingly help the item traders. You needed time invested over a long period, and if you didn’t do that then you couldn’t do it fast because everything was new, and too big and too complicated.” “It didn’t take a lot of time,” he told me, “but that being said, you needed experience. That was the secret,” he said.Īntoni used other classic eBay tips, too, like buying resalable items at the last-minute, timing his own auctions carefully, and bidding unusual amounts to help beat last-second rivals. ”I could sift through and find the good items and then put them up in such a way that others could find them. Having invested some initial time in learning the game, and what was and wasn’t valuable, Antoni then spent about 30 minutes a day looking for stuff to buy and flip for profit. ![]() While not strictly true - he did get all the classes to level 60 in order to learn them and explore some builds - the majority of his trading success came from simply buying and selling on the auction house, using it a lot like eBay. In fact, in his own words, he “almost never played the game.” What surprised me most talking to Antoni was that these items weren’t ones he’d pick up playing Diablo III. Converted to dollars, these sold for about $50 a pop. His highest profit item was the Mempo of Twilight, a legendary helmet that, with the right stats, would sell for 700 million to 900 million gold. Even stuff that had no level requirements I could sell for a couple of bucks.” ![]() “Any time you had an influx of new players or people coming back to the game,” he told me, “I had a really easy time selling low-level stuff. And then what would happen was, every time there was a major patch, the auction house would see this flurry of activity and then it would just die like a month later.”Īntoni used these renewed periods of interest to sell the kind of items Blizzard never expected to feature on the auction house. “We had a bunch of issues with launch, and that hurt it. “Early on there was a peak period,” said Antoni. The auction house also reflected both Diablo III’s early success and its subsequent decline. ![]() “I feel that there were like six million people who started and there were probably a million left after the first two months.” “This game was a huge disappointment,” said Antoni. Running two Diablo III websites with active forums - Diablo III Gold Guide and Just My Two Copper - Antoni (known as Markco in the Diablo community) could track Diablo III’s fluctuating popularity from the traffic hitting his sites. “So it wasn’t just me making money here.” “There were multiple people emailing me doing the same,” he said. “And it worked out pretty well.”Īntoni was making a good thousand dollars a month on the RMAH at its peak - and even more from selling guides and running a forum that helped others do likewise. “I figured I had a leg up because I could determine what players wanted in the game fairly early on, just from previous experience in other games,” he told me via Skype. When he heard about the Diablo III real money auction house (RMAH), he decided he’d try making some money. He also has a background playing massive multiplayer online games, such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and NCsoft’s Guild Wars. On the side, he likes to program video games for fun. By day, Christopher Antoni is a computer engineer. ![]()
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