Auction House fees

What do y'all think of the Auction House fees that Blizzard has announced?

Just a short summary:

These fees will only be charged if your auction successfully sells, and will automatically be deducted from the item’s final selling price.

For Equipment (weapons, armor, accessories, and other unique items)

• Transaction Fee (Gold Auction House): 15% of final sale price
• Transaction Fee (Real-Money Auction House): $1.00 USD per item / $1.00 AUD per item
• Transfer Fee (when sending proceeds to PayPal or other authorized payment-service provider): 15% of amount being transferred

For Commodities(gems, materials, dyes, pages, recipes, and other non-unique items)

• Transaction Fee (Gold Auction House): 15% of final sale price
• Transaction Fee (Real-Money Auction House): 15% of final sale price
• Transfer Fee (when sending proceeds to PayPal or other authorized payment-service provider): 15% of amount being transferred

I'm guessing my initial feeling is similar to many other people in that the fees are too high and that they're double dipping on the transfer fee as they're already taking a transaction fee. It's worse than the banks!

Paypal usually charge you a transaction fee as well but that won't be the case when receiving money from Blizzard which makes me wonder if Blizzard negotiated a lower transaction cost with Paypal and then figured out they could charge a much higher transaction fee themselves.

They obviously need to charge something as I'm sure the RMAH has a real world cost for them - customer support, staff wages, on-going fraud detection, monitoring of the economy and other things I can't think of right now.

What bothers me the most is their cap of $250 for any item. I wonder what the reasoning is for that? Perhaps to avoid some kid buying a $10,000 worthless weapon and creating a headache for them. If parents are letting their kids go to town on the RMAH, some might be inclined to blow off a $250 purchase here and there but unlikely much more than that (it's a weak argument though). Another reasoning could be that the vast majority of transactions are going to fall under this amount anyway. Perhaps they'll even lift the limit as time progresses and it's only initially in place to avoid people pricing all sorts of rubbish at crazy prices. You only get one shot at doing it right after all.

If I find a legendary which I consider to be worth more than $250, I could A) sell it on the black market, something which will probably be very limited as most will want to stick to the RMAH or B) If I consider my weapon to be worth $500, I could sell it on the Gold AH for an amount of gold that is equivalent to that amount and then sell the gold instead. Playing devils advocate, how often is such a scenario going to come up anyway? Perhaps it won't even matter.

At the end of the day, the fees are somewhat like the rake in poker. At the micro limits, even if you're a good player and can beat the players, the rake eats away most of your profit margin and you have to move to higher stakes to beat the house in the long run although some players manage to do very well.

I think it is too early to talk about any RMAH related things without any "if". Balance will be patched first few months, including RMAH fees and stuff. And the major point for me is that I can TOTALLY ignore it and play just for my own fun.

Blizzard is going to run a tight-rope walk with the RMAH.

The interpretation I have is that the fees have to be high to make the implementation worth it at all.

This screams to me that they haven't fixed major exploits, or that they can't. It says to me that duping may eventually become the norm, with no way to prevent it, and as the markets get saturated and things start going for cents on the dollar, they need to make sure there is still in-come from it.

At some point, the market will go belly up, unless they come up with a way to keep the rares rare. Tuning the item generator will just piss off the playing fan base. No one wants to run mobs 1/1,950,000 for a Zod. And making them too common kills the economy.

Flat fees will be the only way Blizzard makes money off of people's transactions. They are high for that reason alone.

This is what excites me the most about Hardcore. It'd be the primary reason I play that mode (not for the challenge, it's hard and scary!)

Raspbuten - as long as you stick around, no-one can accuse me of being a cynic

You're correct in that the rmah was only worth implementing if fees were high enough to make it worth their while. While I personally believe it will be possible to make money with it, they stand to benefit the most. I don't really take issue with it as RMT in Diablo 3 was going to happen whether they officially supported it or not - the money is just going into the pockets of Blizzard instead of a gold farm this time around.

The situation you describe though, at least for me, isn't of any real concern as I don't believe it'll get to that stage until the game gets to it's end life stage and that could be a decade away given Diablo 2's history.

People think the market will go belly up and do so quickly but I disagree as they have integrated the rmah into every facet of the game. Want a specific weapon or armor piece? Farm or buy it. Need gold or materials for artisans? Farm or buy it. Want to play a different class? Level to 60 or buy it. No gold left and little time? Little choice but to buy what you need. I think the PvP system will place even higher demand on the RMAH as well.

I'm sure they have clever ideas of sustaining the growth of the economy as well such as releasing new items (they already have plans to do this) as the economy slows so that there are always new things for people to spend money on. I'm not sure if there is any data on the TF2 items but they seem to follow a schedule and I'm sure they do it when sales begin to drop off on the old stuff. That's exactly how they will "keep the rares rare".

As for bots - I'm not overly concerned about them until a cheap, available to the masses version hits the net like WoWGlider. The private ones run by an individual or small groups won't have a large enough impact (or perhaps I should say an unnoticeable effect) on the economy to sway it one way or the other IMO.

Solid points.

Just because the RMAH is the focus for "fast progress", doesn't necessarily mean its the "best" way. That's a relative term I understand. But basically the player-base will determine if RMAH "progression" is popular. I personally would rather join bot games for an hour or 2 a week that pay real money. But that's my preference...anyone could have different ones. The majority of the fan base will determine how "good" it is.

Don't forget, recalling the mistakes of Diablo 2, many thought that the 1.09/1.10 rune words encouraged rune duping and did nothing to help stabilize an already destroyed economy. Just by releasing new items with rarity doesn't solve the problem. There is a fine line to walk to make sure the AH stays a vital part.

With reward comes cost...in this case.

Thought this was an interesting post by Bash. Gives a little more context to the RMAH: