Soft Core Auction House ... Huge selection, crazy prices!

[gogoblender 3,072]

Me and Schot just yesterday were looking for equipment to buy for an old level 20 Demon Hunter I have. Wanted to try out some of the new Combat Arts I had picked up on Belial before I took in my HC one, and mozied on down to the AH...

 

 

Beautiful equipment, TWO SLOTS PER for armor, first page, with crazy stats... for a few hundred or thousand per?

 

When you compare this to the HC Aunction House, we're going broke having to grind for gold, gems and equipment... Is this what happens when you have umpteen billions playing?

 

I'm almost kinda jealous of these prices running at fraction of HC prices...and the list of pages of availble equipment versus what is available in HC is astonishing. lol, in fact the first time visiting the Soft Core Auction House, I thought it was broken... I usually always look for buy outs first, no patience here , and when I first landed on the SC page, I kept turning page after page, after page to finally get to the first page that had Buy out... more than 30 pages in...

 

 

 

 

gogo

[Shadout 8]

There surely is a lot more items available in SC, but then the amount of buyers should be equally higher. I dont think the amount of players has that much of an influence on its own.

 

"Mediocre" items are cheaper in SC, simply because the availability of high end items are so much larger, pushing everything else down in price. Why spend 100k on a level 30 item, when you can save those 100k and buy something nice at level 60 for example. That means people will have to sell much cheaper.

 

In HC even the mediocre items are taken out of the economy when people die, and people aren't even able to find the really high end items in inferno in HC yet.

 

On the other hand the really high end items, which does not exist on the HC AH yet, can be insanely expensive on SC AH.

 

Another, maybe more long term, influence I could see, is that since you arent losing gold in HC when dying, gold will build up forever (HC wont even have the same repair cost gold sink as SC got), while demand for items will remain higher in HC because of deaths. Raising item prices to ridiculous heights over months and years.

 

Of course SC AH will be drastically changed the moment RMAH is released, making any comparisons after that meaningless.

Edited June 4, 2012 by Shadout

[masteff 64]

At first I was going to say it's the larger number of sellers. But it's a bit more complicated than that. Whether you have 100 or 100,000 players, you still have an equal number of potential buyers and sellers. The underlying reason is the very natures of SC and HC.

 

In SC, death has a low absolute "cost". Thus, your statistically average player is only willing to spend a certain amount to avoid death. This means that demand is lower in SC than in HC. And not dying means every single player survives to exit the game and enter the AH with their gear intact, increasing supply. Lower demand with higher supply results in lower average pricing.

 

In HC, death has a very high "cost". This has 3 results. 1) Players hoard good gear for themselves (this reduces supply). 2) Players die with good gear on them before they can get to the AH (this reduces supply). And 3) Player covet good gear and will pay more (think of it as insurance against an absolute loss) (this increases demand). Reduced supply with increased demand means higher prices.

 

So, your strategy for making money in HC should be to farm drops, making sure to off-load good drops immediately. Is the stash persistent between toons in HC? If so then off-load to your stash. Otherwise, exit and off-load directly to the AH.