Gold selling live on the US Auction House

Finally Blizzard has switched on gold selling on the RMAH. After 2 months of third party pages dominating the gold marked, it is time for the real players to get a share of the pie.

Prices for 1 million gold har varied wildly for the last couple of weeks, going from 10€ per 1 million to 1-3€ pr 1 million. It will be interesting to see how much gold sells for when it goes live on the D3 Real Money Auction House in Europe and how much it will sell for in a week or two.

In any case, time for some good old fashioned gold farming!

Edit:

Gold can now also be sold on the European RMAH. I have of course thrown some lots up there. 
As predicted the auction house seems pretty flooded with gold at the moment, but hopefully I get something sold. We will see.

Act 1 Inferno gear farming guide

Inferno Act 1 farming is great, both to upgrade your gear for Act 2, but also in order to get some high end items to sell for gold or if you are lucky real money. The monsters are relatively easy so you wont die as much as you might if you try to farm Act 2 and with the changes in patch 1.03 you now have a chance to get some item level 63 gear. 

To help you maximize the time vs gain from farming Act 1 Inferno I will share the best places to grind gear and gold.

It is important when sitting down for a farming run, that you understand the basics of getting optimal loot drops. In D2, boss runs were the bees knees, but in Diablo 3 it is all about the champion/rare packs. As such the main focus for grinding gear should be to get as many champion monsters killed in as short a time as possible.

The other thing to keep in mind is the Nephalim Buff.
Not only does it up your magic find percentage, it also ensures yellow drops when it is stacked to 5. This means that before you can do any real meaningful farming you should look at getting the Nephalim Buff to 5.

If you have all the time in the world you can of course just clear Act 1 from one end to another, however if you like me often don't have more than 1 hour to spare, that is not very efficient.

Fear not though. The farming run I am about to share can be cleared in between 45-60 minutes and will yield you at least 6 guarenteed yellows in the worst case scenario and usually much more.

To start off the run we want to build Nephalim Buff stacks ASAP. To do this go to your Cemetary of the Forsaken waypoint. This is a great place to build stacks for several reasons. First of all there is usually an elite skeleton spawning in the graveyard itself. Skeletons are generally easy to kill so 5 out of 6 times you will get your first Nephalim stack very easily.

After you killed the elite, you have the 3 crypts to explore. Each of these has at least 1 champion or elite pack and very often you will find 2 in one or more of the crypts. It is a fast clear, generally I can finish all three within 20-25 minutes.

Once you are done in the Cemetary of the Forsaken you should have 5 stacks of the Nephalim buff. If you were really unlucky, you may just be at 4, but fear not you will get the last stack quickly.

Go back to town, empty your bags and take the waypoint to Festering Woods.This is one of the quickest places to grind in Diablo 3. Circle the waypoint a bit and you will find the entrace to a very small dungeon. In here you will find a couple of packs of monsters, one of them will be a champion or elite pack. Kill it go back up and circle the other way around the waypoint to find the other small dungeon in the area. Rinse and repeat.

After this explore the rest of the Festering Woods. You will usually find 1-4 more packs of champion and elite monsters to kill and loot.

If you have more time after this, then take the waypoint to Leorics Manor. Go back through the building where you will often find 1 champion/elite pack. Leave the manor and in the courtyard there will be another pack to kill for (hopefully) some awesome drops.

In my last 40 min playthroug of this farm route I got around 50k gold and a couple of items to sell on the Auction House. 1 of which sold for a couple of euros in the RMAH. You can get items of level 51-63 from killing the monsters you encounter from following this guide, so if your luck is good, you could walk away with some very powerful upgrades and items.

Please feel free to share any route you use to farm Inferno Act 1.  

Commodities on the real money auction house

When will it be possible to sell commodities and gold on the Realm Money Auction House in Diablo 3? I don't know about you guys, but this is something I have been asking myself for well over a month. Now the wait is over or so I thought. A blue post was made some hours ago stating that it will soon be possible to sell and buy Gems, Pages, Plans, Designs, Crafting Materials and Dyes on the Realm Money Auction House. 

What about gold though? When will we finally be able to sell and buy gold on the D3 RMAH? Well the blue post grants us a vague answer saying, it will hopefully be enabled in the near future. Unfortunately this probably means it is at least a month away which in turn means that the gold will have devalued even further. At this point it might be time to stop stocking up gold and start spending it on gear that will and can be sold on the Real Money Auction House. Hopefully Blizzard will work fast though so we can start trading gold through ingame means soon.

As for buying and selling commodities on the Real Money Auction House, I have a hard time seeing anything  but the rarest of plans/designs and possibly the highest tier gems getting sold for anything but ingame gold.

Items that sell on the Real Money Auction House

The Real Money Auction House was finally released in Europe this morning and people are already reporting sales rolling in. Check this thread for instance where some players has already earned almost 300€.

Question is, what does sell on the real money auction house?

Since Blizzard has still not enabled commodity trading, gold can not be sold. The items that does seem to sell are legendary, greens and really nicely rolled yellows.










Someone put this item up for 250€. Is it a nice item? Yes. Will it sell for max buyout.. who knows, but I would think it is unlikely.













There is also stuff like these yellow boots, put up with a min bid of 2.22€ and no BO. I am quite sure they will not sell either.





But great items do sell. There are some really high DPS weapons up on the Real Money Auction House that will probably reach quite a high buyout price.




The guy who put this extremely high dps 1 handed weapon up for auction might actually get his 250€ asking price. So in essence. If you wish to make money on the RMAH, make sure you price your stuff realistically and make sure it is worth something in the first place. Good luck. I am off to farm some more!

D3 Real Money Auction House postponed again in Europe

I got up early this morning as I wanted to be able to get a headstart on stocking the real money auction house, time is money as they say.

To no real surprise of mine though, it wasn't available. Blizzard has postponed it yet again, this time until the 15th of June. That means, that the RMAH is now a month delayed from the release of Diablo 3.

Grrrr!

The Real Money Auction House is live in the US now though, which means the worst bugs and issues might be caught before the EU starts using it. Also it gives me the opportunity to try and figure out what will sell on the RMAH besides gold.

It is currently a bit unclear whether gold can be traded for real money immediately, since commodities are not yet live in the Realm Money Auction House.

I sure hope it is not only items that can be sold.

Great places to farm gold in Diablo 3

The Real Money Auction House has been postponed until the 13th of June now and that of course is a bit annoying. It does leave more time to farm for gold though.

I have tested a lot and here are the best places to farm for gold in Diablo 3.

Fields of Slaugther

Fields of Slaugther is in my opinion by far the best place to farm. With Diablo 3 moving away from boss runs for loot, farming has become a question of how to kill the most monsters in the least amount of time. Any monster can potentially drop a legendary and while champion mobs and special monsters are good, normal monsters should not be discarded as they are fast and easy to kill.

Fields of Slaugther is great because it has both a high density of normal monsters to kill and a good chance of multiple  rare and champion packs to spawn.

It is also the best farming place in D3 because there is a very good chance of finding the Cavern of Frost which has champion and named monsters and a Resplendent Chest in the bottom. I also often find a Treasure Gnome in the Cavern of Frost giving me even more drops and gold.

The Fields of Slaughter are even a fantastic farming place in Inferno. You know those Demonic Mines that has a tendency to kill you when you are mindlessly grinding away? Yeah well, they can be used for killing off mobs too. Just kite the monster across the mines and watch them take almost a million points of damage when the Demonic Mine explode.
Finally it is awesome for solo farming, because not only do you get your follower, Tyrael will join you in the battle as well.

To get to the Fields of Slaugther, simply pick Act 3 and the quest the Siegebreaker. Now you should have the waypoint The Bridge of Korsikk. Be ready to fight immediately when porting in as there are often a rare or champion pack around the waypoint.

Now just clear the area, find the the cave and then reset and go again.

Whimsyshire

Whimsyshire is a great place to farm for items, although not as much for gold. The drop rate of blues and Yellows in Whimsyshire is incredibly high, even with little Magic Find. The drawback of course is the cost to get access to Rainbowland. 150k for the normal staff of herding, 200k gold on top of that for access on Nightmare. Hell will cost you 500k gold and the Inferno Whimsyshire staff is a staggering 1 million gold, meaning you will have spent 1 million 850k gold for your farm place. Of course if you are lucky and get a legendary drop amongst all the blues and yellows, that will easily cover your entrance fee. Time to gamble on the drop rate perhaps?

Garden of Hope level 2 and the Silver Spire

These levels of Heaven are okay in terms of gold drops, but not as good as the Fields of Slaugther. They are however better if you want to get some high level drops.
Gardens of Hope and the Silver Spire is good because there are a lot of monsters spawning. The drawback is that the monsters here are quite hard and as such you chance getting killed over slightly better loot. In terms of time vs payout for farming I don't feel the increase in gold and items over act 3 is worth it.
Personally I would recommend Fields of Slaugther for Gold and the Whimsyshire for items, but if you do not have access to the latter or you want to farm for both at the same time, then the Silver Spire and Garden of Hope are going to fit the bill.



The most important thing in terms of picking a farming spot in Diablo is to look for high density "easy" to kill monsters with high drop rates. The less you have to move and the more rares/champions  or chests you have access to in the area the better.

Happy Farming!

Diablo 3 Aucion House price development

Over the last couple of days I have been keeping a close eye on the D3 gold Auction House. As expected prices has dropped drastically on most commodities. Here is a chart over a couple of the most  basic items.

 

The blue line represents Blacksmith Pages, the Red one Jewelcrafting. The yellow is Subtle Essence and the green one is Fallen Tooth.

It might be a bit hard to see, but it seems like Subtle Essences has stabilized around 14g pr item and Fallen Teeth at around 25g. This being said thoug, as mentioned in a previous post, it is not really worth it to salvage items for this as you can get more from selling the item directly to a vendor.

So what sells you ask?

Well at this point mostly yellow items and above. I have had really good luck with selling resist item as people are starting to realize that they will need those for hell and beyond. Anything that fits the perfect mold for a class item sells as well. That means things with Int, Vit and attack speed for Wizards for instance.

I must admit that I am a bit disappointed with the pages, gems and dyes. I was expecting them to be the money makers, but it seems they are just too common to be worth anything now that the initial surge of buyers has disappeared. I managed to make quite a profit on them while it lasted, so I wont complain too much, but still!

Unfortunately I am going on vacation for a week now, so I wont be able to keep tracking the price development, but I will be back with a vengeance on the 29th of May. Until then happy money farming! 

What sells on the Diablo 3 Auction House?

Diablo has been out for 2 and a half day and I felt it was time to share my speculations based on current experience of what sells on the Diablo 3 Auction House.
This post is mainly dedicated to things that sells on the gold Auction House, since the Real Money Auction House has yet to go live.

My observations so far is as follows. Crafting materials will sell, but the price fluctuates wildly as people go through the content I foresee the normal mode crafting materials becoming really cheap or not selling at all. At this point in time you can still sell them, however here is a small tip. The subtle essence sells for between 20 and 25 gold per item at present and the Fallen Horns are about 40g (This is likely to fall drastically). Most blue items of act 3-4 sells for 100+ gold and you usually only get 1 essence or horn from an item. This means that unless the item value to sell to a merchant is less than 30 I would not recommend salvaging from a pure money perspective. The same goes for Shimmering essence and Lizard Eye with prices on the auction house 30g and 150g. Most items simply sell better to the merchants.

What can you earn money on then you ask? Well so far I have been selling the Jewelcrafting and Blacksmithing pages. The first goes for between 300 and 500 gold at the moment and the blacksmithing ones goes for 1400-1500 gold. These prices are likely to drop significantly, so now is the time to sell off pages. You can always pick some up cheap later on. Gems is another thing that sells, albeit it is dependant on the quality. Unless you sell really cheap I don't think you can get rid of chipped ones and regardless, it is more profitable to upgrade them and sell them on. I have yet to delve too much into the gem marked, but a flawless ruby sells for between 2000 and 3000 gold at present. I am holding on to mine though, hoping to upgrade them and auction them for a higher profit.

Last item I have been selling is dyes. I found a random NPC vendor that sold them and picked up a few. Sadly I didn't stock up on them as they sold like hot buns. At this point however, everyone has picked up on the dyes and they no longer sell for a real profit, if at all.

I just entered Act 2 on Nightmare and I am sitting on about 320k gold.
Not as much as I would like, but I will keep pushing the gold limit as I foresee the Real Money Auction House mainly be good for gold transactions.

How much gold can you make in D3 in 24 hours?

It has been a little over 24 hours since Diablo first went live and it is time for a status update. Unfortunately I was kicked from the server before I could take screenshots, so they will have to follow tomorrow. So far my Wizard is level 27. I am halfway through act 3 and I have earned approximately 100k gold. I have not spent much money on anything besides repairs. I leveled my Blacksmith to level 2 so I could get some proper gear at the lower levels, but now I haven't touched him since. The 100k gold is going up on the Real Money Auction House as soon as it is unlocked. Hopefully I can get it sold.

Diablo 3 - Act 2 Run Through

This post will be work in progress as I battle my way through act 2 of D3. I can say one thing, it is definitely getting harder so the promise that we will die is very real.

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Diablo 3 Live - Act 1 Run-Through - Spoilers

I finally managed to get online after almost 2 hours of attempting and when I finally managed to get in I figured I had to get something out of the opportunity even if it was already quite late. So here I am at 4:30 am in the morning ready to share videos of the entire first act in Diablo 3.
The videos are unedited and the sound is a bit weird, but if you are interested in seing a Wizard battling through the start of the game then this is for you.

I wont give any spoilers in this text, but if you watch the videos there obviously are tons. What I will say though is that the last boss was quite the surprise and extremely epic! :D (last video might not be done with importing yet. I just threw the link as soon as I could and it seems it is not loading. Hopefully it will be up soon.)

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Diablo Error 37

So here we are, almost 1 hour after the European Launch of the long awaited Diablo 3 and first impressions are abundant.....well in truth, most of us haven't actually managed to log into the game yet. The dreaded Error 37 is hitting people in the face when they try to log in, Blizzards official Diablo forum is flooded with angry rage threads demanding to know why Blizzard has not learned from previous releases.

I think they have though. The thing to remember when you think about launches and companies like Blizzard is that they have to make a choice at some point, deciding how many resources they can spend on login servers. Now on release day there might be a gazzilion players logging in at the exact same time, warrenting a very huge login server capacity, but will that really be necessary a day from now? A week from now? A month from now?

I think Blizzard made a calculated risk and assumed that people while annoyed with not being able to login, will still enjoy the game enough to forgive an hour or 2 of queue time.

That is of course my opinion and I don't know much about server structures etc., but to me it makes business and logistical sense.

Now I'd better be able to log in!

Diablo 3 launch night preparation

Tonight is the night when it all happens. In about 6 hours I will be logging in to play Diablo 3!
Here are a couple of tips to help prepare.

Pre-Install

The early install has started and if you sorted out the downloader, you will be able to install right now. That way you will be able to hit the game a 23.00 GMT sharp.
Also as a side note. If you get a message saying Unable to initialise streaming or createstreamingmanifest::getstreamingmanifestcontents then there is a couple of things you can try before you panic.
Make sure you run the installer as admin and if that doesn't work try again, try again, try again. I had to start my installer 7 times before it actually worked and with more and more people hitting the servers I expect that others will run in to similar issues.

Prep Snacks and Food for D3 gaming night

You don't really want to have to break off gaming early to go shop for food and snacks do you? I thought not. You have 6 hours to stock up on vital things like drinks, sweets and proper food. Do it now!
Here is my stash of snacks for Diablo 3. I don't actually like the standard gamer nutrients like soda and crisps which is why this might look slightly stange to you.

There is always room for Kinder Eggs and hot chocolate though ;)

Free up space on your D3 drive

If at all possible, make sure to free up space on your Diablo drive. The downloader is 7.something GB and the game itself is 15gb+

On a final note. I will be streaming my gaming experience live as soon as I am able to log in, so if you are at work and can't play or in another unfortunate situation that makes it impossible to log in, you can still get a dose of D3. The link to my LiveStream is here.

Time to slay some Demons!

D3 Real Money Auction House fees

Big news has been revealed about the RMAH(Real Money Auction House) in Diablo 3. Blizzard has come out and told us exactly how big fees will be associated with putting up auctions and it is actually not looking too bad in my opinion.

For items such as weapon and armor you will pay a flat fee of $1 if it sells.
For Gems, Gold and Materials it will be a 15% of the sales price.
There will also be a 15% fee to cash out to PayPal, something you can avoid paying if you just let the money go directly into your Battle.net Balance.
Finally the maximum sales price of an item will be $250

While the flat fee on weapons means that only really nice items will be viable for the RMAH, money, gems and materials will still be great for earning cash.

All in all I think Blizzard has made a good decission on the fee-level.

Another announcement was made as well that is putting a stick in my wheel though.

Remember how I was going to see how much I can earn on the first week as I have a very inconvenient holiday booked from the 21st of May?  Well, Blizzard has announced that there will be no RMAH for the first week after launch.

Quite annoying, however I will get around it by stockpiling resources and level as high as I can. Hopefully I will have Internet in my hotel so I can put things up for sale still.

If you are curious about Auction house fee calculations, then check out the nice little calculater Diablo Fans has put together.

Why it will be possible to earn money playing Diablo 3

I was out with a couple of friends yesterday and the topic wandered into D3 and the Real Money Auction house.

I started laying out my plan of generating an income through playing the game when one of my friends interrupted me and shut down the entire idea with the words “Noone will make any money of the Real Money Auction house.

A bit stunned I asked him to explain himself and he stated, “no gamer is going to want to spend money on something they can get through playing the game themselves”.

Now this is not the first time I have heard this argument when talking about making a living off Diablo 3, but it was the first time I heard anyone being so dismissive of the idea.

And so incredibly wrong as well people have been making money of MMORPG's since they were first introduced to the gaming community and that is why you will be able to make money off the Real Money Auction house. Don't believe me? Check out these examples

Ultima Online was the first really successful MMORPG with 250.000 subscribers in 2003. And with all those subscribers came a bustling digital items market.

Julian Dibbell is a freelance journalist with balls of steel. In 2003 he decided to quit his job and go into the world of Virtual trading to earn enough money to pay his bills every month just from what he could earn buying and selling online goods in Ultima Online. His book Play Money follows his attempt to make it big in the virtual economy. Not only is it a really fascinating book to read, however it shows that already back in 2003 with the MMORPG genre in its infantile state, it was possible to make money from playing computer games.

That is a 9 year old example you say, well sure, but it is a good one. The next example comes from D3s little brother Diablo 2. The game is 10 years old and still now in 2012 there are multiple pages dedicated to selling in-game items for real cash. Just as an example on one of them you can buy a 10 Max dam, 49-69 attack rating, 45 life great charm for $3.48. Yes that is more than a cup of coffee would generally cost at Starbucks and this is a game that has been out for 10 years, you would think people had, had enough time to grind for the item themselves if they really wanted to?

Unfortunately it is quite hard to find any numbers on how many items are sold in DII on a monthly basis, since the practice is not permitted by Blizzard Entertainment, however I bet you that unless it was quite lucrative still, there wouldn't be as many pages out there offering the service. You can also have a look at this poll to get a bit of an idea on numbers of people purchasing virtual items for real money. While the sample is not the biggest and while they might be a bit skewed as this is people who are on a Diablo related forum and as such probably more hardcore gamers than the average player, it is still interesting numbers. If we are to believe this poll then about 20% of players has ever bought items in Diablo using real cash. Surprised?

For another proof that it will definitely be possible to make money off the Real Money Auction house, you just have to look at World of Warcraft. On a daily basis players are getting hacked or running in to bots when playing. Why? So the goldfarmers can feed the never ending demand for gold sold for real money.

Last example for the day is League of Legends, World of Tanks or any of the many other free to play and micro transaction based games.

These type of games are hugely succesful and even if the items you can purchase are not offering any benefits, players are still buying. In League of Legends for instance you can buy skins for your character and the only purpose of these are the bragging rights it offers to have enough dough to throw at a computer game.

In Diablo 3 most of the items you will be able to buy and sell will have a tangible influence on the gameplay (better damage, more magic find, more money) and that is why you will be able to make money selling through the Real Money Auction house. When it all boils down to it, people are lazy, even in games created for leisure, people do not want to spend more effort than they need to.

There will be plenty of people buying gold, items, dyes and recipes. Especially if the PvP part of Diablo becomes succesful, but even if it is only moderately good, people will buy, shop, purchase and all the other lovely words merchants like us love to hear. And best of all, this time around it will be legal for players to go through with these sales and a supported system created by Blizzard themselves to sort out the sales. This means people who were previously too scared to get scammed will also start buying items for real money.

So there you have it, yes it will be possible to make money playing Diablo 3, will it be possible to get rich doing that? Now that is a whole other question, but I will be damned if I don't give it a go at least!

Diablo 3 Auction House video walkthrough

Today I thought I would share my current knowledge on the D3 Auction house. Having played around with it a bit in order to familiarize myself with the money making tool, I felt I could go over the main features in a video and show others what they can expect.

Consider this a kind of D3 auction house tutorial.

Watch live streaming video from mistelsworld at livestream.com

This is my first livestream where I am actually talking, so please forgive the uhms and ohs. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to submit a comment. Best of luck to all the Diablo 3 merchants out there.

Diablo 3 Monk run part 2 - does life steal make you invincible

I finished the second part of my Monk run through and the entire thing took me about 1 hour and 7 minutes. I ended up at level 9 when facing the skeleton king.

Life steal did not make me invincible, however the fight was notably easier on the Monk than it was on the Wizard and that is despite the fact that I didn't even use the upgrade runes on any of the skills I had.

Does this mean I will swap to the monk instead for my D3 money making  scheme?

No! I still think the Wizard is the better choice, especially when you get into inferno mode and I am sticking to my guts on this one. Feel free to laugh at me in a month or so if I made the wrong choice.

Check out the second part of the monk run here:

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When Diablo goes live I will be aiming at a run through of under 1 hour for act 1 and then I will take it a bit more slow in the following acts. The aim is to finish Normal mode in the first play session, but that might be a bit optimistic.

How effective is Life Steal in D3?

After my double fatal encounter with the Skeleton King yesterday I wanted to do a fun run with a Monk. But not just any type of run I wanted to make a near invincible killing machine. How to you do that you might be thinking, well in my world you do it by making sure that any life lost is quickly recovered.

So I went over the gear my Wizard had collected, I spend her money leveling the Blacksmith and scouring the Auction house and I came up with these items:

I was super lucky to find the Resplendent Plate on the gold auction house and won them for 500 gold on a bid.

The idea of the set is to regen life constantly and to gain life when chopping monsters up.

First part of my run through with the Life Steal monk can be watched here:

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I must admit that I had a ton of fun, especially when I ran into a treasure gnome that lured me into a knockback Scavenger and a nightmare Grotesque along with all their minions and whichever other normal trash mobs I came across as I was hunting the gnome across the map.

I never got the treasure Gnome, but I did get to kill a huge group of monsters. Check out the carnage at 00:20:40

It is a bit hard to decide whether life steal is awesome based on the early parts of act 1 normal mode, but I will say this. I foresee it being very strong once you start to get some real damage going.

I aim to have the second part of the run through up by tomorrow evening.

Diablo III Beta - Act 1 Speed Run - part 2

I managed to get online first attempt today... wohooo! :)

I also almost made the run through in under 1 hour. I did run into one issue with this though. Because I am running through so fast I was only level 8 when I reached the skeleton king and while it is doable to kill him at that level, it made things a lot trickier than on previous runs I have done. I am embarressed to say that I died twice while attempting to finish. Mainly because I was rushing and the first attempt I simply underestimated how squishy the Wizard is.

It did show me one thing though and that is the benefit of leaving health globes for when you really need them. The 3rd attempt was a fairly smooth kill.

You can watch the second part of the run through of act 1 here. No calling me noob please, my boyfriend already mocked me for dying twice in beta! ;)

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Another thing this highlighted to me was that the Wizard does need to kite a lot and is very dependant on crow control in order not to die too much on the bosses, especially when powering through content and maybe being a little bit too low level.

I can't wait to try act 2!

Diablo III Beta - Act 1 Speed Run

With the current stability, or should I say lack of stability of the D3 beta servers I have given up on doing act 1 in one stretch and instead divided it into parts, lenght will be decided by how long the servers will allow me to stay online.

In the first part I managed a 30 mins run, which got me all the way to retrieving the crown and getting the Blacksmith on my side.

If you are interested check out the video of the first part of my Diablo 3, act 1 speed run here.

Watch live streaming video from mistelsworld at livestream.com

Please excuse the slight lag that you see, my computer was not 100% happy with running the live stream and the game at the same time. In fairness sake I did have three firefox windows with 30+ tabs open so it should be looking better next time when I actually close down everything I don't need.

I do believe that I can manage to do the other part of act 1, complete with killing the Skeleton King within 30 more minutes meaning I have effectively cut off 22 minutes of my best time.

In this run I did not explore anything except if it was right in front of me and I mostly left greys/whites on the floor. I still had 6.4k gold by the end of the 30 minutes which is not too shabby.

I will attempt second part tomorrow, if I am allowed in, but hopefully with Blizzards Diablo Weekend being over the servers will be much more stable. 

D3 beta blues.

Again today it has been impossible to log in to the Diablo 3 servers. I am not panicing though as once the Diablo 3 beta weekend is over things should stabilize so I can do my final fine tuning.
While I wait for that I have put together a list of what I want to check and here it is:

• How fast can I run through the first act in the beta?
• Which level will I be if I power through to the end ?
• How much gold can I earn from the first act?
• How much gold can I earn if I disregard the Blacksmith?

For the first day after release I only plan on selling gold, which means I will probably not level my Blacksmith. On the other hand, leveling the Blacksmith might allow me to get better gear that will make progression faster, which in turn may earn me more money, so it might be a good investment. I have yet to decide which way I want to go with that.

I think, that when Diablo 3 is live, I will play the first chapter through with no Blacksmith and see how difficult I find the enemies in chapter 2.

Edit: In case anyone is getting frustrated with the D3 beta errors, then here is a list of what they mean so you can at least understand why you are banging your head against the wall.

Error 12 - Still under investigation, but can be circumvented by changing your password.
Error 37 -  Server full, keep trying.
Error 3003 - Change Region to Americas.
Error 3004, 3006, 3007, or 300008 - Timeout or creation errors. Server-side issues. Keep trying
Error 315300 - Wrong account or PW details. Make sure there are no additional spaces n your login details.
Error 24000 - Known issue

Read more on the blue post here

D3 Beta servers down

I was going to make a video of one of my Diablo 3 Wizard runs, but due to the free beta access for anyone with a Battle.net account, the beta servers has been down for most of the day. They just game back up, but I am unsure, if I will have the time to sort out a video today. If not, hang tight for tomorrow and in the meanwhile, go have fun with the beta yourself! :)


Update: I just gave it a go and the game crashed after 25 minutes. Now Blizzards servers are down again now, so I will be passing on this and giving it a go tomorrow instead. 

Play Diablo Beta - free access if you have a battle.net account

I am taking a small break in perfecting my run-through time of act 1 in Diablo 3 to make a small note to anyone reading this blog.

Blizzard has opened the D3 beta servers for anyone who has a valid Battle.net account so if you are not in the beta yet, then now is your chance. You can read more about it here

Also on the note of run-through time I am down to 1h22min. At the moment I am trying to find out exactly which skills that are the most effective.

Class choice for making money on Diablo 3

After 2 days of much D3 beta playing I have decided my character class for the experiment of making money on the Real Money Auction house when Diablo 3 goes live.

My choice has fallen on the wizard.
The reasoning behind choosing the wizard is crowdcontrol. In the first act, the wizard is arguably the worst class to play as she can not compete with the damage output and speed of the other D3 classes, however I am not here to just play the first act and I fully believe that with the wizards abilities, she will be the strongest class further into the game.

As such I have made the decission to gamble based on my instincts. We will see whether it pays off or not.

In other news, Blizzard just announed that they will be closing the Diablo 3 Beta down on the 1st of May. This gives me 12 days to perfect my act 1 run through speed.
For now I have prepared a D3 wizard itemization guide for the first 1-13 levels that you can check out by clicking the link.

Picture attribution: Screenshot from Diablo 3 by Blizzard Entertainment.

Making a living from the Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House

I don't think there is a single gamer out there, who hasn't dreamed about making money from playing computer games. I am no different. Ever since I realized that I would have to work to put food on the table I have yearned for a way to turn the countless hours of nerding into a sustainable income.

I do however have what I would classify as a relatively high set of morals, which means I have never been able to get myself to participate in botting or shady gold selling. 

With Diablo 3 however, Blizzard is legalizing the act of selling and buying ingame items for real money and they are even putting a handy mechanic in place in order to facilitate the contact between buyer and seller. The D3 Real Money Auction House.

Last week I lost my job, but instead of being down about it, I have decided to turn this unfortunate event into something positive and see if I can not chase the gamers dream of earning money from playing Diablo 3.

D3 releases on May 15th and here is my current todo-list:

• Decide on the Diablo 3 character class.
• Test out the auction house and get a good idea of how it works, what sells and for how much in comparison to other items.
•  Play through the first act and perfect the runthrough time in order to get a good headstart.

I have access to the Diablo 3 beta and I am currently testing out all the characters
in order to find the one best suited for longterm farming of gold and items. Deadline for choice of character 2012-04-17

I will keep you up to date as project "get rich" from D3 progresses.

Now I am going back to testing!

Picture courtesy of Amazon