Maintain your gold’s real value by using the D3 AH
As everyone who spends time looking at the general chat in Diablo 3 knows, the price of gold has dropped like a rock. And the spammers in general chat aren’t even the cheapest goldsellers in the market. If you dig around a bit, you can get gold for anything between 1-1.5 USD/EUR per million. And that is not going to change any time soon. Bots are here to stay and Blizzard is fighting a losing battle against them.
What this means for you, is that your gold is losing its value rapidly. You might also have noticed this yourself on the AH: high end gear could be had for a few million a few weeks ago, and now you are routinely seeing high end gear going for 20-30-50-100+ million gold. This is due to the massive amounts of gold being injected in to the economy by the botters and that is not going to stop anytime soon. Instead the economy will continue getting inflated by millions and billions of gold.
However, there are a few things you can do to not get left behind.
Using economic theory and common sense to keep the value of your gold
5 million gold is not going to buy you much in one or two months time due to inflation. And since you don’t accrue interest on your gold, just by having pure, ready gold in your account, you lose out. This also means, that 500k gold goldfarmed an hour is not going to get you anywhere a few months out. Spending 8 hours farming would net you 4 million gold, which buys you nothing, when an upgrade goes for 50 million. Don’t get me wrong, using the goldfarming guide to farm the best spots for pure gold is still a good use of your time. It just won’t continue to be!
Instead of farming gold, we need to start moving over to magic find gear. By farming gear and sell it on the AH, inflation works for you and not against you. If you farm a 1k DPS weapon today and sell it, you might get 1 million for it. With inflation you might be able to sell it for 2-3 million down the line. The same amount of work, but 2-3 times the money made. So start collecting a magic find set.
Collect a good set of MF gear to stay ahead of inflation
Another thing you can do, is to get rid of all your gold by investing it in gear. As I said above, concentrating on gear will let you keep up with inflation. However, some item classes will be better for this than others. You want to focus on high end gear, since we will see much less of this entering the economy, as opposed to medium grade gear. Medium grade gear will continue to drop in price, as we have seen with 700-800 DPS weapons, because it is becoming more and more common.
Focus on high end gear on the D3 AH to preserve your real gold value
Investing in gear on the D3 AH
When you are out looking for gear to keep your gold in, go with what you know. You know more about your own class than any other class. You know what stats work for you and what gear is great. Use this information to find the gear to put your money in.
Once you have decided on an asset class to invest in, the real work begins. Start checking the AH daily for bargains with a low buyout and strike at once. If you can flip it for a quick profit, then do this. This gives you more money buy better gear with and you will make more money from inflation. Use bidding to your advantage, when you are browsing. If an item has a high buyout, don’t just dismiss it. Check the bid on it, and either make a bid for the item right away, so you don’t forget or make a note of the time and come back to the item to snipe it.
If you continually refresh the search results, you can see the auction duration countdown on the minute if it has less than 24 hours remaining on it. Note the time, add the remaining time and you know when the auction ends. This is high maintenance AH’ing, but you can get some great bargains with it.
TLDR – preserve your wealth using the AH
In conclusion this is what you need to do to keep the real value of your gold:
- Start collecting a MF set and slowly sell of your GF gear.
- Invest all your gold in high end items. Use your knowledge of your own class to know what is high end or not.
- Use the AH to its fullest. Look for bargain BOs, low bids and snipe auctions.
So there you have it. A guide to staying ahead of inflation and keeping your gold’s worth. Don’t forget to check the Diablo3farming.com Facebook group.
Now get farming that AH, ya lazy bum!
Inflation is a double edged sword, sure you might get more gold for an item if you sell it in a few months, but at that time things will also cost more, making your saving effort negligible.
I agree on gearing for mf if gold keeps doing that. I also recommend to keep enough gold for repairs or to buy an item you want. Having it stay in your account doing nothing is wasteful.
@Joe_Limon One thing we had to learn here in Poland in early ’80s is that material assets is the one and only way to survive hyperinflation
1-1.5 USD /mil? Where do you find such cheap gold? Usually these days i see them 1.7-2.2/mil
Wrong, gold will always keep a certain value, because it’s needed for gem crafting. While new items always will be injected in the market, thus making it a lot harder to find valuable items.
In other words, while more low level guys will reach inferno difficulty, they will not need average good items anymore. The price of most items has already dropped dramatically, while very good/near perfect items’ price is still high. But in a few months, even those items, due to the abundance in the market and the presence of items even nearer to perfect, will drop in price dramatically.
Buying gems can be useful because you need 729 flawless square gems to build a radiant star version. Which is a lot of time to farm, days or weeks. In the end it’s what the people will need and what they won’t sell either. For now they do because they think the price is good for a gems that they don’t have use for, but the tendency is slowly turning.