on harder difficulties, you actually LOSE gold from playing

However, due to bots (programs which farm gold around the clock) and duping (copying of items by exploiting the code), the market has already spun out of control

I feel the auction house is the reason the "end game" dies out so fast, but really it becomes you trying to find good items to sell for enough gold to buy good items for your character

So, go get into a group, where it will cost you 20,000+ gold to repair your equipment if you die 4-5 times

End game now consists of grinding gold to pay for repairs in order to progress through

They released an article showing "how much work they have done" on diablo over the past year, and had so little work to show for it that they had to include the PTR data and multiple versions of each release they did to make it look like there was far more content added than there really was.- game economy is in the trash, gold is worthless once again.- Constant glitches, hacks, and gold spammers

In Diablo 3 you need to earn the right to farm act 3 & 4 (mostly act 3 for easier runs- siegebreaker) to actually make decent gold.

Rain hell on your enemies and use the interactive environment as a weapon: lay cunning traps, turn destructible objects against your foes, and use environmental obstacles to your advantage - all powered by the Havok physics system- again thanks to nerfs the environment no longer drops gold or items when destroying the enviroment and you will be lucky if monsters even drop gold

You now have a miniscule chance of finding treasure and more white (junk) items to sell to vendors while paying exorbitant gold to have your equipment repaired

My conclusion: Blizzard is deceptive and greedy, just as so many other reviewers on this site are saying: Blizzard allows items in the Auction House to be so inflated that it is extremely hard to earn enough gold to buy the good gear

The original game capped hero levels at 60, then Blizzard added 100 Paragon levels (levels beyond the first 60), where you get the normal level-up stat bonuses, PLUS an additional 3% gold and magic find bonus.

If your idea of fun is sitting in the gold Auction Hall hitting refresh until you chance upon a low priced item you can flip for profit until you make enough gold to actually buy good gear, then this is the game for you.

They can barely save enough gold to buy decent stuff

In Diablo 3, in order to progress to Act 2, one must farm enough gold in Act 1 (or below) in order to buy Act 4 equipment to beat Act 2

The games skill system is weak and lacks depth, the gold and real money AH take away the fun of loot hunting, the graphics are okay but are to bright and not dark enough, and the map aren't random enough.

You don't actually have to play well either, just amass enough gold (not very hard) and buy any piece of equipment in the auction house a la WoW. No challenge whatsoever, and therefore no feeling of accomplishment either

The looting system: Because of the official endorsement to the auction house from Blizzard, it is now much easier to just accumulate enough gold and buy something from the auction house than from killing the monsters

at level 60, each time you kill a champion or elite set of baddies, you gain one point of nephalem valor up to a stack of 5 which also increases your gold and magic AND gained experience % (in inferno only - you do gain NV in the lower difficulties, but you do not gain experience points towards paragon leveling). with 5 stacks of NV in inferno, there is an automatic guarantee that at least one RARE item will drop.

Finally when I did use my month of afterworld hour or two to play and saved up enough gold to purchase items from the AH, there was a server lag and I lost 750K gold whom customer service said they could not help and it happens

Because of the gold farmers who work 8 hour shifts (24/7 if botting) have saturated the market with an over abundance of currency

And the boredom did not end there, because after I farmed up enough gold, I would often spend an hour or two or more, sifting through the results of auction house searches using the very limited 3 search criteria that are available (since higher level gear usually has 6 or more characteristics), to try to find some small upgrade to a single piece of gear at a reasonable price

You can either buy items with real money, bot (aka Cheat) for enough gold to buy the million gold items, or pay gold farmers (cheaper than the RMAH btw).With the latest set of patches (at 1.0.3 right now), the design team has implemented yet another punishment for not playing the game the way they want you to

This new patch has increased gold repair costs for your gear by roughly 4x, WHILE drasticly reducing or outright removing the effect magic/gold find has on chests, barrels and all the other in-game "containers" which can spawn loot

In addition to gold find and magic find

Auction House: The Auction house is terrible because of bots, gold farmers, exploits and a bunch of major issues in D3.

You level up to 60 and then you grind until you can either get enough gold to buy what you want, or your item falls--which has never happened for

If you haven't earned enough gold to buy what you need?

Finally when I did use my month of afterworld hour or two to play and saved up enough gold to purchase items from the AH, there was a server lag and I lost 750K gold whom customer service said they could not help and it happens

You can't really make enough gold now to do what he does

I only play now (when not crippled by lag) so that I can amass enough gold to cash out for a few dollars for gas when the semester starts back up

Stuff is worth gold and gold is worth stuff

It has enough content for 2 days, then you're just grinding gold and xp.

There are no end game incentives to make players want to repeatedly go through inferno other than to become a gold farmer (which one accomplishes much more easily by botting--another unstoppable problem in the game)

, yellow=rare, gold=legendary, green=set piece

All the gold that he uses to play the market now, he made by playing the market back in the early days--when only the Gold AH was available and the market was unstable

Good luck thinking you can sell your items because unless your finding million gold worthy items daily you will not make anything and advance your character

Have you ever played a game with a somewhat stable gold system that didn't have a gold sink built-in

Speaking of Inferno, the supposed "hard" difficulty is made insanely easy by spending not much gold on the Auction House to vastly improve your gear, and then fly right on through every enemy and boss without so much as using a potion

So you needed gear to progress, but you didn't have enough gold for the gear if you weren't good enough to farm inferno mode

So a game that should be about killing monsters and gearing up thru that method has become about playing the Auction House to amass enough gold to progress past Bosses or elite packs that are too hard

In fact, I was only able to sell one of those two legendary items, and I only got enough gold to make a few higher level gems

And since I can't expect to ever find on my own any decent gear for my max level character, game play becomes just a gold grind to get enough to buy better gear on the gold auction house (GAH), or worse, an exercise in spending even more real money to buy gear on the Real Money Auction House (RMAH).As a specific example: the significantly increased repair costs of the 1.03 patch.

Many who had spent their precious gold, real and virtual, were now banished to the Halls of Buyer's Remorse.

I then went to Act 4 hell difficulty and farmed enough gold to buy good enough gear to farm Act 1 inferno

I don't mind that but barely 3 hrs of playing, I haven't collected enough gold to pay for the high cost of repairs

Inflation-How am I supposed to farm if the gold is worth less and less

It's almost like they designed the game to waste your gold, make

Once I found that one small gear upgrade for just one equipment slot, and if I had enough gold still to pair for a huge repair bill, I could take another stab at trying to progress back in Act 1 of Inferno difficulty, and that would last all of 15 or 20 minutes because then I was out of gold again.

This is not directly Blizzard fault, but say after running the game in inferno a few times, you got like 10 million gold

I then farmed enough gold in Act 1 inferno difficulty to buy good enough gear to farm Act 2 inferno

Or maybe you'll be lucky enough to find something decent enough to sell on the AH yourself and make enough gold to buy two items

The sad thing is, b/c of the Auction house and the poor management of economy, gold is worth less and less every single day

Seriously, I died all of 3 times, and I didn't even lose my gold or my stuff

Now the huge repair cost is just making the game a stupid gold grind.

You grind for 100s of hours and barely make enough gold to pay for your repairs much less buy upgrades in gear to advance in inferno

And it's just not possible to afford this gear without either having no life & farming gold all day, or spending real money to buy gold to afford the gear

If you can't farm enough gold to get an item you can always spend your real money to buy it.

Will Gold be useless

In diablo 1-2 gold was nearly useless

I cannot phantom why blizzard needs to take a 15% profit from my gold (fake money) auctions but whatever.

With each new patch the game improves dramatically.1.03 added Nephalem Valor, a stacking buff (to 5) that improves gold and magic find, and guarantees a drop from every Elite pack at 5 stacks.1.04 added Paragon levels, so now you can get your grind to the top like you had in D2

Gold is becoming so cheap to buy now

NO gear, no legendary, no gold.

Right now the prices are ridiculous, as one reviewer mentioned, you can grind gold for hours and hours to get that piece of gear you need to advance, or you can just throw 5-10 bucks to solve the problem, and Blizzard takes their cut.

I, like many Diablo III fans I would guess, grew up reading all the great, old D & D books published by TSR (yes, back before it was Wizards of the Coast)