As of Today the Diablo 3 Auction house is dead. This after the announcement six months ago that Blizzard plans to turn off all trading and completely shut-down both the gold and real money Auction Houses.
Though you’re still able to access both the gold and real-money Auction Houses from the game’s main menu, you can’t bid, buyout or list new ones. What this means, then, is that Blizzard is essentially waiting for all the auctions still listed to time out before presumably removing the interface completely. A note on the interface explains,
“The Auction House is shutting down. You must claim your items from the Completed tab by 6/24. Existing auctions will complete based on the time remaining.”
In essence then, you’ll be able to collect anything you’ve won or failed to sell, or pick up any gold you may have earned between now and June 24 at which stage it’ll be lost and, presumably, the Auction House window will be leaving Diablo III forever. Explaining the decision to remove the Auction House last year, Blizzard admitted it had severely undermined the title’s gameplay.
We are extremely anxious to see how things will pan out with gameplay and especially Loot 2.0
Remember Loot 2.0 is Blizzards way to increase the amount of quality drops and make it more class relevant. The loot drops will be less, but better. This means you will be selling your unwanted items for next to nothing in-game, or at third party sites, which we are sure will pop-up all over the place.
If you want to get a more detailed view on what will change with with coming Reaper of Souls Expansion, then check-out our complete Reaper of Souls preparation guide.
In The End
In the end we are sure lots of people made lots of money out of the Auction house, and lots of people spend crazy amounts of money on gear. The sad things is that most of that gear will be worthless after Reaper of Souls go live. We are very optimistic about the coming expansion, we feel this will have the same effect as the expansion for Diablo 2. This will be the expansion that makes this game great! But intil then, we salute you auction house. R.I.P. Diablo 3 Auction House.
