Incoming changes to beta version of Diablo 3 auction house

Over the weekend, Blizzard released Diablo 3 Beta Patch 13 introducing a slew of changes to the character skill and rune systems as well as a series of tweaks and bug fixes.

Blizzard isn't done with the changes, however.  In the near future, they will be implementing several changes to the posting limits and fees related tot he beta version of the Diablo 3 auction house.

Community Manager Kaivax took to the forums to give a quick summary of what's in store for Diablo 3's auction house.

• Listing fee is being removed.
• Transaction fee is being increased to 1.25 Beta Bucks.
• Minimum listing price is being raised to 1.50 Beta Bucks.
• You will be limited to 10 active auctions per auction house.

The overall goal behind the changes, which are explained below, is to provide a "much cleaner process for selling items".

With the removal of the listing fee, players will no longer need to worry about whether they’re going to run out of free listings for the week. In addition, introducing a limit on the number of active auctions means players won’t feel as though they should be trying to sell everything they find, potentially flooding the auction house with unwanted items. Under this new system, players will only pay an auction house fee if and when an item actually sells. This has the main advantage of allowing players to try to sell their items risk-free. In addition, because the transaction fee is already baked into the price when an item is listed (as part of the minimum listing price), it’s no longer possible to be in a situation where you don’t have enough Battle.net Balance to list an item, forcing you to have to charge up your Balance just to attempt a sale.

This new active-auction limit will also apply to the gold-based auction house. Because gold can be sold on the currency-based auction house, we need to ensure there are limitations on the gold auction house as well; otherwise, a player might be tempted to sell everything for gold and then sell that gold on the currency-based auction house, which isn’t supportive of the kind of thriving item-driven market we’re trying to foster. In addition, for the first time in the beta test, we're planning to have both the gold- and currency-based auction houses active at the same time when these changes go live.

Blizzard hopes these changes will ultimately "lead to a better experience" when players use the brand new currency-based auction house in Diablo 3.