That I hope, oh so much, is that we won't need a credit card/paypal account to get started. Like...we get a small balance when we buy the game and it's all set up from there and we can earn cash on that balance if we need to.

Else...this shuts out many people without credit cards, living abroad or just not willing to connect their real life finances to a virtual world.

EDIT - thanks Bashi...looks like we will be able to get started with free listings without a credit card or Paypal account.

Now I just hope they never start charging us bank fees for our balance or for cash-outs :)

Someone will, but it won't necessarily have to be you.

The system will allow for a certain number of free listings per week (or something like that) which allows you to post a few things risk free and see if they sell. If they don't it's no sweat for you, and maybe you wait until next week to do the same thing again, or maybe that was good enough, you got your feet wet, and you go back to the gold AH.

If you do sell something you can use that to build up your Battle.net balance which can be put toward buying items yourself. If you're putting up the right items for the right prices you could pretty easily never 'buy in'.

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Q u o t e:


Thanks - but so...right off the bat I will need to attach an account? Permanently?

I suppose I could get a friend to charge the account once off with me giving them money (I live in an Asian country where the US dollar is standard, but foreigners can almost never get credit cards).

But if it needs to be a permanent connection with a financial system I am sorry to say that I will not be able to participate in this game.

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You only need to attach your Battle.net account with a third party if you want to cash out.

When you sell an item you have two choices, the money goes to your Battle.net balance where you can use it to buy more items, or buy stuff in the Blizzard store, or you can choose to send it to your third party payment provider account. Once the funds are in either they can't be transferred between each other. It's a question of keeping funds to keep playing in the auction house, or shifting out funds to get it as cash.

The third party payment provider hasn't been named yet since we're still inking that contract, but it's a reputable one, for sure.

Anyway, you don't have to unless you're planning to cash out.

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Q u o t e:
Just out of curiosity, is there any advantage at all to keeping the money in the BNet account? Would you get more e-balance if you kept it in there or what?

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You can't use funds sent to the third party to buy more items. I'd hazard a guess that people will want to keep some amount in the Battle.net balance toward purchasing future items, and if there's some extra left over cash that out.

I don't know though, I don't think anyone knows how it's going to really shake out once a lot of people start using it.

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Q u o t e:


Well yeah, I get that part, but can't you just get the cash and then put more cash back in whenever you wanted to? I suppose that's inconvenient, but still.

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Yeah, of course.

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Q u o t e:
But how are you guys actually going to deal with the real problem that plagues D2. Are you really just hoping to TAX the cheaters or do you actually think you can stop them this go around. Keep in mind there are already dozens of maphacks and even two public disconnect hacks that have been released for Starcraft 2, and that's a game that isn't going to financially reward players.

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I really couldn't speak to specific measures or intent, but I think we'll certainly have a vested interest in ensuring the auction houses, gold and real money, are stable. That's kind of a non-answer I realize, but I'm just not going to make a statement about specific actions before we even know what we're going to be dealing with.

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Q u o t e:
Hmm thanks Bashiok. This string of posts was helpful; I can see why you're the CM (no sarcasm, it's equally hard to convey sincerity over the intertubes.) Particularly the bit about X amount of free listings per week. After some amount, a listing fee is charged to... I guess... discourage listing spam? Or... halp.

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Yeah we want there to be some hurdle to the real money auction house so that the average quality of items on it (versus the gold auction house) are higher. No one's going to be happy if they go to the real money auction house and see a bunch of junk. We think it just makes more sense to keep the quality level of items a bit higher. A few free listing a week (or whatever it ends up being) could cause some problems in this area, but probably nothing too extreme.