Put in 300M on an item with a current bid of 500K with 24 hours remaining and let it do its thing... No need for cold sweat and panic attacks. If someone pays over 300M, then hot damn.
Bad idea. This would be fine if everyone knew exactly how the system work and play the same game you are playing. However as you can see even in this very thread, a lot of people have no clue how this works, and bidding during the last 5 seconds screws them over.
For example, let's assume your competition is the guy who doesn't understand why his bid is always too low - If you bid early, he'll keep bidding and bidding and increase your bid. If you bid the last 5 seconds he won't have time to do that and you will get the item for cheaper.
So yes, bidding your max early and letting it run would be fine if everyone knew how the system works. However due to people not know how the system works, bidding last 5 seconds can sometimes net a huge profit over bidding early. If it doesn't net you a profit, you still haven't lost nothing over bidding early.
Kripp has a video showing how to bid last 5 seconds. It's good enough to prevent you from needing a bot. Existence of bots in this case does not hurt you because bots are made by people who know how the system works. People who know how the system works will bid the same amount regardless of how you are bidding, and thus you will never be able to take advantage of them regardless of whether or not they use a bot. Bidding last 5 seconds is only there to take advantage of people who don't know how the system works, and for that no bots are needed.
Price estimation is tough business. To save time, people would generally over-price their items, and as they don't sell they would lower the prices more and more until the item sells (or if they're stupid, might just leave it at the high price). Once an item is listed for a low enough price, it sells pretty fast.
Sure if you don't know the price you could just let people bid on it, but due to 36 hour auctions and general laziness and desire for instant gratification, most people don't engage in the bidding scene, and thus items that sell via bidding sell for lower prices than they could have been sold for with a proper buyout price. This, combined with the fact you can just try different buyout prices until the item sells, makes people not want to list items for bids as they want to get the most gold out of their items.
Since bid-able items are not common and items with proper buyouts disappear quickly, you end up seeing mostly items with both minimum bid and buyout prices much higher than what anyone in the world is willing to pay. It's not the economy that is messed up, it's just that those are the items that stay on the AH for you to see.
A good fix from Blizzard is to make bidding more user-friendly, so people don't have to play with the buyout price to sell their item for good value. This would be hard to do, though, as 2 hour auctions may hurt the seller twice - Once for losing competition due to less people seeing the item, and twice due to people not willing to wait 1-2 hours to see if they won the item. Therefore I'm not even sure there is a solution.
In any case, the only way for you, as a player, to deal with this: Either constantly scour the AH for good deals that just got listed (time-consuming but potentially extremely profitable), or just do 1 search every 24-36 hours for items that have a low enough current bid that are worth bidding on, and then wait for the last 5 seconds to place your bid on them. With bidding you will at most pay 5% more than what another person was already willing to pay, rather than an overpriced buyout price that absolutely nobody is willing to pay (as if someone was willing to pay it, the item would have sold and you would not have even seen it in your search).
If you have a problem selling, rather than buying, then still, understanding the above will help you understand why what you think is a good price to list your items at is actually overpriced.
At lot of people are missing the point. I don't think any sane person who understands anything about this game says that it would be better with no AH even though you can still trade stuff. Removing AH and letting you still trade will just make the current situation 100 times worse. Instead of spending 50% of your time on the AH, you'd have to spend 95% of it trading if not more. That is if you want to be efficient, which is something most would want in a game where efficiency is the only real goal as stated by the developers. They are too incompetent/ignorant to give us real challenges, while keeping efficiency as an important factor without discouraging us from taking on said challenges.
Changes to drop rates or affix rolls of any kind will fix nothing. They will change the difficulty of the game, which won't matter much as it just changes how easy it is (it is already quite easy). However you will still need to spend a huge portion of your time on the AH (or trading if AH didn't exist) in order to be efficient. There is no fix for that other than adopting a WoW-like system, which they wouldn't do - Some argue because of RMAH, some (and Blizzard) would argue that it's what players want and is more D2-style (which may be the real reason but a pretty stupid reason in my opinion).
In the end the problem is not the AH itself, but rather the fact anything can be traded.
As for finding your own upgrades on a regular basis, unfortunately no matter what they do this is not going to happen. If you keep finding upgrades on a regular basis your stats will eventually explode beyond all proportions. The rate at which you find upgrades has to decrease the longer you play. No way around that unless they want to allow you to get infinite power. This doesn't have anything to do with AH, trading, or even how loot works at all. It's a fact that won't be changed in any way whatsoever. Then again, I think what people complain about more is that they can't find "upgrades that would make them as godly as the top players" often, which is not the same argument, but then again if the whole purpose of the game is upgrading your gear to massively increasing rarity levels so that you always have something to upgrade, then you simply can't be allowed to find such items on a regular basis, because then they won't be so godly anymore.
As for the actual fighting of monsters, it has things I don't like too, as to be honest I have more fun with less gear so that I can't faceroll through everything, but for the sake of this discussion let's assume killing monsters is fun. In the current state of the game, I have to spend a big chunk of my time browsing the AH rather than killing monsters, which for me and a lot of others is not so much fun, but simply something we do to be effective. In fact, most people I know who quit the game or slowed down, did so when they reached the point where you need to spend about as much time on the AH as you do playing (which is about the time when you transition between act 1 inferno to acts 2/3, where spending more time on the AH is most effective and farming is not nearly as useful). So yeah, it's not about the farming itself not being fun/effective (even though they really could make farming a lot more fun than it currently is), but about the fact that in order to be effective you need to spend a lot of time browsing items on the AH, which is simply not fun for most. Those who refuse to use the AH because it's not fun are not being effective and those who do use it feel like the AH is robbing them of their fun as they spend more time on it than they'd like.
I don't like the AH for a very simple reason - I like playing more than I like browsing. But even more than I like playing I like being effective. When being effective and having fun conflict with each other that's where the games becomes much less fun. Even Blizzard themselves said that a good game is one where being effective and having fun go hand in hand rather than conflict with each other, and I very much support this claim. Unfortunately, their design decisions don't implement this philosophy very well, and the changes they implement every patch don't bring them any closer, either.
The game is still cool and way better than any alternative out there, but is quite a big disappointment in the aspect of "having fun vs being effective" rather than "having fun being effective".
1
Bad idea. This would be fine if everyone knew exactly how the system work and play the same game you are playing. However as you can see even in this very thread, a lot of people have no clue how this works, and bidding during the last 5 seconds screws them over.
For example, let's assume your competition is the guy who doesn't understand why his bid is always too low - If you bid early, he'll keep bidding and bidding and increase your bid. If you bid the last 5 seconds he won't have time to do that and you will get the item for cheaper.
So yes, bidding your max early and letting it run would be fine if everyone knew how the system works. However due to people not know how the system works, bidding last 5 seconds can sometimes net a huge profit over bidding early. If it doesn't net you a profit, you still haven't lost nothing over bidding early.
Kripp has a video showing how to bid last 5 seconds. It's good enough to prevent you from needing a bot. Existence of bots in this case does not hurt you because bots are made by people who know how the system works. People who know how the system works will bid the same amount regardless of how you are bidding, and thus you will never be able to take advantage of them regardless of whether or not they use a bot. Bidding last 5 seconds is only there to take advantage of people who don't know how the system works, and for that no bots are needed.
2
Sure if you don't know the price you could just let people bid on it, but due to 36 hour auctions and general laziness and desire for instant gratification, most people don't engage in the bidding scene, and thus items that sell via bidding sell for lower prices than they could have been sold for with a proper buyout price. This, combined with the fact you can just try different buyout prices until the item sells, makes people not want to list items for bids as they want to get the most gold out of their items.
Since bid-able items are not common and items with proper buyouts disappear quickly, you end up seeing mostly items with both minimum bid and buyout prices much higher than what anyone in the world is willing to pay. It's not the economy that is messed up, it's just that those are the items that stay on the AH for you to see.
A good fix from Blizzard is to make bidding more user-friendly, so people don't have to play with the buyout price to sell their item for good value. This would be hard to do, though, as 2 hour auctions may hurt the seller twice - Once for losing competition due to less people seeing the item, and twice due to people not willing to wait 1-2 hours to see if they won the item. Therefore I'm not even sure there is a solution.
In any case, the only way for you, as a player, to deal with this: Either constantly scour the AH for good deals that just got listed (time-consuming but potentially extremely profitable), or just do 1 search every 24-36 hours for items that have a low enough current bid that are worth bidding on, and then wait for the last 5 seconds to place your bid on them. With bidding you will at most pay 5% more than what another person was already willing to pay, rather than an overpriced buyout price that absolutely nobody is willing to pay (as if someone was willing to pay it, the item would have sold and you would not have even seen it in your search).
If you have a problem selling, rather than buying, then still, understanding the above will help you understand why what you think is a good price to list your items at is actually overpriced.
1
Changes to drop rates or affix rolls of any kind will fix nothing. They will change the difficulty of the game, which won't matter much as it just changes how easy it is (it is already quite easy). However you will still need to spend a huge portion of your time on the AH (or trading if AH didn't exist) in order to be efficient. There is no fix for that other than adopting a WoW-like system, which they wouldn't do - Some argue because of RMAH, some (and Blizzard) would argue that it's what players want and is more D2-style (which may be the real reason but a pretty stupid reason in my opinion).
In the end the problem is not the AH itself, but rather the fact anything can be traded.
As for finding your own upgrades on a regular basis, unfortunately no matter what they do this is not going to happen. If you keep finding upgrades on a regular basis your stats will eventually explode beyond all proportions. The rate at which you find upgrades has to decrease the longer you play. No way around that unless they want to allow you to get infinite power. This doesn't have anything to do with AH, trading, or even how loot works at all. It's a fact that won't be changed in any way whatsoever. Then again, I think what people complain about more is that they can't find "upgrades that would make them as godly as the top players" often, which is not the same argument, but then again if the whole purpose of the game is upgrading your gear to massively increasing rarity levels so that you always have something to upgrade, then you simply can't be allowed to find such items on a regular basis, because then they won't be so godly anymore.
1
1
The game is still cool and way better than any alternative out there, but is quite a big disappointment in the aspect of "having fun vs being effective" rather than "having fun being effective".
1
For attacks, anything other than energy twister will simply not proc critical mass enough.
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#VQhXYO!bag!YZcaZc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OTuazstYa8&list=UU9yG7ooCkbatIekFfANro_g&index=1&feature=plcp