14 DAY TRIAL // Diablo 3's Auction House, in both gold and real-money variants, will go offline next week, on March 18, and developer Blizzard has offered a few more details for players who still have ongoing auctions and items for sale in the online system.
Diablo 3 came out back in 2012 for the PC and Mac platforms, bringing a complex dungeon crawling role-playing game that allowed players to go on epic quests for impressive loot.
Unfortunately, the actual loot drop system wasn't really geared towards giving players items relevant for their actual character class and this led a lot of veteran users towards the in-game Auction House. Here, they were able to search for specific gear with certain attributes and buy them from other players in exchange for in-game gold or real-life money, as there were two versions of the Auction House.
This proved to be a great source of quality gear for players and of money for those who found them and sold them to others via the Auction House.
After 2 years and ahead of the release of the Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls expansion, Blizzard has implemented a new Loot 2.0 system through the game's huge patch 2.0.1.
Now, after seeing that players are more than happy with the new loot drop system, the studio is getting ready to shut down the Auction House and has posted an updated FAQ on its website.
More specifically, the Auction House will go offline on March 18, at 3am PT.
At that time, all active auctions will expire as normal and the items will be delivered to the current highest bidder or returned to the seller, appearing in the Completed tab of the Auction House. Unclaimed gold will also appear in that location.
Players have until June 24, 2014, to retrieve the items they have in the Completed tab. Items and gold that won't be claimed until then will, according to Blizzard, "be consumed by Treasure Goblins, never to be seen again."
"The auction house window will remain available for all players until June 24, 2014; however, the ability to Bid, Buyout, and list new auctions in the gold and real-money auction houses will be disabled on March 18, 2014," the studio said.
"To access the Completed tab after the gold and real-money auction houses have shut down, simply click on the gavel icon and select which auction house (gold or real-money) you wish to access. The Completed tab will appear in its normal location on the far right of the auction house window."
Bear in mind that the Completed tab can display up to 50 items at a time and players with more than that will still get items in the "backlog," which will appear once things are removed from the main tab.