Diablo 3’s Auction House Has No Effect on Drop Rates

Blizzard has talked about the item drop rates in Diablo 3 and has emphasized that the Auction House has no effect on what type of gear appears after defeating an enemy.

Diablo 3 introduces a wide array of things into the dungeon crawling role-playing game genre, including a few controversial features like the Auction House, where players can sell, either for in-game gold or real-life cash, the loot they get from killing enemies.

Some players, however, believe Blizzard is rigging the items dropped by enemies in order to keep the Auction House filled with different types of gear.

That’s not true, according to Blizzard’s Wyatt Cheng, who has revealed that the two systems don’t directly interact with each other.

“The auction house has absolutely no effect on drop rates. There are conspiracy theories and misunderstandings, but I do want to re-iterate: there is NO interaction whatsoever.”

One of Blizzard’s community managers did say that the Auction House has had an impact on the design of the drop process, so Cheng went into detail about the studio’s philosophy.

“The drop rates were tuned for a player who would never use the Auction House. For the majority of internal development, we didn't have an Auction House, and we all played using our own drops only. I've personally leveled multiple characters from 1 to 60 internally before the game came out using only drops that I found - we all did,” Cheng added.

“When we say we "took the AH into account," that means it's one of many factors -- i.e. some players will choose to play without trading, some players would play in a group of 4 where they share drops among each other, and some (as it turns out, many) players would use the AH.”

Now that the Real-Money Auction House is available alongside the in-game gold one, way more players are expected to start selling and buying items.