Windforce? - A thousand tiny needles

We have the legendary bow used by the great Amazon who slew Baal. Wait... who are we kidding... She was probably a javazon. See how much I sold this for after the jump.

I can't believe I sold this either.

This bow is just amazing.

I'd like to pretend that I sold something awesome, and spend word after word extolling the virtues of this bow. But I'm not going to. This item is shit. Don't take this in the wrong way Blizzard, but I've seen a D2 Windforce that has more damage than this one. Do you know what I do with Legendaries nowadays? I pick it up, look at the icon to see what it is, and then I usually just drop it on the ground if it isn't Inferno Salvageable. Lidless Eye? Cindercoat? Those are ground decorations. It spruces up the tone of the barren snow.

The only people who would possibly equip a Windforce are beginners (who happen to be D2 fans) that go straight to the RMAH before hitting level 60, and type in Windforce. By the way, I think you're stupid love you guys for doing that.

I sold this bow on RMAH day 1, just to see how the system worked. The 1$ fee was disappointing, and the 15% cut was also disappointing. For a bow that was actually going for ~200k at the time, I think I actually lost money according to today's "$:gold" ratio. But that's not the point of this post.

The real way to make millions

I went to my parent's house this weekend to visit, and was hanging out with some of my friends. At some point, the conversation came to Diablo 3. I asked one friend if he had used the Auction House yet. Now this guy, my best friend actually, is not a meta-gamer, he is not an min-maxer, he is not an optimizer. He plays the game for fun like a normal person. So it's a completely possible that he has never used the AH before; casual players tend to shy away from it.

"Yea. I've been making money on the RMAH," was his reply.

My jaw dropped. Impossible.

My friend, let's call him Paolo (because that's his name), hasn't even beaten Act 1 in Inferno. His monk barely beat act 4 in hell, and he hasn't really mastered it yet; two of his 6 skills don't have runes in them. His demon hunter is level 50; there's no way that he can even farm. No way, I thought. What I didn't realize is that he had stumbled onto a gold mine.

Then came the flurry of questions. "Show me your RMAH page." "What do you sell?" "You're paying for dinner right?"

Paolo's monk.

What he showed me was unbelievable. I don't think anyone will believe what his RMAH page looked like. There were rows and rows and rows of the same item. Some sold, some didn't, but that didn't matter. What was this miracle item that was making him rich?

Well... Paolo has always been the lucky one. He would open a Time Spiral booster and get THREE rares (a normal, a foil, and a timeshifted rare) instead of just one. He would assemble his PCs on his carpet without antistatic gear and his computers would still work. So I guess it wasn't impossible that he stumbled upon the most absurd money making scheme ever.




Pendergrasps.

What the FUCK are Pendergrasps? I didn't know. Hell, I still don't really know right now. They are like level 30 legendary gloves or something. Christ.

...what

Paolo found the crafting recipe for this and had been crafting dozens of them. His sale price? 3$. And people actually bought them. When there are people are struggling to sell their 1100 dps bows with sockets for pocket change, Paolo had been making money with level 30 gloves. Why is this guy so lucky? When I asked him who was stupid enough to buy these, he simply said, "Well, not everyone is level 60". And he was right. Damn, I hate when he's right.

The game is young; it would be silly to assume everyone was level 60. It would be silly to assume that only level 60 items would sell. But I had made these assumptions, and I was wrong. Now, Paolo isn't rich from selling Pendergrasps. He's sold maybe a dozen pairs. But the theory itself is flawless, and I applaud him for this.


Why am I telling you this story? It's not going to make anyone rich. Pendergrasps are not the solution to the European debt crisis. They are, at best, the solution to Paolo's "what-am-I-gonna-have-for-lunch-tomorrow" crisis. The takeaway here is that a different way of thinking led to easy profits. It did not require a 80k dps whirlwinding barb. It just took something outside the box.


Scroll down to see how much that Windforce sold for, if you still care (because I sure don't, I'm selling Pendergrasps now. That's where the real money is at!)

After the 1$ fee and 15% fee, it comes out to 35 cents