Buying and Selling Characters like Storage Wars?

Storage Wars

Originally when Blizzard announced the RMAH back in August of 2011, there were screenshots of the auction house where player characters were actually for sale. This excited me quite a bit, and I began brainstorming about how to manipulate this new system for profit.

Barbarian for Sale! Get Your Barbarian Here!

I'm disappointed, to say the least, that this feature isn't going to make it into release on May 15th. However, 3rd party services are still going to sell Diablo 3 characters anyway, so the option will still be available to those willing to take the risks (like break the terms of service and put your account information in front of potentially nasty individuals).

It's not all gloom and doom though, as Blizzard has stated that this feature is intended to be added eventually, and you can tell from the screenshot above that development was actually pretty far along. So let's talk about the interesting world of buying characters.

Obviously, one of the simplest ways to profit from buying characters is to flip them, but recently I was watching Storage Wars and another idea came to my mind. What if you could buy a character and look through their equipped gear plus inventory for hidden treasures. If players do eventually sell characters, I don't believe that you'll get anything other than what's in their main inventory. It wouldn't make sense to give the shared stash or artisan levels away, since that's account bound.

Think about it, some guy sells a character for $100 and doesn't bother to empty their inventory out before the sale. Maybe it's someone about to quit the game. He posts a screenshot up of his character and you notice there are quite a few magic and rare items both equipped and in the inventory. It's like Storage Wars, when the lock is cut and the steel curtain rises to reveal a pile of potential loot. You can't see the names of the items, but you can come up with possibilities in your mind for what they could be based on the images.

Maybe we'll be able to see their inventory when the new feature is added, but on third party services I don't really know. You'll probably just get a screenshot and a price. The whole concept is fascinating to me, but I would really like to know what you think about buying and selling characters in Diablo 3.

Would you buy a hardcore character at max level? Skipping countless hours of content is definitely one of the primary reasons people buy characters, and max level hardcore characters will be in high demand. If Blizzard puts a real money auction house into the hardcore ah, then expect selling characters to be allowed on that side as well.