In my opinion, nothing has ever come close to the rich economic system that emerged naturally in Diablo 2. Maybe it just hit me at a good time in my life, towards the end of high school.

I spent probably half my time playing that game just doing arbitrage trading. For example a sorceress or necromancer would always give you 4-5 Perfect Skulls for a Stone of Jordan (SOJ) ring, and you could pretty easily buy an SOJ from a barbarian or amazon for 3-4 Perfect Skulls. Through nothing but these trades I was able to go from a couple SOJ (the most valuable 1x1 item in the game) to about 40 or 50 over the course of a few months.

You sound like you've never played Eve Online

There was a stable economy time where there weren’t continual “buff patches” dumping more and more items, and it was a good time.

Very much agreed, but…

My favorite AH score was a max stat level 3 chest piece that I sold for $25.

That piece was good for 5 or maybe 10 minutes of gameplay at the start of the game.

I knew it was a premium piece for that level and type. I knew they didn’t stay on AH long. That said, I didn’t want to compete with all of the lower price point folks, so i set the price to something absurd just to see what happened.

I have no idea why they bought it.

I had much better late game stuff for sale for much cheaper that never sold. It was a strange market — I’m glad it is gone.

People would search by “best I can equip” and you caught a whale.

I would disagree with that.

D3 RMAH was bad because D3 was bad. At that time there was basically no itemisation, everything gear was basically dps/main stat/trifecta. D3 was so bad that the fix was to remove trading completely and never been brought back.

People traded D2 items for gear, runes and/or real money for decades, there is no problem and the game is alive for well.

I mean, the real improvement to D3 was they massively upped the drop rate of rare items, which "coincidentally" happened when they stopped taking a cut off people selling their rare items for real money.

Yeah. The money always causes a conflict with the fun. Only the pure cosmetic games seem to avoid that when the money flows.