Blizzard has announced more details about its Real Money Auction House today.  The first item of note is that it won't be available at launch but will be brought online about 1 week after the May 15th release date.  The gold based AC will be available from the get go however.  For those that are unaware of how auction houses work, it's fairly standard fare in MMO's, it's simply that if you have an item, say a magical item for a character of another class, you can put it up for auction for other players to bid on as opposed to selling to a vendor.  In most games the price you end up selling for is often much more than what the games vendors will offer.  It usually takes a little while for a game to find its "economy" which is the general accepted value for such items. Of course fairly common items usually don't sell or sell for very little and more rare items can start some great bidding wars.

Another interesting part of this AC is that players can sell their excess gold.  As anyone that has ever played Diablo II is most likely aware, gold farming was fairly rampant with players or bots "gathering" gold and then selling it via their own websites to other players for real money.  Well now you can be your own gold farmer which is Blizzards attempt to cut out the gold farming black market.  This is an intriguing idea and once you factor in the fees that Blizzard will collect we'll see how effective it is.

The AC also boasts a "smart search" feature which will look at your characters and show you a list of recommended upgrades for your specific character, additionally as the AC is tied directly to your Battle.net account each AC search can net you results for all of your characters.  

Selling options are another interesting aspect to the trading system, you can for example decide on a per item basis whether or not you'd prefer to sell it for real money or gold, sell to ingame vendors, or trade with another player.  Additionally Blizzard itself will not be selling items on the AC on behalf of itself, although it should be noted that the terminology on their site is careful to not rule it out completely, it just says that there is no plan to do so.

Blizzard is hoping that by having these trading features available through Battle.Net that users will be happy to pay the fee in exchange for ease of use and security of not having to deal with potential scams associated with 3rd party websites, we've heard that the fee amount could be as much as 15% however we have been unable to confirm that for sure.  If you want to see what Blizzard has to say about their Auction House, you can do so here by clicking the link!