No one knows. Prices will likely fluctuate wildly for a little white, until it settles in. I can see super-rare items selling for $30 and up, though.

I wonder if the posting charge will be real money on that AH.

potentially a lot at first, but I can't imagine it would pan out to be more than a few dollars per hour once it flattens out.

At first, there will be a few lucky random drops, which will sell for big money. the more early sales go for, the more people will try to start farming for equipment, which will definitely drop the prices quickly, dropping the price of all but the best gear to a few dollars, at which point, only the extremely rare will make any money at all.

that's my prediction any way.

Yes they could, and whatever people will pay.

Although I've seen a lot of people excited about selling gear for real money, but no-one excited about buying it... will have to see what the actual take-up rate is.

I remember friends who could sell max level, decked-out characters for enough money to buy a whole new cd key (and hence a whole new account to make another max level decked out character to sell) and still have a fair amount of money on the side. It certainly wasn't a livable amount of money, but it was enough over time to pay for some nice computer upgrades.

However, its worth noting that this was well into Diablo's life-cycle, where you could both sell characters (not possible in D3) and people had found a pretty standard rate for characters and items.

Ultimately I'd say it's pretty unreasonable to a make a living wage off selling stuff, but I'd imagine the first couple weeks or months with the game being popular, fresh, and with PvP just getting started, there's certainly a lot of money to be made.

The lack of visible buying may be made up by people who spend some of what they make selling to buy stuff for themselves, thus perpetuating the cycle.

Or it might be 99% selling to 1% buying.

Or it might be like gold selling in WoW. I've met one (1) person who has admitted to buying gold. And yet if there wasn't a viable market, we wouldn't be inundated with spam about it. (buying gold may be shameful to most who do it, but if they're already willing to spend real money, they are a market for this ah.)

Id imagine it would be fairly trivial for the average gamer to make enough for his monthly sbscription and perhaps a decent amount of "play money". I think hardcore AH tycoons could very realistically make an actual living on D3 money. I'm also recalling back in the day when an ex told me he'd paid $300 for a rare EQ item. I wasn't an MMO gamer so I was appalled at the time. Now I can easily see how a teen with a lot of disposable income or a hardcore competitve player would pay that and more without qualms for, say, HM DS25 loot (if it was buyable).