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===The Item Economy===
It's too early to say anything much about the item economy, since there are too many unknowns. Players have no idea about the intended scarcity of high end items, the costs or likely success rate of high end crafting recipes, the quality of items NPCs will sell, etc. The developers have also hinted that the highest level items may be [[Bind on Equip]] and/or [[Bind on Account]], which would remove them from the trading pool. All those things will obviously be prime balancing concerns come the beta and then the early days after release, and there's no way to predict how that will all shake out in advance.
The elephant in the room, when speculating about Diablo III's economy, is the factor that ruined Diablo II's economy: duping and hacking. Valuable items were duplicated and widely-disseminated, wrecking the value of [[legit]] items. [[Hacked]] items were created that were better than any legit items could ever be. And especially in the D2X days, massive [[duping]] of {{iw|Rune Runes}} has made the elite quality {{iw|runeword Runewords}} vastly more common and affordable than they were designed to be.
The Diablo III developers have said that there will not be hacking and duping in Diablo III, and that they'll be able to apply the lessons they've learned in keeping WoW largely cheat-free. Most fans wish them the best of luck with that, but as successful as hackers have been in ruining the economy of most online RPGs, the [[D3 Team]] clearly has their work cut out for them.
==Obtaining Gold in Diablo III==