As farming Diablo 3 Gold and items becomes increasingly easy, farmers and botters are begrudgingly accepting a new reality of lower profit margins.

In bot enclave BuddyForum.com, user JohnnyIop started a thread asking: "Does anyone know what happened to the Gold price that dropped in two days from $0.40 per million to $0.34? What's happening here?"

The Diablo 3 price tracker here at MMOBUX.com also shows that RMT shop selling prices are down to around $0.98 per million Gold.

Forum replies offered a number of reasons for the steep decline in prices at the Real Money Auction House (RMAH). Some pointed to undercutting competition, while others pointed to declining demand for Gold. But the most popular explanation is that farming Gold has become ridiculously easy, causing a flood of Gold supply and crash in prices.

"With the amount of Gold I make daily, and easily I might add, there is no way the price of Gold can maintain. If I don't hit 300 million Gold a day, I question if my bots are even running correctly," said bot runner and fellow TheBuddyForum user happysticks. "The drop in price is fully expected and possibly even overdue."

Low-Cost Item Flood
The latest Patch 1.0.5 has exacerbated the problem. Newly introduced features such as the Monster Power and Infernal Machine systems have increased item drops, which in turn are sold by many casual players in the auction house, been blamed

"All these people flooding the auction house with items for 50-150k crap items just trying to dump stuff they find actually hurt the gold market," said user JimJohnsonBanMe4Life. He suggests that there be a concerted effort to remove these low-cost items to force players "buy something for a chunk of gold. This in turn means it takes more gold to buy things so the gold you sell on the RMAH is worth more."

Rolling with the Price Punches
The alarming dips in prices and profit margins have even made some bot users question whether it is still profitable to sell Diablo 3 Gold. JohnnyIop said "This won't be profitable as soon as the Gold prices drops a little bit more."

But others are quick to argue that selling Diablo 3 Gold can still be profitable, but it will take a bit more patience and creativity.

"More Gold is farmed each day and we can also assume that there are more people trying to sell Gold through RMAH," said TheBuddyForum user Swazer. "With the reduced price you just have to bot for a longer time to make some kind of profit."

Others, meanwhile, see opportunity in the current stock of low-priced Gold. "The smart thing would be to buy it now maybe at $0.3 [per million] and stack a few billion and resell in a few weeks for $0.45+ and earn some big cash," said user tonari.