Here’s the thing though.
You want an item for your character. You could spend hours and hours of your time mindlessly farming for that one item or something equivalent or better to trade for it.
Or you could just toss a bit of money and save all that time. Maybe even use that extra time you now have on overtime at your job.
But really, very few people likely a massive amount of money on forum gold at jsp. There are a few people that spent a ton at some point because you will see people with thousands and tens of thousands of fg. Either that or they seeded the economy at some point.
People who sell lots of items probably spend at least $10/month when actively trading to get a larger inbox but that’s probably about it.
You can pretty easily start at jsp with nothing, selling a couple items you have and then buying items you spot at a discounted price in order to flip them.
Fg works much better as a currency than runes and pgems. It’s a great deal more granular, having a lot of one rune (cough ist cough) doesn’t become a problem, and it also doesn’t tie you to staying with the game to the end of a ladder season. I can quit now and my work this “season” has value based on the items I’ve given to others. My work also has value if I decide I’ve gotten my fill of d2r. I think the complaining about activision blizzard goes too far on these boards but the game does still take a lot of my time that could always be spent on other games.
That said, I’m liking diablo2 io as a trading site, a lot more than this traderie which looks fairly meh. Only issue is putting up a lot of items for trade which is a bit tedious and the site has some performance issues still.
Jsp may be a glorified message board, but it’s fast, it’s easy to search, and prices are relatively fair.
Psssst: also, as I haven’t played d2 since ladder was first added, I would not have realized d2jsp was a thing if there weren’t threads on this forum talking about it constantly, poking my curiosity. I knew about ebay sales and was sure there were some d2 items for money sites, and of course those obnoxious spambots, but lol, visit those spambot sites? Never gonna give those spammers a cent. They should be sent to death row. Probably infect my computer with keyloggers that they use to log into my account and use it for their spambot armada when I’m not online.
But d2jsp, I went to because it was often discussed here. So…all the people complaining about d2jsp, piece of advice: stop mentioning it.