clueless child. I don't know to feel sorry for you or to flame you.

I can't believe this topic is still going. The FAQ quoted way earlier makes it perfectly clear that you can buy an item off the AH and immediately relist it. The FAQ makes no mention of any prohibition against doing so for the purpose of making a profit, despite the fact that profit is the most immediate and obvious reason for buying an item and immediately relisting it. If there were such a prohibition, Blizzard would have mentioned it there. Instead, they did the opposite and explicitly said "Go ahead, buy items and immediately relist them." They said this without any disclaimer about your intent to profit or not, which disclaimer people in this thread have just made up out of whole cloth.

If there's a "rule" against doing something, Blizzard states it explicitly. They certainly don't maintain a FAQ that says you can do exactly the opposite.

I'm sorry to admit that I'm a lawyer with some experience in securities law. As the law student earlier explained 100% correctly, the line about not using the AH as an "investment vehicle" is not there to prevent any particular behavior on the part of players. It is there to guard against lawsuits put forth on the theory that Blizzard profited from selling unregistered securities. The US has strict laws about the sale of securities, and the securities so regulated are not limited to the more common examples such as stocks and bonds. You may be surprised to learn that just about anything you can buy and later resell at a profit can under certain circumstances be classified as a security; an important case you'd read early on shows that even the oranges from groves of trees down in Florida can be the basis of a security, if they're sold as an investment vehicle. Virtual items sold on an electronic exchange directly for $US, or indirectly for "gold" which can in turn be sold for $US, could easily be considered a security if the items were marketed as investment vehicles; which is to say, if Blizzard were marketing the AH portion of Diablo 3 as a way to make money through speculation. The ToS line about investment vehicles is there to make it clear that Blizzard is not offering you the AH for that purpose.

So why does it matter if their virtual items are classified as securities? Thanks for asking. Securities need lengthy registration filings, have regular reporting requirements and disclosure rules, and offering them to sale to the public a big old headache. Activision, for example, is a publicly registered entity which presumably complies with all these regulations, and if I buy 100,000 shares of ATVI today and when I sell them in a month those shares have lost half their value, well that's just tough for me. Generally speaking, I can't sue to recover my lost money from Activision. People lose money on stocks and other investments all the time. (And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of lawsuits stemming from people losing money. But investors need to allege some actual fraud or wrongdoing by the company in addition to their own losses. Just losing money on a registered security isn't enough.)

However, if a company is offering and selling unregistered securities to unqualified investors (like say the entire D3 player base), then things are different. If an unqualified investor loses money by investing in an unregistered security, then they are entitled to recover every cent. Blizzard, reasonably enough, does not consider the RMAH an exchange, nor the items you can buy there to be securities and Blizzard (reasonably enough) has not registered them as such. This is the why the ToS wants to be clear that said items and said RMAH are not to be used as "investment vehicles."

Someone might dump $5,000 into the RMAH with the intent of flipping and making a profit. If a court found that Blizzard encouraged or even suggested this use of their RMAH as an investment vehicle, then believe it or not said someone might be able to recover any losses they suffered on the RMAH. It's not so likely, but not impossible. Therefor, you'll notice that even though half of us instantly had that idea when we first heard about the RMAH, and even though many people started and continued to make money off of it from day one, and even though Blizzard of course profits handsomely whenever anyone takes money out, you won't find any official encouragement or suggestion that the RMAH should be used in that manner.

However, you won't find any prohibition against it either. Merely allowing people do buy and sell items is perfectly fine, and if some people do that with no objective other than profit, that's perfectly fine too. Blizzard is safe as long as they don't market the items as investment vehicles. As their own FAQ states explicitly, you can buy an item and immediately relist it. Obviously you're doing that for a profit, and Blizzard thinks that's dandy. But officially speaking, they just want to make it clear that they never told you this is a way to invest your money and get a return, and they never encouraged you to consider these items to be investments like stocks or bonds. If you want to use them that way, by all means go ahead. The FAQ couldn't be any clearer.

Seriously, that's the real answer. This is not some common sense thing where anybody cares what you think "investment vehicle" means.