Wishful Thinking: Changes To The Auction House
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[caption id="attachment_9589" align="alignnone" width="640" caption="Auctioneer makes the AH 100x more usable."]
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Wishful Thinking is a column for the theorycrafting behind World of Warcraft. No, not the number crunching madness perfected by the folks at ElitistJerks, but the features, abilities, and design ideas that the Project Lore writers conjure from their squishy pink stuff.
I believe it's safe to say that there are two things in World of Warcraft that everyone uses at some point in their heroic career, their inventory, and an auction house. Whether it be the one in a capital city or Dalaran, you've likely perused the magical storage system for deals. Materials for your professions, enchanting mats, gems (cut and uncut), gear and hawking your own wares are the reasons most players know the fastest way to their local auctioneer. Even the most AH adverse player has likely spent hours scanning for this or that, with heavy users spending days of (often semi-afk) playtime. Yet like our inventory system, the auction house, for all intents and purposes, hasn't changed a lick since vanilla WoW.
How are we letting these basic things slide? How can we, as paying customers, sit by and allow the system's we use the most to completely suck. Unlike fleeting raid dungeons or jousting, this content will never go out of style because it's a necessity. Just like Peeps at Easter. I hated the system when I first started playing the game. It just seemed obvious to me that it could have been so much more, possibly rising into an economic game in and of itself.
At the time I shrugged off the oversight, chalking it up to developers being too busy perfecting the meat and potatoes of the game. I assumed that the system would get attention after bigger fish were fried. Here we are, five years and two full course meals later, and little has changed.
Thank god for Auctioneer. At least that appetizer makes the current incarnation palatable.
Things the Auction House severally needs:
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Wishful Thinking is a column for the theorycrafting behind World of Warcraft. No, not the number crunching madness perfected by the folks at ElitistJerks, but the features, abilities, and design ideas that the Project Lore writers conjure from their squishy pink stuff.
I believe it's safe to say that there are two things in World of Warcraft that everyone uses at some point in their heroic career, their inventory, and an auction house. Whether it be the one in a capital city or Dalaran, you've likely perused the magical storage system for deals. Materials for your professions, enchanting mats, gems (cut and uncut), gear and hawking your own wares are the reasons most players know the fastest way to their local auctioneer. Even the most AH adverse player has likely spent hours scanning for this or that, with heavy users spending days of (often semi-afk) playtime. Yet like our inventory system, the auction house, for all intents and purposes, hasn't changed a lick since vanilla WoW.
How are we letting these basic things slide? How can we, as paying customers, sit by and allow the system's we use the most to completely suck. Unlike fleeting raid dungeons or jousting, this content will never go out of style because it's a necessity. Just like Peeps at Easter. I hated the system when I first started playing the game. It just seemed obvious to me that it could have been so much more, possibly rising into an economic game in and of itself.
At the time I shrugged off the oversight, chalking it up to developers being too busy perfecting the meat and potatoes of the game. I assumed that the system would get attention after bigger fish were fried. Here we are, five years and two full course meals later, and little has changed.
Thank god for Auctioneer. At least that appetizer makes the current incarnation palatable.
Things the Auction House severally needs:
- First and foremost, steal from Auctioneer. Blizzard makes no qualms about lifting ideas from the AddOn community, from the CT Mod crew to Quest Helper ideas have been "borrowed." Take everything from Auctioneer that isn't automated. This includes price matching and being able to do multiple postings of the same item (not an automation I'd avoid, it's simply logical). And don't worry about this killing theAddOn. The creators are far to inventive to let that happen.
- Add a standing buy option. This would enable players to post the quantity and amount they are willing to pay for an item. If another player comes along and adds an item at the correct (or lower) price, then the system would automatically purchase the item for me. Instant gratification for the seller, and a time saver for the buyer.
- Put a price tracking measure into the standard interface. Blizzard has tried to stop players from scanning the Auction House for average pricing a few times. The best way to stop it would be to just display the information to us. Rather than dozens to hundreds of players scanning the AH a few times a day, Blizzard servers can take care of it, scanning every six hours and displaying the median prices of items. It'd make the players better informed, save our time, and the AH database would have millions of less calls. Win, win.
- Expanded "Usable" filter. I need a gem, a Cardinal Ruby gem for a rogue. Stop showing me caster/tank items. They are usable in theory, but come on. Sortable by class-based items would be a nice start (allowing you to buy things for an alt on your main).
- Combat Auction House flooding. One technique that you can use to make sure your items sell is to make them appear on the first page. Players rarely flip to the second page so by selling stacks of one, your items can push other lower priced items off the first page. I'm not sure what can be done to combat the spam of a user posting 100 single item auctions of Infinite Dust without breaking the reason for splitting existing, but it's annoying and adds to the slowness of the Auction House.
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