AH addons periodically come up for discussion on the forums, but I wanted to address some concerns about addon functionality based on my experience from this expansion. I apologize for the long post as I’m unsure how to condense it without leaving out info that I feel is important.
We all know that addons like TSM allow you to quickly cancel listings that have been posted in front of and repost them with just a few clicks. These features allows people with the addons to push more casual players out of the AH particularly when they sit in town for hours a day or login repeatedly.
My cluster of 4 medium pop RP servers have a number of these players. In fact, there are a couple that login every 45-50 minutes like clockwork (I’ve actually used timers a few times to test this out). These players are easy to bait in auctions (assuming you are online) because they are literally only online long enough to cancel and relist their auctions. I’ve tried messaging them (politely, no insults or anything) and never get a response.
They obviously don’t owe me a response, but when I message them that I’m going to bait their auctions that they just cancelled (like listing at 500 when the going price is 2500) and they repeatedly fall for it, either they are incredibly oblivious or perhaps botting. I’ve also noticed that when I buy the auctions from these players, they lack the crafting tag that is normally associated with a bag or piece of equipment. In my experience, this has only happened to me when the crafter is not from my server group (I could be wrong on this).
I’m actually less inclined to believe it’s botting because I’ve noticed a new trend that has started since warband banks were implemented. Now I love the bank and it’s an amazing feature, but when you throw in AH addons like TSM, it allows people to easily flood multiple servers with auctions which is really frustrating.
I know of at least 2 accounts doing this on my servers and have suspicions of several more. The two that I can confirm are because I messaged one and they admitted that is what they are doing and another made characters on all 4 servers in my server group with character names xxxxcenarioncircle, xxxxblackwaterraiders, xxxxsistersofelune, and xxxxshadowcouncil (truncated to whatever the limit is). They would list the exact same items from each character and it took them 2 days to realize that they were competing with themselves and cut down to one. No one who actually plays on our servers would make that mistake. Some clockwork listers may seem botlike because they are simply going as fast as possible to do their listings across many servers.
Crafting materials on the AH were made region wide to help stop people from cornering entire markets on servers and that was a great change. However, with warband banks and these AH addons, it’s letting people easily flood markets on multiple servers and consolidate gold and items into a single place that can be accessed from any character.
These players are making it more difficult for your average player to craft and sell items on the AH. Even I am exhausted dealing with them and I’m absolutely willing to put in a significant amount of time for this as I enjoy crafting.
TL;DR
Please remove cancel scanning and reposting features from AH addons. I’m fine with certain features like tracking income, tracking items across multiple characters, etc.
With the implementation of the warband bank, AH addons with these features allow players to flood multiple servers with auctions. This pushes out even more players who might otherwise engage with professions than when they were limited to their own servers.
Yes, it could be done without the addons but it would be far more time consuming and far less convenient. Just like how crafting materials were made region wide to combat a few players dominating markets, removing these features would be another big step in that direction.