With the region-wide AH change, it now takes one troll dumping something at a stupidly low price to tank the market. The posting and buying happens so fast that it’s virtually impossible to buy up the low priced items quickly enough, even if you’re staring at it, so then everyone just starts posting at lower and lower prices for no real reason. This has been a pain point in the AH forever–trolls making it impossible to profit from a particular item. It’s just a matter of time until the prices drop so low that nobody wants to participate in the market anymore. This already happened on large servers–unless you got a smokin’ deal on mats, it was often wrong to buy mats and craft to sell on the AH–even for your own use, you’d be better off buying consumables instead of crafting them. And it’s much worse now that one troll from any server can tank the market.
We also have a problem with items “not being available” when we try to buy items, I assume because of the speed of the new AH buy/sell cycle with this many people plugged into it.
My solution to these two issues is as follows:
Instead of posting at a particular price, the seller should post their minimum price–the price below which they want their items skipped and not sold.
The AH, NOT THE SELLER, should set the price, based on supply and demand, for commodities.
ALL commodities of a particular type are then sold for that price. Therefore if there are any items for sale in a particular commodity, any one of them can be sold to anyone–you’re not selecting a particular first flower anymore, so no more errors when trying to buy. And one person can’t unilaterally tank the price of a given commodity.
This gives sellers agency over their sales–their items will never be sold below a particular price that they set–but it will make the markets much more stable, reliable, and in the case of the “item not found” warning, it will make them functional (which they currently are not).
There is a wealth of data available on commodity pricing–Undermine Journal, for example, and I assume Blizz has more and better data even than that. Surely someone could design an algorithm that sets prices at a level high enough for sellers to make a profit and for buyers to not get bilked.
This has been sorely needed for a while IMO, and I think the region-wide AH change has dialed that need up to 11.
we need a fixed price for comodity items, also bots make imposible to buy something because they post and cancel the items at low prices so fast. fix the damn AH or return to the old one blizzard, this is garbage changes.
I’ve been thinking about this too. The whole scanning, canceling, relisting at the lowest price thing has always been a problem. It’s worse with the cross-realm AH (which, for the record, I actually support).
Here’s my idea:
Sellers list the minimum price they’re willing to accept;
Buyers enter the maximum price they’re wiling to pay and the # of items they want.
The AH lists the approximate selling price. It’s fine if this only updates even once a minute.
So when a buyer comes along they enter an item, a quantity and a maximum price. If that can be fulfilled, then it fills. There are no partial order fills.
So how is the selling price determined? This is well-trodden territory. It’s called a generalized second-price auction.
For most people, it’s really too difficult to sell anything so a ton of people don’t bother. You should be able to click a button that says “sell this” and it’ll sell it at reasonable defaults.
I think it’s probably also time to revisit the “last in, first out” sales method on the AH. It would be pretty cool if there was some way to sell things without having to cancel scan all day long.
Actually, my dude, it’s not. There are so many factors that are specific to the wow AH that invalidate general buzz-word theories that it’s not even worth getting into.
Like, you know, there is more than one place to sell things in the real world, so not every seller of bread is competing with every single other seller of bread on the continent.
the LIFO sales thing is a bad design for the AH, bots take advantage of this posting/cancelling items so fast that normal players dont have a chance to sell any, what if blizzard change the LIFO logic to RNG logic, this could make players avoid the posting/relisting .
That would be much better. If there is a single pool of commodities, having it randomly select from them would be more sensible than being best off posting 10 at a time every 20 seconds to always sell yours.
First in, first out sounds like it would be best, but I’m not sure it really would be tbh.
Humor ha ha…
I tryed to buy at a higher price.
It wanted me to buy all up to that price.
I wonder if it applets also to gear? I’ll look into that. Like… If a pc of gear had the same name, but several different levels. The cheapest being very low level. Would you need to buy all of them to get the level you wanted.
Most likely not the case .
They can in Trade Chat. If you want to sell it below AH prices, I’m sure someone well buy it from you. But the AH isn’t working well in it’s current form, and your choice to sell low shouldn’t screw the entire player base.
I have a masters degree in economics from UC Berkeley and currently work for GS on high speed trading platforms.
Trust me when I say you have no idea what you’re talking about. LIFO is the best system when goods are exact duplicates and the only question is how low someone will sell to you for. It’s how all how speed trading systems work for that exact reason.
It actually takes a bunch of people willfully dumping the market. A single person listing 20 items for 5% market value does not tank the market. Other people using TSM, constantly relisting auctions for the same value does.
It’s not uncommon for people to have several thousand of an item. I’m not talking about someone posting 20 (though that can do it, if the next person doesn’t notice the price drop and posts theirs low too). I’m talking about dumping a bunch at a low price or successively posting small amounts to stop anyone else from selling at the market-dictated price.
It’s not trolling to undercut. Just a market strategy.
Wow ah has always been prone to market manipulation.
And when they tried add some regulations all the ah goblins made threads on the forums until they reversed them.
