That’s part of the problem here. They haven’t defined anything.
Is someone who posts a handful of flasks a day casual?
How about someone who crafts glyphs and posts them?
But what then of someone who not only posts glyphs, but also logs on their Tailor and posts some rare vanilla crafted patterns for transmog collectors?
That’s a line that hasn’t been defined. And by setting an arbitrary throttle number (which addresses only the symptoms, and not the problem) they’re adversely effecting a very large portion of the player base that many of us might very well consider “casual” compared to the global playerbase who use the AH frequently.
They haven’t even told us what the root problem is. The post by @Kaivax seems to indicate that this was done to reduce the overall API traffic generated by a “minority” of players.
If that is, in fact, the reason for this, it makes absolutely no sense. There’s some serious inefficiencies in the current in game API with regards to the AH. Reducing the traffic that goes over the wire from AH addons is a good thing and should be welcomed by everyone, Blizzard, TSM Team, and users. But the solution isn’t to just throttle. It’s better API design.
Some examples include:
- Batch API requests
- Finer grain APIs which allow the client to specify exactly what data it needs, and transfer no more than that data.
- Client side caching of non-realtime data, which reduces chatter between the client and server. Resolve any disagreements or data sync issues on the server and notify the client accordingly.
- If throttling must be used, inform the client appropriately and allow the client to make informed decisions about exactly when they can safely make the next request.
These are just a few examples off the top of my head, but I’m sure with a proper discussion between Blizzard’s developers and the community and addon authors to identify their use cases, we can reach a solution that benefits everyone.
It might not be immediate, but it’s clear to me that this hotfix does more harm than good. So let’s revert it until we have a proper solution.