again i agree with you that people posting gold to trade to chinese sellers should be stopped, i just dont understand how this change stops that
I know that happens but I’m talking about transmog gear. I see plenty of that that always have 4 or 5 posts that hardly ever change in price.
All of these tears… so delicious!
“The thing is, the ‘minority’ that are heavily using the addons really are only buying stuff to resell it and not buying items to effectively use.”
This is nonsense. I buy mats to craft and sell items. Which is precisely what BoE crafted items are for. I’m not in that minority, but the current throttling makes trying to list my items near pointless - it would take too long.
Also, for fast moving mats and consumables, there is not a lot of buying low to sell high. That generally doesn’t work. Competition quickly drives prices down, and if prices get well below equilibrium, then yes, someone resets the market, but it usually drops very quickly down to equilibrium.
On my server, Sage Agate has been selling for around 300g-350g typically. Periodically (say once every couple of weeks), competition may drive the market under 150g. Then and only then, someone might buy up the market to repost above 500g. But that doesn’t last long at all - pretty quick the price will be back down to its regular price.
Goblins don’t buy up the market at market price to repost higher because it doesn’t work. Some other goblin will just come along and list list list at whatever the market price is. For these fast moving goods, cornering the market doesn’t work.
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It seems to me that there were 2 main goals you wanted to achieve with these changes:
- A reduction of the amount of auction house API calls made by players to reduce stress on the servers and speed things up for everyone.
- Making the AH less frustrating and more accessible to “normal” players who have a hard time because people who camp the AH undercut them within minutes.
First, I’d like to give you some insight into what it feels like to use the AH with these changes in place and later on I am going to make some suggestions for how the herein before mentioned goals can be achieved in a much less disruptive manner.
I mainly play WoW because I enjoy the economy side of things, so these changes have had quite an impact on my day to day enjoyment of the game, but I think even “normal” players will be impacted by this change.
But even if it only impacted people like myself who post a lot of auctions, this change is doing a lot more harm than good. I have been playing WoW mostly to play the AH for the better part of 15 years and throughout all these years I have been reassured over and over again that what I do is a perfectly legitimate way of playing the game and that the economy and playing the AH is a big part of the game and its content. Now all of sudden we AH players are told that what we are doing isn’t an acceptable way to play the game and there are throttles put in place to intentionally slow us down and diminish our enjoyment of the game.
Now, as for my concrete and detailed experience with these changes:
On one of my characters I trade transmog. Today, I tested how long it would take me to repost 4 batches of 136 items (that’s how many items I can fit in my bags at once) that had expired would take. That’s a total of 544 auctions, which is a fairly reasonable amount for transmog - most people that actively trade transmog likely have more items than that.
The first batch of 136 items was the “fastest” as I hadn’t used up any of my call budget yet. I put “fastest” in quotes because even this first batch was terribly slow. I am using TradeSkillMaster to post the items, but even without an addon, I’d execute the same exact calls - it would just require me to navigate more menus and I’d probably end up getting carpal tunnel sooner or later.
For each item I have to look up the price of the other auctions that are currently listed for this item and then I have to post the item, so that’s 2 API calls per item I believe.
The first batch of 136 was the “fastest”. Since I hadn’t used up any of the budget, I was able to look up the prices for the first ~100 items without getting throttled, but looking up the last few prices was painfully slow. Actually, posting the 136 items while throttled took roughly 2 seconds per auction.
Total time to post the 136 items: 5 minutes and 48 seconds.
The second batch of 136 took me 3:36 seconds to look up the prices for all 136 item, the throttling kicked in after checking roughly 1/4rd of the items. Actually posting these 136 items while I was throttled then took a whopping 4:31, so roughly 2 seconds per item. Not only is this awfully slow, since the revamp in 8.3 we cannot “queue” API calls anymore either, so I can’t click a post auction button 136 times and then wait 4:31, I actually have to post and auction, wait 2 seconds, post the next auction, wait another 2 seconds, etc.
It feels like staring at a website that is taking forever to load. And the worst part is knowing that it could be faster but that I am artificially being throttled. You are actively making me spend 4:31 waiting for the AH to execute the commands I am telling it to execute.
Total time for the second batch of 136 items: 8 minutes 5 seconds
The third and fourth batches were fairly consistent.
Total for the third batch of 136 items: 7 minutes 55 seconds
Total for the fourth batch of 136 items: 8 minutes 5 seconds
So in total it took me 29 minutes and 48 seconds to post a medium sized stock of 544 transmog items - and that’s only counting the time I spent in the AH, it does not account for the time it took to collect the expired mails.
Before this hotfix, it took approximately 1.5 seconds in total to look up the price for an item and to post it. Posting 544 items would have taken me approximately 13 minutes 36 seconds. That is less than half the time it takes now.
I do understand that people who are constantly undercutting, canceling their auctions and reposting them over and over again are putting a lot of stress on the servers and I understand that some players might not enjoy getting undercut within minutes.
But that’s not what I was doing here. All I was doing was reposting a medium sized stock of expired auctions that I am putting on the AH both to make gold (obviously), but also to provide people with the option to work on their transmog collection. I don’t think anyone would say that me posting 544 transmog items is in any way harmful to other players, nor is it putting an excessive amount of stress on the servers.
And yet, despite using the auction house in its intended way, I am intentionally being slowed down. The new system is forcing me to spend more than twice as much time reposting auctions that simply expired. Am I supposed to not post auctions? Are we only supposed to post 50 auctions because more than that is excessive?
I feel like you approached this problem (whether there was a problem or not is debatable) with a sledgehammer, without engaging with the community first, without listening to our feedback and our concerns.
Only after you broke the AH and made it nearly unusable for many active AH players, only now do you ask for feedback. It’s quite disappointing and I hope these things will be handled better in the future.
What can be done better?
Obviously, I think the way you tried to address your 2 main goals you wanted to achieve with these changes
- A reduction of the amount of auction house API calls made by players to reduce stress on the servers and speed things up for everyone.
- Making the AH less frustrating and more accessible to “normal” players who have a hard time because people who camp the AH undercut them within minutes.
did not work out very well.
The throttling is punishing essentially every player who wants to post more than a couple dozen auctions - which feels like what the AH is supposed to be used for.
I thought about this and I think the main cause for both issues you were trying to address are not players who are reposting expired auctions like I did with my transmog items, whether that’s 100 or 2000 auctions.
What is causing these issues are players (and bots) who continuously cancel and repost their auctions over and over again, all day. Not only do these constant searches and posts put a lot of stress on the servers, it is also why “normal” players feel like they cannot compete as they tend to get undercut within minutes.
While cancelling and posting auctions over and over again involves searching for the items, canceling them and posting them, I don’t think all of these aspects are an issue and need to be throttled.
If someone wants to do a bunch of searches to look up all the different variations of level 120 BoE items that are currently on the AH, that shouldn’t be a problem. That seems like reasonable use of the AH and I don’t think that player get throttled.
If someone ants to repost their transmog items that expired to make some gold and so that people can search for appearances they are missing in their collection, that shouldn’t be a problem either. I shouldn’t have had to spend 30 minutes instead of 14 minutes reposting my 544 transmog items because I am getting throttled for no good reason.
Canceling on the other hand could be considered the issue. Obviously people should have the ability to cancel an auction if they no longer wish to sell the item, but the constant cycle of canceling items just to repost them at the lowest price again is what is causing so muchs stress on the servers. It’s what’s causing frustation for “normal” players that get undercut within a minute after they post their auctions.
My suggestion:
I think there are two fairly straight forward ways to address both issues, without being too disruptive for players who are not actually part of the problem.
1) Remove the throttling for searches and posting API calls and only keep the throttle for the API_C_AuctionHouse.CancelAuction call. You could even lower the “budget” for this or even increase the delay from 2 seconds to 5 seconds.
This way, people who are simply searching the AH or reposting expired auctions, both of which constitutes fairly normal use of the AH, won’t be impacted by any throttling at all. Yet, those players that camp the AH to continuously run cancel scans to cancel auctions that have been undercut just to repost those same auctions right away, undercutting “normal” players will not be able to do this anymore - or at least not nearly as efficiently.
If you disincentivize cancelling your auctions, then a lot fewer people will be constantly canceling and reposting their auctions, which will alleviate server stress and also make the AH more enjoyable and more fair for “normal” players.
2) Alternatively, you could remove throttling completely, even for canceling auctions and instead of throttling the canceling itself, you could make it so that items you cancel take 1 hour before they show up in your mailbox, just like the gold from successful sales.
Ideally, this would only apply to auctions that you cancel within the first couple of hour after you listed them. That way, you are still disincentivizing people from canceling and reposting their auctions all day, but you are still allowing people to cancel their auctions in the evening if they are about to expire anyway, so that they can repost them one last time before logging off.
TL;DR: Reposting auctions with the new throttling in place feels awful. People searching the AH and/or reposting expired auctions or things they farmed are not the problem. The problem are people who continuously cancel and repost their auctions over and over again all day. The best way to fix this is to throttle canceling or to make it so that canceled items take an hour to appear in your mailbox. Searching and posting items should not get throttled at all.
Thank you for taking feedback.
- BilisOnyxia
48 Likes
because it takes time to sell. months for specific transmog even. stop talking about a market you clearly know nothing of.
you need to visit the economy reddit. all they do is talk about buying and resetting markets.
My gold goes up because I sold you something useful. The total gold in the economy goes down because of the 5% gold sink of the AH.
I am getting 5% less than what the item is worth on every single transaction I ever complete on the AH.
Yes the bruto removes 5 million gold in return for an item. In total, more money is traveling through the AH than per brutosaur.
In fact, if someone earned the gold for their burtosaur by selling on the AH they’ve removed MORE gold than if they’ve farmed for it.
Firstly because by farming you don’t actually remove anyone else’s gold. You artificially create the gold in the first place.
Secondly, let’s assume I sell everything for a 20% profit. That means my profits need to equal 5 million, which is 20% of my total sales. In other words I would have had to sell 5 million / .2 = 25 million gold worth of items.
25 million gold net worth of transactions over the AH would have resulted in 25mil/.95 (26,315,789g) worth of total sales. That’s 1,315,789g lost in the AH fees.
Buying the longboi from playing the auction house, removes 6,315,789g (5,000,000g to the vendor and 1,315,789g to the AH)
Meanwhile, by farming and selling items to the vendor (eg. creating gold) I remove a whopping ZERO gold from the economy.
2 Likes
Yeah, so we have months and months worth of turnover that results in very few sales, so why bother?
that is a big majority of the time when people are posting TOO LOW. that is a market reset. buy lower and set to regular market…not buying at market and going higher that doesn’t work lol…you need to talk about things you actually know about.
2 Likes
Rather than address the issues with multiboxers flooding the AH with tens of thousands of a single item, or dealing with botters in general, Blizzard (being the idiots that they are) decide to punish everyone who uses the auction house.
How about you just fix the actual problem, Blizz? Oh yeah, that would take dedicating employees to the problem which costs you money. Can’t have that now can we?
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because overall it becomes worth doing when you have enough auctions up that you are steady selling something daily.
Maybe you should stop trying to sell ‘markets’ and just… play the game, and sell stuff sometimes? 
Look, this is the result of LIFO. I’m sorry I didn’t raise my voice and encourage others to do the same when you made this change. But many of us saw this coming. So please consider tweaking your throttling to just the cancellations. There’s the vast majority of your problem.
Those of us selling transmogs and crafted gear just want to be able to post as full a portfolio as possible and cancel scans by our competitors just forces us to do the same.
I’d be happy to leave my auctions up the full 12, 24 or 48 hours if I knew that someone else wasn’t going to be able to cancel hundreds of their auctions within seconds of my postings to become the LIFO on my attempted sales.
Throttle the cancels, not the postings please.
3 Likes
maybe i can do what i enjoy? i dont sit on the AH and reset markets i will buy soemthing when i see it too cheap though. i do however enjoy farming and gold making.
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Transmog sells really slow but it does sell high.
glorious legplates sell for about 45k but it will probably take you over a month to sell them. This is why transmog sellers generally have huge amounts of transmog.
You can’t post singles anymore.
Then why does this change upset you? You get to spend more time doing what you enjoy.
No, he gets to spend less time farming and counting his gold and more time pressing buttons on a UI.
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no, i get less time because my regular daily posts take way too long now not allowing me time to go out and old world raid farm or do anything. adds up every single day.
3 Likes